Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America's Greatest Marathon

Book by Brant John

1

Monday, April 19, Patriots' Day, broke warm and blue over Boston, perfect for just about anything except running 26.2 miles. At a little after 7:00 a.m., Dick Beardsley stood at the window of his room at the downtown Sheraton, watching work crews ready the marathon's finish-line area on Hereford Street far below. Behind him in the room, his wife, Mary, slept. He was glad to have her with him, but it also felt somewhat strange. Normally, when Beardsley traveled to road races, Mary stayed home in Rush City, Minnesota, where she worked as a secretary in an insurance office. But Mary had wanted to see the sights in Boston and support her husband at the crucial moment of his career.

Although it had lost some of its luster in recent years, the Boston Marathon remained the world's most famous distance run, defining the sport for the general public the way Johnstown defined floods. Americans became horse racing fans on Kentucky Derby day and auto racing fans on Memorial Day for the Indianapolis 500; on Patriots' Day (commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord and the start of the Revolutionary War), they turned their brief attention spans to the Boston Marathon. Even Beardsley's father in Minnesota knew about the race. When Dick had started running as a high school junior, his father had given him a special birthday present--an IOU plane ticket good one day for a trip to the Boston Marathon.

A decade later, Dick had finally made it to Boston for the marathon's 86th running. His father, however, hadn't paid a cent for the trip; the only thing Bill Beardsley was interested in buying was his next fifth of gin. Nor did the race organizers offer appearance or prize money (those emoluments wouldn't come to the race for a few more years). New Balance, Beardsley's shoe sponsor, was picking up his tab.

Tradition and prestige, not cash, had drawn Dick to Boston. Most big-city marathons, for instance, started early on Sunday morning. Boston, by contrast, always started at noon on Monday. Instead of getting out of bed and proceeding directly to the starting line, as was his custom, Dick now had 5 long hours to fill. He wasn't hungry, but he knew he needed nourishment. He tiptoed to the phone and ordered toast and hot chocolate from room service.

As he nibbled the toast and sipped the cocoa, he watched the Today show, turning the volume down low so as not to disturb Mary. Willard Scott, the weatherman, predicted bright sunshine and a high of 75 degrees for the Boston area. "A great day for the marathon," he said.

"Shows how much you know about the marathon, Willard," Beardsley murmured to the screen.

Dick flicked off the TV and moved back to the window. His edginess transcended normal prerace jitters. He felt as if he were standing at a precipice, as if something momentous lay in store. By predilection and economic necessity, Beardsley liked to race nearly every weekend. Combined with his $25,000 annual stipend from New Balance, prize winnings from 10- Ks, marathons, and other road races earned him and Mary the semblance of a middle-class income. For the last 3 months, however, Beardsley had forgone the road-race paydays, sequestering himself in Atlanta, where he trained exclusively--and furiously--for Boston. Two weeks earlier, he had logged his last hard workout, 20 miles at 2-hour, 12-minute marathon pace over a hilly course. Later that day, he'd reported the results to his Boston-based coach, Bill Squires.

"I couldn't feel my feet touching the ground," Beardsley said. "I felt like I was flying."

"You damn fool!" Squires screamed into the phone. "You just left your marathon in Georgia!"

But Beardsley knew he had plenty left in him. During training, he typically ran 120 to 140 miles per week, an average of just under 20 miles a day. In the 2 weeks before a marathon, when he cut that mileage to 70, he felt like he was barely running at all. He couldn't sleep. The energy boiled out of him.

He pushed aside the cup of chalky hot chocolate and took a long drink of cold water. The only defense against the heat was to drink all morning, flush his tissues with water, and keep drinking all through the race. Maybe Salazar wouldn't be so careful.

For a while, Dick sat in the chair, his feet up on the table, by turns watching the TV and the morning light rising on Hereford Street. He sipped water, made frequent trips to the bathroom, and, as he'd been doing continuously for the last month, thought about Alberto Salazar. On Thursday night, Dick had watched on the TV news as Salazar arrived at Logan Airport.

