Jerome Drayton
1977
 The
man who would become the greatest Canadian distance runner of
his time was not born Jerome Drayton. Nor was he born in
Canada. He entered the world at Kolbermoor, Germany, in the
final days of World War II. The date was January 10, 1945, and
he was christened Peter Buniak after his father. Buniak was a
Ukranian name and it was conspicuous in the Germany that still
belonged that winter to Adolf Hitler. Any non-German name was.
His mother Sonia was young and frightened by the war. Just
nineteen she had come to Germany as a girl from a small
village in the Ural Mountains of Russia. She and her husband
could not guarantee their own safety bet alone that of a
newborn child. (a) Friends
and family, worried that a child would complicate life
impossibly for the couple, urged her to have an abortion. She
recoiled at the idea but did agree to have the child at home,
away from the prying eyes of German authorities.
Life carried on against the backdrop of the war until the
eighth month of pregnancy when she slipped and fell while
boarding a streetcar. Going into labor prematurely, she was
left with no choice but to enter hospital.
The birth was attended by a disinterested German nurse to whom
Sonia Buniak reacted with instinctive distrust. Her fears
seemed realized when the nurse held up the newborn infant
dispassionately and spoke doubtfully about his chances of
survival. Terrified, the new mother snatched her baby away and
slapped him on the back until she heard a cry of life. Seizing
the first opportunity thereafter, she stole up to the hospital
nursery and fled into the night with her infant in her arms.
"She had nowhere to go so she
just ran, feeding me on potatoes and icicles as she went
along." (78)
The Buniaks survived the war
but could not escape the poverty and deprivation it left
behind. Rarely during the ensuing years was there adequate
money for the shelter, care and feeding of their young son.
The strain took its toll and the couple separated when Peter
was six. Since neither parent could afford to look after him,
he was placed in a foster home at Eggenfelden on the outskirts
of Munich. A farm was attached to the home and there were
occasional good times when the boys who stayed there would
pitch hay or ride cows but for the most part it was a lonely
and jolting experience. His parents visited when they could
but Peter spent most of the time fending for himself in what
was normally a noisy and quarrelsome atmosphere.
He was there two years before
being moved to a second home in Munich. The change meant he
was closer to his parents and saw them more regularly but the
new home was rougher than the first. Inhabited by about fifty
boys, it was run by overworked Roman Catholic nuns who had
little time to settle squabbles or look after individual
needs. Peter knew little of love and comfort in the two
further years he spent in a foster home setting. Instead, he
became the target of taunts and abuse from others. One reason
was his size: he was small, almost frail. But the main reason
was his name.
"Children are terrible at that
age. I didn't have a German name and when you're with the same
group all the time there tend to be frustrations and fights.
Groups within groups tend to form and each group has its
leader, and usually it's the leader who challenges outsiders.
I was challenged a lot."
Some fights he lost but many he
won, storming back against his tormentors with fists flying,
dark eyes flashing hate and vengeance. He learned to live
within himself, defensive, coiled, ready at an instant to
strike back in anger. Fights extended even into the sacred
confines of the church where Peter was an altar boy. Priests
were sometimes called upon in the middle of mass to pull
warring antagonists apart. It was not a happy existence and
the recollections remain deeply etched in his memory.
"I wouldn't recommend it for
anyone. I wouldn't want to experience it again but, in
retrospect, it had an effect on me. The struggle made me a
stronger person. You had to survive."
Sonia Buniak, who had official
custody of her son, wanted badly to be reunited with him but
found that to do so she first had to leave him behind. Seeking
a new life in the new world, she left Germany in 1955 for
Canada where she settled in Toronto and found work at Toronto
Western Hospital. Originally she had wanted to go to New York
but changed her mind upon learning that her son could be
drafted into the American army. Canada seemed less likely to
involve him with the military or with war, she thought.
In Toronto she met Walter
Huziuk, also a Ukranian immigrant, a former school teacher who
was trying as well to build a new life. They were married that
December and Peter finally joined them in November, 1956, a
move that came for him without warning. One day he was still
in the foster home, the next he was stepping off a plane in
Canada and being swept into his mother's arms.
