Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  “But are you gambling, Flanagan?” asked a voice from the middle of the room.

  “I’m gambling, yes – that there’ll be at least someone still on his feet at the end!”

  “Campbell, Glasgow Herald. We have considerable knowledge of professional running in my country and our experience is that it is usually corrupt. How do you prevent cheating?”

  Flanagan pursed his lips. “A dozen officials will follow each stage of the race. Anyone caught hopping on trucks or cars will be immediately disqualified.”

  “Glenda Farrell, Woman’s Home journal. How many women are in the race, Mr Flanagan?”

  “One hundred and twenty-one.”

  “Are there any separate prizes for women?”

  “No,” said Flanagan. “I reckon women are always trying to prove they’re man’s equal. Here’s their chance to prove it.”

  “What is the longest distance a woman has ever covered, Mr Flanagan?”

  Flanagan looked down at his notes. “The longest Olympic distance is eight hundred metres. About half a mile.”

  “And weren’t there protests after the Amsterdam Olympics about the dreadful finishing condition of the female competitors in the eight hundred metres?”

  Flanagan looked nonplussed and whispered for a moment with Willard. Then he said, “It is our view that the ladies in the race will have prepared themselves thoroughly for the Trans-America. Only time will tell if their preparations have been thorough enough. Next question.”

  “Are the ladies being provided with chaperones?” asked Miss Farrell.

  “Five ladies from a well-known seminary are acting as chaperones, led by Miss Dixie Williams.” He nodded to his left to the girl whom Hugh McPhail had earlier met at the reception area.

  “Who’s chaperoning her, Flanagan?” asked a voice.

  “I will treat that question with the contempt it deserves, Mr Grose,” said Flanagan with a smile, scanning the room for further questions.

  “Howard, Chicago Star.” The top baseball reporter of the Eastern Seaboard stood up at the front of the hall, sucking his pencil. “I have reviewed the route, Mr Flanagan. There seems to me to be no rhyme or reason to much of it. Why have you failed to choose a direct route across the continent?”

  “Two reasons, sir. One is that I wished competitors to see every aspect of our beautiful nation. The second is that several cities have expressed a particular desire to host the runners of the Trans-America.”

  “Isn’t there another reason, Flanagan?” asked Howard. “Isn’t it true that each major town on the route has to pay what you call an ‘assessment’?”

  Flanagan flushed. “If you mean that certain cities are paying sums to have the Trans-America pass through, then that’s perfectly true. Their mayors believe that the Trans-America will be good for trade, and I have given them the complete franchise on race programmes. That has meant that the race is sometimes less than direct, but it puts more money into the pot for stage prizes.”

  “Tell us a little more about the stage prizes, Flanagan,” said Howard.

  Flanagan visibly relaxed. For the moment he was off the hook. “Stage prizes of between three hundred dollars and one thousand dollars have been offered at certain points along the route. For instance, Coca-Cola are offering a three-hundred-dollar stage prize in the Mojave and General Motors a prize of one thousand dollars for the King of the Mountains, in the Rockies. But remember, gentlemen, that the Trans-America winner will be the man – or woman – with the lowest aggregate time over the full distance, like your Tour de France bike race.”

  Carl Liebnitz, of the New York Times, rose to his feet. Liebnitz, lean, tanned and white-haired, had earned his reputation as the seeker out of all that was false or phoney. He was not, strictly speaking, a sports reporter, enjoying the rare freedom to comment on what he pleased in his weekly column of national and international gossip. “Is it true that you are also featuring a circus, involving” – he picked up a press release – “Madame La Zonga, the Samoan snake woman, Fritz the talking donkey, and the mummified head of the Mexican bandit, Emiliano Zapata?”

  “Correct,” said Flanagan. “And you might also note the jungle Dodgers, the first baseball-playing chimpanzees.”

  Liebnitz could not completely mask a grimace. “May I respectfully ask you what in the name of tarnation a troupe of freaks has got to do with a serious foot-race?”

  “What we are taking from here to New York is entertainment,” said Flanagan. “Everywhere we go, every minute of the way, I aim to put on a show. When the runners are tired, then it’s up to Madame La Zonga to do her stuff. This isn’t college track and field, gentlemen; this is the world of entertainment.”

