Marathon Man (39 page)

Surprisingly, Päivärinta maintained his grip on the lead as we passed through Williamsburg and a number of bewildered-looking Hasidic Jews in black coats and fur hats. At around eight miles, I threw a light shrug to some people in the press bus that was ahead of us but trailing Päivärinta. Go figure.

Now that the race had started, the nervous energy quickly dissipated, replaced by the excitement of being in the middle of the hunt and hearing people cheer for me as the New York City streets flowed under my shoes. Through Brooklyn, I continued to trail four blocks behind Päivärinta, content to run in a pack with Frank and nine other runners.

For a time, Shorter and I ran shoulder to shoulder along the course.
Sports Illustrated
would describe after the race: “Shorter's stride was the more fluid. His feet falling more softly, yet Rodgers' was the more beautiful. There can be something hard in Shorter, a scornful quality, especially when he is out front and applying pressure. But Rodgers, blond and open-faced, simply ran faster, ghosting away with a look of amazement.”

Around the twelve-mile mark, somewhere in Queens, I caught up to Päivärinta and passed him. Chris Stewart, a thirty-year-old stamp seller from Great Britain, went with me. Shorter did not.

As we neared the Queensboro Bridge, Stewart pulled even with me.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Chris Stewart,” he replied.

I didn't know a lot about the British runner except that he had run a fast marathon time before and that he was a serious threat. I watched as Stewart surged past me into the lead. It was a clear challenge to my dominance. Maybe he thought I would start to fade now as I did in the Olympics.

At about the 14.5 mile point, we came off a long, flat stretch onto a steep half-mile climb up the Queensboro Bridge. I said to myself, Okay, time to challenge, and picked up the pace.

We were running stride for stride up the incline. I could feel his breathing growing heavier and his form breaking down a bit, and the more I sensed he was laboring, the more I put on the afterburners. While I floated over the metal grating that covered the road surface on the Queensboro Bridge with my light running style, Stewart ended up with bloody feet and missing toenails from pounding on the surface. (For later races, they installed a 3,975-foot strip of nylon carpeting, or what was hailed as the “world's longest runner,” over the steel expanse.)

Once I broke away from Chris Stewart at the bridge, I felt like nobody in the world was going to catch me. It was the first and probably last time during a race that I just knew I was going to win. It didn't matter that I still had ten miles to go. I felt that full of confidence.

Once in front, I started to relax. I was feeling strong and feeding off the buzzing energy of the crowds that lined the streets. A couple months earlier, traversing the same distance, I almost had to crawl to the finish. Now I ate up the miles, stride after effortless stride. I glanced over my shoulder; there was nobody behind me. Shorter was nowhere in sight.

While I no longer feared any of the other runners, I had to stay alert about following the course. It wound itself in every strange manner through the unfamiliar urban jungle. A painted blue line was supposed to guide me along the race route, but the early morning rain had washed it away. Suddenly, the screaming crowds provided more than inspirational support, they made sure I didn't get lost and end up in Yonkers.

As I came into Manhattan, I expected to be greeted by the roar of fans along the shops of First Avenue but I was unexpectedly rerouted to the East River—and the start of a harrowing adventure.

I can't say I enjoyed sucking in car fumes from the cars zipping by me on the FDR Drive. I did, however, derive amusement from the strange looks I got from the bums, prostitutes, and drunk guys fishing as I whizzed by them in my racing singlet. The trickiest part was navigating flights of stairs on the drive's sidewalks. Sure, flights of stairs seventeen miles into a marathon. Why not?

I ran up through the mean streets with a “bring it on” attitude. If I had to leap over garbage cans, dodge fashion models, somersault over livery cabs, and outrun the two robbers that had held up Jack Foster at Kennedy Airport, so be it. Nothing was going to stop me from reaching Central Park and crossing the finish line for victory.

At eighteen miles, I passed Dick Traum, a thirty-five-year-old competitor who had set out to finish the marathon in under eight hours. Not the most difficult task unless, of course, you accounted for the fact that he was running on a prosthetic leg. Traum had begun his attempt to become the first amputee to run a marathon at 6:49 that morning. Traum was now four hours into his journey when I came up on him. I guess Traum was feeling a little discouraged, the faster runners making him feel like he was “going backward.”