"There's no other runner here who especially concerns me," Salazar had told the reporters. "If de Castella or Seko were competing, it would be different. But looking at the rest of the field . . . let's just say I'm fit and prepared. If there are no injuries or unforeseen developments . . . well, the facts are plain; I'm the fastest man in the race."

There was no disputing Salazar's facts: He was clearly the fastest man in the race. For the last few years, he had been the fastest man in just about any distance race on earth. Salazar owned the world record in the marathon-- 2:08:13. He was the two-time defending champion of the New York City Marathon. On the track, he was the second-fastest American ever in the 10,000 meters and a member of the 1980 Olympic team. He'd been an NCAA cross-country champion and last month, in Rome, had finished second in the world cross-country championships. The state of Salazar's present fitness was daunting; just 9 days earlier, he'd run 27:30 for 10,000 meters, 2 seconds off the American record and almost 2 minutes faster than Beardsley's best for that distance. Salazar, moreover, was handsome and charismatic, the closest the sport of running came to a household name. After his world-record performance in New York City last autumn, Sports Illustrated published a long, adulatory profile of him. President Ronald Reagan congratulated Salazar at a ceremony at the White House.

Beardsley had run against him once before, at the 1980 New York City Marathon, Salazar's debut at the distance. Then a 22-year-old senior at the University of Oregon, Salazar had swaggered into the media capital of the world and publicly announced that he would run the race faster than 2:10, the standard for a world-class marathon. At the time, Beardsley's personal best for the distance was 2:12. All through race week, he watched Salazar cut around Manhattan in a black leather jacket, looking like a young Montgomery Clift.

"Alberto wasn't exactly bragging; he was just extremely confident," Beardsley recalled. "He had already trained with Bill Rodgers, who was the reigning champion of the marathon, and he knew that he was in just as good of shape as Billy--in fact, a lot better shape. He didn't predict victory, just that, if the day went reasonably well, this is how he would perform. It's not really bragging if you back it up."

On the day of the marathon, Beardsley broke fast from the start on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and by midrace had established a significant lead over the rest of the pack. He held the lead through the 18-mile mark, which came at the Manhattan end of the Queensboro Bridge. When Beardsley swooped down from the bridge, which was closed to spectators, the roar from the crowd lining First Avenue nearly staggered him. Bill Squires, who had recently begun coaching Beardsley, stood among the crowd. He was shocked to see his runner so soon. "Holy shit, Dickie!" he screamed. "You're leading the New York City Marathon!"

It seemed too good to be true, and it was. Just beyond the bridge, Salazar blasted past Beardsley without a glance, gliding on to a commanding 2:09:41 victory. Salazar had logged the fastest debut marathon ever and delivered the time that he'd promised. Beardsley, meanwhile, faded to a ninth-place, 2:13:55 finish. As close as he'd come to Salazar, however (at the finish, roughly two-thirds of a mile separated them), he might as well have been 90th.

So what would be different here in Boston 18 months later? Everything, Dick vowed. "My whole life boiled down to this," Beardsley would remember in his autobiography. "One way or another, this race would change everything. . . . I was a runaway train. That's how it felt. My times were getting so much better so much faster, I had no idea where it would lead."

He sat down again at the TV and, by reflex, started drumming his thighs with his fists. All through the winter, as he sat in front of the TV in the evenings, Dick £ded his thighs 1,500 times. He had read somewhere that £ding your muscles made them tougher. If he thought it might gain him a few seconds on the downhills, he would have tried curing his quadriceps in a smokehouse.

Beardsley knew that the Boston Marathon would be decided on the course's four long hills rising between miles 17 and 21. If he had any chance of beating Salazar, he would have to fly down those hills like a bobsled racer, capitalizing on the fact that Salazar outweighed him by 20 £ds. Conceivably, a series of rocketing descents might pummel Salazar's legs to the extent that Dick would be able to pull away from him before mile 25. If that plan failed, and the race came down to a kick at the end, then Salazar, with his superior short-range speed, would do the pummeling.

