Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  Hugh looked up at the flapping flags and took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and watched it flutter.

  “Get them to run the races into the breeze,” he said. “A horse and sulky has more wind-resistance than a man. And get them to put me down a sprint-lane, Mr Flanagan. Four feet of space. Something I can focus on.”

  Flanagan jotted down some notes on the back of an envelope and nodded at Willard.

  “Got it,” he said. “Now let’s have a look at the country.” They walked to the stadium exit, which led through the car park for fifty yards to a rough, rocky patch leading up a hill into bumpy grassland, on which Levy had already pegged a three-quarter-mile course. Levy’s workmen were hammering in fence-posts and stretching rolls of fence-wire as Doc and his men began their walk.

  “This is where we’ve really got to make it count, out here in the country,” said Doc, turning to Thurleigh and Morgan as they walked up the hill. “You see, a trotting horse is a rhythm animal – take it out of its rhythm and it wastes energy, gets pooped.”

  “What about our boys’ rhythm?” shouted Flanagan, raising his voice over the noise of hammering workmen.

  Peter Thurleigh answered. “I’ve trotted horses,” he said, walking away from the noise. “And run cross-country. Doc’s right. We can keep rhythm over broken ground much better than any horse, particularly a trotter.”

  “Okay, I suppose you guys know your business best,” sighed Flanagan. “So will you run a mile each in turn all the way?”

  Thurleigh looked at Doc.

  “Yep,” said Doc, nodding. “I reckon Mike and Peter here can run inside five-minute mile pace all the way, given five-minute rests between. Perhaps even better.”

  “Jesus,” groaned Flanagan. “Levy’s horse can run inside two minutes. Back in Topeka, Levy prattled on about one minute fifty-six till the time rattled around in my head like a pea in a can!”

  “Yeah,” said Doc. “But not one minute fifty-six seconds over rough, uneven ground like this. I reckon that Levy’s horse could run flat out, carrying a one hundred pound jockey, about three and a half minutes round this course.”

  “And remember that Silver Star is a sprinter not a distance-runner,” said Thurleigh. “Tomorrow it’s got to keep up that pace for ten miles, non-stop.”

  “I reckon that brings it up to over four minutes a mile,” said Doc. “If not more. So we’re getting closer.”

  “But it still leaves you a minute a mile to find,” observed Kate.

  “Not really,” said Doc. “Kate, just imagine you had to run ten miles with an extra hundred-odd pounds around your waist.”

  “I’d die,” said Kate, laughing.

  “Well then,” said Doc, “that’s precisely what Silver Star has to do, with our friend Levy providing that extra hundred pounds of lard. Our friendly undertaker may not know it, but he’s our first ace in the hole.”

  “And do we have another?” asked Kate.

  Doc winked and looked up at the blue, cloudless sky. “That, lady, is in the lap of the gods.”

  The races were scheduled for two in the afternoon, with Hugh McPhail’s sprint series first in the programme, but by 1O a.m. the gates were closed, Coolidge stadium was already packed and General Fosdike’s Wild West Show and Flanagan’s circus were already in full and noisy flow in a field adjacent to the stadium. Even out in the country, before noon, families had set up picnics at the edge of Levy’s pegged track, and impromptu books were being made and bets laid. Betting was now down to nine to one against Thurleigh and Morgan, six to one against McPhail in his “best of three runs” competition. Over a million dollars had been laid on the race in the St Louis area alone.

  With just over an hour to go Peter Thurleigh had never felt so nervous, not even at his first Olympics in 1914, when he had run against Nurmi in Paris. The Finn had run him ragged in the 5000 meters, lapping at a steady seventy-two seconds, at the end of each lap coolly checking his pace on the stop-watch he carried in his right hand. But the watch was superfluous. Nurmi ran to a deep inner clock set and held in motion by his cold Finnish will.

  Even so it was in the cross-country event, run in the dry, torrid heat of a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, that had showed Nurmi at the peak of his powers. The Finn flowed over the parched, dusty course as if he were still on the track at the Stade Colombes, while the greatest cross-country runners in the world gasped and wobbled behind him. Peter had run himself into glassy-eyed delirium, and it was only in hospital in Paris the next day that he learned that he had finished a creditable fifteenth and that Nurmi had been holding interviews with journalists by the time the second runner had entered the stadium.

