The Front Runner

by Warren, Patricia Nell

  "That's a long time," I said. I didn't want to remind him of his own observation that gay relationships seldom lasted that long.

  He shook his head. "I never wanted to love anyone that long before." He laughed a little. "It's funny. You're the first thing that I can project into the future, after Montreal. The rest just goes up to Montreal and stops. Even running somehow . . . stops there. I don't mean that I'll stop running afterward. But . . . you know what I mean. Right now, I'm just running and loving you, and that's all I want to do with myself."

  He lay down on the leaves again and stretched luxuriously beside me. I felt that same ease, that same slackening of the months of hurt and tension.

  "I want to sleep," he said.

  "Nothing doing," I said. "We both have classes. We have to get back"

  We both got stiffly up. We moved so slowly that we might have been drugged. Suddenly Billy started laughing.

  "What?" I said.

  He pointed down at our feet. We were both still wearing our shoes.

  We stood by the little waterfall and cleaned our­selves off. Then we pulled our clammy clothes back on. We were shivering a little, even in the warm sun.

  "Speaking of Montreal," I said, "there's something we ought to agree on. For the moment, this has to take its place in what we're trying to do. If it inter­feres, it might cause you to fail. That might spoil our feeling for each other too."

  "Yeah," said Billy. "I was thinking of that. Actually, the pressure's off us now, so it'll be easier. We can both just relax and get on with it."

  "The pressure is going to be coming from other people from now on," I said.

  Suddenly I had more questions. I wanted to talk to him about being married and about living together. But he'd already said he disapproved of ceremonies, and anyway I knew it was not the moment to come out with our relationship. I wanted to keep it secret as long as I could.

  I decided not to spoil that moment with any dis­cussions of this sort, and just swallowed the questions.

  Billy was laughing again. He was convulsed. He pointed at my stopwatch. "Mr. Brown, you even forgot to stop your watch before you grabbed me."

  We both leaned against the rock, laughing, shivering in our wet clothes. "Mr. Brown," he said, "what was our pace per mile?"

  "More like 3:50," I said.

  We walked slowly back with our arms around each other, our sides pressed together. About a mile from the edge of the woods, we saw Vince and Jacques coming along the trail. I drew away from Billy nervously.

  "Hell," said Billy, "we want them to know, don't we?"

  So we kept walking like that, two lovers, with bits of leaf still in our hair. Vince and Jacques came loping up to us, grinning widely. They stopped just long enough to enable Jacques to caper around us. He was playing an invisible recorder and making noises that sounded like the Mendelssohn wedding march. Vince punched me gently, and punched Billy gently.

  "Now maybe we'll have some peace and quiet," he said.

  9

  As graduation 1975 neared, every passing day told me how right I'd been not to say no to Billy. The deci­sion had been right not only for me, but for him too.

  Both of us relaxed. I stopped barking at him. He stopped fighting me about his training schedule. It was amazing how docile he suddenly was about cutting down his mileage. He was still a little addicted to it, and fidgeted like an ex-junkie sometimes. "I fought you because I resented your behavior to me," he said. "Now I'm going to be good."

  For me, the relaxation was gradual, as the buried ten­sions and pains of years slowly dissolved. For Billy, the relaxation was immediate. From that first morning in the woods, he abandoned himself to love.

  "I always fell in love with unhappy people," he said. "I was a sucker that way. I wanted to change their lives and make them happy. It never worked out. It was the same with you. You were the unhappiest guy I ever saw. But you're stronger than the others, and you really want to be happy. This time it's going to work."

  The relaxation had a curious effect: for the first week or so, both of us wanted to sleep all the time. Billy nodded off in classes. In the afternoons he went back to his dorm and napped. I found myself falling asleep in my office with my head on the typewriter. I found my eyes falling shut as I stood by the truck supposedly timing my runners. We both found that we couldn't stay awake past nine p.m. We laughed about it.