  Liebnitz resumed his seat, shaking his head.

  Albert Kowalski, of the Philadelphia Globe, burly and crew-cut, stood up. “Sir, in a year Los Angeles will host the 1932 Olympic Games, which is an amateur meet. Won’t your professional Trans-America race therefore deprive the United States of possible Olympic gold medals?”

  Flanagan placed the knuckles of both hands on the table and the cameras exploded. “A good question,” he said evenly, flashing his great teeth. “First, it’s a free world. Olympic medals pay no rent, and if an American boy chooses to take a chance on setting himself up for life by running in the Trans-America rather than going for an Olympic gold medal then surely that is up to him. Second, when did America last win gold in a marathon Olympic event?”

  There was no answer.

  “I’ll tell you. 1908, when Johnny Hayes beat Dorando in the London Olympics. That’s one helluva long time to wait, gentlemen. Let’s face it. Here in the USA we’re sprinters and jumpers and throwers, not marathon runners. I don’t see a three-thousand-mile race losing us any goddam sprinters or shot putters. Do you?”

  There was silence; Flanagan had made his point.

  Liebnitz was on his feet again. “Carl Liebnitz. I see you have a nineteen-year-old Mexican, Juan Martinez, entered. We have no athletic record for Mr Martinez. Have you any background on him?”

  Flanagan leant to his right to whisper to Willard.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Carl. We know that he is the only Mexican entered and that he has been sponsored by his village, Quanto.”

  “Pollard here. I can help you there, Flanagan, though . . .” he turned to face the reporters behind him. “I ain’t certain I should be helping my learned colleagues. Quanto is right in the middle of a famine area. I’ve talked with young Martinez. My information is that he is running in the Trans-America to save his village from starvation.”

  Flanagan glanced quickly round the room. “There’s your story, gentlemen,” he smiled.

  “Kowalski again. What are the living facilities for the athletes like?”

  “For the next couple of days they’re living high on the hog in hotels. En route they live in twenty specially-constructed tents, a hundred bunks to a tent.”

  “And press facilities?” queried Kowalski.

  “Six thirty-seater press buses are being provided, courtesy of Ford Motors. I know that you fellas are making your own accommodation arrangements at each town.” He sensed that questions were slowing up, and a few reporters were drifting towards the back of the packed hall as deadlines approached

  “Rae. What provision is being made for food for the competitors?”

  Flanagan rifled through a file of papers and selected one. “The culinary arrangements are in the hands of international chefs specially brought over from Europe,” he said. “Dr Maurice Falconer, our medical director, one of America’s leading nutritionists, is also acting as our nutritional adviser.”

  “What about drinks?” asked Liebnitz.

  “No question that adequate supplies of fluids will be essential, particularly in the desert areas,” said Flanagan. “Maxwell House are supplying all the hot drinks and will follow us all the way to New York in a specially constructed refreshment caravan, the Maxwell House Coffee Pot. Cold drinks will be suppli
ed by Sport Ade, the sensational new sports drink.”

  “Do you have any knowledge of the Williams’ All-Americans?”

  Flanagan held up a sheet of paper and read from it. “The All-Americans are one of fifteen teams, most of which are company or state teams. For instance, Oklahoma and Arizona both have strong teams entered.”

  “What’s the point of teams, Mr Flanagan? You’ve got no team competition,” Ferris, The Times reporter, asked belligerently.

  “That is correct,” replied Flanagan. “The object of the teams is to gain prestige for the organizations which sponsor them. Each man earns a wage, with bonuses if they finish in leading positions.”

  “What do you know about the German team?” It was Liebnitz again.

  One further time Flanagan filed through his pile of notes. “The team is a young one,” he said finally. “From a group which calls itself the Hitler Youth Movement. It’s a five-man team of boys aged nineteen to twenty-one, headed by a team manager, Herr von Moltke, and a team doctor, Eric Nett.”

  “Have they any track record?” asked Ferris.

  “Only the one hundred-kilometre trial – that’s about sixty-two miles – they held to choose the team.”

  “Can this be called a German national team, Flanagan?”

  “Strictly speaking, no. Herr Hitler is an aspiring politician. His Youth Movement is part of his political push.”

  “Rae again. How many Olympic medallists do you have entered?”

  Flanagan made a show of shuffling his papers.

  “At the last count, twenty.”

  “Fair enough, but how many can you guarantee will start?” asked Howard from the back of the room.

  “As many as are willing to take a chance,” said Flanagan, leaning forward. For a moment his mask of geniality dropped. “Let’s face it. This amateur set-up is a can of worms. The reason why some of these so-called amateurs are afraid to run in the Trans-America is because they can pick up two or three thousand bucks a year, steady money, no tax, year in year out as amateurs. They get that not for winning but just, for God’s sake, for appearing! With me, they’ll have to run hard for every buck they earn. No play, no pay.”

  “Munaur, Paris Match. Is there any truth in the rumour that Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, will run in the Trans-America?”

  Flanagan pursed his lips. “Fellas, all I can say is that Mr Nurmi is at present in San Francisco with his manager, Mr Quist, considering the possibility of entering. He has just finished an exhausting American tour and is also embarking upon his preparation for the 1932 Olympics. All that can be said for the moment is that he’s giving the matter considerable thought.”

  “Are you saying, Flanagan, that as an amateur Nurmi might not be able to afford to enter the Trans-America?” shouted a reporter.

  Flanagan grinned. “No comment.”

  “Kevin Maguire, Irish Times.” A thick-set, tweed-suited man stood up. The strong Irish brogue made many of the departing journalists turn round to listen. “Mr Flanagan, is it true that Lord Peter Thurleigh, the British Olympic athlete, has entered the Trans-America?”

  There was a hush in the room. Flanagan took his time, teasing out every moment.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “it was my pleasure to meet for the first time Lord Peter Thurleigh, British Olympian in 1924 and 1928. Lord Peter has been given special dispensation to stay with the British Consul, rather than being exposed to the publicity which he would have to endure at our final training camp.”

  Liebnitz stood up. “Flanagan, can you give us any good reason why an English aristocrat should lose his amateur status and spend three months plodding across America with a couple of thousand tramps and a freak show?”

  Flanagan paused, “It is my understanding,” he said, putting on what he imagined to be an English accent, “that Lord Peter has wagered a hundred thousand pounds with a group of English aristocrats that he will finish in the first six places.”

  “A hundred thousand pounds? What’s that in US dollars?” asked Kowalski.

  “At yesterday’s rate of exchange, I reckon about four hundred thousand dollars,” answered Flanagan. “The biggest wager in the history of foot-racing.”

  The reporters at last had their lead story. There was a general rush for the lobby telephones, leaving a trail of upturned chairs in their wake. The conference was at an end.

  Flanagan bit off the end of his cigar and spat it towards the waste-bin. This time it landed in the bin, plumb centre. He leant forward, surveyed the chaos of upturned chairs and discarded papers, and beamed. The first hurdle had been cleared and cleared in some style.

  Carl Liebnitz sat on his bed, propped against his pillows. He wore red silk polka-dot pyjamas and sat, legs crossed, his Trans-America report on a clipboard on his knees. He was sucking the tip of his pencil.

  Liebnitz had been with Clarence Darrow at the Scopes “monkey” trial, with Lindbergh in Paris, and in Washington when Douglas MacArthur had scattered the Hooverville rioters. His brief from his editor was to treat the Trans-America for the carnival that it was, and that meant three hundred words, crisp and sharp, twice weekly. Flanagan he couldn’t yet place. That the Irishman was a flim-flam man he had little doubt; what the chances were of him getting his ragged crew across America Liebnitz did not know, but the odds were against it. And that was exactly what he was going to tell the American public. He adjusted his pillow, bent his knees, and slowly started to write.

  AMERICANA DATELINE 19 MARCH 1931 LOS ANGELES

  Your columnist has known of Charles C. Flanagan for some time, but his qualifications for running an enterprise of the complexity of the Trans-America foot-race are unknown to him. Flanagan is a forty-five-year-old Irish-American whose father, for thirty years, pounded the beat on New York’s East Side. Mr Flanagan first came to our attention in 1919, at the time of the Red Sox scandal, when he tried, as he put it at the time, “to bring some dignity back to baseball” by starting a women’s baseball team, the Tallahassee Tigerbelles. Alas, many of his Tigerbelles showed more talent for maternity than for the baseball diamond and the team folded in 1921, with Mr Flanagan saddled with at least two paternity suits.

  Mr Flanagan surfaced again in New Orleans in 1923, with a team of midget mud-wrestlers, which he eventually sold to a circus. For a time he managed a boxer rejoicing in the name of the “Young John L. Sullivan”, but not, alas, also rejoicing in Sullivan’s talents. The “Young John L.” went down to the first firm blow which he received from a Milwaukee bank clerk and was last heard of in the chorus of a male burlesque show called “Swain Lake”.

  Mr Flanagan’s fortunes took a turn for the better in 1927 when he briefly managed the delightful tennis player, Miss Suzanne Lamarr, but plummeted again when he attempted to import the European game of soccer to the American continent. Soccer, indeed! Undaunted by the disasters of the past, Charles C. Flanagan has now bobbed up again, with his Trans-America foot-race, in which two thousand runners will attempt to cover on foot the distance between Los Angeles and New York for prize money of $360,000.

  He has certainly gathered about him a motley crew. His band of two thousand athletes does, it is true, contain some of the finest long-distance runners in the world. It also contains twenty-one women, a Hindu fakir, sixteen blind men, three men without arms, twenty grandfathers, sixty-one vegetarians, and a spiritualist who claims to be advised by the long-dead Indian runner, Deerfoot. And this is to say nothing of Madame La Zonga, Fritz the talking mule and a baseball team composed, we are told, entirely of chimpanzees, all of whom are to accompany the runners on their trek to New York.

  It would therefore be true to say that nothing of its like has been seen since Peter the Hermit and his Children’s Crusade. Let us hope that Mr Flanagan proves to be better qualified than his illustrious predecessor.

  CARL C. LIEBNITZ

  3

  The Broo Park

  Hugh McPhail had first heard about the Trans-America at half-time in a sixpence-a-man soccer mat
ch on Glasgow Green, a rough stretch of land known locally as the “Broo Park”. “Broo” was a colloquialism for the unemployment bureau which all the twenty-two players dutifully attended each Thursday. There they collected the few shillings which the government supplied to sustain them and their families for another week.

  There were few recreations available for the unemployed in the bleak winter Glasgow of I930. The public library, the park bench, the street corner, the betting shop, the pub: there was little else to do.

  The library was one of the few warm places in the city, and in its antiseptic silence lived the unemployed from 9 a.m. when the doors opened till 7 p.m. when the library was cleared. There were three activities. The first was the study of racing form in the pages of the sporting press. On such earnest studies rested the long-odds “doubles” and “trebles” designed to bring the unemployed if not to riches then to slightly better rags. Alas, the library did not house the specialized racing papers beloved of gamblers, such as the Sporting Life. Hugh’s father, down to his last sixpence, had once despatched his son to the newsagent in search of the newspaper. Finding none available, the boy had purchased a copy of the comic paper, Comic Cuts, which featured his favourites, Wearie Willie and Tired Tim. His father, enraged, had given him a sound thrashing. However, later that evening Hugh had been treated to a massive bag of sweets; his father’s Aintree double of “Wearie Willie” and “Tired Tim” had come in at I00-I.

  The second activity at the library was sleep. All day long men who had exhausted the possibilities of the daily press and the Encyclopaedia Britannica sat with their heads resting on the backs of their hands on the glass tables in front of them. This was a dangerous practice, for it gave the assistants an excuse to move them out. Better by far, therefore, to pretend to pore over a vast medical dictionary, snatching a few moments of furtive sleep behind it when one could.

  The final activity was study – random study of anything and everything the reference library had to offer – and many men became experts on subjects as diverse as astrology and bee-keeping from those long empty hours in the silent libraries of Glasgow.