  One o’clock, only an hour to go. Morgan lay parallel to Thurleigh as they were being rubbed down, on black, leather-topped massage-tables in the still, dark stone-floored dressing room. Above them, a naked bulb provided the only light. The room itself stank of horse liniment. Thurleigh smiled wryly and looked sideways at Morgan. Only a few yards away, they were probably rubbing the same stuff into Silver Star’s supple flanks.

  Morgan lay with eyes closed, while Doc gently teased the belly of his bulging hamstrings. He had faced worse challenges: running against a horse was nothing compared with facing the bare fists of another man in an ice-cold warehouse. Morgan knew it was going to be tough, for running five-minute miles on his own, over rough country, was quite different from slogging across America in company some two minutes a mile slower. This would be a world of heaving lungs and oxygen-debt, with legs which already had in them two thousand miles of running. He looked above him at Kate, standing beside Doc.

  “Nervous?” she asked, attempting to conceal her own anxiety.

  “No.” He took her hand in his. “Perhaps a mite scared.”

  “No problem, Mike,” said Doc, tapping him on the right knee as a signal to turn over on to his stomach. “You’re in great shape.”

  “Sure,” growled Morgan. “But who’s rubbing the horse, and what the hell are they saying to it?”

  Hugh McPhail stood in the tunnel below the main stand. At the end of the tunnel, the glare of the afternoon sun. Hugh could hear the bubble of the crowd, even here, deep beneath the stand. It was just like Powderhall again, like that bitter January day eight years ago. The crowd outside reminded him of the miners who had watched him run against Featherstone. They had laid their bets; now they waited to see the outcome. Three runs against a horse, with 40,000 people looking on . . . Stevie walked down the tunnel towards him, dressed in an over-large summer suit and a ludicrous Panama hat. Hugh still found difficulty in accepting that the little man from Glasgow was really here in America.

  “Jist like the old days,” said Stevie, nodding behind him.

  Hugh could not prevent a yawn, a sure sign of tension.

  “Aye,” he said. “But back at the pit I hadn’t run two thousand miles for a warm up.”

  “How fast do you think you can run now?” asked Stevie.

  “Now . . . about ten point six for a hundred yards, eyeballs out.”

  “That might be enough.”

  “Against a horse?”

  “Maybe,” Stevie went on. “The big thing is that you’ve got three runs – you can learn. I don’t think the horse will, and this man Levy, he’s no Olympic athlete, is he?”

  “No,” said Hugh. “But I’ve been told he’s no fool, either.”

  “You know the odds the Glasgow bookies were giving on you?”

  “Ten to one against?” suggested Hugh.

  “No,” said Stevie, walking up the dark tunnel with him towards the bright sunshine of the trotting track. “Four. And that’s because of old Wallace of Perth. Remember how he talked to you, back at the mine, before you ran against Featherstone? Well, he once ran against a horse himself, way back in 1901. Old Wallace’s been talking to the Glasgow bookies. More to the point, he’s been talking to me. This race will be won or lost at the start. So pin back your ears, my friend . . .”

  1.30 p.
m., 10 May 1931. In the gloom of the officials’ dressing room at the Coolidge stadium, Colonel Alan Cranston bent over the dressing-room table and carefully loaded a clip of blanks into his Winchester. There was going to be no hanky-panky this afternoon, not if he had anything to do with it. After all, he had his reputation to consider. He had ridden with Teddy Roosevelt and the Roughriders in the war against Mexico, and had been mentioned in dispatches. Not long after, in 1912, he had finished only one place behind that arrogant upstart, George C. Patton, in the Olympic modern pentathlon in Stockholm. In France, in the Great War, he had served with distinction with the fighting fifty-first, America’s most distinguished regiment.

