V 1 N. 18 Ted Haydon Book Reviewed by Paul O'Shea
Don’t Worry About Today’s Race.
You’re Capable of Much Worse
A Book Review by Paul O’Shea
The Genius of
Ted Haydon and the
University of Chicago Track Club
By Jim Knoedel, 240 pages, Amazon $17.
Ted Haydon’s life needed an author.
Kenny Moore wrote Bowerman and The Men
of Oregon.
Brendan O’Meara explores Prefontaine with
his new The Front Runner.
Jim Knoedel fills the Haydon gap with The
Genius of Ted Haydon and the University of Chicago Track Club.
Before track and field is harmed further
by grand slam track, kangaroo shoes and new
concerns over doping, we now remember and honor Ted Haydon. With The Genius
of Ted Haydon, his history as humanist, teacher and leader is now preserved.
Here’s why he stands with the sport’s important
figures since mid-century.
Ted Haydon coached at the university level
and beyond for 35 years. He mentored U.S. distance runners at the ’68 and ‘72
Olympic Games and managed the first American track team to compete in the
Soviet Union. More than a hundred of his athletes qualified for the U.S.
Olympic Trials. Two won Olympic medals, two set world records. One relay team set an indoor world record.
In 1950 Haydon created the University of
Chicago Track Club, accommodating post-graduates when there were limited
competitive opportunities. He played a central role in attempting a
reconciliation between two major governing organizations, each reluctant to cede
power. He was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the U.S.
Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Ted Haydon was a mosaic of a man. Writing in Sports Illustrated in 1975,
Sarah Pileggi described him as “someone who could squeeze a week’s worth of
activity into an 18-hour day, but the greatest of his talents is looking at any
one moment, as though he has nothing at all to do.
“He was a big, pink-faced man in a spotted
windbreaker and dirty golf cap with stopwatch strings hanging from all his
pockets,” she wrote. “A ragtime
piano-playing sociologist who coaches the University of Chicago varsity track
team.
For a living.”
Stagg Field was his canvas.
More an oval than a parallelogram, the running
track had historic neighbors. The first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, which
ultimately became a nuclear bomb, took place in a shed under its bleachers. Nearby, visitors from around the world toured
Frank Lloyd Wright ‘s Robie House, a National Historic Landmark.
Born in
Saskatchewan, Canada, Haydon came to the United States with his family in 1917. He graduated from the University of Chicago
in 1933, where he captained the track team. Competing for the Maroon he ran the
hurdles and took up the hammer (and kept his hand on the wire until well into
middle age).
As a coach, Haydon’s
motivational recipe relied on dark humor and reverse psychology, somewhat like
the half-miler who ran the second quarter faster than the first.
On the first day of college practice coach
handed out a list of 75 possible alibis, one of which the athlete could turn to
after an unsatisfactory performance:
--Coach reminds me of my father. I hate
both.
--I wanted to see what they gave for
third.
--Girlfriend too friendly last night.
Even when the stakes were the highest, he
wielded his wit: In the ’68 Olympic fifteen hundred meter final, Jim Ryun was
minutes away from sharing the starting line with Kip Keino. It was the most anticipated race of the
Games. Ryun asked Haydon to say a prayer
for him. “Jim, I’ve decided not to say a prayer for you. I’m going to save that for something more
important.”
There were other pivots.
When one runner wanted advice on how to
turn in faster times, his solution: Run shorter races.
When the team went out for dinner after an
away meet, they ended up at an upscale restaurant, a departure from the usual
fast-food sites. “Nothing’s too good
for my team: Except the competition.”
The Nineteen Sixties saw the emergence of
dual meets between nations. Haydon was chosen to manage several international
teams including the dual meet in 1972 when the U.S. met Russia.
A second meeting of national teams took
place in Chicago on the University track.
With a Polish population of three hundred
thousand, Chicago hosted the U.S.-Poland meet in 1962. To promote the event Ted
arranged to have Illinois Governor Otto Kerner sign a proclamation endorsing
the Stagg Field event. More than thirteen thousand attended the first day’s
events.
Two-mile relay teams were a particular
Haydon strength. Primarily served up at big indoor meets in Chicago, Milwaukee
and New York, and occasionally outdoors, among the premier teams were Oklahoma State,
Villanova and the University of Chicago Track Club. In five years UCTC set two
world and two American records. Seven of
its half milers would break 1:50.
