Pawlik chosen Bengay Masters Athlete of the Year
Emil Pawlik, an oilman from Jackson, Mississippi, is this year’s Bengay Masters Athlete of the Year — as decided by the chairs of the Masters Track and Field and LDR committees and USATF President Bill Roe. Emil’s the second person to win the award. In last year’s inaugural presentation, W50 distance runner Kathryn Martin of New York was the Bengay winner.
The news arrives in the December issue of National Masters News.
Emil won the M65 decathlon and 100m hurdle golds at San Sebastian worlds and set the M65 world record in the decathlon this season — his first as a member of the USATF Masters Hall of Fame. Great year for Emil.
His selection, of course, puts the USATF Masters T&F Awards Committee in a bind. When this committee meets at Jacksonville in a week, it may feel obliged to make him USATF Male Masters Athlete of the Year. We’ll see.
A graduate of Texas A&M University, Pawlik has two son and two daughters. (His 1998 USATF directory citation doesn’t mention how many grandchildren.) At the time, Emil was president of Hughes Eastern Corp., which helps prolong the life of oil fields.
His company helped produce a technical study with this “bottom line”:
“Microbial permeability profile modification technology is being used to improve reservoir sweep and recovery in the North Blowhorn Creek Unit, Carter Sandstone waterflood in Alabama. Inorganic nutrients are being injected to stimulate growth of in situ microbes. This process diverts injection, thereby improving sweep efficiency. After five years, field life has been extended an additional five to 10 years or more.”
Appropriately, Emil isn’t hot on global warming. He’s a signatory of a petition that basically says global warming is hooey.
The petition reads:
“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Whatever.
No question about Emil, though. He was hot this year, and is a fine choice for Bengay Masters Athlete of the Year.
Here’s a shot I took of Emil winning a sprint at a recent Eugene nationals:
