Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  He couldn’t sleep the night before the race. In his dreams he ran and re-ran the race, each time wallowing with leaden legs up endless tracks. Each time he woke up sweating.

  Management tried to play down the exhibition, treating it as just a minor part of a day of handshakes, junketing and grand speeches. But there was no doubt about how the colliers saw it. All morning long the pit seethed with anticipation.

  Hugh could eat virtually nothing and had only tea and toast. Stevie, as was the custom, had given him a good dose of laxatives the night before, and Hugh spent most of the morning in the toilet. By noon he felt he could not run one yard, let alone a hundred.

  “Relax,” said Stevie, as Hugh lay in the cottage on the massage table. “For God’s sake.” But Hugh could feel the tension in Stevie’s voice and knew that the little man had invested as much as anyone in him, not merely in money but in the meticulous and purposeful training programme he had devised. For the past six weeks the bandy-legged little man had lived his sporting life through Hugh. They both knew how fragile a sprint performance was. The slightest overtraining and a muscle could go like a violin string. Undertrain, and one came to the start sluggish and heavy. In the race itself the slightest mistake was lethal: over a hundred yards there was no time to recover from error.

  That afternoon, an hour before the race, even Dad McPherson sweated as he lightly caressed the muscles of Hugh’s hamstrings. The old man had put his life-savings on Hugh – fifty pounds, ten shillings and sixpence, at ten to one. For him the race meant the difference between five more cramped years at the pit and a life of ease with his beloved pigeons and whippets. McPherson knew how greyhounds sprang from the traps to seek their whirling prey. He prayed that his fingers could breathe something of that quality into Hugh McPhail.

  Half an hour later, a black silk dressing-gown, which had been purchased by the colliers, draped round his shoulders, Hugh walked down through the packed pit towards the competition area, flanked by Stevie, engulfed by the crowd who lined every yard of the cinder route. Hugh felt weak in the stomach. This was not what he had expected; no fragile sprint was meant to bear such pressure, and certainly no man. He felt like a pit prop, bending and groaning under the black earth above. These miners were burying him beneath their hopes. He warmed up, feeling tired and breathless. Everything poured into ten brief seconds. His mouth dried as he thought of lt.

  Featherstone was a tall blonde man, his lightly-tanned skin a product of Cannes in summer, Chamonix in winter. He had a soft handshake.

  “Pleased to meet you, McPhail,” he said.

  Despite his manner Featherstone was under no illusions about what was at stake. Row upon row of grimy chokered men in flat caps and pit-boots, straining at the ropes which enclosed the track, made it only too clear. He checked his lane. Those fellows had certainly done a good job: it was quite the equal of Queen’s Club. He looked across at Hugh. The man had the look of a sprinter. Thick, powerful thighs, light calves, strong shoulders. Well, they would soon see.

  They stripped off. Featherstone wore long silk Oxford shorts, rimmed in dark blue, as was his half-sleeved vest. A whisper ran through the crowd. The man had a superb physique, yet as unlike McPhail’s as could be imagined. It was completely balanced, with no obvious rippling muscularity. Featherstone looked an animal born to run.

  Hugh did not even glance at him, focusing rather on his strip of track. Four feet of space, old Wallace had said . . . Gradually the area outside of his lane was narrowing, and with it the bubble of the crowd faded.

  “Take to your marks!” The starter stood only ten yards behind them, but his voice seemed to come from a long way off.

  Hugh looked up the track again. His lane was like a beam of light, with nothing but darkness on either side. He screwed his feet into his holes, feeling the light pressure of his right knee upon the cinders as he lowered it to the ground. All was still.

  “Get set!”

  He lifted his hips, feeling the pressure on his finger tips. The gun was a release. He surged out like water bursting through a hole in a dam, piercing the space, his legs eating the ground beneath him. Then, suddenly, it was slow, but not sluggish, for this was the slowness of ease, the slowness induced by a feeling that there was ample time for every movement, time enough for the high pick-up of the thigh, time enough for the strong drive-back of the elbows. Hugh knew that his running was pouring out of him, gushing along that narrow four-foot strip which had been made for his movements and his alone. He ran in a sweet dream, only dimly aware of the noise which raged on each side of his lane. He wanted it to last for ever. Then it was over.

