by Tom McNab
Flanagan grimaced. “So what does he want us to do? Rollerskate into New York?”
“No. He wants us to put up the three hundred and fifty grand for a standard marathon into New York, the full classic twenty-six miles three hundred and eighty-five yards. So the slate’s wiped clean for the past three-thousand-odd miles. All the money goes on the marathon alone.”
They could almost hear Flanagan’s mind clicking into place.
“Why not?” he said, smiling. “Why not? The way things are no one gets nothing. Sure, the guys in the lead coming into New York have got a beef after running three thousand miles, but it’s either that or nothing. We’ve got to go along with it.”
Flanagan looked round at Packy and Stevie. He shook his head.
“Well,” he said. “It’s sure not working out the way I planned back in L.A.”
“Has anything?” growled Liebnitz.
Flanagan grinned.
“Not much.”
Edgar J. Hoover’s flat, square face crinkled into a smile. “Finley, that son of a bitch Flanagan has done it again.” He laid down his newspaper. “There he was, dead on his feet in Cleveland, his bank gone bust, all his prize money gone. Then he lost all the rest of his money in a card game. What a son of a bitch!”
Finley allowed himself a smile. “Bullard reported that he vanished into the Boondocks on a three-day binge. Took them a coon’s age to wake him up once they’d found him.”
Hoover laughed. “Then he digs up three hundred and fifty g’s from this marathon nut, Ross of Transcontinental, and presto! he’s back on his feet again.”
“With a bound he was free,” offered Finley.
“Come again?” said Hoover.
“Nothing, Director,” said Finley, taking his glasses off his nose and polishing them.
Hoover sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“Finley, it is my belief that the Trans-America is about as political as Mom’s apple pie.” He opened his eyes and leant forward on his desk. “Does that coincide with your views?”
“Precisely, Director.”
“Then call agent Bullard. Tell him I want to see him. And also tell him right now that if he values his job to get me on that VIP platform when Flanagan’s boys hit New York, and to arrange all necessary hotel accommodation. I want to be in on this at the finish.”
The cable Peter Thurleigh sent to his London club was addressed to Lord Farne and the others with whom he had made his wager all those long months ago on his reaching the top six in the Trans-America. It read: “Trans-America race discontinued through lack of funds. Now only final marathon.
Does wager stand? Suggest all money on marathon. Thurleigh.”
He now had in his blazer pocket a crumpled reply from London, received only a day after his own had been sent. It read, “Wager now on marathon. Still top six. Run for your life.”
It was with some pride that on 5 June 1931, Charles Ross sat in the Roosevelt Room in the newly-built Empire State Building, alongside an immaculate Charles C. Flanagan and his retinue, facing the world’s press.
Flanagan stood up to the whirring of cameras and explosion of flash-bulbs.
“Let me first say,” he said, “that it is with great gratitude that we have received the sponsorship of Transcontinental Airlines and its distinguished owner, Clarence C. Ross.”
“Wouldn’t ‘relief’ be a better word, Flanagan?” quipped a voice.
“Yes,” said Flanagan, smiling. “But don’t quote me on that.”
Bill Campbell of the Glasgow Herald had risen to his feet, and stood patiently until the laughter had subsided.
“I’d like to ask Mr Ross a question, Mr Flanagan,” he said finally, in his rich Scots burr. “Many of my readers at home, observing that a Scot, Hugh McPhail, had a two-minute lead in the Trans-America before the final marathon stage was placed on the present ‘winner take all’ basis, will ask if the present competition is entirely fair to him.”
Flanagan flashed an uneasy sideways glance at Ross, who was growling under his breath. “Perhaps,” said Flanagan, “that question should be addressed directly to Hugh McPhail himself.”
Hugh stood up.
“No,” he said. “I don’t feel badly about it. I came out here to cross America by foot, and it looks as if I’ve just about done that. Even to have led a group of runners of this class all that way is an honour as far as I’m concerned. Mr Ross has put up money that otherwise wouldn’t have been there, so I’m content to fight it out over the marathon on Saturday.”
