Category Archives: track and field

R.I.P.: Track’s Fred Thompson

Leave a reply

Too late now. I wish I had asked Fred Thompson what originally drew him to track and field as a youngster; whether his participation in the sport—he competed for Brooklyn’s Boys High and City College—enhanced his feeling of personal worth; whether running track not only gave him something to do, growing up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community, but also dared him to push limits, stay in school, think in terms of being a productive member of a group.

All those things were transmitted by Thompson to the thousands of girls and young women he mentored through the Atoms, the track club he founded in 1963, and enhanced with the female-only Colgate Games he organized in 1974. Thompson died last week at 85, and I never even asked him the source of his transformational club’s name.

I could guess. The atom is the smallest unit of a chemical element, and Thompson’s club was for the little ones, kids as young as 8 and 9 and teenagers, often from broken homes and lives of poverty. (Thompson originally was a chemical engineering major at City College before switching to history and later earning his law degree at St. John’s University, so he knew his atoms.)

He himself had grown up in Bed-Stuy, which rivaled Harlem as a prominent black enclave, raised by an aunt after his parents split. And whatever it was he got out of running track he soon realized was available only to boys in those pre-Title IX days. So, barely into a career of law practice, he created the Atoms, based on the belief that more investment in grade-school sports would counter “the many problems in high school” and the lure of the mean streets. The atom, of course, is a primary source of energy.

He promoted competition—not winning-as-the-only-thing but as a means to demand maximum effort in a challenging world—and a responsibility to teammates. He preached a “yes, you can; yes, you can” attitude that one of his runners called “stubbornness” to be “positive instead of negative.”

In strict coaching terms, Thompson was among the best. His Atoms’ stars included Cheryl Toussaint and Diane Dixon, Olympic gold medalists in 1972 and 1984, and two-time Olympian Lorna Forde. (In 1988, Thompson was named the women’s sprint coach for the U.S. Olympic team.) But the Atoms were started as a social project; no previous track experience was required but school attendance was. And what the club really stood for, he said, was “excellence in education, trying to better yourself.” In the club’s first 15 years of existence, the unlikely total of 50 former Atoms earned college degrees and went on to varied careers that included teaching, the law, nursing, psychology.

A long-ago NBC-TV series, Real People, once aired a segment on Thompson in which Toussaint called the Atoms “my second family…the encouragement I got. If anyone wants to call Fred a saint, it’s fair enough.”

One of my first beat assignments for Newsday in the early 1970s was the New York track and field scene, including the annual winter series of meets at Madison Square Garden. One of my first expert sources was Thompson—almost always in a suit and tie, always dripping with passion for the sport and his Atoms, which often had as many of 50 team members.

For a while, they trained in locked Brooklyn schoolyards by scaling fences in the early evening before he arranged workouts at Pratt Institute and before the most accomplished Atoms performed at the Garden, the self-proclaimed “world’s most famous arena.” Thompson brought his kids, and then the Colgate Games, to that premier athletic stage. (Since Thompson’s 2014 retirement as Colgate meet director, his replacement has been Touissant.)

He never married, he said, because no woman would have put up with him and the Atoms. He didn’t like to be called “Coach” by club members, preferring “Fred” or “Freddie.” “I’m their friend,” he said.

In that old Real People report, Lorna Forde said, “Freddie’s crazy. He takes his whole income and just spends it on us and, ‘Well, maybe I’ll get it back when I get some funds and stuff.’ And nobody would do that. Nobody.

“They don’t make people like that anymore.”

Jay Horwitz: A PR man who measured up

Leave a reply

News to me: There is a Museum of Public Relations in New York City, which boasts hundreds of rare artifacts, oral histories, letters, photos and film to “bring PR history to life.”

It happens that, in a half-century as a sports journalist, I have dealt with countless PR practitioners, what we used to call—not unkindly—tub-thumpers. And it happens that one of the best of them, Jay Horwitz, has lately been the topic of heartfelt appreciations after 39 years as PR chief for the New York Mets.

