Marathon Man (41 page)

I used to always say, if the marathon is a part-time interest, you will only get part-time results. That's true of anything in life.

 

TWENTY-ONE

The Forty-Foot Wave

In college, nobody would have ever imagined that the top two American marathoners would be Frank Shorter and me. Anyone who trained with us back then would never in a million years have predicted that he would become an Olympic gold and silver medal winner and I would become a four-time New York and Boston Marathon winner. So how did it happen? I got my chance after losing my job and motorcycle. I suddenly had the time and motivation to aim for the marathon. As for Shorter, it wasn't until he was in law school that he found the time and hunger to start excelling. We each had our own internal timetables, I guess.

Our stories are proof that passion and purpose in life can lay dormant for years. But then, one day, you find your desire, your dream, your strength. It was in you the whole time. And once you find it, nothing will ever be the same. From that day forward, you will put everything on the line, make every day count, test the limits of your heart, and embrace the challenge of your spirit.

You don't know when it might come—this spark—which is why you should never lose all hope. The spark came for me after years of getting knocked down by life. But it did come. It did come. And I always knew it was a matter of time before others would discover the power of running to elevate, to inspire, to reshape their destiny, as it had mine.

When I ran my first Boston Marathon in 1973, running was a fringe activity. The tiny band of us bounding through the streets, in our running shorts and training flats, were viewed as drifty freaks of nature. After Jim Fixx came out with his book
The Complete Book of Running
in 1977, running became a bona-fide craze in America. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of people were lacing up their sneakers and taking to the streets. Nike shoes were flying off the shelves. Road races sprang up all over the country. The Boston and New York City Marathons became major social happenings with the newly converted showing up to the start line in mass droves. Other major cities, besides Boston and New York, decided to hold their own marathons. The running boom was on.

Fixx had all these chapters where he detailed the physical and psychological benefits of running, but the most compelling thing about his book was his own personal transformation from overweight smoker to dedicated runner. He also included a whole chapter about visiting Ellen and me in our little second-floor apartment in Melrose. That day, we'd gone out for a seven-mile run around Spot Pond. He wrote about how I ran easily and how it was harder for him. Ellen had cooked him dinner. I remember we had macaroni and cheese—a high-carb feast. He asked me about my training. He got a glimpse into my simple life as a top distance runner (he wrote about how our kitchen table wasn't level, the kind of food I ate, all the running shoes in the hallway). I hated that runners had always been viewed as weaker athletes in America. Fixx showed that it actually took a lot of strength to live this lifestyle—and also that it was fun.

At the time of his visit, I thought Fixx was working on a little running book, but then it came out and topped the
New York Times
bestseller list for sixty weeks in a row. I was stunned. His story inspired hundreds of thousands of average Americans to lace up their running shoes and take to the streets. It also got a lot of people interested in trying the marathon for the first time. Suddenly, every lawyer, doctor, professor, and housewife in town was a reborn runner, espousing the virtues of “runner's high.”

When I saw everything that resulted from Fixx's book, my reaction was: Well, yes, this is the way it should be. Our sport has always had a lot of power to it—now people are finally waking up to the benefits of running, and you didn't need to be Bill Rodgers or Frank Shorter to get them. Everybody gets something out of this sport, everybody gets results, both physically and psychologically.

I was doing what I'd done my whole life, since I was a kid in Newington—run. Only now the whole world was running with me. It was thrilling, addicting, and more than a little mind-boggling. I suppose people liked the fact that I was this homegrown kid from Boston—friendly, warm, and easy to talk to. I also didn't resemble the typical athlete of the day: I was this five-foot, nine-inch, 128-pound Peter Pan who liked to run marathons in Snoopy hats and oversize white gloves and eat pizza with mayonnaise. Up until then, the image we all had of professional sports athletes was somebody like Joe DiMaggio. People you could watch on TV and cheer for up in the stands—but you could never see them, touch them, feel like you shared a whole lot with them. In the world of running, we all felt like we were on equal footing, because everybody ran 26.2 miles, it's just that some people ran it in two hours and some ran it in three hours.

