The Front Runner Read online

  Vince's biggest problem was going to be those fragile legs of his. He came to me broken down by Lind-quist's high-power training methods. It pained me, as I worked over his tendinitis, to think that a little common sense would have averted this. Slavedriver though I am, I think that there is such a thing as enough stress, beyond which a given athlete's system breaks down. I got hold of an experimental drug, dimethyl sulphoxide, that had been successful in reducing the pain and in­flammation of tendinitis, and started dosing him with it.

  Despite all I'd heard of Vince's temper on the track, he was very docile with me. I just told him what I thought he should do, and he did it, and I checked in on him every other day. Like Jacques, he was a good student, and he went right to work. He was also cheer­fully promiscuous—while he didn't sleep around much, because he was too busy, he would lay anything that interested him, even girls. Jacques put up with this stoically.

  Vince hadn't been at Prescott a week before he tried to lay me. "How about it, Mr. Brown?"

  Had this been Denny Falks six years ago, I would have jumped right out the window. This time I took it very casually.

  "Listen, you little nymphomaniac," I said, "you're a very attractive kid. But I have a rule about not going to bed with my runners, and I never break it. It's the only way I can keep a job and earn a living. You under­stand?"

  "Shit," he said, disappointed. "I really wanted to find out what you're like. We heard so many stories."

  "Stories?" I said.

  "John Sive told us you were one of the heaviest studs in New York."

  "Tell the others about my rule too, so they don't get any ideas," I said crisply.

  Billy Sive had three problems. Shortly he had me tearing my hair out.

  His first and biggest problem was that he always overdid. He was the most strongly motivated and hard­est-working runner that I had ever known, but he had no common sense at all. It was obvious to me that if I didn't keep a tight rein on him, he would train himself and race himself to death.

  Second, he was a front-runner.

  You have two kinds of runners: kickers and front-runners. Vince and Jacques were both kickers. The kicker likes to dawdle in the rear of the pack, letting the others carry the burden of setting the pace. He saves himself for a last-lap sprint to the front. But the front-runner goes out in front right away, and tries to stay there and burn off the rest of the field. If he goes out too slow or makes a tactical mistake, he sets himself up for the kicker's killing rush. Many a front-runner has given a world record to a kicker.

  Later on, the sports magazines were always compar­ing Billy to the great Australian front-runner, Ron Clarke. As a former trackwriter, I was always irritated by these facile comparisons. If I were to compare Billy to anybody, it would be to Emiel Puttemans.

  Billy and Ron Clarke were different in two ways.

  First, Clarke was a front-runner on principle. He thought it was immoral to noodle along in the rear. Billy was a front-runner because, simply, it panicked him out of his mind to run in the pack. "I choke back there," he told me, "with all those elbows and feet. I have to have open space in front of me. I have to run free." For him, a race usually resolved itself into an animal struggle to keep that freedom. But he still didn't have the strength, or the speed, or the grasp of tactics, or the strong finish, to burn off the biggest kickers. My job would be to give him what he lacked, if I could.

  Second, Clarke was a nervous uncompetitive guy who often psyched himself out before big races. Billy never had this problem. He was at his coolest in a big race, and he was savagely competitive. He would, as I said, kill himself to stay in front. His desperate need to be himself, and to prove that he had some worth as a man and as a human being, showed very movingly on the track.

  Billy's third problem was that he was stubborn. In the first months, I had battle after battle with him. He felt he needed my direction, yet—for reasons that I'll go into shortly—he also felt he had to put me down.

  Our first battle was about mileage. This was ironic: Billy came to me hoping I would tell him what he was doing wrong. When I told him, he refused to listen.

  At Oregon, he had lived in a euphoria of testing him­self, and had been stacking up close to 200 miles a week. Lindquist, who is very big on volume training, had encouraged this. I wondered if Billy's lack of im­provement had been due to simple overload. His history of cramps and stress fractures was a dead giveaway. He was calcium deficient, but magnesium deficiency can also cause cramps—magnesium regulates the motor im­pulses to the muscles, and high mileage really drains the runner's system of this crucial electrolyte. Beyond that, I think that Billy was simply unable to handle such high mileage, and the lactic-acid accumulation in his muscles would complicate the magnesium defi­ciency. At any rate, I found that dosing him with Magnesium Plus didn't solve the cramp problem. As for the fractures, his bones were simply giving away under the overload.

