The Front Runner

  They nodded. "Agreed," said Jacques softly.

  "Because when you kids get forced out in the open, in all likelihood I'm going to be forced out too. That's going to be a painful moment. It might mean the end of my career for good."

  There was total comprehension in their young eyes. Joe was lighting a cigarette, and there was comprehen­sion in his eyes too.

  "And that's just the human angle of the problem," I said. "Second, we have the athletic angle. I'm sure you know by now that there are conservative people in track who hate runners and coaches that don't con­form. It doesn't much matter how they don't conform. The littlest misstep, and whammo."

  The boys' eyes met mine squarely as I looked at each of them in turn. They knew what I was talking about, but I knew more than they did.

  In amateur atheletics, officialdom has an almost medieval power over the athletes. By "officialdom" I mean the various bodies that govern U. S. athletics. My three boys were presently under control of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which runs college sports. When they graduated, they would pass to the control of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which directs most noncollegiate com­petition. There are other, smaller bodies, but the AAU is the giant, and controls access to international com­petition. Finally, there is the 300-member U. S. Olym­pic Committee, which cooperates with the AAU in se­lecting and preparing the American Olympic team every four years. These three powerful organizations were going to be the focus of our struggle.

  Officialdom does not hesitate to use its power if it feels that an athlete or a coach has stepped out of line. The all-time example is the way the AAU treated Jesse Owens after he won four gold medals for the U.S. in the 1936 Olympics. The AAU wanted to show Owens off in post-Olympic meets in Europe, but Owens said he wanted to go home and see his wife and children— he was overtrained and exhausted. The AAU's reaction to this human situation was to punish the great athlete by revoking his amateur status, thus barring him from all further competition.

  Today, forty years after the Owens tragedy, the pow­er of officialdom is still that strong. In recent years, amateur athletes have started to fight this power, and to talk a lot about what they call "athletes' rights." They feel that too many officials were too interested in controlling and punishing athletes, and not interested enough in benefiting them and in recognizing their real human needs. They are forcing officials to rethink old attitudes, to liberalize old and irksome rules.

  As a former runner, and as a fledgling liberal, I was strongly inclined to side with the athletes. There are, of course, some fine fair-minded people in all three of these organizations, who give unstintingly of their time and energy for the sport, and who join with the athletes in fighting for change. But all three organiza­tions still harbor too many fanatic and/or senile men and women who form a dangerous power bloc. As in Owens's day, they feel that athletes should be wind-tip dolls who run record times and don't talk back, and they are fighting the athletes' rights movement every step of the way.

  "For instance," I said, "when people hassled Marty Liquori because he partied and had a beer or two. It didn't matter to them that Marty could beat Jim Ryun every time the two of them met. They were ready to throw Marty's best performances in the garbage can because he didn't fit their old-fashioned idea of what a runner is."

  The three boys were nodding.

  "And as far as the personal morality of athletes goes," I said, "these old men, their idea of total degen­eracy was when those two guys on the New York Yan­kees swapped wives."

  We all laughed a little, grimly.

  "So," I said, "now we're going to have a gay coach with three gay runners. We are going to be out in full view, with 'gay is beautiful' written across our foreheads in letters of fire. And the conservative element in track is not going to like that at all."

  They were silent again. Joe was smoking a ciga­rette, gazing into the Ire. Joe and I had already had this same discussion, and I knew he wasn't afraid.

  My Irish setter, Jim, came wagging into the room and curled up among the three boys, licking Vince's hand.

  "I also think that they will avoid talking about homo­sexuality, if possible," I said. "It just scares them too much. So what they will do is try to trip us up with the rule book. If you put an extra spike on your shoes, and they catch you, you're disqualified, whether you're gay or straight. Do you follow me?"

  They were all nodding. I tossed them three copies of the AAU handbook.

  "If you've read it before, read it again. Learn it by heart. Some of the rules are good, and some of them are stupid, but this is what they'll hit us with, if they can."