“Attaboy, Dick,” I shouted to him as I roared past him.

My little pat on the back gave him the lift he needed. Traum said after the race: “I was blown away that he knew who I was. It had to be one of the most exciting moments of my life.” Traum went on to complete his first marathon in seven hours, fifty-one minutes, beating his goal by nine minutes. Maybe it's true, as Alberto Salazar said, that we all start out the marathon as cowards. But Dick Traum is all the proof you need that all of us who finish the marathon finish as heroes.

I crossed over the Willis Avenue Bridge, which carried traffic over the Harlem River into the Bronx. Coming off the swing bridge, I had reached the twenty-mile point, a spot that would later be dubbed by runners as “the wall.” But if this was a wall, I'd smashed through it without a scratch. I was sailing.

I expected to see crowds of spectators cheering for me as I descended off the bridge leading into the Bronx, but the area was oddly vacant. I took no more than a few steps into the fifth borough when I suddenly came upon a light pole where the faint blue line on the road seemed to come to an abrupt end. Do I make a sharp U-turn and head back into Manhattan? Or do I keep running into what the
New York Times
called “the nation's most infamous symbol of urban blight, a bombed-out relic and a synonym for hopelessness and decay”? I made the call. I swung around the pole and started back over the bridge.

Going back over the Willis Avenue Bridge, the olive-colored river merging with the misty sky, I spotted a runner approaching me from the other direction. It was Shorter. He gave me a nod and a little smile. “Way to go, Billy,” he said. The moment didn't last more than a second but, looking back, it was a symbolic moment in American marathon running, the passing of the torch from one champion to the next. Shorter had reigned for the first five years of the decade; I would reign over the final five years.

A lot of people started slowing down after twenty-one miles, but I was floating along like a feather as I made my final assault through Harlem down Fifth Avenue. The crowds in Harlem kept me running hard with their boisterous cheers of support. I entered Central Park feeling on top of the world.

The exhilaration I felt running that final stretch though the park, sandwiched between screaming throngs of New Yorkers from every walk of life, young and old, urging me on to victory, was indescribable. I braced for the daunting hills at the north end that were part of the old New York course. A guy riding his bike kept telling me the hills were just up ahead. But they never materialized (for all I know, the bicyclist had just escaped from Bellevue) and I just kept coasting along, free and easy.

The crowd was screaming like crazy as I squeezed between them. I felt like I was running a cross-country race in high school, except instead of dodging bushes and rocks I was navigating around people, potholes, cars, bicyclists, you name it.

The scene was utter chaos as I approached the finish line. It made for great dramatic theater. Of course, at that stage, all that I was thinking about was getting to the finish line, wherever the heck it might be.

Crowds pressed in all around me. Cops were trying to hold back the frenetic crowd and keep stray vehicles from running me over. I was veering in and out of the insanity when suddenly the lead vehicle stopped short.

At the last second, I weaved around it and shot through the narrowest of openings between the car and the wall of yelling spectators. I broke through the tape. A roar of cheers ripped through the crowd.

In spite of all the wild obstacles I had to navigate along the 26.2 miles of urban frontier, I had crossed the finish line in 2:10:10, beating runner-up Shorter by more than three minutes. I was sweaty, exhausted, and my ears were ringing. I was in heaven.

In the winner's circle, Mayor Beame handed me a Tiffany sterling silver tray and then crowned me with a handmade laurel wreath. As he pushed the wreath down on my head, the wire tips used to hold it together pierced my skull. “Ouch,” I exclaimed.

That 1975 Boston Marathon will always be my favorite because it was the breakthrough I had worked so hard to achieve, but New York might have been the best marathon I've ever run. I broke the course record. I set the fastest marathon time in the world for that year. I ran the eighth fastest marathon in history. I was only fourteen seconds from breaking my own American marathon record, which I had set in Boston in 1975.

After three attempts, I had finally beaten the great Frank Shorter in a marathon. (Shorter hadn't run Boston during his marathon peak because the BAA, in their infinite wisdom, refused to pay the champ's airfare and travel expenses. He wouldn't run Boston until 1978, when he was getting past his prime.) Even after my failure in Montréal, I believed I was good enough to beat the Olympic champion. Few others did. But everything came together that day in New York. I had shown people that Boston hadn't been a fluke. It's hard to put the emotions into words. I felt redeemed.