  Alan P. Cranston still considered himself an athlete even at the age of fifty-two. Every morning he took a cold shower, exercised rigorously to Bernarr McFadden’s callisthenics programme, then further purged and punished his body with a three-mile run. Cranston was not only a career soldier: he was a public figure. And when he had been approached by Levy to act as arbiter between himself and Flanagan in their crazy “man against horse race” his first impulse had been to refuse.

  Then he had thought again. Cranston soon realized that this was going to be a big affair, discussed nationally, perhaps even internationally. Flanagan’s Trans-Americans were already household names. Dammit, his grandson had even asked him for “Iron Man” Morgan’s autograph, and his wife had begged to be introduced to the Sheridan girl after the race. Whoever acted as arbiter in the St Louis races would have to be someone of repute, of strong character: men against horses wasn’t like football or baseball – it was uncharted territory.

  In short, he had accepted.

  Now he yawned and stretched to his full six-foot four. He laid his Winchester down gently on the dressing-room table, then turned and faced Flanagan and Levy.

  Pressing back his neat, crinkly grey hair with both hands, he began his prepared speech. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s first establish some ground rules. Let me make it clear to both of you that I didn’t take on this job in order to look like a damn jackass in the eyes of the world. I remember all too well what befell General Douglas MacArthur when he managed the 1920 Olympic team. So first let me make it clear that I must be the final arbiter on all matters pertaining to these races. Otherwise, I open that door over there” – he pointed to the dressing-room door – “and leave you two to fight it out between you.”

  The imperious Cranston, impeccably dressed in his khaki ceremonial army uniform, brooked no dissent. Levy, already bursting at the seams of his silk jockey pants, nodded. Flanagan followed suit.

  “Now both of you know as well as I do that, though there are clearly prescribed rules for races between men and for that matter for races between horses, there is nothing in writing to cover the present situation in any of the rule books of either harness-racing or track and field. Nothing beyond what you have written here in your contract.”

  Cranston picked up a sheet of paper, perched his glasses on his lean nose and held it in front of him. “Here are the rules to which both of you agreed. They’re mostly commonsense, but there is one which appears to me to be critical. Mr Levy, your horse Silver Star is a trotter. Trotter means exactly that- trotting. Any ‘break’ into a gallop during the sprint will mean automatic loss of that heat. And that decision must be mine and mine alone . . . Agreed?”

  Levy again nodded.

  “Now I fully realize that the sprint finish may be tight,” continued Cranston. “I have therefore asked Eastman Kodak to provide cameras at the finish. Film can be developed in ten minutes for scrutiny. These films, if required, will be the final arbiter.”

  Cranston hoisted himself up to sit on the dressing-room table, allowing his booted legs to dangle loosely. “However,” he said, “the distance race presents greater problems. After all, I can hardly disqualify the horse during a ten-mile run for a single break in its trotting action on rough ground.”

  “No question, Colonel,” said Flanagan, obediently, looking at Levy.

  “So I propose the following,” said Cranston. “For a foul during a lap we immediately stop the horse for half a minute. These penalties will be signalled by the sound of a bugle, so that both the stadium crowd and Mr Flanagan’s helpers back at the track can be kept fully informed.”

  “How many fouls are allowed before disqualification, Colonel?” asked Flanagan.

  “Eight,” said the Colonel. “Agreed?”

  Levy made to speak, but stopped himself. He had never even considered the possibility of Silver Star fouling.

  Cranston raised both eyebrows. “You have something to say, Mr Levy?”

  “No,” said Levy, fingering his whip. It was a negligible handicap: he would put such distance between Silver Star and the runners that even a few fouls would not matter.

  “But how are you going to check for fouls, Colonel?” asked Flanagan. “After all, it’s a one-mile course, most of it out in the country.”

  “I intend to have six judges, all army officers, posted at intervals round the course,” said Cranston. “Each one is a qualified trotting judge. Take my word for it, gentlemen, they’ll miss nothing.” He picked up a whistle and a clip of blanks and stuffed them into his top tunic pocket, then finally he looked down at his watch.

  “Any further questions, gentlemen?”

  “I think that we can both safely leave matters in your capable hands, sir,” said Flanagan. Levy nodded in agreement.