Horwitz has been assigned a new position as “team historian” and tasked with gathering alumni and tidbits for next year’s 50th anniversary of the Mets’ first World Series championship. But as he moves on, I propose including a symbol of quintessentially quirky Horwitz salesmanship in that carnival-barker hall-of-fame: Specifically, what I would call a 1978 “game-used” tape measure from Horwitz’ pre-Mets days.

The relic in question was employed 40 years ago at Mama Leone’s Midtown Manhattan restaurant, where a small group of New York track and field writers had gathered for their weekly luncheon to hear college and club coaches pitch potential news about their athletes’ latest running, jumping and throwing feats. To some extent, those were exercises in being numbed by numbers—mostly dry statistics like split times, personal bests and local meet records.

At the time, Horwitz was the sports information director for New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University. And his chore was to somehow sell the local media, already inundated by the Big Town’s myriad sports happenings, on some reason to pay attention to FDU’s decidedly humble athletic operation. Which he did brilliantly with an ear for the novel, dispensing odd morsels—beyond the cold stats—that were both revealing and entertaining.

FDU had a sprinter then named Ephraim Serrette who kept a list of the various misspellings of his name, 13 in all, from meet results—Abraham Seit, Eram Sert, Earl Serrette, Ephrimim Sirreti and so on—so Horwitz playfully passed that along. FDU had a baseball player whose summer job at a munitions factory was putting pins in hand grenades. Horwitz let the news hounds know. FDU had a hurdler who asked to leave practice early to go to his ballet class and “before he knew it,” Horwitz giggled in retelling the tale years ago, “I was at the ballet class with a guy from the wire service.”

FDU had another hurdler whose hobby was collecting snakes and Horwitz, naturally, requested the athlete bring the aforementioned reptiles in cages to a track workout, where a local photographer was waiting to document another deliciously idiosyncratic sports moment.

The story got even better because, as Horwitz later reported, “the damn snakes got loose. Four boa constrictors running around the damn track, slinking along. They bolted, and guys were running every which way, and this hurdler running after his snakes, grabbing them….”

Only a crack PR person could orchestrate that kind of breaking news.

Anyway, for that luncheon at Mama Leone’s (which then was a theatre-district landmark but has been closed since 1994), Horwitz brought along FDU’s star high jumper, Franklin Jacobs. Jacobs already was plenty newsworthy, having recently defeated the world’s top-ranked jumper, Dwight Stones, by clearing 7-feet-6 inches, lifting Jacobs to No. 1 in the United States and No. 3 in the world in his event.

Horwitz raised the bar by pushing an additional nugget, precipitated by his earlier telephone query to the Amateur Athletic Union. “I’ve got a kid here who’s 5-foot-8 and he’s jumping over 7 feet,” he informed the AAU. “Is that unusual?”

He was told that the average high jumper stood 6-1 ¾, almost half a foot taller than Jacobs. He went to the Guinness Book of World Records and learned that, at the time, a 5-foot-9 San Jose State jumper named Ron Livers had cleared 7-4 ¼ for the existing record—19 ¼ inches—of jumping above one’s own head.

By the time Jacobs arrived at that luncheon, he already had gone 22 inches above his height. Horwitz had a major scoop to advance.

“I’ll never forget the track luncheon when we measured him,” Horwitz recalled soon after the event. “Franklin kept saying to let me measure him to see if he grew taller. And I kept saying, ‘Franklin, don’t do that. You don’t want to be taller. You want to be 5-8.'”

Jacobs was beckoned to stand as a flexible retractable tape was produced and unfurled from the floor to the top of his noggin, the way track officials check the high jump crossbar for accuracy after a significant leap. “I was sitting in my seat saying, ‘Please, God, let him be 5-8,’” Horwitz said. “I mean, I knew he was 5-8, but….”

Four days later, in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, Jacobs upped his best to 7-7 ¼, which remained his career optimum and, at 23 ¼ inches over his head, still stands as the record these four decades later. (It was equaled in 2005 by the 2004 Olympic champion Stefan Holm of Sweden, who was 5-11 ¼ and jumped 7-10 ½.)