  Hugh’s legs burnt the final yards of the track. He had no need for the “dip” finish with which his chest snapped the tape. Featherstone proffered his hand, this time with a firm shake.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You ran as if you were on your own.”

  “I was,” replied Hugh.

  When the official announcement came it was almost drowned in the shouts of the crowd. “First, McPhail, Shotts. Ten seconds even.” Many of the miners started to dance up and down, gripping each other by the shoulders. Children ran on to the track to touch him. Stevie and McPherson stood by the finish, tears streaming down their faces. On the special dais constructed for management and guests there was silence.

  Although a reporter from every national newspaper was there the “exhibition” was reported in none of them. It was as if a race watched by six thousand people had never happened. A week later Hugh and Stevie were sacked. No reason was given, none required. It was not simply that Hugh had beaten Featherstone. His mistake had been in taking it too seriously – in having the miners formally invest in him in a way which Featherstone’s class had done since birth as a matter of course. Worst of all they had won for Lang, the union man and for the people. For Featherstone the race had merely been a ripple in what was to be a successful campaign, and he was not told of Hugh’s leaving.

  But Lang did not let them down. Through contacts in Glasgow the union man had arranged work for Hugh and Stevie as dishwashers in a central hotel. Ten hours a day with hands in hot greasy water was a far cry from the pampered life of a professional athlete, but Hugh was content. Those ten seconds of the Shotts sprint had taught him much about himself. He had been tried and had not been found wanting. The work in the hotel, was, however, only a short step from the unemployment of 1930, and for Hugh and Stevie it was soon back to the pleasures of the library, the street corner and the Broo Park.

  McPhail had tried them all, these pleasures of the poor, and, being physically active, had found the “tanner-a-man” matches on Glasgow Green most to his liking. The rules were simple enough: if you won your opponent gave you sixpence; if you lost you gave him the same sum.

  The name Glasgow Green was misleading, for there was little green about its soccer pitches. The area around the Green had once, long past, been elegant enough, with pillared Georgian houses, homes of the eighteenth-century tobacco barons, but had long since gone to seed as successive generations of the working class had pressed in and on, and the rich had moved south or west to avoid both the smoke and the workers who created it. The remaining “green” lay in the well-cut lawns provided by thoughtful Victorian councillors, but the soccer pitches themselves were made of rough, black industrial cinders. Now, in winter, corrugated, gripped by frost, they could rip a man’s flesh to shreds.

  The “tanner-a-man” matches were desperate affairs, for few of the men could afford to lose even sixpence. It was one-all at half-time and McPhail and his team were squatting at the side of the pitch when wee Stevie let slip that he had read in a newspaper about the Trans-America race. “Ninety thousand pounds,” said Stevie. “But the bastards’ll earn it. Three thousand miles across America. Poor sods.” Stevie had read the news in a paper in which he had bought his staple diet of fish and chips, so for all McPhail knew the race had already been run. But he made a mental note before returning his attention to the game.
r />   One of the players, McGowan, had in his early years been a professional with Partick Thistle. He had been a beautiful player, a nimble dribbler who could lay off streams of goal-scoring passes, but a leg injury had stopped short his career. Now in his mid-forties, tubercular, he hardly appeared to run a step but dominated the middle of the field, rarely having to make a tackle, always reading each situation early, making interceptions and still pushing out accurate passes. The game was tied at two-all when McGowan fell to the ground coughing. He put his hand to his mouth and dark blood seeped through his fingers. McPhail went to him.

  “Off you go, old man,” he said. “I’ll pay if we lose.”

  The old player was helped, protesting, from the field, still spluttering blood. Ten minutes later McPhail laid on a pass for another team member to score in the top right-hand corner. “You’ve earned a pint,” said McGowan, as McPhail trudged from the pitch.

  The game had been over for two hours. Hugh, after a brief excursion to the public library, had settled in a corner of the pub to drink his pint with McGowan and look at the page of the newspaper which he had ripped off from the library copy, the same page he had seen beneath Stevie’s fish and chips. No, there was time: the Trans-America race was still several months away in March I931. But where in God’s name was California? He finished his drink, and after making his farewells to McGowan returned to the library to seek out a map. California was on the west coast, and could not have been farther away. He could see no way of getting there.

