Michael T.’s Book Review

I have a clipping from the Statesman-Journal (Salem, OR) dated Tuesday, April 17, 1979.  Torn and smudged.  I know the feeling.

Front page of the sports section.  Big headline: BILL RODGERS wins second straight Boston Marathon.

Sidebar: Four locals finish race.  (From combined reports)  Boston.  Four Salem men finished the Boston Marathon held here on Monday. 

Jim Hiebert led the Salem entrants with a time of 2:45:02.  Jim Frank trailed with 2:47:45.  Michael Smith and Jack Welch finished two seconds apart with 2:53:16 and 2:53:18, respectively.  First time I actually knew what ‘respectively’ meant.  

I am guessing the little bugger targeted my tall ass, hung on like a leech, then outkicked me at the finish.  Everybody did.

Thirty-five years later, I drove a couple hundred miles out of my way in a rented car to visit a track coach at practice in rural Turner, Oregon.  I wanted personally to give Michael T. Smith a copy of my book.  Coach Smith’s love of the sport likely exceeds my own and that is saying something.  I wanted to show him that respect.

Later, he bought a kindle version.  And wrote my all-time favorite review.  He’s not even family. – JDW

Michael T. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Runner to Runner

July 1, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
“When Running Was Young and So Were We” is a candid and self-deprecating account of the American Running Boom of the 70s and 80s by an enthusiastic and proficient practitioner of the sport of running, as many of us were who made up the second or third tier of talent during American running’s first golden age.
 
Jack Welch had the respect, and therefore the ear of the greats,or rather they had his.  Running has always been a niche sport, one whose fan base has always largely consisted of its practitioners. Runners like Jack Welch routinely ran in the same competitions as the leading lights of the era.
It was the rule rather than the exception.
 
So there is an odd intimacy between star and fan, just as there has always been a close camaraderie among the sport’s fiercest rivals, sharing as they have the largely solitary demands of excellence.
 
The barriers between star and fan are matters of degree, not kind, as each strives for heroism on his own terms.
 
In this, Jack Welch was the ultimate fan, one who shared the passion for the sport by practicing its rituals, the Sunday twenty-miler, the interval session, just as did Benoit-Samuelson, Salazar, Sinclair, and Waitz, albeit not quite as fast.
 
They confided in him because to a very real extent, he was them.
Youth and talent are gifts we all possessed to one degree or another, and they came with expiration dates.  Somehow Jack was able to infect his subjects with the awareness that they were more like him, and like his readers,than they were different, a rarity in sportswriting, to say the least.
 
When Kenny Moore wrote intimately about world-class runners, there was something ethereal about it, since he was one world-class athlete talking to and writing about other world-class athletes.  They related to each other, but to the degree they are like each other, they are unlike us.
 
When world-class runners talked to Jack, they related to him as another runner, and the manner in which they were like him, they were also like us.
Jack is our eloquent stand-in in conversation with the greats.
1979 Boston Marathon. I Was There.
Running Free

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