Marathon Man (33 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, I'm making a vow to never question you again.”

I laughed and then so did he.

That night I wrote in my running log: “Won 79th BAA Marathon in 2:09:55. New personal record for that distance. Total miles run today 26.2.”

The next day I was back in my tiny basement apartment, finishing up my interview with Amby while we shared a pizza. I was sore, but it was a pleasant soreness. I tried my best to recount the events of the previous days, which boggled both our minds. I asked Amby to tell me about his race. “Well, as I was running, I kept asking people how you were doing,” Amby told me between bites of pizza. “They kept telling me that you were with the leaders and I got more and more excited. Around eighteen miles, I saw Coach Squires and he said you were a quarter of a mile ahead and then he screamed out, ‘and a minute under the course record pace!' At that point, I started begging people to drive me to the Prudential so I could see you finish but everybody kept telling me there was no way to get through the traffic. So I just ran as fast as I could to the finish line.” In fact, Amby ran so hard he crossed the finish line in 2:21:20—almost a full minute faster than his winning time in 1968.

I took great pride in being only the fifth American to win Boston since John “the Elder” Kelley had won it twice, in 1935 and 1945. I marveled at the thread connecting my achievement with my New England road-running predecessors. The Younger Johnny Kelley, who won it in 1957, studied the Elder Kelley and called him “a great confidant and mentor.” After Young Johnny Kelley revolutionized the sport in America in the 1950s—daring to push beyond the old grind-it-out plodding style, embarking on a whole new level of training that allowed him to sustain his innate speed over 26.2 miles—he then passed down this sacred knowledge to his protégé, Amby Burfoot, one of his runners at Fitch High School in Groton, Connecticut.

Propelled by his dream to follow in Kelley's footsteps, Amby became the next American to win the Boston Marathon, in 1968. And, of course, it was Amby, my roommate at Wesleyan, who persuaded me to try running long-distance races (I still recall running that thirteen-miler in a blizzard!) and gave me an appreciation for the Boston Marathon and all that it represented. He introduced me to the sheer joy of going on long runs through nature. He showed me the dedication, hard work, and sacrifice required to race in a marathon. “At one point in the mid-1960s, Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Jeff Galloway, and I all lived in Connecticut within fifty miles of Kelley's home in Mystic,” adds Amby. “Our proximity to Kelley, and our resulting marathon careers and assorted contributions to road running, is no coincidence. Kelley was first, the path breaker. The rest of us followed in his footsteps. The entire American running boom thus traces a straight line to him, and the road he explored.” Now that I had been crowned with the laurel wreath of victory, it sunk in how blessed I was to be part of such a great heritage of New England marathon runners.

It was a powerful feeling to have won the Boston Marathon and suddenly be called Beantown's newest hometown hero. I was high as a kite for a long time. I remember driving up a week or two later to Connecticut to visit my family. My sister and my father had made a big sign on Styrofoam board and hung it on the front porch. It read,
GOOD RUN, BILL!

To this day, when people ask me what's my favorite marathon, I tell them Boston 1975. I would run other great marathons over the next five years, but this was where I broke through. I was now a world-class marathoner, and someone who I believed could contend against anybody in the world, even the mighty king of the sport, Frank Shorter.

I knew I would get my chance to knock the reigning marathon champ off his five-year throne the following summer on the sport's biggest stage—the Olympic games in Montréal. Such an audacious thought would have never crossed my mind before, certainly not in 1972 when I couldn't make it more than a couple of laps around the local YMCA. Or when I was smoking Winston cigarettes and living off potato chips and soda. Or when I was lying on the couch, watching in awe as Shorter pulled away from the field at the Munich games. If Shorter was worried about the challenge I posed to him now, he sure didn't show it. “I wasn't concerned that Bill broke my American record,” he said. “He ran a very good race at Boston. I was concerned with my own training.”

The day after my victory, I went running alone around Jamaica Pond. I ran three or four miles, a traditional distance the day after Boston. Nobody recognized me. Nobody stopped to ask me for my autograph. It was just another ordinary day of training; I was just another anonymous face in the park.

