The Front Runner (21 page)

A couple of days later the
National Intelligencer
was on all the supermarket magazine racks across the country, along with
TV Guide
and
Reader's Digest.
Housewives checking out with their forty dollars' worth of groceries could see the big photograph of Billy and me frozen in that moment, looking at each other, the silver bowl in Billy's arm and that anguish in our eyes. The headline: 
STAR ATHLETE AND COACH

ADMIT  TO HOMOSEXUAL  RELATIONSHIP.

The article paid due attention to Vince and Jacques, to the little gay ghetto at Prescott and even to Billy's father. But it dwelled on Billy and me, because of the shocking (to the straight) fact that I was older and Billy's teacher.

This blast of publicity had a number of very unpleasant repercussions for us.

First, Billy and I started getting letters from all over the country. About three-fourths of them were hate letters. Many were addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Brown." I didn't let Billy read the hate letters, because I was afraid they'd upset him. But, perversely, I read them myself, and some were really frightening. They said we should be dead. For the first time it hit me that someone might try to harm either or both of us.

We also started getting threatening phone calls. They talked of bombs and kidnapping. The police investigated the calls with a curious lack of enthusiasm. We quickly had our numbers changed to unlisted ones. We gave the new numbers only to a handful of intimates, and had the college switchboard screen all our calls. Reporters, track officials et al could reach Billy only through me.

As Billy's coach, my duties extended to shielding him from all this. He needed the peace and solitude to train in. An athlete can take only so much mental pressure before his performance suffers. Emotional stress causes the blood lactate level to rise—the same lactate that produces fatigue from physical stress. I had a lot of faith in Billy's toughness and in his ability to tune things out, but I wasn't taking any chances.

Second, to counter the bias of the
National Intelligencer
article, Billy and I decided that an article closer to the facts ought to get published. Bruce Cayton had been doing his promised research on homosexuality in sports. He had talked to a lot of people quietly, and gotten a lot of quotes, most of them anonymous. So we offered him an exclusive interview with photographs.

Delighted, he accepted. We sat down with him and talked fairly frankly about our feelings and gay attitudes and sports. We were pleased with the sensitive article he wrote, in which this interview was the centerpiece for all the background he'd gotten. He tried to air the subject impartially. Was there enough homosexuality in sports to worry about? Was it worth worrying about? He presented both sides of the argument,

but wound up implicitly suggesting that too much fuss was being made, especially in view of the Supreme Court decision.

But then he had a hard time selling the article. Magazine after magazine turned it down, saying glibly, "Timely, but not for us." Finally
Esquire
bought it. When it appeared, it drew some of the heaviest reader mail that
Esquire
had ever gotten.

Meanwhile, the AAU had been shocked out of its mind by the
National Intelligencer
disclosure. More accurately, certain AAU officials were shocked, including executive director Melvin Steinbock.

Steinbock was not exactly one of the senile conservative fanatics. He was an improvement over the previous executive director, and had changed or liberalized some AAU policies hated by athletes. But he was easily pressured by the fanatics, and his broadmindedness did not extend to homosexuality. "It's one thing to have this rumored around underground among track people," he said at a regional AAU meeting shortly afterward. "But it's something else to have it all over the front pages. It gives amateur athletics a terrible image."

Steinbock's knee-jerk reaction was to blacklist Billy, Vince and Jacques on a nationwide basis.

The blacklist is a time-honored AAU punishment. It's castration pure and simple. It's usually reserved for coaches and athletes who openly criticize AAU policies, and it cuts them out of competition. An outspoken coach, for instance, finds that his team is being kept out of meets.

In this case, Steinbock was very open about the blacklisting. Why not? It had always been done that way. He put out a memorandum saying that "action would be taken" against any meet promoters who invited any of the three boys to compete. "Action" meant that AAU funding to these meets would be cut off.

The effect within the track world was explosive.