  They flipped through the books, very soberly.

  I was talking bluntly now, jabbing the air with my finger. "At all times, we are going to conduct ourselves with dignity. We are not going to give them any extra grounds for criticism. Like, Vince, the time you got disqualified for warming up during the national an­them. I agree that it's stupid to make an athlete stand around and get cold during the anthem, but the fact is —they can use things like that to hurt you. Let's not have any irrelevant provocations."

  "Yeah, right," said Vince in a low voice.

  "I want no doping. No taking under-the-table money. If any of you are hard up for money, come to me and we'll find money. I want you clean on money, so they can't use that against you." I paused a moment. "Have any of you taken money?"

  "I've been offered money, but I never took it," said Jacques. "I didn't need it, so why take it?"

  "Nobody ever offered me any," said Billy. "Anyway, I wouldn't..."

  "How about you, Vince?" I said.

  He shrugged. "I've taken it. Always."

  I sighed. "That's bad."

  "Everybody was taking it," he said.

  "I know," I said. "But the point is, they close their eyes to their favorites taking it. If you're blacklisted, suddenly they maybe discover that you've taken it, and whammo."

  "Then I guess the kiss of death is on me," said Vince morosely.

  "Well, we'll just have to be optimistic," I said. "At any rate, from now on, we have to think of every contingency. We have to figure out every strategy that they'll try beforehand, and block it if we can. Because at least one of you is going to Montreal, probably, and I wouldn't want you knocked off the Olympic team just because we messed up our tactics. Some people in track, and some people in the country as a whole, will be very unhappy if any of you represent the U.S. They're going to take it as an insult to our national masculinity. I have a feeling that these people won't stop at any­thing to keep you kids from setting foot on the Mon­treal track."

  Their eyes were fixed on mine, full of naked se­riousness.

  "We don't know anything much about track politics," said Billy. "We'll mess up for sure."

  "You leave the politics to me," I said. I smiled a little. "That's what I'm for. All you have to worry about is running. And when I figure out the politics, you do what I suggest. That's all."

  "We may have to go to court before it's over," said Billy.

  "We might," I said. "Your father may have to help us out."

  "Shit," said Vince, "I'd love to see the AAU in court."

  "It won't be fun," I said. "Before this whole thing is over, we may have moments when we wish we'd never been born."

  "But it's worth doing," said Billy, softly.

  "Yes," I said, "it is."

  When they got up to leave, I pointed at the messy kitchen and said, "One of you stay for KP." I hoped Billy would volunteer. To my delight, he did.

  In another minute we were alone, busily cleaning up the piles of carrot peelings and nutshells and washing teacups. I was feeling benevolent and able to control my feelings. And I was hungry to know more about him. So I said, "Tell me about your father."

  "He's, coming to visit me at Christmas," said Billy, "so you'll meet him. My dad is a great guy."

  I was washing the teacups in the old-fashioned enamel sink, and Billy was drying them
with one of my scroungy dishtowels.

  "So your father is gay."

  "My mother left him when I was about nine months old. She abandoned me. He married a gay after that, and the two of them raised me."

  "How did your father manage to hold onto his law career and live openly with a gay?" I asked.

  "Well," said Billy, "my father goes for TV's. None of my father's business colleagues ever suspected Fran­ces was a male. He looked like a very slender Mari­lyn Monroe. He had beautiful silver-blonde hair. My father would entertain, and Frances would float around, saying, 'Another cocktail, darling?' Visually, he was incredible."

  "A hermaphrodite?" I asked.

  Billy shook his head. "No, he had male organs. I know, because I stumbled in on him once when he was in the bathroom. He was very modest 'and he screamed. After that I took it for granted that every­body's mother had a cock." He laughed a little, very busy with the teacups. "You can imagine what a shock I got when I found out the truth. I was in seventh grade, and one day the kids were handing around some dirty pictures. I saw a cunt for the first time. It was all red and wet, like a wound."