  “That settles it then,” said Cranston, reaching over to shake Flanagan’s hand in a strong grip before doing the same to Levy.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day out there. I think we’re going to see some fine sport. Teddy Roosevelt sums it up perfectly for me: a fair field and no favour, that’s what he always used to say. And that’s exactly how I see it too.”

  Colonel Alan Cranston turned, picked up his shotgun, opened the door, and straightened himself to his full height, pulling down on his jacket and adjusting his tie. It was now 1.42 p.m. At the end of the dark tunnel he could hear the expectant crowd. Yes, it was going to be a great day.

  One forty-five p.m. Thurleigh, Morgan and McPhail sat on the dressing-room bench in front of Doc. It was nearly time.

  Doc was sweating hard, having just completed his massage of all three men.

  “Right,” he said, clasping both hands in front of him and interlocking his fingers. “Up till now, most of the time we haven’t been racing in the Trans-America, we’ve simply been running, getting fifty miles under our belts every day. Running’s physical. But racing – that’s emotional. So you guys have got to dig real deep out there. The whole Trans-America’s riding on you. Win, and Flanagan can take about a hundred grand from here, enough to pay off most of his debts and take us beyond Chicago.”

  He paced up and down restlessly in front of them.

  “Hugh, in the sprint you know your business best, so there’s no point in me telling you what to do. You’re a pro. Dixie will be standing in the crowd twenty yards from the finish with a white handkerchief. Just sprint as if the devil’s behind you with a poker at your ass.”

  Hugh nodded, smiling nervously, feeling the dampness of his palms, the thin trickle of sweat on his flushed right cheek.

  Doc looked at Thurleigh and Morgan.

  “In the distance run, the main thing is not to go crazy in the first couple of miles. By my reckoning you will be close on two minutes down on Silver Star by that time. You should be running steady at five minutes a mile or inside for the first six miles. Doc Falconer will be taking your pulse at the end of each mile to give us a guide on your condition, to let us know if we can safely push you harder.”

  He turned his back, took a deep breath then turned to face them again.

  “God knows how many words coaches have wasted at times like this. You’ll have a thousand Trans-Americans out there rooting for you every yard of the way, guys who know exactly how it feels to dig into your guts when your whole body is begging you to stop.
In the end all that counts is that, win or lose, you don’t let them down.”

  Hugh felt like a gladiator going out to face hungry lions. He blinked as he stepped out into the sunshine on to the soft dirt-track, his body still glowing from Doc’s rub-down.

  On the in-field cheer-leaders were still at work. Levy had trained a hundred plump-thighed High School majorettes to prance about in the centre of the arena, singing his “Levy can’t lose” jingle to the off-key strains of John Philip Sousa. To this sheer volume of noise Flanagan had no real answer, but he had scattered a dozen Hawaiian dancers around the arena, to dole out kisses and Trans-America badges to the crowd, and had paid two hundred dollars to Rickenbecker’s Flying Daredevils to pull a Trans-America streamer a thousand feet above Coolidge stadium. A thousand lean, sun-blackened Trans-Americans had posted themselves in groups in each quarter of the stadium and throughout the crowd on the cross-country course. Already their self-appointed cheer-leaders were warming them up, to the amusement of the good-natured St Louis crowd.

  Hugh stepped gingerly on to the trotting track.

  “The world’s champion sprinter, five foot ten inches, one hundred and fifty pounds, Hugh McPhail from Glasgow, Bonnie Scotland!” boomed the announcer. There was sustained shouting, scattered applause, and rhythmic chanting from the Trans-Americans.

  Hugh looked around him. He felt engulfed. The arena was packed to capacity, with children resting on the shoulders of sweating fathers, and popcorn and drink vendors finding it difficult to find channels in the vast, sticky, expectant crowd. Beyond the bleachers some intrepid youths had even settled in the trees. In the back stretch he could see massive improvised Trans-America banners: “Hugh, Hugh, we’re with you!” and “Go Morgan, go Lord, go!” they said. In the packed stand to his right the Trans-Americans had somehow devised a yellow Scottish flag, featuring the red lion rampant, and he could hear the wail of pipes, abominably played. He became aware of the whirr and click of cameras.