Liberal AAU officials, long ashamed of the blacklist, protested. The angriest was Aldo Franconi, whose district the boys were in. Meet directors were unhappy

because, whatever their moral views, they viewed Billy, Vince and Jacques as good box-office. The name of their game was selling tickets to track meets.

A number of track and field athletes were highly disturbed. Many of them certainly did not approve of homosexuality. On the other hand, the younger ones were inclined to be tolerant. Their attitude was, What is the fuss about? The sight of the AAU blacklisting three of them on such a naked broad-scale basis gave them all the horrors. But, with an Olympic year coming up, none of them dared to protest publicly. They were all afraid that they'd be blacklisted themselves. Several of them did write letters to Steinbock about it, and sent carbons to us.

The angriest letter was written by trackman Mike Stella, a leading activist. He scarcely knew Billy, Vince, or Jacques, so it surprised us a little to see him so vehement.

Stella wrote Steinbock: "Your action sets the athletes' rights movement back approximately five hundred years. In other words, into the Middle Ages."

But even Stella didn't protest in public.

The blacklist put the whole subject on the pages of the track and field publications for the first time. Up until now, they had been delicately avoiding it, on the ground that it was irrelevant. {And they were right.)
Track & Field News
and
Runner's World
were suddenly carrying pages of editorials and letters from runners, coaches, fans, school principals, AAU officials— the whole spectrum.

None of them talked much about homosexuality per se. They disguised their upset by talking mostly about the political question of blacklisting. But the letters were all masterpieces of emotional writing. Some thought that the three boys and I should be awarded Purple Hearts. Others thought we should be lynched and burned.

For the moment, Jacques and Vince were not hurt by the blacklisting. They had planned not to compete hard again until the indoor season started in midwinter. But Billy had set his heart on running in the national AAU cross-country championship in Kansas City on

November 15. Obviously his entry would not be accepted now.

But we were going to get a chance to strike back. The annual AAU national convention was going to be held in Lake Placid, New York, during the last week in October. So we decided to try to meet with Stein-bock and the others—they would all be there. We planned some ball-crushing maneuvers to force them to lift the ban.

First, Billy, Vince and Jacques organized a zap (gay parlance for demonstration). This zap would be held on the opening day of the convention. Vince masterminded it, and did much of the work. The boys spent hours on the phone, stirring up gay activists and sympathetic student groups all over the metropolitan area. They even managed to stir up some local runners who had no Olympic ambitions.

Part of the zap would hit the Metropolitan AAU office on Park Place, since it would be hard to transport so many hundreds of demonstrators to Lake Placid, just a few miles from the Canadian border. But several busloads of angry gays would go up north and zap the convention hall in Lake Placid.

The reason the boys were able to stir up so many students was that the gay issue was becoming fashionable on many campuses. With black and women's civil rights already somewhat old hat, the gay thing was new and daring. Several rock musicians had helped out by professing bisexuality. And the front-page photograph on the
National Intelligencer
had made us the overnight sensations of this new cause.

John Sive, Aldo Franconi and I got our heads together on the legal angles.

On Sunday, October 21, the day before the convention began, the three of us drove up to Lake Placid. The magnificent drive through the Adirondacks, with the maple forests turning flame red and yellow, and the steep mountains reflected in the lakes, was oddly at variance with our grim mood.

The little winter-resort town of Lake Placid, its Olympic days decades gone, was already stirring with AAU arrivals. Cars unloaded in front of hotels, people

registered for the convention, milled in and out of bars, or went out jogging on the trails around the lakes. We found everybody at a wine and cheese party at the Mont Blanc Hotel, and asked Steinbock if we could meet with him and several other officials immediately.

Steinbock was mild but firm. He had come out of the party room sipping his California burgundy, with a piece of cheese still in his hand. "I don't have anything to say to you," he said. "I'm not answerable to you."

"Well," I said, with equal mildness, "this is the boys' lawyer, and I think we'd better talk."

