Friday, October 14, 2011

Tom Longboat

With the Toronto Marathon going this Sunday it would be a good time to look back at Canada’s greatest marathon runner Tom Longboat.
Longboat’s career was documented in Jack Batten’s The Man Who Ran Faster Than Everyone (Tundra Books, 2002)

Some time ago I reviewed that book.  Here is an edited version of what I said.

Tired of 21st century professional athletes?  These unfortunates can’t make enough money, won’t run out groundballs, and are as likely to spend Saturday night in conflict with the constabulary as interacting with loved ones.  Or so it seems.
If you share my cynical view you’ll enjoy Jack Batten’s look at a real athlete from the first decade of the last century.

The Man Who Ran Faster than Everyone looks at the life and times of distance runner Tom Longboat.

No doubt today’ s running boom would have puzzled Longboat, who grew up at Six Nations, south east of Brantford.

In his first significant victory at the 1906 Around the Bay Race in Hamilton he bested a small field of only 25 competitors.  Longboat’s time, however, would still be a decent performance in recent Bay races - a remarkable result when viewed from the perspective of the overall improvement in athletic performances and equipment in the last decades.  Other things have changed as though. Race followers these days would likely be surprised to learn that one busy, but unlucky, bookmaker dropped a whopping $4,000 on the 1906 event where Longboat went off as a long shot.  

Batten’ s sympathetic tale documents this race and Longboat’s 1907 Boston Marathon victory, many more wins, some loses, and much controversy in an amateur and professional career spanning the years 1905 through 1912.   In the early twentieth century running, and particularly two competitor challenges, was as certain to capture public attention as the Leafs annual futile spring run for the Stanley Cup does today. 
Try if you can to imagine indoor marathon events in Buffalo and at New York’s Madison Square Garden with screaming crowds exceeding 10,000 people.  Or 40,000 fans at New York’s Polo Grounds, once home to the baseball Giants, witnessing a 26-mile event. Or closer to home, Hanlan's Point Stadium, site of today Billy Bishop Island Airport, where Longboat often raced against other top performers of the day thrilling crowds of  9,000 - 10,000 spectators.

As idolized then as hockey stars are today Longboat suffered a serious, but temporary setback, when forced to drop out of the 1908 Olympic Marathon.   (Questionable circumstances possibly involving doping are explored by Batten).  Soon after the runner turned pro winning a $500 diamond medal in his first outing, getting awarded (but never receiving) $500 from the City of Toronto and pocketing an extraordinary $3,750 for victory in a two-man event in December 1908.

More than Just Sports
But Batten’s book is bigger than sports.  It reveals the racism that permeated early 20th century society; details unscrupulous promoters working angles to make a buck and illustrates the appalling poverty endured by aboriginal communities.  Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Early supporters and advisors to Longboat such as Toronto Star reporter Lou Marsh are exposed as bigots and hypocrites.

An early supporter Marsh later changed his view offering harsh criticism of the runner’s approach to training, opining that he “did not have a white man’s business brain.” 

In fact, Batten makes the case that Longboat’ s training was advanced for his time as he lifted weights, played other sports (called cross training now) and utilized today’s well accepted approach of mixing hard and easy workouts and varying speeds and distances of runs.

With running being overtaken in popularity by team sports Longboat’s life changed.  World War One found him in Europe as an "army runner" who’d often take on dangerous assignments behind enemy lines.  A post-war attempt at farming out west didn't succeed.  Returning east he worked in steel mills and then spent 17 years with the City of Toronto in the Street Cleaning Department.  Life after athletics, while not lucrative, appears to have been a relatively happy one for Tom.

Some quibbles: The author seems confused about the date of Longboat’s death (1948 or 1949) and sends his subject racing through the Royal Botanical Gardens decades before Thomas McQuesten established it. 

The publisher has aimed this book at younger readers but anyone who wants a break from pro athletes, their agents, and Don Cherry will enjoy this book.

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Tom Longboat Racing Highlights
·    Finished second in his first race a 5 miler on Victoria Day in 1905 in  Caledonia Ontario.
·    Won the Around the Bay Road Race in Hamilton in 1906 by three minutes.
·    In 1907 won the Boston Marathon in a record time of 2:24:24 over the old 24-1/2 mile course.
·    Set a Canadian three-mile record of 15:09.6 prior to the 1908 Olympics.
·    Collapsed in the 1908 Olympic marathon, along with several other leading runners.
·    Turned professional in 1909 and defeated Alfie Shrubb in an indoor race at Madison Square Garden catching Shrubb at 24 miles to earn the title professional champion of the world.






Sunday, October 9, 2011

"The Man Who Couldn't Play"

Right now I’m reading fiction by David Adams Richards called Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (2011).  
Richards won a Governor General’s award for fiction (Nights Below Station Street) and non-fiction (Lines on the Water:  A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramachi). Only two other writers have accomplished this.

A couple of years ago I really enjoyed reading Richards non-fiction hockey book - Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play (Doubleday, 1996.)  Richards is passionate about the game.
Hockey and Ice Hockey

And that game is “hockey” not “ice hockey.”  Hockey, according to Richards is greater than ice hockey - the later being a European invention. 
To Richards’ hockey is “more than a game.”  It can be played with a puck and skates on ice; with a ball and galoshes on the road; or with any combination of the aforementioned equipment.

A story illustrates the difference in these two games:
Richards, as an adult, recalls hearing a song by an old black man from Mississippi. The song had been a hit when covered by a white rockabilly singer in the winter of the year much of the action in this book takes place - 1961.  This was the year Richards (and your blogger) turned eleven.

But the record company wanted a cleaned up “not so troubling” version of the song.

"But yes, they could profit from it.  They wanted the song.  They did not feel they had to tell you where this song came from.  They did not feel a need to tell you that it came out of a person’s love of a country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away.”
Think of the original version of the song as hockey; the rockabilly version is ice hockey.  Ice hockey was created by those who invent the world for us as they often do.  “They legitimize by deligitimizing.”  

Childhood Memories
As a child Richards was certain the NHL would expand to Newcastle, New Brunswick.  But corporate (i.e., American) interests and the shady international ice hockey community were taking over the game while on his river a friend would be occupied in trying to find a “busted stick in what seemed to be the remotest corner of the country while others were thinking of multi-million dollar television syndication rights.” 

Richards’ writing takes me back to my childhood; my own memories of a man (boy) who couldn’t play.
My recollection is that most of us got a chance to play.  Some who aspired to stardom got it.  Others for reasons I didn’t then understand would never achieve stardom.

Richards’ friend, Michael, lived in difficult circumstances. He wasn’t allowed on the organized team as a result of perceived low social status.  It hurt. But on the rink that Michael made and maintained:
“(F)licking the puck at us and smiling as he skated backwards turning on a thin dime and breaking into strides that seemed to swallow the ice – at those times, the hurt wherever it came from, was all gone away, and he was free.”

Much More than a Game
Richards reflects on the famous 1972 Canada/Soviet series.

“It was more than just a game to us.  We existed with it, and if it was forgotten then we could not exist without it.  Without hockey the country would not exist.  Not in the way it should.

Richards is doing some events in Hamilton (at Mac and Westdale United Church) in November.