The Museum of Public Relations should find that tape measure, put it on display and have Jay Horwitz sign it, a manifestation of the man’s golden (and fun) promotional touch.

 

The endurance of 3:59.4

Leave a reply

In effect, Roger Bannister’s immortality was reinforced by his death last week at 88. Moreover, his international claim to fame, the first sub-four-minute mile, remains timeless in spite of having existed as the world record for a mere 46 days.

What Bannister accomplished a lifetime ago—64 years this May—was simultaneously incapable of reproduction even as it set up its quick demise. No one ever can replace Bannister’s Original Win against the four-minute barrier. Yet the moment he finished track’s classic race in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, he assured the benchmark’s vulnerability.

That is because Bannister’s feat was as psychological as it was physical. Before his breakthrough, there had been building, for at least a decade, myths and old-wives’ tales that attempting such a speed at that distance might result in heart failure. That human lung and muscle capacity already had reached the maximum.

So, with that nonsense dismissed, Bannister’s record, earthshaking as it was on May 6, 1954, was put to rest by Australian John Landy’s 3:58.0 on June 21 of that year.

Within three years, 12 runners had turned in a combined 18 sub-four races. In Bannister’s wake, it now has become almost routine for elite runners to break four minutes, with nearly 1,500 now in that club. At an indoor meet in Boston the week before Bannister died, four men in the same race finished under four minutes. There are high school lads these days running as fast as Bannister’s old standard, with the world mile record now lowered to 3:43:13 by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.

In the long view, that sort of human progress isn’t so shocking, with all manner of advancements, beyond individual talent, having greased the skids for modern runners. Bannister’s fellow Englishman Sebastian Coe, who rewrote the world mile record three times in the late 1970s and early ‘80s (with a best of 3:47.33), once noted that Bannister clocked his 3:59.4 “on limited scientific knowledge, in leather shoes in which the spikes weighed more than the tissue-thin shoes today, on tracks at which speedway riders would turn up their noses. So as far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great runs of all time.”

Indeed, in 1954, even full nutrition was an issue, with vestiges of the United Kingdom’s World War II-era food rationing still in place. The era’s cinder running tracks were closer to the consistency of sand than present-day synthetic surfaces that put a little bounce in the runner’s step. In Bannister’s time, the science of training was in its relative infancy, with his workouts reported to consist of fewer than 30 miles per week. Compare that to El Guerrouj’s 100 to 120 weekly mileage during his peak seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bannister even confessed to the occasional cigarette.

Also, the dawn of full professionalism in track during the 1980s began to afford athletes access to the best coaching and the freedom to concentrate all of their time on their sport.

Still, with Bannister’s death, the obituaries and appreciations of the man and his historic moment have exhumed the impact of that first sub-four race from the boneyard of old news. It came a year after the first ascent of Mount Everest and was widely compared to the latter. (Bannister’s Sherpas, his version of mountaineering guide Tenzing Norgay to Edmund Hillary, were track teammates Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, who functioned as pace-setters through three of the mile’s four laps.)

And here are a couple of fascinating details from Bannister’s big day:

It happens that one of the men timing the race at Oxford University’s Iffley Road track was Harold Abrahamson, the former British sprinter whose 100-meter victory at the 1924 Paris Olympics was the inspiration for the 1981 Academy Award-winning film “Chariots of Fire.”

It happens, too, that the Iffley Road public address announcer was another former sprinter named Norris McWhirter, who at the time was a sports journalist and track statistician. One year later, McWhirter co-founded the Guinness Book of World Records and commenced compiling factoids of less enduring extremes such as owner of the earth’s longest fingernails, most rapid yodel or longest continuing attack of hiccupping.

McWhirter is said to have telephoned a London reporter to advise that he should be at Iffley Road for the possibility of a big story. And, sure enough, at the race’s conclusion, McWhirter declared to the 1,000 spectators—in a drawn-out, dramatic cadence—that Bannister had won the meet’s fourth event “in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track record, British native record, British all-comers record, European record, Commonwealth record and world record: Three minutes.…”

The rest was drowned out by cheers from the crowd. Somehow still echoing.