The word "lawyer" rattled Steinbock a little. He stood there, wearing a nylon parka and a baseball cap, looking at John, who was elegant and citified in a dark gray Bill Blass suit.

"All right," he said.

He rounded up national track and field chairman Mickey Reel, long-distance chairman Bob Flagstaad and two others who had supported his decision. Shortly we were sitting down in a stuffy smoky little meeting room in the hotel, that must have been vacated by another informal meeting a while ago. The overflowing ashtrays had not yet been emptied, and convention schedules and agendas lay around.

I introduced John to them.

"This is Billy Sive's father, John Sive," I said. "Possibly you've read about him in connection with the Supreme Court decision on sodomy. John was the architect, so to speak, of the case."

The officials shook hands with John gingerly. They sat sipping their wine.

"We want to talk to you about the blacklisting," I said. "Maybe we can work something out."

"As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed," said Steinbock nicely, playing with his half-empty glass. "We simply can't have this kind of thing in amateur athletics, and it's my duty to discourage it. Frankly, I think you have a lot of nerve to come here."

"I'm not here as Billy's lover," I said. "I'm here as the coach of the three boys."

They all actually flushed. It amused me to see how just my talking like that put them on the defensive.

We fenced around for a while, trying to get them to see reason, to persuade them that they were meddling in an area that was none of their business. But they were more or less adamant. I could see that Flagstaad was disturbed (he wasn't a fanatic either), but he went along with Steinbock.

Finally I said pleasantly, "All right, let me put it this way. If the ban isn't lifted immediately, then we're going to take immediate legal action."

"That's your privilege," said Steinbock. "It's a free country."

"Is it?" I said. "When you guys can crush the careers of international-class athletes who have broken no written AAU regulation, is that freedom?"

"Nobody has ever contested a blacklist legally," said Mickey Reel.

"We can fight you as long and as hard as we like," I said. "We have one of the best civil-rights lawyers in the country. We have unlimited money to fight you in court. Two wealthy gays have decided that the boys are a cause worth supporting, and they have agreed to underwrite all the legal and activist costs."

They sat drinking their wine, thinking. The AAU does not have the money to fight long expensive court cases. It barely has enough money to run its athletic programs.

"We'll also call for the congressional committee on amateur sports to investigate the whole business," I said.

"Amateur sports are supposed to stay clean out of politics," Flasgtaad said quickly. "That's the basis on which we belong to the Olympic movement."

"This isn't politics," said Aldo. "It's civil rights. If you don't think you're answerable to the civil-rights laws, then you go tell that to all the black athletes in the AAU, and all the women."

"Then," I said, "we've got that federal law behind us. Maybe you don't know about the law. John . . ."

John sat smoking a little cigar and telling them about the Supreme Court decision, and how it would apply here. "You've put your blacklisting order on paper," he said. "I have a copy of it. So there's going to

be no doubt in a court's mind what is going on. They would see it as a black and white case."

They were all silent, listening, a little mesmerized by John's grim precise courtroom manner. Until just recently, AAU officials have had little to do with lawyers, because athletes did not seek legal redress—they just suffered.

"Now," John went on, "if the ban isn't lifted, the first thing we'll do is get a temporary court injunction against the blacklisting, pending a hearing. This means that you would have to let the boys run, and if you didn't, you'd be in contempt of court. Second, if we have to, we will file suit against the AAU and against all meet promoters who go along with your policy. And we will ask for big damages for the boys. Let's say, for instance, that we might ask for a million dollars each."

Again that silence, as they thought of the AAU's little bank account.

"Now obviously," said John, "you ought to check this out with your own lawyer. Have him tell you if he thinks you stand a chance in court. And bear in mind that if you lose the case, you pay all the court costs."

Flagstaad said, "Mel, the meet promoters. If just one of them gets hit with a suit, they're all going to ignore your memo."

"Then we cut off AAU money to them," said Stein-bock.