The first major task in Toronto
was to learn English. His mother and stepfather lived in the
Kensington Market area and Peter was enrolled at St. Patrick's
Public School. The school was tough by Toronto standards and
learning the strange new language was difficult. But it was a
welcome change from the foster home. Boys mingled with girls
at St. Patrick's and there were fewer fights. Later the family
moved to the west end of Toronto, not far from the windy shore
of Lake Ontario, and Peter went to Mimico High School. He kept
to himself a good deal and had few close friends. In summer,
to save money for university, he worked at the Continental Can
Company, packing tins into boxes or inspecting lids that flew
out of a machine at bewildering speed. His stepfather, who
worked at the plant full-time, helped him get the job.
The track at Mimico High School
was not really a track in the early 1960s, more a field with a
path around the perimeter. Peter paid little attention to it.
He preferred to spend his time in ill-lit billiard halls,
hunched over a cue ball and earning a reputation as one of the
better high school pool sharks. When he turned to running it
was on a whim. A friend asked him to enter the annual high
school track meet for reasons that had nothing to do with
sport. The motive was to attract a girl who at the time was
dating the reigning high school track star. If Peter could
dethrone the champion, the friend reasoned, the girl might be
pried away. So Peter agreed to do his friend the favor and
signed up for three events, the mile, half-mile and two-mile
races. To his astonishment he swept all three, having scarcely
trained beforehand. The girl remained unimpressed,
disappointing the friend, but Peter was filled with
excitement.
"For the first time in my life
I had done something on my own." (79)
That was in 1963. He quickly
discovered he could excel as a runner.
Paul Poce, the man who founded
the Toronto Olympic Club and later coached many of Canada's
best distance runners, recognized his talents and recruited
Peter as a member.
"He was good," Poce remembers.
"There's no two ways about it, right from the first time we
saw him run. He swept through the high school championships
and there were some good people around. He won decisively."
(80)
Yet Poce sensed a lack of
commitment. The intensity required of a top runner was absent.
Peter was running about three miles a workout and training
only about three times a week. Other runners trained daily and
ran three miles merely as a warm-up. Peter stayed for a while
and then drifted away, back to the pool halls and other
pursuits.
Mimico High School was a
recruiting ground for more than promising young runners in the
early 1960s. A motorcycle gang known as the Vagabonds sought
recruits of its own at the school. Potential members were
brought up through a high school chapter called the Rebels.
The Rebels wore black vinyl jackets speckled with metal studs
and were often in trouble with the law. Many carried
switchblades and flashed them menacingly at high school
dances. Peter did not become a Rebel but he came close, buying
a motorcycle with his savings and hanging out with a callous
crowd.
He also happened to get
involved in a new sport, lacrosse, playing for a year with the
Mimico Mountaineers. He enjoyed lacrosse and might not have
returned to running had it not been for a tragedy that befell
another Mimico lacrosse player, a handsome popular junior
named Jim Smith. Knocked heavily into the boards one day
during a routine game, Smith slumped to the floor with a
broken back, paralyzed for life. The incident so unnerved
Peter when he heard of it that he decided to quit the sport.
He returned to the Toronto
Olympic Club, ready at last for the discipline required of a
competitive runner. That was in 1965. Paul Poce welcomed him
back and helped him develop, glad of the chance to work with
such a naturally gifted athlete. Peter blossomed as a runner
over the next two years but did not become a typical club
member. He was quiet and often shunned the camaraderie of the
group to head off by himself on long rambling runs down by the
lakeshore or out among the hills of High Park. The solitude of
running appealed from the outset. A moody athlete for a coach
to judge, Peter said little and his thoughts were not easily
read behind the armor of his dark brooding eyes. As time
passed he acquired an air of mystery, an image enhanced by the
sunglasses he so often wore to shield his eyes from the light.
Poce let him train as he wanted but urged him to try for the
team that would represent Canada at the 1968 Olympic Games in
Mexico City.
One of the athletes Peter met
during this period was Andy Boychuk, a fellow club member and
one of Canada's finest amateur athletes. A marathoner, Boychuk
was at the peak of his athletic career, having set a Canadian
marathon record of 2:18:17 in running sixth at the Boston
Marathon of 1967, and won the marathon gold medal at the
Pan-American Games in Winnipeg the same year. Peter was
intrigued by Boychuk's success but not attracted to the
marathon. He liked the track and wanted to excel at ten
thousand metres, seeing the shorter event as his best chance
of going to Mexico. Boychuk occasionally urged him to broaden
his horizons and try longer distances.