Thirty-seven years later, on the afternoon of the Boston Marathon, I would find myself on a leisurely run through a nearby park in the city. I hadn't gone two hundred yards when I heard somebody behind me shouting, “Bill!” I turned around and saw a Kenyan runner in his warm-ups approaching. He jogged right next to me.

I said, “How're you doing?” I had no idea who he was.

“Good,” he replied.

“So, how did you run?” I asked, our feet hitting the ground in unison.

He said, “I won.”

It was Wesley Korir. I had met him a few days earlier at a press conference, but he looked different. He had shaved his beard. He was doing a recovery run like I had done around Jamaica Pond in 1975. We were running past all these people in the park and nobody recognized us. I thought, Here goes the Boston Marathon champion. How does nobody know who he is? Thirty-eight years later nothing had changed—for some reason this was more beautiful than sad.

The day after I set the Boston course record, Jock Semple called to tell me that the Mexican team had left me a special award. I went over to Jock's clinic at the Boston Garden and he presented me with a block of wood about six-by-six inches with a ceramic dog's head on it. Mario Cuevas had written a congratulatory note on the underside of the figure. I ran into Mario at the Fukuoka Marathon later that year. I spoke a little Spanish and thanked him for the gift. For many years, I treasured that ceramic dog until one day it disappeared. I've always wondered if the canine was a special cultural symbol in Mexico. Most of all, I understood the gift to be a message of international friendship and respect, conveyed from one athlete to another.

A month later, I remember coming back to the apartment and Ellen telling me a famous American runner had died in a car crash. I thought it was Shorter. I was wrong. It was Steve Prefontaine. Gone at the age of twenty-four.

The tragedy of Pre's death hit me hard, maybe because of how much we shared in common, despite training on opposite ends of the country. The press had labeled us both rogue runners, probably because of our long blond hair and tendency to go against the establishment. We both ran with fearless, aggressive heart, guaranteeing that we'd know disasters as spectacular as our triumphs. Neither of us was interested in second place. Neither of us shied away from a fight. Some might say we sought them out, knowing that a head-to-head duel was sure to ignite our inner fire and drive us to run even harder. Pre left it all out there on the track, and I left it all out there on the road.

I flashed back to the day I received the waffle-soled running shoes in the mail, along with the handwritten note from him wishing me success in the marathon. Those “Boston '73” racing shoes had to be one of the last gifts Prefontaine ever presented to another person. And what a gift they turned out to be. Despite running in the brand-new, oversize shoes for 26.2 miles, I didn't suffer a single blister. Judging from the way my feet looked after the race, you'd think I'd jogged down to the grocery store around the corner for milk. It defied logic.

I'd like to think those shoes had been sprinkled with a little of Prefontaine's magic, propelling me to great heights that I didn't even think possible. I think he would have liked how I took on Drayton, dueling with him mile after mile, then taking off. Going for broke. After all, he once said, “A lot of people run a race to see who's the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.” Prefontaine had more guts than a thousand runners combined.

In the end, Prefontaine and I were both on the same solitary quest to discover our potential as runners; to answer what Roger Bannister called the challenge of the human spirit. Doing so required us both to embrace a whole new level of training. For Prefontaine, this meant lung-burning workouts on the track. For me, it meant running up to two hundred miles a week on the roads. The relentless intensity of our workout regimens was born out of the same desire to explore our physical and mental limits. Although I never got the chance to talk to Prefontaine before his shocking death, I think he knew what I did—going beyond those limits was the real challenge of the human spirit. Maybe, in the end, he sent me those shoes so I could do just that. At least I'd like to think so.

For the next thirty-five years, the shoes, along with the handwritten letter from Prefontaine, would hang in the Bill Rodgers Running Center in Faneuil Hall, the shoe store I opened with my brother Charlie in 1977.

