The Front Runner (2 page)

There was nothing diplomatic about the way Billy put this. He backed me right into the corner. I was shortly to learn that this was—always—his way. Billy lived for the pitiless truth because it was the only way he'd been able to survive.

"If you don't want us, we'll understand," said Jacques, a little forlornly.

I didn't know what to say. It was a big decision to make so suddenly. I knew that it would affect me, them, the school and—perhaps—track itself. If I took them on the team, people would talk about it.

To buy a little time, I said, "Tell you what. I'll show you around the campus first. Prescott isn't like most schools. You ought to know what you're getting into."

The four
of us walked all over the campus.

The sidewalks were scraped clean now. The snow was melting already, and falling from the trees into the snow below with little whumps! everywhere. Students bundled in polo coats, Mexican sweaters, sheepskins, army surplus crisscrossed the campus with their briefcases.

"Prescott is an experiment," I told them. "About ten years ago, Joe Prescott decided that America was going

to the dogs, and that American education was going to the dogs. He decided that what we needed was more human people, better able to survive, and cheaper, more practical education. So he turned his computer software company over to his board of directors, and out of his profits he built this school. This campus used to be his estate."

"He's some kind of straight liberal, huh?" said Jacques.

We walked and walked. I pointed out everything to them. "There are no regular courses. Each student chooses his area of interest, and fills a portfolio full of projects. If you want to learn carpentry, we have a damn good vocational department. If you want to learn political or environmental activism, you go out and do it. A faculty advisor keeps track of your portfolio of projects, and it's graded pass or fail."

"Sounds easy," said Vince cheerfully.

"It isn't," I said. "That's what I thought when I came here. No sir. Students without self-discipline wash out pretty fast."

All the time I was trying not to look at them too hard. Three class runners. And beautiful. Especially Billy Sive.

I showed them the plush athletic facilities.

"Joe's a big nut on fitness," I said. "He thinks the American body is going to the dogs too. I happen to agree with that. Physical education is the only required course here. We've got a broad fitness program. It's all aerobic sports. No ping-pong or golf. Only handicapped students are excused."

We were walking along the trail toward the track, our breath blowing white on the sunny air.

"Then, on a level above the fitness program, we have a few competitive sports," I said. "Swimming, field hockey, cycling. But the big emphasis is on track."

We stood looking across the quarter-mile cinder track. It lay in a great open field surrounded by woods. The school's little snowplow had almost finished clearing the track, though the bleachers along it remained buried. The girls' team, about twenty-five of them, were all over the track, striding, doing bursts.

"I've made track a big thing at this school," I said. My heart pained me at the thought of the four happy years I'd spent here, and how these three boys were maybe going to mess it up. "We have the same kind of enthusiasm for track that you had at Oregon, only on a smaller scale. The students and the faculty really get worked up about track. They run, or they jog, and they go to meets. Last year I even fielded that girls' team." I pointed at the girls. "The girls
demanded
it. They gave me a lot of crap about women's equal rights in sports, so I had to."

The boys all laughed.

"Foxes," said Billy, "will be foxes."

"Of course," I said, "we aren't big-time here. We don't have athletic scholarships. But even if we did, I couldn't go out and sign burners like you guys, because you all want to run for Oregon. We think more in terms of fitness and having a good time. We go to the local meets, and we do very well, and that's about it."

"What you're saying is," said Vince, "if you take us, it'll be a whole new ball game here."

"It will be," I said. "But it's no problem ... we have the facilities, and the money, as you can see. We don't have an indoor track, but we're breaking ground for one this spring. And we're also going to install a Tartan track." The old-time cinder tracks are not as fast as the new synthetic tracks.

All three were looking hungrily at the track. Probably they hadn't had a good workout for several days, and they were feeling withdrawal symptoms. Vince had his arm over Jacques' shoulders. They were being quite natural around me—what could Billy's father have told them?