  So I tried to get him to drop his mileage and con­centrate on speed and strength training. Runners like Puttemans have done beautifully on little more than 100 miles a week. But Billy wouldn't listen. He fretted and moaned, "I'm sure I'm not working hard enough." So in January, to his great surprise, he found him­self going sour, getting the flu and another stress frac­ture in his right shin. He had to wear a leg cast for a month, and nearly went crazy from the inactivity.

  I was furious, and really laid into him. "You want to go to Montreal," I said. "You won't even live that long."

  The experience shook him. But his deep-seated rea­sons for battling me were still there. He would sneak out for clandestine extra workouts like a ten-year-old sneaking a cigarette behind the barn in the old days.

  Another battle was over diet. I lost this one.

  I am a firm believer in lean, red meat. So when I found out that Billy was a vegetarian, I got very upset. He said he was a Buddhist, and that he couldn't eat any creature that had been killed.

  I got very uptight about this. I'd already seen sev­eral of my runners get malnutrition on fad macrobiotic diets. But Billy explained patiently that, no, he wasn't into macrobiotics. He was killing two birds with one stone by adopting a bizarre vegetarian diet used suc­cessfully in recent years by some European distance runners. He lived on sour milk, yogurt, fruit and raw vegetables, whole-grained cereals, nuts and potatoes. He fixed these meals himself in the dorm kitchenette, and he was—as far as boiling potatoes went—a fair cook.

  My upset finally slacked off when I had the science department analyze what he ate. They soberly re­ported that it contained the amounts of high-quality protein, carbohydrate, potassium, etc. that I judged vital for his work load. And, since there was no budg­ing him on this religious issue, I let him alone. I can't say exactly how much the diet contributed to his later success. But it did help keep him at about 5 percent body fat, so it contributed to his speed. There is a thing in running called the power-weight ratio, and most runners find that the less fat they carry, the better they perform. Bone and fat are dead weight in running. Light-boned, fatless, Billy had almost the ideal physique for distance running.

  Luckily, Billy's religion forbade alcohol. So at least I didn't have that to worry about.

  Away from the track, Billy had a curious aimlessness.

  He was supposedly studying political science. The three boys had lost their first senior semester's credits at Oregon, but they had agreed to undertake an in­tensive single-project portfolio at Prescott. If they completed it to the faculty's satisfaction, they could graduate on schedule. Billy chose a grandiose subject: an assessment of the effects of civil-rights legislation in American life. But he worked on it in fits and starts— except when he had the leg cast on, during which time he studied furiously. When his school records came to me, I saw his teachers remarking all the way back through junior high: "A bright student, but doesn't apply himself."

  He was, as I've said, involved with Buddhism, and also with yoga. In this he was no different from many students. But he had
his own peculiar approach to it. Billy was no mystic, either about running or about life. He was coldly practical. He simply tried to live the basic Buddhist ideals of peace, control and compassion for other beings, and was not interested in the higher levels of spiritual enlightenment

  Since I knew almost nothing about Buddhism, I had no way of knowing how thorough or authentic a Buddhist he was. But one thing was sure: he learned from transcendental meditation an extra measure of concentration, relaxation and control that he quite de­liberately fed back into his running. He could study (when he chose to study) in a room where six other students were arguing radical politics at the top of their lungs. When people harassed him, he simply tuned them out.

  Before a workout or a race, he retreated inward, into the alpha state of TM, and he didn't come out till he was in the shower. While running, he was plainly in a TM trance, thinking only of his body movements, rhythm, breathing, pace. He plunged forward through the barriers of pain and effort with a serene expression on his sweat-streaked face. His blank look in races frequently brought comments that he was doped.