  He was putting the cups carefully back in the cup­board. "To me, the real trauma was learning about the heterosexual world. Know what I mean?"

  "So you're the second generation of the nation of gays," I said softly.

  "But Frances and my father broke up when I was twelve," said Billy sadly. "After that, he's had a whole raft of lovers, but nothing permanent."

  "So you grew up knowing everything?"

  "Shit," said Billy, "I was into junior high before it really sank into my head that I lived in a different world than the other kids. I mean, I grew up in the gay ghetto in San Francisco. It was all I knew."

  As a veteran of secretiveness and agonizing, I was fascinated by the kid's openness and directness. I was shortly to learn that Billy didn't volunteer personal information unasked. But if you asked him something straight out, he would give you the cold answer, with­out dramatics and without hesitation, no matter how personal it was.

  When we had cleaned up the kitchen, I motioned him to the fireplace and threw one more log on the fire. He sank down onto the rag, and the setter immediately came over and curled up against him blissfully. I sat down in the wing chair.

  "Did your father actually take you around in the gay world?" I asked.

  "Not right away," said Billy. "He was pretty care­ful about what he let me see when I was smaller. He let me find out about things little by little, as I was ready for them. You know, like straight parents do."

  "The straights would say you've been brainwashed," I said.

  "Maybe," he said. "On the other hand, they brain­wash their kids too. Anyway, I might have grown up straight. My father didn't force it on me. I mean, I chose it freely."

  I was curious to see just how far I could force my probing.

  "The straights might wonder about the relationship between you and your father," I said.

  Billy shook his head and smiled. "No way. He was always very concerned about that. He wanted our re­lationship to be as healthy as possible. He never fooled around with men in front of me. He and Frances were very modest. He knew it had to be that way if I was going to grow up with my head in one piece."

  I was shaking my head slowly in disbelief. John Sive had to be some kind of gay Dr. Spock.

  "When did you have your first lover?" I asked.

  "When I was fifteen." Billy was gazing into the fire, stroking the dog slowly. "It was kind of an unhappy business. I mean, I was happy with it, but he wasn't. Ricky was a mess, he couldn't accept himself. We broke up. Later on I heard what happened to him. In college he got busted on drug possession, and sentenced to twenty years. In prison he got gang-raped and com­mitted suicide."

  For a minute I had a terrible image in my head of Billy being gang-raped by five or six macho convicts. "Anything like that ever happen to you?"

  He shook his head. "I got beat up by straights a few times, that's all."

  "I presume," I said, "that you don't mess around with drugs."

  "No," he said, "I was never into dope. That's some­thing my dad is pretty uptight about. I don't even use poppers. I've always been afraid they would take away my edge in a race or something."

  "Who came after Ricky?"

  "Three more. All unhappy. Like, I haven't had much luck. My father was always saying, 'I raised you to be such a well-adjusted boy, what's going wrong with you?'"

  He was still gazing into the fire, and his hand had stopped stroking the dog. He looked sad, and some­how older. I got my first glimpse, at that moment, of a tremendous sense of loss that he lived with. He was only twenty-two, and two mothers and four serious lovers had already caved in under him.

  "So you weren't open about being gay in school," I said.

  "No, I wasn't," he said. "I kept very quiet about it. I didn't feel guilty or anything. But I felt very, you know, very intimidated by straight attitudes, the more I learned about them. I'm not really a very brave person, maybe. But when I felt troubled, I could al­ways go and talk it out with my dad. By the time I got to my junior year at Oregon, I wasn't really worried about it. So when Lindquist blew my cover, I thought, what the hell, from now on I'm going to come out."

  His casual low-key confession was giving me a lump in the throat. We sat listening for a few moments to the soft sighing of the log on the fire. It was getting late, but I couldn't resist prolonging the moment.

  "Have you ever slept with a girl?" I asked in a half-teasing tone of voice.

  He shook his head and laughed.

  "Do you hate girls?" I asked.

