Once a Runner (4 page)

"Gee, that was uncomfortable," he said seriously, as he began to make himself walk; he was unaccustomed to long spikes, one caught, he stumbled as he gripped her hand. "What did you think?"

"I thought you were going to die there for a second. I was afraid."

"Well," he said jovially, "that's cross-country biz."

Denton stood 20 yards away, chatting with the coaches. But his eyes followed Quenton Cassidy very carefully.

Half an hour later the three of them trotted off, laughing, on the eight mile course to get in some mileage for the day.

5. Bowling for Dollars

Jerry Mizner was an admitted obsessive compulsive, probably an absolute necessity for a true distance man; his mind adapted well to the distance runner's daily toil. Cassidy was far more impulsive by nature and had to painfully teach himself the record-keeping, ritualistic, never-miss-a-mile mentality of a dedicated runner. Mizner and Denton, like Jim Ryun or Gerry Lindgren, were natural runners who had never even attempted other sports seriously. Cassidy had good speed, and like Peter Snell had done well in other sports before concentrating on middle distances. At times he felt like a spiritual interloper with the other two; occasionally he was actually jealous of the way they casually handled the stress. Slowly, slowly, he learned the lifestyle of the compulsive personality in order to survive the grind. But at times he tottered. Mizner felt truly sorry for him during these periods of blue funk and strange behavior. Cassidy would tell him:

"The kid is largely unhappy." "There there."

"Got caught in the rain and muh green stamps got all plastered to muh Sweet'N Low." "It'll be okay ..."

"Bet muh money on the bob-tailed nag ..."

The friction produced by superimposing alien psychological traits on his own behavior occasionally burst forth in interesting manifestations: Cassidy arranging a quadruple moon shot (the famous Four Way Pressed Ham) out of the tailgate of a duly licensed state vehicle; Cassidy presenting a series of unauthorized awards at the cross-country banquet in mixed company ("...and now a very special presentation, the Zazu Pitts Memorial Plaque to the runner who most infrequently committed flatus on the morning run ..."); Cassidy, as Nubbins put it one night in absolute bewilderment, "just plain walkin' around
talkin'
funny."

Whatever outward form his inner disquietudes took, his odd energies held Doobey Hall like a spell. In this tiny society where the extreme was commonplace, Cassidy's mystique affected everyone. He was often sought out for counsel and his apparent reluctance to render it only added to his aura. His opinion was solicited on matters scholastic, financial, romantic, and mechanical, though he disavowed expertise in all these areas.

He had the gifted athlete's innate sense of timing, a sense of providence, of fantasy, an intuition into the art of the Proper Moment, where the escape velocity of frivolous lunacy triumphs over the mean gravity of everyday life. By way of example, the doldrums of summer were approaching at the end of his junior year when Cassidy, bored with the hot, ennui-stilled Sunday lunch, posed a general question to the drowsy dining room: "I wonder if Spider can jump over a Volkswagen."

Spider Gordon looked up sleepily from his vegetable soup.

"Of course he can jump over a Volkswagen," said the giant Mobley, his mouth full as usual. "You ought to know that."

"Yes. Yes, of course he can. Spider can easily jump over a Volkswagen," Cassidy said. Mumbling, everyone turned back to the unexciting lunch, clearly disappointed. What had gotten into Cassidy?

"The
real
question," Cassidy continued after a proper pause, "the real question
here
is, whether Spider can jump over
two
Volkswagens!"

The philosophical extensions of this problem became quickly evident and the dining room emptied like a barroom shooting. The neighborhood was scoured for a certain make of foreign car and the entire affair went down in Doobey Hall folklore as "The Day Spider Gordon Busted His Ass On The Fourth Volkswagen."

New members of the team, freshmen or transfer students, were given no special warning about Cassidy. They found out, as everyone else did, in the best way they could.

"Gentlemen," Cassidy would say, rising at dinner and tapping his glass for silence, "we have got to have a plan. We must have a plan even if it is
wrong"
There would come scattered, polite applause.

