Pure Joy Is Running Out

By Tom Callahan

After 86 years, Boston is ready to go commercial

Of all the pure pursuits, among the purest has been the pursuit of slipped discs, varicose veins, shin splints, sagging breasts, side stitches and hernias--the traditional rewards of running. Runners who speak of their exquisite pains (and many runners speak of nothing else) say the compensations are, and ought to be, ethereal: surges of joy, increased selfesteem, improved sex lives. But commercialism is afoot and mercenaries are gaining. The Boston Marathon is about to turn pro.

Sensible people given to sedentary pleasures have long been offended by the unsightly spectacle of their neighbors chugging around town in their underwear ("It must be spring, the saps are running again"), but no one has ever disputed the ideal at the heart of the Patriots Day race through the streets of Boston. For 86 years, it has been as pure as the April snow.

But next Monday looms like Heartbreak Hill. It figures to be the final Patriots Day for the Boston Marathon, and the last stand of undiluted amateurism. For reasons no less prosaic than television, the Boston Athletic Association intends to shift its noble race next year to Sunday, perhaps adjust the starting and finish lines slightly for commercial purposes, and, if all that isn't jarring enough, begin paying the winners. Will Cloney, 70, president of the B. A. A. and master of the marathon, contends that there is at least "a semantic difference between being paid and running for prizes. If you were to say to me, 'Is the Boston Marathon going professional?' my answer is emphatically no. As to paying prize money, under the existing rules of amateurism, that is a distinct possibility."

The existing rules of amateurism could have been written by Cole Porter: Anything goes. On the occasion of his second consecutive victory in the New York Marathon last October, Alberto Salazar allowed as how, given a choice, he prefers his cash "under the table" rather than by way of one of the new trust-fund arrangements the International Amateur Athletic Federation has approved as a slender hedge against hypocrisy. Also on behalf of under-the-table money, Fred Lebow, the New York Marathon's candid proprietor, points out that it "is legal as far as the governments are concerned as long as the athletes pay their taxes. It's acceptable to the media--they've known about it for decades. The public knows about it. The athletes benefit financially. Consequently, everybody is happy."

Not everybody has been happy with the Boston Marathon. Olympic Gold Medal Winner Frank Shorter has run at Boston only twice, the last time in 1979. Among other reasons, he could never coax so much as a plane ticket out of Cloney. Sneaker companies have probably picked up a few tabs over the years in Boston, but the runners have never been paid or even had expenses defrayed by the B.A.A.

"As a matter of fact," says four-time Winner Bill Rodgers, "Boston never even worked within the amateur rules before. For the past many years, they could have paid airfares, housing and food allowances." Now, apparently afraid of being left behind by marathons in New York, London and Tokyo, Boston is ready to pay. "When I see all these things happening," says Cloney, "I have to do something to protect the future of the Boston Marathon."

Since 1965, the Prudential Center--the Pru--has served as the destination of the 26-mile 385-yd. journey, a blessed sight for the survivors among the 6,000 starters. They stumble in looking like advancemen for a famine. But the Pru says it wants no part of commercialism, and the finish line next year will probably be elsewhere. "The marathon is going to be exactly the same as every other marathon in the world," Cloney promises, "with commercial sponsorship."

What happened to nobility and sentimentality? "As for anybody who has illusions about the nobility of the sport," Rodgers answers, "they're generally not the marathoners themselves, certainly not the world-class marathoners. It wasn't the athletes who said they didn't want to be professionals. It's only the people who don't know what it takes to reach this level. There is a kind of dream world. A myth was concocted."

For the Boston Marathoners who are not world class, for whom Boston has always represented a sort of everyman's World Series, will it be the same? Rodgers says it will. He thinks professionalism and commercialism merely "ensure that world-class competitors will be present," and should have no effect on the dreamers. This was put to a dreamer, Washington Post Columnist Colman McCarthy, who writes better than he runs, but has finished three Boston Marathons. He mulled it over for a long moment before answering: "So many great amateurs have triumphed at Boston--Johnny Keliey, Clarence H. DeMar, Tarzan Brown--that it's hard to run there and not feel almost spiritually uplifted by the money-free aura. I know it's 99% impossible and 1% improbable that sports commercialization can be stopped. But that's why the amateur tradition of Boston needs preserving. We're down to our last 1% of pure-joy athletics."

Keliey, 74, who won in 1935 and 1945, plans to run again Monday. It will be his 51st Boston Marathon, though he is half inclined not to count the three he didn't finish (1928, 1932 and 1956). "I meet people every day now," Keliey says, "with gray heads, bald heads, who tell me how their fathers always took them to Fenway on Patriots Day morning to see the Red Sox and then on to the race to cheer us in. Boston is Boston. It's tradition. But I'm as confused as all get out now. Jeepers, it's a whole new ball game." Kelley's favorite running now is at home on Cape Cod in the morning: "No traffic, no people, no nothing." He thinks of when he was young, "when people did hard things for the pure love of doing them," and it pleases him to believe that "there are plenty who still do."

--By Tom Callahan

-- Reported by Jamie Murphy/New York

With reporting by Jamie Murphy

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