  “You’re not using the head,” said Stevie, when he told him.

  “Whit d’ye mean?” Hugh replied testily.

  “Look,” said Stevie. “First you’re a sprinter. You’ve never run a hundred miles, let alone three thousand. Second, you’ve nae money to get there. Why not kill two birds with one stone?” Hugh did not reply, so he went on. “Get somebody to organise a Scottish Trial, for God’s sake. Some newspaper like The Times or the Citizen. That way if you are good enough you’ll find out. If not you won’t have wasted your own or anybody else’s money, going all the way out to California.”

  Hugh thought for a moment. “You’re right, Stevie. But the man for this is Jimmy G. Miller.”

  “Jimmy G.”, as he was commonly known, a Bridgeton turf accountant of doubtful reputation, was not immediately taken with the idea of putting up £500 in prize money for an unheard-of event.

  “What do I get out of it?” he asked Hugh suspiciously.

  “First,” said Hugh, “the prestige. You’ve put up the cash so that a Scot can go to America and take on the best in the world. Second, the betting. You’ll take a big book on the result of the race. And third, me.”

  “You?” exploded Jimmy G. “God in heaven, you’re a bloody sprinter. Where’s the money in you?”

  “Give me six months’ preparation. Take me off with a good trainer and some steaks and I’ll win you that trial. You’ll get big odds on me, and clean up a packet.”

  Jimmy G. took the wet stub of the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table at him. “Can you guarantee to win?”

  “I can’t. That’s your gamble. That’s what you are anyway, a gambler, isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” replied Jimmy G. “I’m a bookmaker.” But he was smiling.

  After that events moved quickly. The £500 prize money that James G. Miller of Bridgeton put up for the Scottish Trans-America trial caused a sensation, and the bookmaker and his race became a national talking point, just as McPhail had prophesied. Jimmy G. was happy with the result, for overnight, for a mere £500, he had been elevated from the relative obscurity of a Bridgeton bookmaker to the status of a national figure. Times were hard, the winter was bleak, Scotland had just lost in the annual soccer match against England. Jimmy G. had given the country something to talk about, something to which people could look forward. The only problem was that he had never organized a race in his life. He decided to seek the advice of someone who had – Murdoch, the organizer of the 1909 Powderhall marathon.

  “Nae problem,” said the old man, and set to planning a course from Aberdeen to Glasgow.

  Meanwhile Jimmy G. had kept the final part of his agreement and had sent McPhail to the Highlands under the stern eye of the professional trainer “Ducky” Duckworth. The bookmaker saw little hope of any return on his investment on McPhail, but reckoned he would soon know from Duckworth’s trials if the Glasgow man had any chance of surviving the Trans-American race, let alone winning it. Duckworth was not so optimistic, for though the trials run by professional sprinters were good guides to eventual racing form, there was no real way of testing whether or not a man could run a hundred miles without exposing him to massive fatigue, from which there might not be time to recover. There was no real precedent for training for this length of race, and there was a real danger of running your man into the ground before the contest. He therefore resolved to make the final trial at least a fortnight before the race, and for it to consist of two fifty-mile runs, with three hours’ rest in between.

  McPhail’s stay in the central highlands was an exhausting one. First, Duckworth boiled him down to “racing weight” from his normal weight of 170 pounds by having him lose eight pounds in the first fortnight. The first two weeks McPhail ran and walked only about eight miles a day, mostly on soft grass, in stints of three to five miles. At first he found this hard, particularly as Duckworth made him run part of the distance in boots and heavy clothing. Gradually, however, he felt his thighs harden again, his breathing become easier.

  After a month Duckworth gave him a trial over a hilly ten-mile course. “Run it in inside an hour,” he said, “or the preparation’s over.”

  Hugh got through the first five miles in well inside the half hour, with Duckworth behind him on a bicycle. Even at seven and a half miles he was inside his schedule, and feeling pleased with himself. Then, at eight miles, he cracked. Suddenly, as if someone inside his body had turned off a tap, his legs tightened and his stride dropped to a crippled trot. Duckworth immediately saw what had happened, slowed, and sat back to watch.

