Hey there, Delilah.
Twenty-nine-year-old Delilah DiCrescenzo gives a half-laugh, as she’s probably done a million times before when friends, strangers or some news reporter kicks off an interview with a lame attempt at a joke.
“I’m used to it,” says the star runner and Chicago native who was an all-state standout at Queen of Peace High School in Burbank and is among the headliners at Bank of America’s Shamrock Shuffle 8K race on Sunday.
A steeplechase champion ranked internationally and nationally, DiCrescenzo was All-American at Columbia University, with an accomplished post-collegiate career that includes advancing to finals in the 2008 Olympic Trials and being ranked fifth fastest American in her event that year.
But the Olympic hopeful – who will again bid to be on America’s team for London’s 2012 Games during Olympic Trials June 29 in Eugene, Ore. – is well-known for another reason. She is that Delilah.
Yes, the muse behind “Hey There Delilah,” the hit song by the Chicago-based Plain White T’s that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 2007 and was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2008.
DiCrescenzo met lead singer Tom Higginson through a mutual friend from her Southwest Side Clearing neighborhood when she was a college freshman.
“I was in a committed relationship at the time,” she recounts. “We became friends though, and he’d joke that he was writing a song about me. I’d be like, ‘O.K., whatever.’ Then one day, he showed up and gave me the CD.
“He said, ‘Don’t listen to it while I’m here.’ Listening to it after he left, I was like, ‘What the…’ I was surprised, and very flattered. But I wasn’t about to break up with my boyfriend,” DiCrescenzo said.
In a 2007 USA Today interview, Higginson confessed he had been smitten by DiCrescenzo: “I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”
Other headliners in Sunday’s 33rd annual race – the world’s largest timed 8K – include Olympian Diane Nukuri-Johnson, also bidding to compete in this summer’s Olympics, and U.S. Olympic Marathon runner Abdi Abdirahman.
The race kicks off at 8:30 a.m. in Grant Park.