"You're not a man until you've
run a marathon,'' Boychuk once said.
The remark was casual,
half-meant, but it lingered in Peter's mind, grating like a
grain of sand in an oyster shell. Gradually it grew into a
challenge to his athletic manhood and he could not resist. His
first marathon was the Motor City Marathon at Detroit, run
June 2, 1968, on Belle Isle in the St. Mary's River. Peter
chose it with the Olympics in mind, even though he hoped to go
to Mexico City as a ten thousand metres runner. Canadian
Olympic officials had just announced that marathoners hoping
to be considered for the Canadian team or to run the Canadian
trial later in the summer must first meet a qualifying
standard of 2:24:00 in another race. If he could meet the
standard he would open a second potential door to the Canadian
team. Peter ran the race as a classic novice, starting too
fast and actually slowing to a walk in the late miles, but he
managed to win the race and meet the standard by three
seconds, running 2:23:57. Second place, twenty-two seconds
slower, went to Andy Boychuk.
It was not necessary to
actually run the Canadian marathon trial to be named to the
Olympic team in 1968. If a runner performed well enough
elsewhere he could be selected on that basis alone. The idea
behind the two-level selection process was to send the
strongest possible team to the Games.
Having just defeated Boychuk,
the national champion, Peter gambled that he would go
automatically to Mexico as a marathoner. So he skipped the
marathon trial and went instead to Europe for the summer track
season, planning to hone his skills in advance of the Canadian
ten thousand metres trial. As it turned out, he was
overshadowed in Europe by Dave Ellis, another Toronto Olympic
Club runner. Ellis set a Canadian ten thousand metres record
of 29:18 that summer and stole the headlines back home.
Peter returned to defeat Ellis
in the Olympic trial, running 29:19.4, within two seconds of
Ellis' national record, then discovered to his disbelief that
the committee was reluctant to put him on the team. Ellis was
still the national champion and had been the better runner
through the summer season so he should be the one to run ten
thousand metres in Mexico, the committee reasoned. Sending
both runners was a problem financially. This arbitrary ruling,
making a mockery of the trial outcome, provoked such
controversy that the committee relented and agreed to give
Peter another chance. A second ten thousand metros trial was
arranged.
He ran it alone in 29:17.2 to
break Ellis' record, then learned to his dismay that the track
had been mismeasured. It was twenty-seven feet short. Again,
the committee refused to bend. Ellis remained the superior
runner and he alone would go to Mexico, it ruled. For Peter
the blow was as crushing as it was unfair.
Meanwhile, Andy Boychuk had run
and won another marathon, redeeming his reputation with a time
nearly five minutes faster than he had run in Detroit and
displacing Peter as the committee's first choice for the
marathon. Once again, Peter discovered, he was about to lose a
berth on the team. As with the ten thousand metres, the
committee balked at sending more than one marathoner to
Mexico. Instead of representing Canada in two events at the
Games it looked suddenly like Peter might not go at all. He
was angry and hurt. Such a cavalier selection process seemed
incredible. Others felt the same way, and the committee again
relented and agreed to give Peter one last try.
A second marathon was arranged,
over the same regional Ontario roads between Guelph and Dundas
that Boychuk had run. The date was August 25, 1968, only five
days after the last ten thousand metres trial, a scant fifteen
after the first. A poorer way to prepare for an exhausting
marathon would have been hard to devise but Peter was in no
position to bargain.
He ran the trial like a man possessed, knowing he faced a
formidable challenge. Put simply, he must run the fastest
Canadian marathon ever or he would not make the team. Anything
less would leave Boychuk with the title of national champion,
still the obvious choice of the selection committee. Two other
runners started the race to make it official but dropped out
early, leaving Peter to his lonely quest. He reached down and
found reserves he did not know he had. In those twenty-six
miles, alone with himself and alone with his dreams, he became
a marathoner and a champion. When the clock stopped as he
crossed the finish line at Dundas it read 2:16:11, a new
national record by more than two minutes. He would go to
Mexico at last. Boychuk, fittingly for a Pan-American Games
champion, went as well. The committee concluded that each had
earned a rightful place on the team.