Chairs scraped as everyone turned their attention to Cassidy's table. Some veterans muttered approval at these odd sentiments while the new guys looked around in stark confusion. After waiting for the buzz to die down, Cassidy continued:

"I realize World Team Bowling is a relatively new concept. But gentlemen (a small chuckle here) as our attendance figures indicate, it is a concept...
whose time has come!"
Cheers from the veterans. New guys aghast.

"Now we have made some mistakes. No one denies that." Negative mumbling; certainly no one was going to deny that. "When our Eye-talian all-star here, Jerry Mizerrelli, split his pants on network teevee going for that spare in the sixth frame against Akron, well gentlemen, it was a bleak moment for our fledgling organization as well as for sports in general. Certainly no one is faulting Jerry for that one, but I'll tell you that all of us, players and management alike, were keeping our fingers crossed. All of us except Jerry, of course, who was doing a medium-slow crab walk with a new Brunswick double ball bag jammed in his crotch ..."

Well, it was just old crazy Cassidy of course, and maybe the moon was full or something. But he had eaten their bread and salt (and was always walking over exhausted from his race to inquire just how
was
the pole vault going anyway?) and to put it simply he could get away with just about anything with them.

At times he swiveled the spotlight and its harsh glare fell on those not quite so ready for wholesale craziness; it was in this way Mizner had been "discovered." As a new distance man, Mizner had sat around with a dour expression through his first of Cassidy's Bowling Banquets, and had generally been marked off as an old maid until Cassidy suddenly presented him with some mythical honor one night. Mizner stood timidly as Cassidy handed him a Dr. Pepper can fashioned into a ridiculous trophy with a scrap of tinfoil. The new runner stared with wide eyes at the bemused, expectant faces around the room. He cleared his throat. A few veterans looked at each other; this was going to be good.

"I, uh, would like to thank Mr. Cassadamius for this here award and I'd like to say something else while I'm standing here. You know, I wasn't really nobody at all when Mr. Cassadamius found me in that little three-lane alley in Pittsburgh. Sure, I mean I was a local hotshot and all, rolling 210, 215, and just, you know, getting along. But I wasn't no serious contender is what I'm trying to tell ya. Never made the cut or nothin' like that. And then one day Mr. Cassadamius comes in and be watches me roll a few frames, no more'n that, just a few frames, and then he comes over big as day and says 'Son,' he says, 'Son, if you get rid of that limp wrist of yours and learn to come
over
the ball on your follow through, you just might knock yourself over a few a' them pins.' I mark that as the turnin' point in my career which has led me to the point at which I am at today." He started to sit down, changed his mind and stood back up, clearing his throat.

"That, uh, and going to the 25-pound composite ball. Thank you."

They sat stunned for several seconds, finally breaking into rowdy applause that quickly became a standing ovation. Mizner looked around the room with a faint smile on his dark face, making little bows with his head.

Cassidy, sitting across from him all mooney-eyed, fell smack in love.

6. Bruce Denton

Quenton Cassidy would have thought it amusing had someone described him as a great runner. He wasn't even the best in the neighborhood. Nor was Jerry Mizner, who could claim to be an All American at the six-mile distance. It wasn't even close: the best runner around Kernsville was Bruce Denton, a methodical, dryly humorous doctoral candidate in botany. While both younger runners were considered formidable talents in collegiate circles, Denton's place in the hierarchy of distance running was lofty and secure. The others held him in secret awe and reported his words to comrades with the solemnity of one reading from the Dead Sea Scrolls: "Well, now Denton says you should warm down like blah blah ..." Such pronouncements could halt the most vociferous arguments.

As an undergraduate at a small school in Ohio, Denton had not been a spectacular performer (he ran the mile in 4:08), but as with many runners he began to improve with age. He took up graduate studies at Southeastern and started training again with a scientifically precise vengeance. On the altar of Consistency he offered up no less than two portions of his life per day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. His neatly filled calendar diary told no lies; the symbolism of the unmissed workout—ritualistic with him—took on an importance he did not like to admit, even to himself.

