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.”