 

SIXTEEN

Lunch Break Runs

By winning the Boston Marathon, and breaking Frank Shorter's American record, I had achieved the Holy Grail of long-distance running. I was sky-high. My life changed almost immediately. Suddenly, I got invitations to compete in major road races around the world. One of them was a marathon in Enschede, Holland, run every other year in late August. I was thrilled to receive the invite, knowing the race officials picked only one or two Americans to come and compete against the top Europeans. They offered to pay for Ellen and me to fly over there and put us up in a hotel, but they couldn't pay me a fee under the table. Around that time, Frank Shorter told me, “Ask for a thousand dollars. That's what I get.” I started to become more curious; maybe I could make a living at this.

One problem: If I was caught asking for a racing fee, the AAU would strip me of my amateur status and I'd be barred from competing in the Olympics. I felt this system of tight control over athletes was backward and un-American; it equated not getting paid with integrity but expected runners like Steve Prefontaine and myself, who were striving for the highest level of excellence, to do so with almost no resources. Geoff Hollister explains, “In the world of amateurism, an athlete was on his own to qualify for the very competition the AAU controlled. The AAU pocketed all of the ticket money, advertising money, and television money without giving any back to the athletes who brought all that money in.”

The very rules that were supposedly in place to ensure integrity forced top athletes like myself to make shady backroom deals. I needed somebody to act as a go-between; somebody I trusted wholeheartedly. I trusted Ellen. I was apprehensive about involving her in this messy business, but she was eager to help; as she pointed out, the backward rules of amateurism were impacting her life, too.

Ellen wasn't asking for big money. She would tell a race official over the phone, “Well, could you cover Bill's airfare and maybe an appearance fee, a per diem fee?” If I went to Japan to race in the Fukuoka Marathon, I would get thirty-five dollars a day to buy my own food. This was the seventies. Today, if you're a top marathoner and get invited to a major race like that, you might get fifty or one hundred thousand dollars, so it's all changed. The first time Ellen negotiated on my behalf—the marathon in Holland—she asked for a thousand dollars and they agreed. We were a little in shock. We were a couple of small-town kids entering a brave new world.

While race invitations came my way, job offers did not. I received my graduate degree in special education at Boston College. I remember going down to the Boston School Department with Bobby Hall, a twenty-four-year-old from Belmont, Massachusetts, who had just become the first athlete to race the Boston Marathon in a wheelchair. Race director Will Cloney told Bobby, who had contracted polio as a child, that he would recognize his time but only if he finished under 3:30. Hall crossed the finish line in a time of two hours and fifty-eight minutes. The stunning landmark achievement, along with the official finisher certificate, was all his. As a result of his daring feat that day, he helped wheelchair racers earn the respect and legitimacy they'd always been denied and soon formal wheelchair divisions were established at most marathons, including the Boston Marathon, which in 1977 was declared the National Wheelchair Championship.

Bobby and I showed up at the Boston School Department. What we realized very quickly was that our highly publicized breakthroughs didn't mean as much as we thought. In fact, my title of Boston Marathon champion made very little impression on them at all. They offered us no help in securing a job and we left.

What followed my win at Boston was a whirlwind of activity. I landed a job as a special education teacher of emotionally disturbed children at the Edward Everett Hale School in the city of Everett, a few miles outside Boston.

To be closer to my new job, Ellen and I moved into the second-floor walk-up of a dark green three-story frame house in Melrose. For some unexplained reason, the floors sloped down to the middle of the room, causing plates and cups to slide off tables as if we were out on the roaring seas. On the walls, above the TV that didn't work and the radio that needed repair, hung flags and medals and, of course, my prized childhood collection of butterflies.

We also got married in Jamaica Plain that summer. Our wedding was anything but typical. It was conducted so fast and casual-like that I don't even remember our exact wedding date, which is terrible. It felt very spur of the moment: “Oh, what happened? We got married.” There was pressure on us to tie the knot, which we should have ignored. Her mom was a devout Catholic and didn't want us living in sin. Of course, we were already living together, but this was a big secret, which required me to leave the house (and hide all evidence of our cohabitation) when her parents came to visit. Ellen was an only child and I don't think she wanted to offend or hurt her mom. Neither did I. She was a nice person. The conversation probably went something like, “Oh, honey, it's not a big deal. Let's just do this!” It's just a wedding, after all. Just a vow of love that bound our souls in eternal sacrament. What's the big deal here?