  Once, out of curiosity, I took him to the Bingham Center for Athletic Research down in New York. They had been doing some research on other athletes who were using TM. They put Billy on the treadmill, ran him to exhaustion and found that while in the alpha state, he exhibited the highest tolerance of lactic build­up of any champion athlete they'd tested, as well as increased blood flow to the muscles.

  It's been said that Billy was a classic animal. "Animal" is the somewhat derogatory word for an athlete who feels no pain. This was true. I don't think he felt pain much. If he did, he accepted it as casually as eating and breathing. By contrast, Vince Matti was a connoisseur of pain and gloried in it. Jacques had trouble dealing with pain—it was part of his nervousness.

  Billy "The Animal" Sive, the sportswriters started calling him. My feeling was that, if being an animal got him to Montreal, I wasn't going to criticize. Watch­ing him, I used to get cold chills sometimes. I thought: if I can ever get him to train right, and keep him in­jury-free, I might really have something here.

  I kidded him a little about it. "Are you in Nirvana out there?"

  "Oh no, Mr. Brown," he said. He didn't laugh at my joke. Among other things, he had little sense of humor. "I'm a very pragmatic Buddhist. I just need a good dharma to run well."

  Dharma, I knew, was the Buddhist's right way of living, in which one had a state of inner balance. If you were in control and peaceful, your dharma was good. If you were racked by anxieties and cravings, your dharma was bad. The idea was to rid the mind of all cravings, leaving only peace and compassion. Ob­viously I had a very poor dharma—my craving for Billy was stronger every day.

  Right away Billy became enormously popular with the students and faculty. His sunny candor disarmed everyone. He hardly stirred anywhere without other boys and girls trailing after him. He was the gay Pied Piper.

  Soon half the girls on campus were madly in love with him. Several always went to the track to watch him work out. He was friendly, went with them to campus films, even danced with them. But he mystified them by his refusal to date and/or sleep with any of them.

  "Billy, you've got a secret old lady," they insisted.

  He just shrugged and smiled.

  Vince and Billy both loved to dance, though Jacques didn't. Evenings, in the faculty-student union, there was a permanent floating canteen-discotheque, and the three of them usually spent a while there. In my youth I had thought rock music was sinful and un-American, in spite of the fact that Elvis Presley was already on the scene when I was at Villanova. But in recent years I had come to tolerate rock because I associated it with New York, gay bars, Prescott, peace of mind and—now—Billy. So sometimes, in the eve­ning, I took to drifting past the canteen, hoping to glimpse him in action.

  One evening just before Christmas, I was passing the canteen after a faculty meeting and saw him. I looked in.

  From the crowd in the place, it was obvious that something unusual was going on. The driving beat filled the room, and a black singer was shouting and screaming. The tables were packed with students and teachers eating healthburgers and drinking health drinks. More stood along the walls, and more were coming in and craning their necks to watch.

  Vince, Billy and two girls were right in the middle of the floor, and the other couples were stopping and watching. The two girls were doing a rather abandoned heterosexual version of the Flop. Vince and Billy were not. They were doing the gay boogie. And they were doing it as I had seen it done only in films and at parties in New York.

  The gay who is a good dancer can turn even the foxtrot into an uninhibited celebration of male sexu­ality. Billy and Vince were doing the boogie about six feet from their partners, not looking at them or at each other. They were dancing like blacks. They were loose, cool, with all the foot-stomping and finger-snap­ping that goes with it. Their shoulders and torsos bare­ly moved. All the action was in the hip-jerking, the crotch-gyrating, the buttock-twitching and the thigh-weaving.

  Vince was aware of the crowd, grandstanding a little. But Billy was a shade more restrained, inner-directed, as if he were dancing to that fantasy-lover that every gay sees in his mind.

  I watched them through the door, simply stunned. For the first time, it was visible to me how deeply sexual Billy was, and how deep his sense of loss went. He was dancing that sense of loss right there in front of me.

  I decided that I had to see it from up closer. Walk­ing in casually, I went over to one of the faculty sitting at a table and fabricated something very impor­tant to say to him. Then I spotted Jacques sitting in the front row of tables, and worked my way through the crowd toward him.

