Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  She was beginning to feel her breathing weaken, the air coming through lungs that seemed hedged with thorns. Kate ran against the rhythm of this pain, fixing her eyes on the sweat-stained vest of the next runner, an Austrian, whom she slowly passed, hearing his grunt as she did so.

  The next three ran together, the tall Texan, Kane, and two tiny Japanese, running in their now familiar split-toed shoes, a hundred-odd yards ahead. For a mile she did not seem to be gaining ground at all, could see no change in the space which separated her from them. Then she began to hear Kane’s monotonous, high-pitched wheeze, and suddenly the distance between them seemed to shrink. With five miles to go, as she crossed the George Washington Bridge, she drew level, then squeezed past. Kane put his hand to his forehead in salute, and brushed the sweat from his eyebrows. Kate nodded, feeling herself for the first time that day grow stronger as she ran on. Ahead, at the end of the bridge, a prim, angular woman stood holding aloft a large piece of cardboard. It was a jubilant Glenda Farrell.

  The board read “200”.

  Kate felt her leg cadence increase as she passed it, smiling. In the next mile, she passed three more men in the storm of confetti and ticker-tape that was now Lenox Avenue. She had made it . . .

  . . . Each man felt it, felt his body protest as Doc placed new demands on bodies already screaming at their maximum. But they held firm, stayed glued to Doc’s sweat-drenched vest as he pushed ahead of them to go into a five-yard lead. Hugh felt as if he was being torn apart, his breath roaring through his lungs as he fixed his eyes on Doc’s back, picking up each infinitesimal flicker of muscle on its sweating surface. To his right Thurleigh and Morgan ran in step, Morgan low and flat-footed, Thurleigh’s legs bowed and buckling, his mouth flecked with foam.

  Doc could feel their eyes boring into him, feel the thread which bound them – for that was what he had always told them to do. But Doc was deeply imbedded in this final moment, while the others were simply struggling to become part of it. So he kept pressing, feeling his strength and their weakness as he piled on yard after yard down the length of Lenox Avenue, towards Central Park.

  The three runners continued to focus their gaze on his back, desperately hanging on. But Doc was getting away, gradually slipping from them. With just over a mile to go, and the entrance to Central Park in view, Doc knew that he had the race in his pocket. His lead had stretched to over a hundred yards. It had not been hard, despite the excessive heat. Like all things done well, it had come almost easily; the race had only released what had been lying dormant in him for twenty years.

  He accelerated again, through the park gates and along to the left towards the finishing tape at the Obelisk, now just over half a mile away. He took a last look at the clock as the timing-truck and the press buses peeled off to get into position at the finish. Just over two hours thirty-six minutes: faster than he had expected.

  Then he heard the crowds in the park.

  “Doc! Doc Cole!” they roared, and as he passed through the park gates a beefy cop patted his shoulder.

  Doc cruised easily through the park, passing the Lasker Pool Rink on his left, then curving down the left hand loop to Fort Fish, waving to acknowledge the crowd as he ran. Two hundred yards behind McPhail, Morgan and Thurleigh ran in line, still locked together.

  He strode strongly down the cool, tree-lined shadows of East Drive past delirious crowds straining behind police cordons. All the years, all the miles, and now the big pay-off, the place in the history books. He had done it.

  He had shown them who he was. Yet as he ran Doc felt a moment’s uncertainty. Hell, he knew who he was, had known for the past thirty-odd years. He had no need to prove it, to these people or to anyone else. Finally, in the Trans-America, he had got to the centre of himself, beyond the fairground huckstering, beyond even the lost records on forgotten roads . . .

  As he ran along the left side of the Reservoir he could see the brown-painted Obelisk on his right, three hundred yards away, and the massive wooden VIP platform which straddled East Drive just beyond the finish and which was crowded with celebrities straining to catch a glimpse of the first Trans-American. He looked over his right shoulder. Two hundred yards behind him, hugging the side of the Reservoir, McPhail, Morgan and Thurleigh ran as if held together by a magnet: only feet divided each one from the other.