After a road race, I would hang out with the guys, go to the pizza joint, have a beer and a few laughs. Somebody would say, “Hey, you want to run tomorrow at seven?” And I would say, “Yeah, come and get me and I'll run with you guys.” And people would say, “Really? You'll run with us?” And I'd say, “Yeah, sure. Why not? That's what I do: I run with people.” That's how I ended up going out on more runs with local running clubs than probably anybody in history.

I remember once running with the guys from a running club in York, Pennsylvania; another time a group from Binghamton, New York. I didn't go out and run them into the ground in the morning; I went out and ran a nice, easy, relaxed eight or ten miles with them. Probably most of the guys in the club were three-hour marathoners and probably most of them could stay with me every step of the way, much to their amazement and delight. There were groups of people who, when they ran together, turned all their runs into races, but that was not the tradition I came from. It's not the tradition Johnny Kelley passed on to Amby and it's not the tradition Amby passed on to me. Running was just the fun, relaxing, social thing that we did in New England.

I was the biggest star in the sport, a household name among both runners and nonrunners. It was like being a surfer and being on top of a forty-foot wave. I knew the wave would eventually crash, but I was excited to ride it as long as I could.

I wasn't the type of guy who saw a good reason to change my lifestyle even after the store was starting to make money and I landed on the cover of magazines. Ellen and I continued to live in our sloping one-bedroom apartment in Melrose. I continued to putter around in my beat-up VW Beetle. I would sometimes sneak off by myself with a pocketful of quarters to play Asteroids and Space Invaders at the local video arcade. I turned down the assorted invitations to movie premieres and celebrity parties, preferring instead to hang out with my small group of friends.

People from as far away as Russia and as close as two blocks away would show up at the store, looking to meet me. I'd say, “Come on. I'm about to go on a run. Let's go.” At first, I'd get a shocked reaction—You're the Boston Marathon champ. You can't be serious? I didn't care if the person was a top marathoner from Kenya or a recreational distance runner from Tennessee. You've got two feet that work—let's hit the roads. For me, this was the best part of our sport—making long-lasting friendships with people from different cultures and backgrounds.

Ellen and I made a great team. I needed a smart, no-nonsense person in my life like her. She acted as a buffer between me and aggressive race directors who wanted me to come to their races, reporters who wanted to interview me, and people who wanted me to show up to charity events or lead running clinics. When we attended some corporate event, she always brushed me up and put on some clothes for me. I just didn't do the suit-and-tie thing.

Ellen always made sure I stuck to my busy schedule, which wasn't easy. In 1975, I ran the Amsterdam marathon too soon after Boston. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. I wrote the organizers a letter, telling them I wasn't going to be able to make it. The race officials kept calling the house and pleading with me to come. I finally said yes. My agent/wife wasn't happy.

Sometimes she would try to break my pledge to race, but mostly she would just shake her head with exasperation. It wasn't in my nature to say no to race directors, hang up the phone on reporters, brush off a low-level racer who wanted to bend my ear, or deny somebody an autograph. I always wanted to please my fans and show them my appreciation. As a result, I'd end up staying around for hours after a race, embracing people with a warm smile. Ellen often had to step in and say, “Well, Bill can only be here for an hour.”

When Ellen met me, I was down and out. Drifting aimlessly through life. She had literally watched me pull myself up by my bootstraps. I give her thanks and credit for being my sole support through those lean years when I was trying to rediscover my talent. After I won Boston and things started to really improve, we had a great time riding the wave together. We found adjoining passions in this world of running. At the peak of my success, she traveled with me to races around the globe, joined me on business trips to the Big Apple, and was my date to dinner at the White House. We went everywhere together, and it was a blast.

I wasn't getting rich, nothing like that, but there was quite a bit of media and excitement surrounding me. Everything was changing rapidly for both Ellen and me; it was pretty heavy for two small-town kids to be caught up in this whirlwind. I think if you're with someone you care about and they care about you, life is easier.