Two of those half milers deserve special
attention: Olympic bronze medalist Rick Wohlhuter and anchor Lowell Paul.
“When it comes to the UCTC,” Knoedel
writes, “I think of his two-mile relays, the successes they achieved, their
dominance so remarkable…pictures of Lowell Paul and Rick Wohlhuter in Track
and Field News a regular occurrence.”
In Genius Knoedel captures the
indoor atmosphere with this lovely image: “Fans could hear…the rolling thunder
of foot strikes as runners circled the track.”
The Track Club’s most successful middle
distance runner was Rick Wohlhuter. He
made two Olympic teams, winning bronze behind Alberto Juantorena in the ‘76 800
meters. Other achievements included
world records at 880 yards and one thousand meters. Wohlhuter received the James E. Sullivan Award
as the nation’s top amateur athlete in 1974.
One of the founding members of the
University of Chicago Track Club was Carleton College graduate Hal Higdon. He qualified
for the Olympic trials seven times, placing fifth in the 1960 steeplechase. He
also was a prominent marathoner, fifth at Boston in 1964.
Higdon would go on to write 34 books. His
signature literary achievement is On the Run From Dogs and People, now
in its third printing. He remembers
Haydon’s selflessness:
“During the cross country season Ted would
return from the park where he had been coaching his varsity team…post
collegiate runners would appear after work. It would be dark and cold by then
and he was getting no extra pay for hanging around with us. He would stand beside the track as we ran quarters,
using a flashlight to read times.
“Sometimes, for protection from the cold,
he would drag a (portable) ticket booth left over from the Amos Alonzo Stagg
era and position it trackside so he could stand inside. We would run past and
from within the ticket booth would come an eerie glow and a hollow voice
shouting, Sixty-six…sixty-seven. Looking back, those were magical
moments for me.”
One of the book’s highlights is Knoedel’s
recounting of how a new track came to be installed at Stagg Field.
When the City of Chicago stepped in to host
the 1959 Pan American Games after Cleveland bowed out, Mayor Richard J. Daley
named Ted Haydon as chairman of the games committee. But Soldier Field’s
quarter mile surface, where the opening and closing ceremonies were to be held
along with track and field was paved asphalt, ready for Brad Pitt but not Faith
Kipyegon.
The answer to a new surface rested four
thousand miles away in Oxford, England, the site of the Bannister sub-four
minute mile, its En Tout Cas surface.
Haydon arranged to have the Iffley Road surface
dug up and shipped to 5750 South Ellis Avenue.
The contents consisted of 1,200, forty-two-gallon barrels filled with English
clay, burnt cinders and red coloring.
Stagg Field’s existing track was removed
and a crew of University of Chicago, UCTC athletes and others worked over the
fall to install one of the world’s premier track installations.
Chicago’s Hyde Park was a rough area in the
Sixties, with crime rampant around the university campus. In 1979 Haydon was
shot in the leg during a robbery near his South Side home. But that didn’t slow him down. Six days later
he and his athletes were on their way to a meet in New York City.
Eighteen-hour days over decades, poor
eating habits, and high blood pressure took an early toll on this indefatigable
man. After experiencing a stroke after a
development meet in 1985, he died three weeks later at age 73.
Jim Knoedel coached the University of
Illinois-Chicago for two decades. He was
head coach for two U.S. national teams, the Ekiden women’s team and the junior
men’s team at the IAAF world cross country championships. He wrote two other
books about girls’ running.
The idea for writing about Haydon came from
Al Carius, the highly successful coach at North Central College.
This book is deeply researched, but there
are some editing lapses. The book would also be more useful with pagination and
an index.
But one of our sport’s most respected
figures now gets his due.
So they ran on, runners against the
darkness, listening for the raspy voice which told them to push on: Sixty-six,
sixty seven, sixty eight….
"Paul O'Shea is a longtime contributor to this blog. If we had a corner office it would be his."
George Brose
Below is Coach Haydon's Alibi List
which I'm sure most readers used at some time in their careers.
One of the commentors in the article is listed as 'Tom', That's Thomas Coyne another one of our early contributors who has gone to that great running track in the sky. He was a wonderful friend of all of us.
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