“I think that answers your question, Bill,” said Flanagan.
“I’d like to ask why we’re finishing the race in Central Park instead of Madison Square Garden or the Polo Grounds,” said Liebnitz.
Charles Ross stood up. At forty-five he still had the lean, hard build of a long-distance athlete.
“May I answer that question, Mr Flanagan?” he said. Flanagan nodded and Ross continued. “It was my treat to the citizens of New York. I felt that everyone should see these great athletes who have trekked all the way across the roads of America. I consulted first with Mayor Jimmy Walker, and we were in full agreement. This way, I reckon, well over three million citizens will view the final miles of the race; the greatest crowd for a marathon in the history of track and field.”
There was scattered applause as Ross sat down.
Pollard of the St Louis Star stood up.
“Flanagan, do you see any possibility of Kohlemainen’s Olympic best of two hours, thirty-two minutes, thirty-five seconds being broken in the race?”
Flanagan stood, shaking his head. “How many miles did Kohlemainen run in 1920 before that record? My boys have covered more than three thousand miles. They won’t be looking for any Olympic records on Saturday. Anyhow, no athlete ever does. Athletics is about beating other men, and with three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the pot this is the richest race of all time. So if I were you I wouldn’t wear out your pencils talking about records.”
“Kevin Maguire, Irish Times. What celebrities are you expecting to be at the finish, Flanagan?”
Flanagan rose and picked up a sheet of paper. “You boys will get the full official list after this meeting, though we’re still getting calls from all over the States. We have Governor Roosevelt, Edgar Hoover – who has, throughout, shown a personal interest in the race – Walter Reuther, Miss Tallulah Bankhead and Miss Helen Hayes. Douglas Fairbanks is flying in from Los Angeles, accompanied by Miss Mary Pickford, and the British, French and Finnish ambassadors are going to be in attendance.” He lifted a telegram from the table. “And I’ve just received a telegram from the famous evangelist, Miss Alice Craig McAllister, to say that she’ll be at the finish. Gentlemen, all the world’s going to be in Central Park in three days from now.”
Albert Kowalski of the Philadelphia Globe, sun-bronzed and lean from hundreds of miles of running, rose to his feet.
“Lord Thurleigh, with about one hundred miles to go, when it became known that the race money was going to be decided by a marathon you were lying half an hour and two places short of the sixth position required by your wager. Do you think that you could have picked up those vital – and might I say lucrative – thirty minutes?”
Peter Thurleigh rose, smiling. “Yes, it was possible. All I had to do was to pick up fifteen minutes on two consecutive days over one hundred miles. My wager has been changed, and now relates to Saturday’s marathon.” He smiled. “So, gentlemen, when that gun goes on Saturday I’ll be running for the money like everyone else in the race.”
“Charles Rae, Washington Post. Flanagan, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars is one heck of a pot, right in the middle of the hardest times the United States has ever faced. Have you any means of ensuring that no cheating takes place? I mean, like doping?”
“Could I answer that one, Flanagan?” It was Doc Cole, who stood up in the audience, his face serious.
“I know that journalists are by nature a pretty cynical bunch
,” he said. “But I’d like to say this. I would trust every man in this race with my last buck. For the last three months we haven’t just run together and raced together – we’ve lived together. Tell me, who wants to lie to his buddies and lie to himself for the rest of his life? Say there was something a guy could take – and I wouldn’t know what that could be – that would help him win this final marathon. What would he feel like, living with that lie, wondering whether or not he could have won on his own merits? No, I don’t think the question will arise, gentlemen.”
There was an awkward silence, but Rae stayed on his feet.
“I’m sorry to pursue this point,” he said, looking down to scribble on a pad in his left hand, “but it is common knowledge that many of the Trans-America competitors have formed themselves into teams and will split any winnings they have picked up during the race. Now, I’m not suggesting that there is anything corrupt in this. Far from it. What I am asking is whether or not such agreements might result in teams shepherding their favoured runners or individuals sacrificing themselves for the sake of another team member. This would surely diminish the Trans-America marathon as a race.”