"From then on I felt that maybe
the marathon was my best race. It's amazing what you can find
out about yourself when you want something so badly. You'll do
anything to get it." (81)
he Olympic marathon was run
October 20, 1968, from the Plaza de la Constitucion in
downtown Mexico City to the packed Olympic Stadium in the
south of the densely-populated metropolis. An account of the
day described the scene:
"The spectacle was something
that wasn't easy to explain. Gathered in the square were 83
guys without their pants. They came from places like Kuwait
and Guatemala and Zambia and Chad, and their attire, indeed,
was unconventional. Some complemented their underwear with
hats. Others wore headbands and still others berets, caps,
handkerchiefs and bandanas. You pictured the puzzled Mexican
observer nudging his friend and asking uncertainly, 'Amigo,
what's happening? Is this a march of the peons?'"
(82)
Neither Canadian was considered
likely to challenge for an Olympic medal in 1968 and neither
did. Boychuk, a straw hat perched on his head, ran a
respectable tenth but his time was a disappointing 2:28:40,
slowed by the rarefied air in the high Mexico City altitude
(b). Peter fared less
well. Stricken by dysentery, he dropped out of the race at
fifteen miles.
Mexico was a keen
disappointment for Peter but he was deeply affected by the
spectacle the Games had been — the sense of high drama and
ultimate athletic challenge. Even as he winged home to Canada
his thoughts were on the medals he had seen the Olympians wear
in Mexico. He too wanted one day to stand atop the Olympic
podium and wear about his neck that dazzling circle of metal
that said he was best in the world at something. The event did
not matter. If it must be the marathon, if that was what
physiology dictated, so be it. He would accept the challenge,
submit to any discipline to achieve the goal.
Athletics transformed Peter's
sense of self-worth, lifting him out of the obscurity he felt
as an immigrant and uncovering qualities in his character that
surprised him.
When called upon, as he often was
in competition, he found he could summon as much willpower,
forbearance, even courage, as any athlete. For the first time
in his life he had faith in himself and believed in his own
abilities. The layers of inferiority, built up over so many
years as an outsider, began to fall away. The process
accelerated when he became a national champion and began to
see that he was, in fact, an athlete with few peers. He was
proud of his achievements and proud of his new identity,
finding that he had entered a new life, one that was good and
worthy and entirely of his own making. In March, 1969, he
startled friends and family with a bold symbolic act declaring
his new identity to the world. He changed his name. By the
stroke of a lawyer's pen he expunged his old name and became
Jerome Drayton. At his mother's request he retained Peter as a
middle name but that was his only concession to the past.
Buniak was not a name to which
he had ever felt attached. For as long as he could remember,
back to the hostile days of the German foster homes, it had
been a liability. Even in Canada it marked him as an
immigrant, something less than a full member of society.
''Peter who?'' people would ask. He resented having to spell
and pronounce it.
The cost of shedding his ethnic
past and becoming a Canadian clear and free was two hundred
dollars in legal fees. The new name pleased him with its solid
new world ring. When combined with his Caucasian skin, his
western speech and dark hair it allowed him to blend perfectly
into the crowd. Friends were unsure what to make of the change
and some refused to stop calling him Peter. But he was adamant
about his new identity and in time won his point.
A myth developed, the result of
an inaccurate newspaper story, that the name was taken from
two black sprinters, Harry Jerome and Paul Drayton. Though
untrue it persisted through much of his athletic life as new
sports writers rooted through old files and typed it into
print again. The truth was that he chose Jerome because it was
a name he had always liked and Drayton because he thought the
two fit well together.
"If I was nutty enough at the
time to take the names of heros they would have been distance
runners,'' he says. ''My heros in my younger days were Ron
Clarke and Abebe Bikila. (83)
(c)
When he graduated from Mimico
High the one obsession in Drayton's life beyond athletics was
to find a career. While others of his generation sought
answers in LSD and marijuana, he enrolled at the University of
Toronto, hoping to learn the drug business from another
perspective, that of a pharmacist. Two years later he
abandoned the idea and, unsure of what he wanted, returned to
the place he knew from summers past, the Continental Can
Company.
