Marathon Man by Bill Rodgers Page B

the other. We flew past a nondescript stretch of the course that, eight years earlier, had been the scene of a brief but historic confrontation. Back then, women weren’t allowed to run in the marathon. Twenty-year-old college junior Katherine Switzer showed up and registered as K. Switzer, fooling the race officials, who assumed she was a guy. Karl or Kevin perhaps?
    Once Jock Semple got wind of the interloper on his course, he jumped on the press bus and took off in a rage. Jock spotted Switzer. He couldn’t believe that somebody would have the gall to engage in subterfuge to get a number. He felt tricked. He thought she was another prankster in the vein of Johnny “Cigar” Connors, out to make a mockery of his serious athletic event. What Jock didn’t understand was that Katherine Switzer was a serious athlete, who had been training hard with a coach for the past year.
    A crimson-faced Semple leaped off the press bus, chased after Switzer, and tried to rip the bib off her gray sweatshirt. “Get the hell out of my race and give me that number!” bellowed Jock. Her hulking boyfriend, Tom Miller, a collegiate hammer thrower who was running beside her, threw a body block that sent the sixty-four-year-old flying through the air. The photographers on the press bus captured the altercation and the next day the pictures of this crazy little Scotsman attacking a woman runner were featured in major media outlets around the world.
    Overnight, Switzer was held up as a defiant hero. When she crossed the line in four hours and twenty minutes, she didn’t just become the first woman to officially finish the marathon, she had broken down a major barrier for all female athletes. It was a big moment for women’s sports. Unfortunately, poor Jock was portrayed as some women-hating Neanderthal. To his credit, after the incident, Jock took steps to make amends. After Switzer ran Boston in 1972, the year that woman were finally welcomed to run, he congratulated her with a kiss in front of the cameras. The pair formed an unlikely friendship that endured until Jock’s passing in 1988. On his deathbed, he laughed and told Switzer, “Oh, I made you famous.”
    It’s a pity that Jock Semple is mostly remembered for trying to pull Switzer off the course that day in 1967. He was one of the race’s top competitors during the 1930s, and, as Runner’s World put it, “a one-man volunteer staff (with Will Cloney as race director) for decades during a period when no one else cared much about the marathon.” Simply put, nobody did more to preserve the heart and soul of the Boston race than Jock.
    Just past the five-mile mark, the mysterious Canadian Drayton opened a small gap on the lead group, which included me, Ron Hill, Tom Fleming, Mario Cuevas, Steve Hoag, Richard Mabuza from Swaziland, and Peter Fredriksson of Sweden. I love marathoning when this happens. A small group of leaders jockeying and rejockeying for position, watching and waiting to see who is going to make their move. The eight of us were within arm’s reach of one another as the course led us through a small residential area. I felt the wind in my hair as our powerful strides devoured the road under us. I knew we were moving fast. Did I know we were twenty-four seconds behind Hill’s all-course record? How could I?
    S EVEN Y EARS E ARLIER
    W ESLEYAN U NIVERSITY, M IDDLETOWN, C ONNECTICUT
    It was the spring of 1968. I was hoping to survive my final exams, a major challenge under normal circumstances, extratricky amid the noisy chaos of radical political protests happening right outside my classroom window. That March, seventy-five students and faculty marched on North College to protest the visit by a representative of Dow Chemical, which produced napalm for our fighting forces in Vietnam. Then, in May, several people gathered for a ceremony honoring 170 Wesleyan students who’d refused to go to war.
    I supported