After the awards ceremony, I returned to the spot where I'd parked my 1973 Volkswagen Beetle and discovered it was no longer there. Apparently, I had parked illegally, and it had been towed away. Fred Lebow didn't want my great day to end on a sour note, so he took up a collection of $100 so I could retrieve my car from the impound lot. I was grateful to Lebow for his help. It wasn't until many years later that I found out he had given the money to me out of his own pocket.

After beating Frank Shorter in a head-to-head competition, I was no longer able to masquerade as the underdog or the marathon runner on his way up. I was now the man to beat.

I asked myself, How am I going to live up to the expectations that my triumphs in Boston and New York have created while holding down a full-time teaching job? I'd seen how my job had impacted my training for the Olympics. Running on top of snowbanks at the crack of dawn was not the best way to train.

One morning, the elderly principal called me into her office.

“Mr. Rodgers, I'm afraid we can no longer allow you to run on your lunch hour.”

“But I have permission.”

“And that permission is now revoked,” she said sharply.

I let out a frustrated sigh.

“It's time you decide what's more important to you, Mr. Rodgers,” she said in a lecturing tone. “Your avocation or your vocation.”

I looked straight ahead at the crotchety old lady demanding that I choose between my job and running—the thing that brought me the most pleasure in life, the thing that I lived and breathed.

I liked teaching. I really did. But I didn't want to be a part-time amateur anymore—I wanted to be a full-time professional. I was done messing around as a marathoner. I made up my mind. I said, “I'm going to go for this.”

The question was, how?

 

TWENTY

More Than a Shoe Store

After my victory in New York, I felt the doors swing wide open. I knew I had a shot to compete at the highest level. I also knew my window of opportunity to become one of the top marathoners in the world was small. I had to strike while the iron was hot, make my mark while I was at my physical peak. I'd worked years to build up to the kind of shape I was in. I was determined to win as many marathons and road races around the world as I could. But I knew there was only one way I could do this: find a job that allowed me a more flexible schedule to train than teaching had. I needed a plan.

Tommy Leonard and others suggested I open up an athletic store around Boston College, which by then had become a big running area for the many students living in the vicinity. I called up Charlie, who was still living in Connecticut, working as a drug counselor, and said, “I'm opening a running store at Cleveland Circle, right along the Boston Marathon course. Want to be manager?”

Charlie's initial response was skepticism. Were there really enough runners to support that kind of business? I explained to him that runners in Boston were no longer a tiny group rustling on the edges of society, getting pelted with empty beer cans by passing motorists. From the banks of the Charles River to the brick sidewalks of Harvard Square, people were running through the streets in their Nike and New Balance shoes with their iron-waffled soles. They were humming the theme to
Rocky
. I told Charlie, “I think we can make it work.”

The phone went silent. Then I heard my brother's voice. “Oh, what the hell. Let's do it.”

Ellen and I pooled the money from our teaching jobs and the under-the-table income I'd made from appearance fees. Together, we invested forty thousand dollars to get the store off the ground. Running friends like Bob Sevene helped build the store in the basement of a former laundromat with saws and hammers and two-by-fours.

In November of 1977, the Bill Rodgers Running Center was open for business. I remember we did one hundred and twenty-seven dollars our first day. We thought that was great. My easygoing, bushy-bearded brother presided over a tiny staff of enthusiastic runners, who roamed the aisles proselytizing about the joys of running.

Charlie and I brought Jason in to be our assistant manager. I remember after I moved out of our place in Waltham, Jason ended up dropping further out of society and delving deeper into psychedelic drugs. He was still drifting while I had found my purpose with the marathon. The store gave him a way to return to the fold. He rediscovered his passion for running, which Coach O'Rourke instilled in us in middle school. He got up to the point where he was running seventy miles a week. He started running after work every day, which he continued to do for the next thirty-five years. He was like Charlie and me in that he knew he was lucky to have gotten into running, and he wanted to help others to discover the sport. The Three Musketeers were back!