  But our happiness was far from complete. It was painful to continue on the same daily schedule as before. We saw each other only during workouts, classes and team open house. We snatched an hour of love every day or every other day, in the evenings at my house, or in the woods, or in my car somewhere. When Billy's father came to New York, we snatched a half hour in his hotel room when he was out. When night came, Billy always went back to his dorm to sleep.

  Above all I hungered for him at night—not merely for his body, but for his presence. I thought: Have I waited twenty years for this, only to wake up in the morning and find myself in an empty bed?

  We often called each other up on the phone. I'd be home about ten p.m. working out new training schedules for the teams, and the phone would ring. "Hi, Mr. Brown," he would say. "Hello, Mr. Sive," I would say. "Mr. Brown," he'd say, "I can't get any studying done because I'm thinking about your body." "You're not even supposed to be up at this hour," I'd say. "You're supposed to be asleep."

  Though Joe Prescott had told me long ago it would be strictly my business, I felt obliged to tell him. He took the news with his usual equanimity. Vince and Jacques had not been able to resist telling a couple of friends among their straight teammates, who in turn couldn't resist telling a few other students and faculty. They observed that Billy did indeed sometimes go to my house alone in the evening, and that I wasn't yelling at him any more.

  The reaction was: Ho hum, another picturesque pair. Unfortunately this knowledge eventually found its way off campus.

  Billy started studying extra hard, trying to make up for lost time. When May came, all three boys' port­folios were graded "Pass" and they were able to graduate.

  Whereupon Joe Prescott then hired Vince and Billy as teachers, with the idea that they would develop a gay studies program. Joe had gotten more and more interested in the whole question of gay rights, and thought Prescott could make a practical contribution that would be in keeping with the college's aim of "more human people."

  He also took Jacques onto the faculty as a graduate assistant in the environmental activist course.

  All three boys were delighted with this development, and so was I. It solved the problem of a base for their training until the Olympic Trials. Billy, of course, stayed on campus to be near me, and the other two stayed on to start working up their course material. It was making their gayness more public, but the rumors in the track world were now so insistent that we knew by next fall sometime their cover would be blown.

  That summer I finally began to see Billy's true potential as a runner. For the first time I began to think that a medal in Montreal was not just a wet dream.

  After the Drake Relays, his improvement had stopped, as his overstrained system slowly, secretly healed itself. I wasn't too worried—it was the familiar plateau in an athlete's development. By now I had him on the program I was sure was right for him. I'd run it through a computer and tinkered with it endlessly, studying the results. He was now weaned down to a mere 100 miles a week, and a single daily workout. But it was all quality and strength work.

  Every day he ran thirty to eighty minutes in the woods, burning through it at a 5 or 5:15 mile pace. All the hills made it a beautiful brutal strength exercise. Then he went back to the track for speed laps. He would do, say ten quarters or twenty to twenty-five 110s at seventy-five percent effort. Before a major meet, I would let him add some second daily workouts of five miles run at nearly race pace. He loved that second workout—he behaved like a child who'd been given a popsicle.

  In July he suddenly started improving again. His three- and six-mile ti
mes started dropping so rapidly that I knew he would break twenty-eight minutes in the 10,000 meter any time now, and go 13:35 in the 5,000.

  We kept strictly to our sparse meeting schedule, and did not parade our relationship on campus, because summer school was going on, and a good number of students and faculty were there. Nevertheless, we were met with a growing number of hostile remarks when we traveled to meets that summer.

  I found it more and more unbelievable that spec­tators and officials could deride those three handsome manly dignified young men. I found it particularly curious that they could deride Billy, when he looked more and more like the only serious threat to Euro­pean domination in the 5,000 and 10,000 that Ameri­ca had so far had. But the deriders wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted medals hung only on clean-cut heterosexuals.

  Thus, a paunchy track nut sitting in the first row, with his well-thumbed program and his cigar, would yell at Billy, "Hey, loverboy, whose girlfriend are you?"

  If Billy came in second, some wit would be sure to yell, "Nice gays never win."