The work allowed him to save
money but he grew impatient with the monotony of the
production line. One day, fed up at his slavery and the heat
of the plant, he shut off his machine and stalked out. The act
dismayed his stepfather who felt responsible and Drayton later
returned reluctantly, the weight of his heavy training
schedule being offered as an explanation of his rash behavior.
"They convinced me to come
back, probably to make my stepfather feel more comfortable,
and also because of the possibility of going back m the summer
months again. In case I wanted to. It was really to leave with
a good record.''
Subsequently he tried his hand
at accounting, working for a period with a small Toronto firm
and taking courses in his spare time. This led in turn to an
interest in business administration and he decided to return
to university, a step that brought an offer of a track and
field scholarship at Eastern New Mexico University in
Portales, New Mexico. The offer was appealing but he turned it
down to enroll at McMaster University in Hamilton. The factor
that persuaded him was Game Plan, a program for talented
athletes run by the federal government. It is a decision that
Drayton still regrets.
"That was a terrible mistake.
It was just a mess for me. I had to fight for the $1,800
grants each year. The frustration and financial problems got
to me emotionally. I was trying to train twice a day while
worrying about the grants." (84)
To make ends meet he once drove
a bakery truck, rising at 2:30 a.m. in Toronto so that he
could be in Hamilton in time to load the truck and make his
rounds before classes. The strain showed. His body broke down
from injuries and his studies suffered as well.
"Obviously I had to skip some
classes. I had some friends who would provide me with their
notes. For long periods of time I couldn't train certain parts
of the day.''
It was 1975 before he finally
resolved his financial problems, finding a permanent niche
with the sport and recreation branch of the Ontario
government. Once the yoke of worry was lifted the results were
spectacular.
Drayton came to international
marathon prominence on a cool October day in 1969 at the Motor
City Marathon in Detroit, the same race he had run and won a
year earlier in response to Boychuk's taunt. Better trained
this time and running with the confidence of a champion, he
attacked the flat five-lap island course, going through five
miles in less than twenty-five minutes, ten miles in 50:30,
fifteen in 1:16:05 and twenty in 1:40:38.5
(85)
When he burst across the finish
line, more than fifteen minutes up on Ron Wallingford, another
Canadian who finished second, spectators were scarcely ready
for his arrival. The clock read exactly 2:12:00. Not merely a
new Canadian record, it was also a North American record, the
ninth fastest marathon ever run. The achievement sent
Drayton's name rippling through the marathon world and earned
him an invitation seven weeks later to the Fukuoka Marathon in
Japan, the race then considered the world marathon
championship in all but Olympic years.
No other international marathon
through the 1960s and 1970s attracted as fine a field of
athletes. The organizers, the Japan Amateur Athletic
Federation, and the Asahi Newspaper Syndicate (circulation
seven million) scoured the world for the best runners
available.
Still held each December,
although its influence has waned with the emergence of major
marathons in North America and Europe, the race is run through
the streets of the southern Japanese port city of Fukuoka.
Television cameras carry it live to the country and as many as
a million spectators turn out in Fukuoka itself to watch and
applaud.
Drayton flew to Fukuoka in 1969
direct from Toronto, an exhausting twenty-hour trip broken
only by refuelling stops. When he stepped off the plane it was
to the unaccustomed blaze of flashguns. A clutch of Japanese
reporters was waiting. Drayton paused for an impromptu press
conference, then tumbled gratefully into bed, glad that his
Toronto travel agent had arranged for an evening arrival. With
a single night's sleep he was able to adjust to the jet lag
caused by flying through thirteen time zones.
Drayton was good enough to be
invited to Fukuoka in 1969 but he was not the race favorite.
That honor went to Ron Hill, the British runner who that year
had won the European championship. The Japanese newspapers
featured Hill's photograph along with the likes of Mamo Wolde,
the Olympic champion, Akio Usami, the swiftest Japanese runner
of the day, and Kim Chung Chi of South Korea. Drayton was an
unknown by comparison but his anonymity ended with the crack
of a gun at noon Sunday in Heiwadai Stadium.
