Excerpts
The Lure—and Lore—of Boston
A not-so-short history of Boston and why it is the marathon’s Mecca.
by Richard Benyo
During one of the Boston Marathon’s troughs, the mid-1980s when Boston attempted to hold out against the trend for big-time marathons to go professional, the New York City Marathon’s Fred Lebow, the marathon maestro who orchestrated much of that professionalism, commented that it didn’t matter how much money you had, you couldn’t buy tradition. It was the Transylvanian transplant’s homage to what Boston had in abundance and what he would love to immediately have more of for New York but that he knew he would just have to wait for. Fred was an impatient man and a man who knew how to make money work to get what he wanted for his marathon. But that tradition stuff: tradition was a patient man’s game.
Ironically, it was a group of New York athletic fans just returned from the first modern Olympic Games and not the Boston Athletic Association that in 1896 imported the first marathon to the New World mere months after the event’s introduction in the Olympic Games. The group staged a marathon from Stamford, Connecticut, to the Knickerbocker Athletic Club at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, a point less than a mile from the finish of Lebow’s marathon. The weather was dismal. There were 30 entrants and 10 finishers. The winning time was 3:25:55.
Additional item of irony: John McDermott, who won that first New York marathon, also won Boston’s first edition, seven months later; there he finished in 2:55:10.
Continued in Boston Marathon & Beyond. Order your copy today. Available late April 2006.
The Genesis of Boston
The First Boston Marathon—How It Came to Be and How the First Race Went.
by Tom Derderian
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
And so on and on goes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s [1807-1882] fanciful poem about that famed patriot’s ride on the night before April 19, 1775, when there was a “shot heard ’round the world.” That date has come to be celebrated as Patriots’ Day, a legal holiday in Massachusetts. Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but more often it is the first refuge of fancy and myth. So it is with the origin of the Boston Marathon, held every year (almost) since 1897. Myth and fancy ruled from the beginning, driving what is the most primitive of sports, a simple footrace, to an epic symbolic of an era.
Myth and fancy are not bad things. They are not lies or fantasy but serve valuable and instructive purposes. They simplify, streamline, crystallize, and spread the values and dreams of an era. Scholarship can, only after a great deal of effort, make understanding crystal clear. Time, study, and discussion are a lot of trouble. Myth fits the argument of an era into a short story. The first Boston Marathon fixed an instant myth like the silvery, dreamy images of daguerreotypes into a single picture to show the kind of world that simultaneously is and should be.
The midnight ride of Paul Revere, for example, gives us the story of one brave man striving against tyranny. Some study, however, reveals a more complex history. The horse had a lot to do with Revere’s ability to warn the citizens. (For the record, his admirable horse he called Brown Beauty.) So really it was a man and a horse. And further for the record, Paul Revere was only one of many riders that night, along with William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, and others.
Continued in Boston Marathon & Beyond. Order your copy today. Available late April 2006.
Women at Boston
From Out of the Bushes to the Lead Pack: a History.
by Kathrine Switzer
Ever since I started running the Boston Marathon, I’ve told time by it. Like many other die-hard runners who are drawn back to Boston’s annual pilgrimage every April, I find that the race acts as a touchstone where we revisit the old family, check out the newborns, and begin the real calendar for the next year.
I’ve been at every Boston Marathon except three since women started running it, but I haven’t actually run it since—yipes!—1976, which was my eighth race there. For 29 years since, I’ve done TV commentary. Either running or talking, I’ve come to know personally every woman who has won the Boston Marathon as well as many place getters and a whole slew of women’s running characters. Most of them I’ve followed through years of triumphs, despairs, injuries, children—and even grandchildren. Many have become lifelong friends. As I go through the years and the list of winners, I am struck by two things:
First, knowing them and being one of them has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
Second, these women reflect not just their own special moment in running, but they also mark whole eras that trace our sport—indeed, that narrate much of our lives. These women tell more than time; they make history.
As I write this, it is late 2004, the year a woman—a woman!—crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon first. Recognizing that the elite women deserve an unimpeded race and that the public wants to see the women’s competition as clearly as the men’s, organizers gave the women an exclusive head start. Thirty-seven years after an official tried to throw me out of the 1967 Boston Marathon simply because I was a woman, I would not have imagined this level of tribute for women, nor, I suspect, would Roberta Gibb, who was the first woman to run Boston—in 1966.
But I would have imagined equality. It’s important to know that despite our rough starts, Roberta Gibb and I had welcome and acclaim at Boston from the people who counted most: the runners. There wasn’t a male runner in either 1966 or 1967 (or ever, as far as I know), who did not applaud women’s participation. It was only officials, some media, and some of the public who did not approve. Our history is as much about social approbation as it is about athletic ascendancy, and it’s woven with a unique quality of fairness that seems to exist among runners —male and female. Thus it is a fitting and satisfying starting point to reflect on a history that had a hopeful, if at times difficult, beginning.
Continued in Boston Marathon & Beyond. Order your copy today. Available late April 2006.
“Duel in the Sun” Revisited
Director’s Cut: Higdon’s Take on Boston’s Best Duel. Part I
by Hal Higdon
Editor’s note: Those runners who purchased Hal Higdon’s Boston: A Century of Running invariably point to his story of the epic 1982 duel between Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley as the most gripping chapter in the book, perhaps the most dramatic race story ever written.
Yet they only got part of the story. Higdon explains: “Invariably when you publish any book, you make some compromises. You only have so many pages to fill without skyrocketing the price, or making the book so heavy nobody could lift it. The story of the 1982 race featuring Alberto and Dick was so compelling—and the details each runner provided me so vivid—that my early drafts were long, way too long. My editor at Rodale Press, Lee Jackson, and I had to either trim the text or eliminate some marvelous photographs. We did a little bit of both, but the result was that a lot of interesting stories told me by Alberto and Dick dropped onto the cutting room floor.”
This is not unusual in the world of publishing, nor in Hollywood, where feature films usually are trimmed to less than two hours for fear of boring audiences. Sometimes the film reaches such a stature that in reissuing it on video, or for later revivals, the director insists that the film be returned to its original length. This is what is called a “Director’s Cut.” And in the book world, books sometimes are reprinted at their original length. Stephen King did this with The Stand. Sometimes the edited version is better, tighter, more readable or more easily viewed. That probably is true with the edited version of “The Duel” as it appears in Boston: A Century of Running. Nevertheless, in the interests of telling the complete story of the 1982 between Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley, here is Hal Higdon’s “Director’s Cut.” Part II will appear in the May/June 2006 issue of Marathon & Beyond.
You can read Hal Higdon’s “Duel in the Sun” Revisted only in Boston Marathon & Beyond. Order your copy today. Available late April 2006.