Mary stirred and sighed in bed, mumbling a few words from a dream. Dick couldn't make out what she said. He stared, unseeing, at the TV. Fifteen hundred punches, each thigh.

At 9:00 a.m., he kissed Mary, who wished him good luck and said she would see him at the finish line; she planned to watch the race on TV in the hotel room. He gathered his gear and went down to the lobby to catch his ride out to the start in Hopkinton, a village of 2,500 people 26 miles west of Boston. To transport its sponsored runners, New Balance had organized a station wagon--a green behemoth with three rows of seats, the first two facing the front and the third facing the rear. The rear bench-seat was the kind little kids rode in, goofing around, wrestling, tormenting the drivers of trailing cars with endless waves or, if they were nasty kids, obscene gestures.

To Dick's dismay, all the front seats had been taken up by other runners and their gear. They were good marathoners, 2:15 to 2:20 caliber, but none would contend in today's race. Beardsley, by contrast, had won the inaugural London Marathon the previous spring and last June had achieved a breakthrough 2:09:36 victory at Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. Until Salazar's entry into Boston a month earlier, Beardsley was considered a favorite to win the race. Moreover, he was New Balance's top athlete; in fact, just last night, a representative from Adidas had made a strong pitch- -including an offer of a $25,000 signing bonus--to try to lure Beardsley to his company. Out of loyalty, Dick had refused. This was his reward? Why couldn't those guys make room for him in the front? Maybe he should have signed Adidas's contract after all.

Dick jammed his gear bag into the cramped rear seat, then squeezed in beside it. He was isolated from the other athletes, facing away from them, like a naughty, exiled 9-year-old. Often he felt like a 9-year-old. Weighing all of 128 £ds, he wasn't much bigger than one. His dad was a drunk in Wayzata, Minnesota, and so was his mom. His college? South Dakota State University. He hadn't graduated. He lived in a rented log cabin by the St. Croix River in eastern Minnesota, an hour's drive north of the Twin Cities. The only places he felt truly at home were the woods and dairy barns and the gravel roads through farm country where he could run for hours with no company but the cows, nothing to look at but the mile markers. Beardsley sulked in the far back seat. The rear window was stuck open. He shivered from the cold air rushing in and felt nauseous from the exhaust fumes.

All winter he had suffered these mood swings--moments of supreme self- confidence, when he would feel as invincible as Salazar, followed by moments of crushing doubt, when he knew he was an imposter, that he really wasn't a world-class athlete, that at some critical point God would expose him as a sad little son of small-town alcoholics. Dick was just a dairy farmer, for crying out loud. He did not belong in the front of the station wagon, and he certainly didn't belong in the front of the Boston Marathon. He belonged on a Minnesota lake trolling for bass and crappies or in a dairy barn, sitting on a three-legged stool, staring into the yin darkness of a Holstein milk cow, her tail flicking flop. He belonged in the rear seat of a funky old station wagon, looking backward like a 9-year-old.

The station wagon moved out of the Back Bay, heading west through the bright morning sunshine, passing Kenmore Square bars already filling up with Patriots' Day revelers. His father would start drinking in the morning, too. Bill Beardsley loved martinis. He kept an inch or two of gin in his glass all day long.

For the duration of the drive to Hopkinton, the station wagon's rear window was stuck open. Exhaust fumes wafted in on a chilly wind. Dick shivered and gagged; but just as his discomfort climaxed, he was able to dissociate, jump outside of himself for a moment. What a comical sight he must make, he thought, shoehorned into the back of a giant old station wagon. Dick gave a thin smile. He repositioned his bag, fashioning a pillowlike perch away from the draft. It really wasn't so bad back here, he thought. At least he didn't have to talk to anybody.

As the station wagon cleared the city and turned west onto the Interstate 495 expressway, Beardsley's gloom and anxiety gave way to confidence. One other thing was true: He felt at home in the marathon.