  Vince and Billy were not disturbed by the remarks. Vince might throw the guy a bird or yell back something smart-ass. Billy simply ignored them. But Jacques shrank from them. "I don't know how long I can take this," he said. His performances that summer really dropped off. He was so nervous that his legs were dead by the time he got to the starting line.

  We got to one meet in July and they told us the boys couldn't compete. They were very sorry. They said that our entries hadn't been received before the closing date. They were polite, but firm. They didn't say anything about the boys being gay. They just said they couldn't run.

  I had anticipated this kind of trick. I pulled out a signed certified-mail return receipt with the meet secretary's signature on it. I always sent the boys' entries by certified mail now. Since I'd sent them in weeks before, the meet people had forgotten some­body had signed. They had to let the three run.

  At another meet, Vince was barred from the track at the last moment. The officials insisted that his new AAU registration was not valid. Vince fumed and cursed, and got out his AAU card. The officials in­sisted that the matter would have to be looked into, and meantime he couldn't compete. They practically shoved him off the track. We had the matter investigated immediately, and of course his card was okay.

  They picked on Vince a lot because they disliked his impudence. At still another meet they wouldn't let him run until he'd paid an extra fifty cents of entry fee to make up for an official's mistake. Vince was scrounging madly for two quarters at trackside, and barely got to his marks on time.

  In late July a more serious matter came up. I wanted to take all three of them to Europe for a month, to get the international experience they needed so bad­ly. We planned to go to a number of big meets, includ­ing Helsinki. But when we applied to the AAU for the routine travel permits, the AAU would not give them to us.

  It may seem strange that in this day and age of total freedom, when Americans travel freely every­where, even to Red China, an amateur athlete does not enjoy quite the same freedom of travel. But the matter of who goes on European tours is a big point of politics with the AAU. They reserve the right to arrange for travel, whether or not it is in accord with the athlete's wishes and needs, and they reserve the right to give or deny permission to go. They insist that foreign meet promoters contact them and not the in­dividual athletes that the promoters might like.

  Recently athletes have been quarreling bitterly with the AAU over travel, especially in view of AAU abuses. Say a Belgian promoter contacts AAU exec­utive director Mel Steinbock and says, "Could I have miler John Doe in my meet?" and the executive director might reply cavalierly, "Sorry, buddy, the meet schedule here conflicts—we need John Doe." John Doe is furious because (1) the meet schedule doesn't conflict and he would have been free to go, and (2) he feels that he should have been consulted about this important decision.

  It reached the point where foreign promoters were as pissed at the AAU as American runners were, and finally the AAU was starting to be more careful.

  That summer, the AAU organized a European tour for a number of athletes as part of the Olympic development program. Some of the athletes' expenses would be paid by the AAU, some by the European promoters. Naturally, though their status clearly warranted it, Billy, Vince and Jacques were not invited on the tour.

  I had known that they wouldn't be. So well in advance I had surreptitiously contacted the European promoters myself, saying we planned to come abroad and asking if they were interested. Quite a few were. Knowing the AAU's strange ways, they kept me surreptitiously informed while they made the formal request to the AAU.

  The AAU was panicked and embarrassed at the thought of their three rumored homosexuals touring Europe. But they didn't say the word "homosexual" out loud once. To the promoters they said, "Oh, we're awfully sorry, we want those three boys for the U.S.­Soviet invitational in Los Angeles in mid-August."

  When the foreign promoters relayed this informa­tion to us, we told Steinbock that the boys did not plan to go to Los Angeles, and that they damn well wanted their travel permits. Steinbock got furious and said he wasn't giving them any permits.

  Then I got furious and called Steinbock up. "You've got a choice," I said. "You can issue these permits and the whole thing will blow over. Or you can deny them, and we'll go anyway."

  "If you do that, I'll suspend all three boys," said Steinbock crisply.

  "Then you're going to buy yourself a lot of trouble," I said. "I'll get a court injuction preventing you from punishing them pending a hearing. Do you want a hearing? What's the big deal? They don't plan to run at the Soviet meet, so why not let them go? What have you got against them?"