  Jacques was sitting engrossed, looking worship-fully at Vince. When I touched his arm, he jumped.

  "Just wanted to say I might be a little late for track practice tomorrow," I lied. "If I am late, don't look for me."

  "Oh sure, Mr. Brown." Jacques' eyes barely left Vince. He pulled me down in an empty chair, that had Billy's jacket hung over the back of it. "Hey, watch these guys, Mr. Brown. They're outrageous."

  There I was, right at ringside. The boys were danc­ing about twelve feet from me. "This is the kind of thing," I said, "that I told them they shouldn't do."

  "Oh, I think it's all right. Look at everybody. They just think it's very sexy heterosexual stuff. After all, the guys are dancing with girls . . ."

  I looked around. Judging by the students' faces, they had never seen anything quite like this before. A few started clapping to the beat, and pretty soon the whole room was clapping and stomping. I could hardly hear myself think.

  I watched a little nervously. On occasion I had seen this dance progress to pants falling, the dancer dex­terously flipping his goodies around and finally jerking off magnificently. I couldn't believe these two would do that, especially Billy. If they did, they would be off the team tomorrow.

  They were really vibrating with the beat now. The students started shouting things at them.

  "Move it, Billy!"

  "Shake it, Vince!"

  "Hey, Vince, is that what they do out at Oregon?"

  "Naw," said Vince. "They do this in California."

  "Watcha got, Vince?" someone else shouted.

  "Eight inches," said Vince.

  I kept a straight face, but inside I was dismayed.

  The place erupted with whoops and wolf whistles. "Show it!" "Take it off!"

  "Don't provoke me," said Vince.

  Just at that moment, Billy saw me there. A blush actually went up through his speckled cheek. I com­municated my disapproval with my eyes. Immediately, imperceptibly, the gay raunch went out of his move­ments, and he was doing a facsimile of straight boogie.

  Then I tried to catch Vince's eye, but he was joy­fully engrossed in his movements. The shrieks, taunts, dares went on. Suddenly Vince laid his hand on his flanks and ran them slowly down to his thighs. The spectators looked at each other g
leefully, and punched each other playfully.

  Vince ran his hands up and down a few more times, then unbuttoned the metal button at the waist of his jeans. Everybody howled and jumped up and down. Vince's body was really moving now, snapping, whip­ping, his hair tossing wildly. Very slowly he started to unzip his fly. His jeans slid down a little around his hips, showing a strip of torso under the hem of his T-shirt. All the tendons and muscles in it were working like a belly dancer's.

  I glanced at Jacques, who was now looking nervous too.

  "Well, supposing he does it?" said Jacques in a soft voice. "I mean, have you ever been at a rock con­cert? The musicians sometimes get dared to expose themselves, and they do..."

  "Billy!" they were now calling pleadingly.

  Billy shook his head, and kept dancing mechanically.

  Vince's zipper was now down far enough that we could see a little black pubic hair. Then, just as it looked like his pants were going to fall, he grinned and pulled them up again and zipped his fly. The whole room yowled with disappointment.

  Now they were after Billy. "Come on, Billy. Watcha got?"

  Suddenly Billy smiled. "Ten thousand meters," he said.

  Everybody groaned. "Goddam runners," said some­body behind me. "They're so fucking single-minded.".

  They begged and pleaded, but Billy was adamant. I thought more of him for it.

  The record ended, and the band hit its last jarring, whanging chords and bashes of cymbals. Vince stopped dancing and was hanging onto his female partner, laughing giddily. She didn't know it, but she had been subjected to some classic, gay teasing. Billy walked away from his partner, hesitated as he saw that he had to rescue his jacket from behind my shoulders, and finally came slowly over.

  "You know," said Jacques, "I think that if Vince ever comes out, he's going to be capable of just about anything."

  I looked at Billy, giving him a Parris Island chew­ing-out with my eyes.

  He pulled his jacket out from behind me, and mumbled, "Sorry, Mr. Brown. I don't know what came over me."