  Only just over a hundred yards to go. The noise engulfed him, the goodwill and affection drenching him as he glided in towards the finish. He heard Flanagan’s voice on the microphone – “The leader is . . . Doc Cole, Doctor Alexander Cole!”

  He was there, where he had for so long dreamed he would be. “Finish”, said the banner above the tape. Suddenly he realized that he was weeping, indeed had been since he had entered the park. A hundred yards . . .

  Doc glanced behind him. Two hundred yards away Hugh McPhail had at last broken clear and was wobbling towards the tape, eyes glazed, his head already jutting forward in a grotesque memory of a dip finish. Five yards behind him came Mike Morgan, legs bowed, arms thrashing desperately, while behind him Peter Thurleigh, foaming at the mouth, his thighs beginning to cramp, struggled to maintain a dignity quite beyond his powers.

  Doc flowed in easily to the tape and the crowded mass of dignitaries seated beyond it. Without losing rhythm he looked behind him again, and in a glance absorbed the final battle between the following trio. The white finishing tape just over sixty yards ahead was at least six inches broad, stretching the whole breadth of the road, and about fifty yards beyond it, was the VIP stand, on which the gathered luminaries were already on their feet, applauding, whooping and cheering.

  With fifty yards to go Doc began to ease up – to the gasps of the crowds on each side of the park. Thirty yards from the tape he stopped completely, and the crowd suddenly became hushed. Doc slowly turned to face the oncoming runners, his palms uppermost. Hugh McPhail was the first to reach him, gasping as obediently he drew to a halt, to be followed by Morgan who, lungs heaving, draped his arms limply over Doc’s shoulders. A moment later a sobbing Peter Thurleigh struggled towards them, eyebrows raised in surprise. He stopped, wiped the white foam from his lips and looked at Doc, his hands on Hugh’s shoulders.

  Doc looked ahead at the platform – to Flanagan, who had descended its steps to stand on the road, a few yards beyond the finish. He then linked hands with an uncomprehending McPhail and beckoned Morgan and Thurleigh to do the same. His and Flanagan’s eyes met, as Doc raised Hugh McPhail’s hands above his head. Morgan and Thurleigh, both still gasping, slowly raised their arms too, and the four men walked forward together in silence, across the finishing line. It was impossible to separate them.

  Doc was the first to reach the microphone, set up on the road below the VIP platform. For a moment he stood savouring his triumph, as the silence around them was broken by a babble of excited talk. Then he seized the mike in one hand, and smiled.

  “We just got in,” he said. “From L.A.”

  Postscript

  In September 1931 Kate Sheridan, newly arrived in Hollywood, appeared in the first of a series of supporting roles in A Thousand and One Nights with Douglas Fairbanks. Her husband, Michael Morgan, began that August a career as a stuntman for Universal and in the 1940s became one of Hollywood’s most famous directors of stunt sequences.

  In December 1931 Hugh McPhail and his wife Dixie went into business with Doc Cole, who had set up with his wife Lily the first of the now-famous Cole Health Spas.

  Lord Peter Thurleigh now again a rich man because of his winning wager, returned to England to fight a by-election, gaining a seat as Liberal MP for Epping. He lost his life on 19 August 1942, during the Allied raid on Dieppe, heading a battalion of the Coldstream Guards.

  Charles C. Flanagan spent 1931 and 1932 managing a burlesque review called “Running without a Stitch”, which toured successfully and was briefly filmed in a sequence in the “Gold Diggers of 1933”. The 1932 Trans-Europe Race did not take place; but Flanagan Foods received the catering
contract for the 1932 Olympic Games, and in 1935 Charles C. Flanagan became a member of the American Olympic Committee, with Avery Brundage as chairman.

  In 1960 Doc Cole was given a place in America’s Track and Field Hall of Fame, and in 1961, at the age of eighty-four, ran the marathon from Denville to Central Park in four hours and eight minutes, a world record for his age group.