At the time, the AAU, our national federation, ruled over track and marathoning with an iron fist. They pocketed two-thirds of any purse won by an amateur athlete. The rest went to a charity of our choice. They insisted that I only own fifty-one percent of any store that used my name, making it virtually impossible to franchise or spread my business. We were being hit and nickel and dimed and treated poorly, and it fueled my anger toward the international governing bodies.

I was capturing national media attention with my repeated wins in Boston and New York City. The press began asking for my opinion on everything under the sun. I suddenly had a venue to express my disgruntlement. Reporters would ask me why the AAU rules were so strict and I'd tell them, “Because we're living in the Dark Ages. Amateurism in this country is treated like mother and the flag and apple pie. And it's all hypocrisy. All over the world, there's always been under-the-table money in track and, now, in road running. But people want us to be the last bastion of amateurism.”

So, what are you going to do about it?

“Well, I talk to a lot of American runners and tell them to fight for compensation, and to not let themselves be exploited. But there are some types of personalities that just want to be hammered. Masochists, I guess. I'm not a masochist—I want to be compensated. I'm being exploited, which is another word for slavery.”

If it sounds like I was trying to make some waves, that's because I was. I knew that I wasn't the only one bothered by our treatment—Tom Fleming, Frank Shorter, all of us chafed at the system. And we weren't the first ones. Previous generations had chafed, too. In many ways, I felt I was carrying on Steve Prefontaine's legacy. Our motivation for railing against the status quo came from the same place—the desire to be treated just like any other “professional athlete” in America. We wanted to lift our sport up and bring it a whole new level of visibility, appreciation, and excitement.

The running boom was the catalyst that gave our calls for change momentum. Due to the sheer number of new converts to running, and the marathon heating up into a hot media event, the financial opportunities for runners like me and Shorter skyrocketed. Meanwhile, our spirited rivalry transformed us into the “stardust twins” of American distance running; people were suddenly very interested in what we had to say.

As I kept up my fight in the press, the pressure was mounting on the AAU to make reforms. They eventually agreed to make some modest amateur rule changes. One way an amateur runner could now get around the money ban was by opening a clothing line.

With a PhD in textile chemistry, Ron Hill of Britain was the first runner to press the limits of amateurism when, in 1970, he started a clothing line and opened a running store. Shorter paved the way in America. With the blessing of the AAU, he formed Frank Shorter Running Gear and hired his Yale classmate and former miler Rob Yahn to operate the business. They figured they would make a profit of $250,000 in the first year; they ended up booking $3.5 million in orders in their first month. I realized I could also take advantage of this change in the amateur rules and start my own clothing line. After all, Shorter owned the entire marketplace. There had to be room for one more.

My battles with the AAU and the Olympic Federation came to a head in 1980. That year, I did two national TV commercials. One was for Visa and one was for Life Savers. I was supposed to be paid $25,000 for each one, but the head of the AAU told me I couldn't receive the money. They demanded that I give the money to them, and it would be used for our Olympic athletes.

Later, I spoke to Frank Shorter. I asked him, “What's your situation?” He'd done a national TV ad for Hilton Hotels and I wondered if he'd had to send the money to the AAU, too. And he said, “No, yeah. I kept the money.” The fact that Frank was a lawyer probably made the difference. I guess he went in there and told them, according to the law, he was entitled to keep it all. But the AAU felt that they could pull the wool over my eyes. Of course, America ended up boycotting the Olympics, anyway, and the ads never were used. To this day, who knows whose pockets the money ended up in. Not the athletes'.

At the same time I was jetting around the globe, establishing myself as the world's top distance runner, our clothing line was growing by leaps and bounds. In 1981, we did $3 million in sales, earning a reputation as the hottest company in the running clothes industry. By 1984, we were number 29 on the INC. 500, the highest-ranked apparel business on the list.