Billy couldn't stand it. He took off and ran gently around the track alone. He passed the chugging snow-plow in the turn. He passed among the girl runners like a thoroughbred among a lot of ponies. He loped easily along, with perfect form. I noticed some of the girls turn to look at him, but he ignored them.

Perhaps it was the sight of his lonely, graceful figure among the girls, against the snowy landscape, that decided me. They were like three young birds driven

away from the flock. Four years ago, Joe Prescott had sheltered me, an older storm-driven bird. It would be a sin not to pass on his Christian kindness.

Billy 'rounded the turn and came back to us, breathing easily, grinning.

"Ready to go, huh?" I said, smiling myself for the first time.

"Yeah," he said.

"All right, you're on," I said. "Go register, and get your rooms assigned. You'll probably lose a semester's credit, but we can work something out. Then report back to me, and I'll issue you your gear."

They all grinned happily, and Vince slapped Billy gently on the back.

"We really appreciate it, Harlan," said Billy.

"It's Mr. Brown," I said.

Their faces fell a little. Billy looked at me strangely.

"Okay, Mr. Brown," he said.

TWO

ALL my life, I have been haunted by the ghost of a runner.

I was born in Philadelphia on August 14, 1935. My father was a track nut, and among my earliest memories is being taken to meets. He'd hold me up so I could see over the crowd at the distant, flitting figures of men in shorts and singlets. "Look there," he'd say, "look how fine they are, my boy."

My father, Michael Brown, was a big, strapping man, half-English, half-Scot, who owned a small printing plant there in Philadelphia. From 1941 to 1945 he was off in the Pacific fighting with the Marines. He helped take Guadalcanal, and he came home with a slight limp and a Purple Heart.

He was a strict man, but also warm and merry, and I adored him. My mother was less close to me—she was a devoted, dutiful Black Irish woman, but a little cold and always nervous. He and my mother were both staunch Protestants, and they gave me the upbringing that one would expect. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, church every Sunday, pledge allegiance to the flag.

And running. For my father, running was almost part of his religion. "Runners," he used to say to me, "those are the real men. Baseball is for babies, and football is a brainless business. Running takes more effort and more discipline than any other sport."

Ironically, then, it was my fine, big, straight father who taught me to worship at the altar of manhood. Whereas if stereotype had its way, I should have had a milquetoast father, a fierce and castrating mother, and grown up disturbed and shy with girls. That was not the case at all. My father, at odd variance with his puritan-

ism in other areas, had no objection to girls. He said it was part of being a real man. Already in grade school, I discovered that the sexual part of my nature was powerful and insistent.

When I got to the Fairview High School, the main thing on my mind was getting onto its famous track team. I wasn't much of a student. But I worked at it, because if I got poor grades, my father scolded me and asked what I was doing with the school taxes he paid so painfully.

I loved competition, and pitting myself against the other boys. But running was also good for its own sake—the discipline and the joy of motion. And physically, running made me different from boys (especially the fat, pampered ones, whom I despised) who didn't engage in high-stress sports. Very early, I got to thinking of myself, and of all runners, as a separate and superior species of human being.

In the summers, we always vacationed in the Po-conos. My mother had asthma and said the city air was bad for her, and my father loved to fish. So we had a tiny cabin in a remote area of the mountains. My father would drive up to be with us on weekends. I was alone there all week long with my mother, and missed him very much. So I hunted up any boys I could find in the area, and spent the days roaming with them.

The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I met a boy whom I'll call Chris Shel-bourne. His family had just bought a summer cabin nearby. He was blond, with calm, blue eyes, very quiet, lean and sun-browned. It turned out he was a runner. We were delighted to discover this common passion, and we quickly became close friends.

In fact, my feelings for him became so strong that I wonder now why I didn't understand them correctly. Perhaps it was because I was so poorly educated about these things. My father had told me what he thought I needed to know about girls. But he had never told me such feelings could exist between two males. As far as I knew, there was no name for what I felt. But instinctively I realized that these feelings were something to

be hidden from everyone, even from Chris, even from myself.