As a field of seventy-nine of
the world's most intensely-trained runners set out in a cold
gray rain, circling the track twice before striking mto the
streets, Drayton took the lead.
"The track was under water. It
was a clay track. By the time we got on the road my socks and
shoes were completely soaked. I was in first place when we
left the stadium and I just never looked back."
He ran with an economical
stride, upper body almost motionless, arms pumping just enough
to maintain rhythm. Thick thigh muscles, developed to the
point that they seemed disproportionately large for his pared
down body, propelled him forward at deceptive speed. He
devoured miles like a machine. Twenty-six miles later, having
run out into the countryside and resumed to the heart of
Fukuoka, he remained in the lead, no other runner able to
catch him. Hill tried with a gallant closing surge but could
only narrow the gap to forty-four seconds. Drayton circled the
stadium track to an ovation and crossed the line in 2:11:13,
another Canadian and North American record. "I'm not tired,
but I'm cold,'' he said. A blanket was wrapped about his
shoulders. A few weeks later Track and Field News, the
authoritative magazine of his sport named Drayton the top
marathon runner of 1969.
Paul Poce was driving his car
along the lakeshore in Toronto, trailing a group of runners
out for a misty Sunday morning run, when he flipped the radio
dial to the noon news and first heard the word from Fukuoka.
He let out a yell and banged the steering wheel with his fist.
Coaching a national champion was one thing, coaching the
champion of Fukuoka quite another.
"Drayton has been slow to
mature as a runner,'' Poce said at the time.
(86) "He's an independent sort of
guy. He doesn't need too much coaching. He just logs miles and
miles of training."
Sixty-two years had passed
since Toronto had known an international marathon hero. The
last was Tom Longboat in 1907, when he resumed from the Boston
Marathon. Tens of thousands had choked Toronto streets to
welcome Longboat. He was paraded in an open car to City Hall,
flags draped about his shoulders. Bands played. Fireworks
exploded. Torches burned in the night air. That was in 1907.
When Jerome Drayton resumed
home with far larger laurels in 1969 little notice was taken
beyond a couple of routine newspaper accounts. Few were
interested. The attention of the modern public was taken up
with team sports that lent themselves to television and money,
major league baseball, professional football and that greatest
of all Canadian sports passions, ice hockey. The marathon was
remote and obscure by comparison, its practitioners freaks,
its champions scarcely worth noting.
One sign of the times was the
Canadian National Exhibition Marathon of 1970, which attracted
an international field including Jack Foster of New Zealand,
the eventual winner. Crowds hurled caustic comments as the
runners left Exhibition Stadium, although there was some
applause along the route, and when they returned it was to
almost empty stands. The Johnny Cash show, the feature
attraction of the evening, ended half an hour early because of
a timing botch-up and the crowds departed. Once the first
couple of finishers arrived the grandstand lights were
switched off. So dark was the place when the last runner came
in that a match was struck to record his time.
(87)
Drayton passed up the CNE
Marathon in 1970 to run a ten-mile race two weeks later on
September 6, also at Exhibition Stadium. The results showed
why. Lapping all others in the twenty-one-runner field he flew
through the distance in 46:37.6 to break Ron Hill's world
ten-mile record by more than six seconds.
"I didn't expect a record but I
started to think of one when there was just two miles to go,''
he said. "At the first it felt like I was dragging my feet and
I thought I would slow down. But I got stronger as the race
went on." (88)
For a while it seemed that no
distance record was safe from this hawk-like Canadian with his
fierce athletic resolve. Yet the ten-mile record was his last
major achievement for five years. A frustrating sequence of
injuries, coupled with bad luck and the strain of trying to
find money for university, reduced Drayton to what he once
described as ''an average Canadian distance runner."
Problems lingered from a bone
graft operation done years earlier when he rode a motorcycle
and toyed with becoming a Rebel. The machine had a forward
kick start that bounced back against his shin. A cyst formed
from the repeated battering of the lever against his leg and
had to be removed. The cast he wore at the time caused muscles
in the affected leg to shrink, creating an imbalance that
would go uncorrected through most of his athletic career. Shin
splints, aggravated joints and a broken toe added to his woes.