“A very good question,” said Flanagan. “I have yesterday asked all Trans-Americans to nullify any financial team agreements which they may have made, or at least those relating to the final marathon stage on Saturday. Any sign of runners using destructive team tactics will result in immediate disqualification.”
“That answers my question,” said Rae, resuming his seat to murmurs of approval.
Albert Kowalski rose to take his place. “A question for Miss Sheridan, please. I believe that, by virtue of being in one hundred and ninety-eighth position at the end of the penultimate stage, she has now been offered the ten thousand dollars originally set by the Woman’s Home Journal. Since she has not completed the full distance, does she intend to accept the prize?”
Kate Sheridan stood up, eyes flashing. “No, I don’t. I was offered the prize for finishing within the first two hundred positions over the whole distance across America. It’s my intention only to pick up the prize if I finish in the top two hundred in the marathon.”
There was immediate applause.
“That’s the spirit of the Trans-America,” shouted Flanagan, as the applause subsided.
Carl Liebnitz got to his feet, looked around him at his colleagues, and addressed himself directly to Flanagan.
“Flanagan, it seems to me that this may be the last time we’re all going to be together in one room: athletes, journalists, you, your staff. And when that last man comes in on Saturday it’ll be sort of like a family breaking up. It certainly will be for me, anyway.”
He took off his spectacles, rubbed his thin, hawklike nose, and looked around him at his silent colleagues.
“I’m not a sentimental man, Flanagan. As you know, journalism isn’t a sentimental profession. But we’ve come a long way together, all of us, across some of the toughest country God ever made. I’d like to say on behalf of all my colleagues that it was worth it, every long mile of it. We’re glad you made it.”
The press corps rose as one man, applauding and, for the first and only time, a blush suffused Charles Flanagan’s lean face. He nodded sheepishly, shuffled with his papers and made his way from the dais as the press broke up.
As Morgan was leaving the conference room he was stopped from behind by a tap on the elbow. It was Ernest Bullard, his face grim.
“Just got a cable from my boss,” he said. “They want me to close the case and hightail it back to headquarters after the race.”
“And what about me?” said Morgan.
“How do you mean?”
“The Bronx Bomber?”
“The Bronx Bomber?” laughed Bullard. “What the hell would a prizefighter be doing in a foot-race?”
“You mean – ?”
“I mean you’re still in trouble,” said Bullard. “If you don’t run your heart out, all the way into Central Park.” He jammed his hat on to his head. “And forget about the Bronx Bomber. I never even met him.”
AMERICANA DATELINE FRIDAY 5 JUNE 1931
Had the Greeks failed to whip the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C. then it is unlikely that three million New Yorkers would tomorrow be watching the richest foot-race in history. Similarly, had, in 1908, an Italian waiter called Dorando Pietri been a good judge of pace and finished the London Olympic marathon without the assistance of officials, then the distance to be run tomorrow would not be the exact twenty-six miles three hundred and eighty-five yards that Charles Flanagan’s Trans-Americans will attempt to cover.
However, the Greeks did defeat the Persians, setting Pheidippides on his epic run to Athens; and Dorando Pietri was no judge of pace, and as a direct result Clarence C. Ross of Transcontinental Airlines has put up over a quarter of a million dollars on tomorrow’s foot-race from Denville, New Jersey, to Central Park, New York.
Everyone and his uncle is now on the Trans-American bandwagon, and many a Hollywood agent is in trouble for failing to secure his client a place on the VIP platform in Central Park, but it was not always thus. There were many doubting Thomases, not least your correspondent, when Charles C. Flanagan first set his tattered crew on their way East from the Coliseum Stadium, Los Angeles, way back in March. That day many competitors failed to survive the first stage, indeed some did not get much further than the Coliseum car park, and my perhaps over-sensitive nostrils began to sense something rotten in the state of California.