On a rainy day in November he was so sick with the flu that his wife, Jeannie, felt constrained to stay home from work to look after him. He threw up regularly and had diarrhea so badly his stomach muscles began cramping. Nonetheless, he arose and ran two eerie miles at a stumbling pace, pale and shivering the whole way. His wife was aghast. Again in the afternoon he repeated the process, this time nearly fainting as he staggered back into the apartment. Dr. Stavius—whose claim to fame was that he had once punctured a blister on the foot of Roger Bannister—stormed into Denton's sickroom and pronounced him a madman.

"What crazy?" Denton asked, trying to make his parched lips resemble a smile. "After today I'm 16 miles behind for the week."

Over the course of several years at Southeastern, as Denton's reputation grew, a number of undergraduate runners decided they would train with him, thinking to pick up on The Secret. The new man showed up the first day expecting all manner of horrific exertion, and was generally stunned and giddy to find he could so easily make it through one of Denton's calendar days. Showing up the second morning at 6:30 he would be of good cheer, perhaps trying to imagine how he would handle the pressure of his incipient fame. That day also went well enough, but he would begin to notice something peculiar. There was no let-up. The tempo was always moderate but steady. If a new guy decided to pick up the pace, that's where it stayed, whether he finished with the group or not. You showed off at your peril.

On the third day (assuming the new man made it that far) his outlook began to bleaken. For one thing, he was getting very, very tired. No particular day wore him out, but the accumulation of steady mileage began to take its toll. He never quite recovered fully between workouts and soon found himself walking around in a more or less constant state of fatigue-depression, a phase Denton called "breaking down." The new runner would find it more tedious than he could bear. The awful truth began to dawn on him: There was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to dwell upon, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close. It was going to be the most difficult, heart-rending process he would endure in the course of his life.

At that point most of them drifted away. They searched within themselves somewhere along a dusty 10-mile trail or during the bad part of a really gut-churning 440 on the track, and found some key element missing. Sheepishly they would begin to miss workouts, then stop showing up altogether. They would convince themselves: There must be another way, there
has
to be. The attrition rate was nearly 100 per cent.

Only Cassidy and Mizner made it through and learned about the Trial of Miles, though in fairness they already had discovered much of it on their own. When Denton saw that they were different, he opened up to them and they discovered for the first time that the silently gliding machine at their sides all those months actually had a personality. Accustomed as they were to the flamboyance of their teammates, they were captivated by Denton's penchant for understatement. Once, upon returning from the large international road race at Springbank, Canada, they gathered around his locker, waiting for details. Well, they wanted to know, how did it go?

"Not too badly, I guess," said Denton, dressing in his quick, methodical way. "I got in a token mile in the morning and then ran a few after the race so the week's total won't suffer too much. Jogged around the Atlanta airport, too." He added the last thoughtfully, scratching his chin.

"Well godamn, Bruce, all the Europeans are usually there, Aussies, even some Africans. Who the hell won?" Cassidy was impatient.

"Oh I won it," Denton said breezily, apparently still thinking about the coup of getting a couple of extra miles at the airport.

"Christ, you won it! Ron Hill, Dave Bedford, Frank Shorter, all those guys usually ..."

"Yeah ..." Denton said, pausing in the middle of tying his shoelace as if remembering something pleasant from his childhood, "... nicest bunch of guys you'd ever want to meet."

When during his first post-graduate year Denton came from relative obscurity to run 27:10 for six miles at the Drake Relays, knowledgeable distance buffs were mildly surprised that such an undistinguished performer could run an international caliber race out of the blue. However unlikely it seemed in retrospect, at the time the phrase "flash in the pan" was bandied about. There are scoffers, it seems, in every line of work. Later that spring when Denton made the U.S. Olympic team, nearly everyone professed surprise. Everyone except Dr. Stavius and a promising young miler named Quenton Cassidy, who watched the U.S. trials on television.