  Hugh had never experienced anything like this before. True, he had tightened up in sprints, but that had been painless, over in a flash. Now his thighs and the inside of his groin were screaming. Yet he did not drop to a walk. He did not dare, for he knew that if he did he would never be able to restart.

  Just as the chemistry of his body had changed, so had that of his mind. Perhaps a scientist could analyse and measure it in terms of molecules whirling desperately towards some mad collision. To Hugh it took the form of a blur of images: on the one hand, the cinders of tanner-a-man football on Glasgow Green, endless cups of kitchen tea on endless winter afternoons, standing in line at the Broo. On the other, a chance – not much of a chance, perhaps – of a money prize and a trip to the sun on the other side of the world. Above all, a chance to break clear, to start again. On the one hand, the pain, and the certainty of at least another quarter of an hour of it; on the other, his hopes and his dreams.

  Hugh started to groan. It was not a conscious groan, but one which came from deep inside and pulsed in rhythm with his now short and shattered strides. In a way it helped, acting as a sort of metronome against which his strides could be placed, his pain measured. Every now and then his groans would be interrupted by a sound which came from even deeper within him, a little scream which pierced the groans and then died away.

  In the central highlands of Scotland, silhouetted against the grey winter sky, a man staggered, groaning, followed by a little man on a bicycle. Fiercer battles had been fought on stranger ground, but none more severe.

  It took Duckworth more than half an hour to bring his charge round. Hugh jerked his head away from the sharp smell of the smelling salts.

  “Did I make it?” he asked, propping himself up.

  “Yes,” said Duckworth. “Ye ran ten miles.”

  “But the time? Did I make it in the hour?”

  “No. One hour and two minutes.”
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br />   McPhail wept, the salt tears dropping on to a vest already sodden with sweat. He wept like a child, in deep sobs.

  Duckworth bent down, so that his eyes were in line with Hugh’s. “Ye didn’t make it in the hour, but ye’ve satisfied me. Ma faither, when he telt me of great runners, used tae call it ‘bottom’. A’ the great yins had it. Ye can call it whit ye like – courage, stamina, endurance. He called it ‘bottom’.

  You’ve got it, lad.”

  “You mean we go on with the prep?”

  “Aye. Now it’s just a matter of getting miles under yer belt. Now we know ye’ll stay when trouble comes.”

  Three months later, his body toned and hardened by Duckworth’s training, Hugh found no difficulty in winning the Scottish Trans-America trial. He had been virtually the only trained man in the trial, a race in which he had faced the gaunt men of the Scottish Broo Parks. He led them easily through the black, slimy streets of Glasgow, and finished before forty thousand spectators at Ibrox stadium.

  Throughout that day broken men stumbled round the sodden cinder track, all hope of the Trans-America gone. Hugh watched them from the comfort of the stands and asked himself why they kept going. Months later, thousands of miles from home, he was to receive the answer.

  4

  The Press meets Doc Cole

  Doc stood up and propped himself on both arms, knuckles down, on the table in front of him. “Okay fellas,” he said. “Shoot.”

  Wearing a faded 1908 Olympic blazer, Alexander Doc Cole looked even smaller, older, less athletic than he had at Flanagan’s press conference the day before. Bald and brown, he looked more gnome than man as he stood at a table on the dais facing the assembled press.

  In fact, Doc could almost have been tailored for the Trans-America. He had set out from his home in Montgomery, Alabama, and had hitched the first two thousand miles, run the last five hundred. The long run-in into Los Angeles had got his legs and feet in shape, for he knew that the Trans-America would be a test even for someone with his background. He reckoned he would be the most experienced runner in the race, with a heart-rate of thirty-four beats per minute and with over a hundred thousand miles of running in the fibres of his lean, hard legs. But he would also, at fifty-four, be one of the oldest men in the Trans-America. On the other hand, age in a race such as this would be no disadvantage. True, the young would have tough, adaptable bodies, and the Trans-America might indeed allow some time for adaptation. But they had never been where he had been, in sour lands where the body dragged itself from one stride to the next, while the mind, still fresh but desperate, fought its own battles. It was in that dark battleground that races were won or lost; and he had lost a few, but won many.