  We packed our bags, and John Sive prepared to get the injunction. But at the last minute, following file AAU's new policy of caution, Steinbock backed down and issued the permits.

  Billy Sive arrived in Europe unknown to track fans there. But he wasn't an unknown long. In Helsinki, right on schedule, he broke twenty-eight in the 10,000 meter, which was already then—and would be—his best race. By doing so he joined the select club of fifteen world-class runners who had run under twenty-eight in this event, and was now in fifth place on the world list. But he had a long way to go before he could beat the world-record holders like Lasse Viren and Armas Sepponan, who held the current record of 27:36.11 in the 10,000.

  Sepponan, in fact, was sure to be Billy's biggest worry in Montreal—if he got to Montreal at all. Sep­ponan had a crushing kick, and blew the front-runners right off the track. Two other big kickers were in that Helsinki race—Australia's Jim Felts and Spain's Roberto Gil—and both of them had run well under 28. So, that day in Helsinki, I wasn't really thinking of Billy winning.

  Still, I was nervous as I watched the men line up at the start. The big stadium hushed a little. The Euro­peans really idolize distance runners, in a way that Americans are only now learning to. For them, this was a moment.

  The gun fired and they rolled off the line.

  The pace dragged a little. Nobody wanted to lead. The kickers were noodling in the rear. Sepponan was running easily in last place. Billy, unusual for him, was running in third place. He told me later that he had felt suddenly intimidated by the thought of all those big guns behind him. Then he thought, What the heck, what was he worried about, and he was worried somebody would elbow him.

  So he moved to the front, and picked up the pace sharply. I was relieved to see him do that. The rest had their choice: hang back or go with him. So they all picked up, and three others stayed close to the front with him.

  Billy was running easily, beautifully, his shaggy curls lifting, his glasses glinting as the sun caught them. He might have been a perfect machine, except that he was so real, flesh and blood turned to an ultrasonic pitch of rhythm and control. His spiked shoes seemed scarcely to strike the track. He kept pulling the other front-runners farther ahead, sticking to the pace he'd struck.


  With a half-mile left to go, Billy suddenly picked up the "pace sharply again. This was his long drive, running flat out to the finish, the tactic that was supposed to burn off the kickers. The other front-runners immediately lost contact with him, and he sped on alone. The crowd started to scream, because now Sepponan, Felts and Gil were moving up fast, hauling Billy down.

  With one lap to go, Sepponan and Felts were coming up for the kill. The crowd was screaming. They were mostly Finns, so they wanted to see Sep­ponan kill off the presumptuous young American that nobody had heard of.

  Billy didn't turn his head to look, but he heard them coming. And then I saw a glimpse of what he was capable of. He accelerated too, ghosting along with those great soft strides, his face impassive.

  The crowd was going wild. As the four men rounded the last turn, we all knew that three, possibly four of them would go under 28. They had left the pack labor­ing far behind. They tore out of the turn in a tight little bunch, Billy still ahead, Sepponan at his shoulder, Felts and Gil behind.

  I knew in my heart that he didn't have the stamina yet to hold them off.

  Almost at the moment I thought it, Billy seemed to falter a little. Sepponan burst past him. The four were sprinting down the straight to the tape. In a last heart­breaking effort, Billy stayed even with Felts until just ten yards from the tape. Then he cracked. He had nothing left. He crossed the line staggering in third place, just barely shading out Gil.

  The Finns were going wild, and Armas Sepponan was taking a victory lap. Nobody paid much attention to Billy as he circled shakily back.

  I went out to him. He bent over, his hair hanging, his hands braced on his knees. Then, as always when he'd really extended himself, his streaming sides con­tracted with the dry heaves. I threw a towel over his shoulders, wiped his face with a wet rag. Then I showed him my stopwatch. He smiled faintly, nodded—he'd already known—but didn't speak.

  The times were already going up in lights on the big scoreboard. SEPPONAN 27:47. FELTS 27:49.05. SIVE 27:50.2. GIL 27:50.7.