Bruce Jenner’s “young gladiator” days of long ago

Leave a reply

Bruce Jenner happens to be among the countless souls with whom I crossed paths in almost a half-century as a sports journalist. It was just a glancing blow, and I can’t say I kept up with his various transformations, professionally or personally, following his star turn as decathlon champion in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. But the current supermarket-tabloid squawk about Jenner “transitioning” into becoming a woman certainly is far removed from his original act as a public figure.

oly

wheaties

Or not. During a long conversation at the ’76 U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Ore., Jenner already was envisioning his moment in the Olympic Klieg lights as an audition for a career in the alternate universe of acting. He had just rewritten his own world record in the 10-event decathlon, and called the experience “everything I’ve ever wanted in athletics, all right there. So challenging, so much involved.” Yet, a month later, as soon as he had sewed up his gold-medal victory, he walked out of the stadium in Montreal without even taking his pole-vault poles with him, because he never intended to compete again.

He was moving on. He had been a phys ed major at tiny Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa—“The way I went through college was to just be a jock,” he said. “That’s all I cared about.” Yet he added that, if offered a college do-over, he would have studied business.

He said he originally thought of himself as a football player—“a young gladiator, you know”—able to turn a debut blunder as the Graceland quarterback into a heroic play. “The first pass I threw was intercepted,” he said, “and when I tackled the guy who caught it and knocked him about three rows into the stands, they made me a defensive back.”

That lasted only three weeks, when his attempt to block a punt resulted in a knee operation. No worries; Jenner recounted how he could do anything in sports that he put his mind to. “I was Eastern U.S. water-skiing champion three times [in high school], high school state champion in the pole vault and high jump. Played basketball, too.”

His athletic prowess was such that the NBA’s Kings—then based in Kansas City—used a late-round pick on Jenner in the 1977 draft. (He never took up the sport professionally, though he did make a basket in a YMCA skit during the 1980 film, “Can’t Stop the Music,” a pseudo biography of disco’s Village People.)

The son of a tree surgeon in Sandy Hook, Conn., Jenner was unknown beyond the track community when he squeaked onto the 1972 Olympic team as a college junior, and even when he first set the world decathlon record in 1975. To train for the ’76 Olympics, when he was 26, he took a six-month leave from his job as an insurance salesman, during which time he was supported by his wife of three years, an airline flight attendant.

IMG_0694

“My wife and I are in this together,” he said then. “We decided a couple of years ago that we both wanted that gold medal.” Within five years, they were divorced, and Jenner married the second of three times.

It is something of a paradox that the decathlon—an endeavor typically devoid of spectators and often lightly attended even during the maximum-visibility Olympics—could serve as a springboard to celebrity. But there was, long before Jenner, a U.S. Olympic-star-to-Hollywood-headliner precedent: Swimming champs Johnny Weissmuller (1924 and ’28) and Buster Crabbe (1932) and decathlete Glenn Morris (1936) all wound up playing Tarzan on the silver screen—in an era when Tarzan movies were a big deal. Two-time Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias (1948 and ’52) also took a turn as an actor—once playing his decathlete self—before becoming a Congressman.

Plus, of course, there was the Jim Thorpe history, which has caused holders of the Olympic decathlon title to assume the shopworn label of “World’s Greatest Athlete.” (The story was that Thorpe, upon winning at the 1912 Stockholm Games, was complimented by King Gustav V of Sweden thusly: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe is said to have answered, “Thanks, King,” and days later was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.)

Decathlon champs, in truth, are closer to being the world’s most obsessed—rather than world’s greatest—athletes, given the need to train for a competition over two days consisting of the 100-meter dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter high hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1500-meter run. During his run-up to the ’76 Olympics, Jenner kept various implements for competition—shot puts, discuses, javelins, vaulting poles—scatted around his California home, and admitted to sometimes going through the motions of discus or javelin tosses while standing in crowded stores.

All the while, too, he was working hard at putting his name out there, with public appearances and motivational speeches. Reality TV didn’t exist then. But now, for somebody who keeps moving on…..