Those of my readers who have shown sufficient endurance to stay with me since those early days will know that I was an early convert to the Trans-America, as were the American people. Floods, riots, defaulting towns, snow-storms – nothing has stopped the onward rush of Flanagan’s men across the United States. When, one day, the full story of the Trans-America is written, it will read like something between Homer’s Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn.
One of my first reservations about the Trans-America was that it was obscene that in the middle of the worst Depression in our history men should be foot-racing for such massive prizes. I humbly admit my error. The athlete represents man at the edge of his limits in an area which few men glimpse, let alone inhabit. We identify with the athlete because we feel this, sense that he is one of the privileged few who can go close to reaching his potential, while most of us spend our lives unaware that such a potential even exists.
Some idea of the nature of Flanagan’s Trans-America may be given when I reveal that every one of his runners insisted on completing the whole distance to Denville, New Jersey, in order that they could claim to have run all the way from Los Angeles to New York. These men had come to run across the United States, and they would be satisfied with nothing less.
So, tomorrow, even when you are looking at some veteran chugging along in seven hundredth position with no hope of ending up in the money, remember that he is the privileged one. For he is one of a select band of men who have made their way on foot across America. He is a Trans-American. And that is in itself an accolade.
CARL C. LIEBNITZ
24
Marathon
Clarence Ross had not been alone in being affected by the London marathon of 1908, for the race had touched the hearts of the world. The marathon event was not, however, one of great athletic antiquity. The first Olympic marathon, in Athens in 1896, had been the creation of the Frenchman, Michel Breal, inspired by the feat of one Pheidippides who in 49 B.C. ran to Athens from the Plains of Marathon with news of the victorious battle with the Persians.
That first Olympic marathon of twenty-four and three quarter miles in Athens in 1896 had been contested by twenty-five athletes, mostly Greeks, most of whom had never competed beyond a mile. Some failed to survive the dust and heat and withdrew early in the race while others fell prey to the hospitality of villages they encountered on the route. Just beyond the village of Karvate, with only a quarter of the race to go, the French 1500 metre runner Lermusiaux was brought to a halt with c
rippling cramps, and was passed by an Australian, Flack. Behind Flack plodded a Greek shepherd, Spiridon Louis, who had doggedly threaded his way through a fading field.
Back on the marble terracing of the Averoff stadium the sixty-thousand crowd were ignorant of the progress of the race until the thirty-seventh kilometre, when a Greek cavalryman riding a white charger galloped into the stadium to announce that Louis was in the lead. Then, a few minutes later, the distant boom of cannons marked the arrival of the first runner at the outskirts of Athens.
Sixty thousand pairs of eyes strained to identify the leader as he entered the stadium. It was number seventeen – Louis! Pandemonium broke out, and men and women wept openly as the little shepherd trotted wearily towards the finish, dwarfed by the lanky Prince George of Greece, who had leapt from the royal box to run with Louis over part of the last lap.
It was only some years after the Paris Olympics marathon of 1900 that the runners realized that they had even competed in an Olympics; nothing on the medals they received gave any such indication. However, the Frenchman, Michel Théato, had chugged through the cobbled streets of Paris to win an undistinguished race.
The 1904 St Louis race turned out to be a mixture of drama and farce. The Cuban, Felix Carjaval, who had trotted across America after losing his stake money in a shipboard card game, turned up at the start dressed in boots, jacket and trousers. Only a pair of scissors wielded by some Irish-American throwers brought Carjaval’s apparel close to the athletic. The Cuban trotted off into the steamy heat and the carbon-monoxide fumes towards the St Louis World Fair, the site of the 1904 Olympics, to finish fourth.
The American, Fred Lorz, had been forced to stop running at ten miles because of cramps. He took a lift in a passing truck, and nine miles later, when the truck broke down, he jumped out, trotted into the stadium and was assumed by the crowd to be the winner. The American did nothing to disillusion the spectators and even paused to have his photograph taken with the President’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt. Ten minutes later, Hicks, the real leader, trudged into the arena and, when race-marshals later reported back, all hell was let loose on the wretched Lorz.