The solving of one problem seemed only to herald the arrival
of the next. Even when he was able to run disaster seemed to
strike.
The worst blow came once again
from the Canadian Olympic Association as Drayton prepared for
the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. He was anxious
for several reasons to compete in Munich, not the least of
which was that it was the city of his troubled boyhood.
Returning as an Olympian offered a symbolic means of rewriting
the past, the way he had rewritten his name. Munich also
beckoned for another reason, one that went back to an indoor
track meet in the prairie city of Saskatoon in December, 1970.
Someone in the stands, probably a member of the local
Ukrainian community, recognized Drayton and connected him with
his original father, still living in Germany. Drayton had not
seen or heard of his father since 1956, when he was swept off
to Canada so abruptly they were unable to say farewell. The
track fan in Saskatoon remained anonymous but wrote to the
father of the son's accomplishments. Some weeks later, to
Drayton's shock, the postman delivered a letter from his
father to his home in Toronto.
They corresponded briefly and
with difficulty, Drayton having forgotten most of his native
German. Only at Munich, he finally decided, when he went for
the games and the two could meet face to face, only then could
contact realistically be re-established.
The Canadian marathon trial for
Munich was planned for Montreal, the city that four years
later would host the first Olympics in Canada . The race route
was the one already mapped out tentatively for the 1976 games.
A standard of 2:17:00 had been set by the selection committee
and Drayton felt confident of meeting it easily. The trial was
run on the evening of June 24, the St. Jean Baptiste Day
holiday in Quebec, and Drayton led from the outset, running at
a methodical pace calculated to bring him home comfortably
within the standard. At thirty kilometres, well into the race,
he was a full minute ahead of schedule. Brian Armstrong, a
rising Toronto Olympic Club member, was a distant second. Then
came the thirty-five-kilometre checkpoint and the news that
Drayton had suddenly fallen a minute and a half off pace.
At first he thought the timers
were wrong. Then he suspected the terrain of the marathon
course, part of which had taken runners into open farm country
outside the city. Drayton was used to running in urban streets
where he could gauge his speed by the proximity of buildings
and nearby objects. His pace felt as fast as ever but he
thought he must have slowed. Discouraged, he abandoned hope of
making up the time and reduced his speed to the minimum
required to win. He finished in 2:23:13, Armstrong having
closed the gap between them to just thirty seconds.
(d)
All top runners, without
exception, posted unusually slow times. The results were
explained away by various factors, including the summer
weather, but doubts lingered. Days later the truth of the
matter leaked out despite attempts to conceal it by
embarrassed officials. The course had been mis-measured. It
was a full kilometre too long, a preposterous error for an
Olympic trial race. Yet the selection committee was unbowed.
It refused to accept the results, arguing that the times would
not meet the standard even if adjusted for the error. The
argument was specious and self-serving, ignoring the
psychological factor to runners of being given incorrect time
splits on the course.
"I had the feeling at the time
that everything was lost," Drayton recalls. "I thought,
'What's the point of pushing any more? Just win the thing.'
That's what was going through my mind."
The committee announced a
second trial which Armstrong ran, again failing to meet the
standard. Drayton declined to enter. The Olympic marathon was
just weeks away. Even if he had qualified in the second trial
the effort would have left him too drained to perform in
Munich. His athletic dreams were dashed and the chance to see
his father along with them.
"You couldn't argue. It was the
fault of whoever organized the marathon and set up that route.
You think of quitting. You don't care about the sport any
more. But I almost immediately picked up running again."
(89)
The 1972 Olympic marathon was a
landmark event for the sport of distance running. For the
first time in sixty-four years it was won by an American,
Frank Shorter. Not since Johnny Hayes was awarded the 1908
Olympic marathon in London, after Italian Dorando Pietri was
helped across the finish line, had an American triumphed in
the most prestigious of Olympic events. Shorter's victory,
watched on television by millions, touched off more than any
other single factor the great mass running boom that swept
North America in the 1970s. The marathon quickly became a
symbol of personal excellence, not only for gifted athletes
but for ordinary fitness runners. Marathon races that
previously attracted only a handful of entrants were
overwhelmed with hundreds, then thousands, of eager new
runners.