Chris, possibly, felt the same confusion. He feverishly sought every opportunity to be with me that summer, but he never discussed his feelings.

An hour passed without Chris was an eternal loss. We fished, hiked, or just lay in the sun and talked about track. We daydreamed out loud to each other about being top college runners, then of going to the Olympic Games.

Every day we took long runs together through the woods, following the many lonely trails for eight or ten miles. We jumped the streams and ran brushing through the mountain laurel. The laurel was all in bloom shortly after we met, heavy and fragrant with pink and white blossoms. We tore up hills and ran sliding down them, running free like two deer. We dashed through the dappled sunlight under the great trees. We were hyper-oxidated and deliriously happy. The act of running was all tied up in my mind with the feelings I had when he was near me.

Miles off in the woods, there was a small, lonely, clear lake. We would always strip there and go swimming. I had seen hundreds of boys naked in the locker rooms at school. But when I saw this adored friend of mine naked, my feelings turned to sexual desire. In confusion and distress, trying to be casual, I always smothered this feeling. Chris apparently did the same.

So we squandered the summer of '52 that way.

At the end of our last run, as we were nearing the edge of the woods but still out of sight from our cabins, Chris suddenly stopped and said, "I want to say goodbye here."

He put his arms around me. But panic equaled affection, so we did no more than embrace each other awkwardly with our panting sweaty bodies brushing together. He touched his lips to my cheek, near my mouth, and after a moment's shaky hesitation I did the same to him. We swore that we would write to each other, and that we'd see each other next summer.

The next day his family closed up their cabin and returned to New Jersey. I ran alone in the woods that

day. I would have cried bitterly, but my father had taught me that real men don't cry.

I didn't have the courage or the verbal ability to put my feelings on paper, so I never wrote to Chris. He never wrote to me either. The next year we heard that the Shelbourne cottage had been sold to somebody else. I never saw Chris again.

My senior year in high school, I went through two or three casual girlfriends, searching in vain for that feeling that Chris had stirred up in me. Part of the problem seemed to be that their intensity about sex did not match my own. That year, too, I won the mile run at the Penn Relays. My dad was tremendously proud, and kept those first newspaper clippings framed on the living-room wall till they yellowed.

After graduation in 1953,
I
was a little torn. I wanted to go straight to college and run, but the Korean War was still on, and I was itching to go over there and collect a belt-full of gook scalps. So my parents let me enlist in the Marines. But I had scarcely finished boot training when the truce was signed.

This was a big disappointment, but I thrilled at being a Marine anyway. They promoted me to lieutenant, put me on the Marine track team and let me compete as much as duty would permit. I trained hard, and my personal best in the mile was a 4:04.3, which was considered very good in those days—Roger Bannister had broken four minutes in 1954. I began to hope I could make the Olympic team in 1956.

But when my four-year hitch ended early in 1956, my dad's business was in trouble. Instead of training, I had to help him out, and to take a job as copy-reader at a newspaper. Bitterly I sat in the noisy city room and proofread the results of the Olympic trials.

That fall I went to Villanova on an athletic scholarship, majoring in journalism and minoring in phys ed. But I was still working nights and my training suffered. While I made the varsity track team, my running went nowhere near as well as in the Marines.

To make things worse, in 1959, my senior year, I was dating a girl named Mary Ellen Bache. While looking for the Chris feeling, I managed to get her in trou-

ble. Of course it was my duty to marry her, and I did. Neither of our families was happy with the event. It was a bad way to start a marriage.

Out of college in 1960, the next Olympic year, I had to face it. With two family responsibilities weighing on me, there was no place in my life for amateur track competition.

But I could stay close to the sport by choosing a profession connected with it. I still didn't have the graduate credits for teaching physical education, so it had to be newspaper work. I went to work for the Philadelphia
Eagle
as a trackwriter, and went to school nights. By getting up early every morning and running a few miles, I managed to stay in minimal shape.