  He laughed again. "No. Why should I? They just don't interest me. I mean, I'm not totally indifferent. I can feel amiable toward a girl, and be friends. There was a girl at Oregon, Janet Huss, we were friends. A lot of people assumed we were serious. Once in a while I thought I'd tell her I was gay, but I didn't. Then she found out about it when Lindquist kicked me off the team." He paused a moment, gazing into the fire. "She was very ugly about it. I told her, 'It's your own ugliness, it's going to make you ugly.' But she didn't believe me."

  "Well, now you know," I said. "Men give, and women take."

  He looked at me questioningly, and didn't say more. I sensed that he wanted to question me about my life. Since it had always been my policy never to discuss my personal life with my athletes, I was not about to answer his questions.

  "Well," I said, "it's nine-thirty, and you ought to be getting back to the dorm. Who are you rooming with?"

  I got up, and he got up too.

  "I asked for a room to myself. Vince and Jacques are rooming together."

  "What are the relationships here? Just so I don't put my foot in it."

  Billy was picking up his battered Mao jacket from the window seat.

  "Vince and Jacques are the lovers. I'm alone."

  "Tell me one more thing," I said. "I just can't be­lieve three of you on that team. One, maybe, but three, . ."

  Billy laughed, pulling on his jacket. "Why not? It's a big team, sixty guys. And a big school."

  "How did the three of you end up there?"

  "Oh, we sort of accumulated. I met Vince my senior year in high school, when we rah in the Golden West Invitational. That was some race, man. He sat on my neck, and then he tried to blast me. Lucky for me, it was just over his distance. I beat him to the tape by about three inches. After the race we got to talking, and we became friends right away."

  "Lovers?"

  "No," said Billy, leaning against the door, answering as if I had just asked him the time. "D'ya have to be lovers all the time? No, we're just best friends. That summer we went crazy running together. We went to every open race we could get to, and we had a great time. And we'd decided we wanted to be on the same college team, and Oregon wanted to sign us both, so that was that."

  "Then you met Jacques at Oregon."

  "Right. And Jacques was still straight, then, but he'd been hav
ing suspicions about himself. When he saw Vince, it was love at first sight. Poor Jacques, he really suffered. Both of us helped him. Jacques adores Vince, but he's awfully nervous about the whole thing. I'll never forget how he cried when Lindquist got done with him. Vince and I were ready to kill Lindquist just because of Jacques."

  "I've noticed he's very protective about Jacques."

  "Yeah. A lotta guys that don't know Vince, they think he's a bird of paradise, and very fickle. But he's more of a mother hen."

  Billy was leaning against the door, looking so wise and so appealing that the old panic was rising in me.

  "Well," I said, trying to sound hearty, "any time any of the three of you have something on your minds, feel free to make an appointment to see me in my office."

  Billy was opening the door, and the fresh night air poured into the room. "We sure will, Mr. Brown. You've been great. Thanks a lot."

  He went out into the snow and closed the door. I was left alone.

  4

  The three boys' coming to my team also caused quite a little stir in the track world. When runners of their caliber change teams, it always causes a stir. Usually, however, such runners move to a team or school of equal or higher status.

  "Prescott?" everybody wanted to know. "Where's that?"

  Right away we had some reporters nosing around the campus. The three runners said glibly that they'd come to Prescott because they liked my coaching meth­ods, and that they were tired of the impersonality of big schools.

  As the December days passed, I was better able to assess my three new team members.

  Jacques' biggest problem, I could see, was his ner­vousness. He was going to be one of those runners who wind up with a shelf full of trophies and a bleeding ulcer. He was not only nervous about being gay, but about competition. He went through agonies before races, shaking, throwing up.

  He settled straight into his studies, spending long hours in the biology lab. His main interest was ornithol­ogy. He also played the alto recorder, and immediate­ly joined the campus's tiny pro musica. He made a few friends and amused everyone no end, but mostly he stayed with the team and me.