Frank Shorter also dominated
the Fukuoka Marathon in the early 1970s, winning four years in
succession from 1971 through 1974. So unbeatable was Shorter
at Fukuoka that the Japanese declined to invite him back in
1975, fearing that others might lose interest in the race.
Invited instead was that other American star, Bill Rodgers,
the slender blond athlete from the Greater Boston Track Club
who that spring had swept to victory in the Boston Marathon
with a new American marathon record of 2:09:55.
Also invited was Jerome
Drayton, back in form after five years of financial problems
and recurring injuries. Drayton had a steady job with Bob
Secord at the Ontario government's sports and recreation
branch, obtained with the help of fellow runners Abby Hoffman
and Bruce Kidd, and he had a new and effective training
regimen, developed with the help of Paul Poce. That year at
Fukuoka everything came together again.
Small things can stamp the
character of a marathon. For Drayton that year it was the fact
that he wore new shoes. A Japanese manufacturer wanted him to
wear its latest model. He refused initially, explaining
politely that it would take two weeks to break in a new pair
from the factory. Not so easily put off, the company offered
to build him a special pair, tailored to the contours and
peculiarities of his feet. Drayton, assuming he would receive
them months later at home, agreed to have measurements taken.
He underestimated Japanese ingenuity.
"Five hours later they had a
pair, made to my specifications. I felt I had no choice but to
wear them. I felt obligated." (90)
Six miles into the race he knew he had made a mistake. The
soles felt fine but something in the upper portion of the
shoes caused his feet to turn outward, threatening leg
injuries. The fact that it was raining, as it had in 1969, did
not help. His mind flashed ahead to the 1976 Olympics. Even
more than had been the case with Munich he wanted to run well
in Montreal. The shoes could threaten his chances if he got
injured so he held back, not pushing the pace. Yet at eighteen
miles he still found himself with the leaders. Despite the
fact that he could feel his legs beginning to tighten, he
gambled and surged to the front, setting the pace for the next
five miles. Then Dave Chettle of Australia shot past with
three miles remaining and all seemed lost. Drayton let him
pull away and looked instead for the flatest part of the
roadway, seeking to ease the strain on his legs.
Then with a mile remaining he
caught sight of Chettle eighty yards ahead and hope soared
again. With a final push he closed the gap and regained the
lead. Turning into Heiwadai Stadium Drayton's legs felt so
unsteady he feared he might fall. A roar filled the stands as
he swung into view and circled the track. In his weariness he
did not sense the electricity crowds generate in the presence
of great performances. The atmosphere was alive with
excitement.
Drayton, who always ran without
a watch, had been unaware of his pace for several miles,
although he knew from the effort that it had been fast.
Exactly how fast came as a surprise. He won the race in
2:10:08, the fifth fastest marathon ever, averaging less than
five minutes a mile the entire distance. It was a Canadian
record that would stand for years to come. Only Bill Rodgers,
on the strength of his great Boston victory that year, was
ranked above Drayton in 1976 world marathon standings.
The victory returned Drayton to
the top ranks of marathoning and set the stage for the
Montreal Olympics. Now thirty years old he sensed it would be
his best chance for a medal. The last Canadian to challenge
seriously for an Olympic marathon medal had been Longboat in
the storied 1908 London race awarded to Johnny Hayes. Yet it
was not to be. Drayton managed to weather a new round of
injuries and reach peak form for the Olympics. But disaster
struck five days before the race. He came down with a head
cold that stole away his high fine edge of fitness. Canadians
watched via television as Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany
ran through the streets of Montreal to victory. Frank Shorter
was second and Karl Lismont of Belgium was third. Drayton ran
sixth and wept. It was a bitter blow.
So he did the only thing that
was left to do. He went back to Fukuoka, back to the faraway
city that was the scene of his greatest moments. Although
Drayton remained little known in Canada despite his
accomplishments, it was not the case in Fukuoka. He was the
defending Fukuoka champion in 1976 and was hailed as such. Not
even the presence of Cierpinski, fresh from his Olympic
triumph, detracted from the stature in which Drayton was held
by the Japanese. They shook his hand and sought his autograph.
They bestowed upon him a nickname, Rainy Drayton, in honor of
his two memorable runs to victory through the rain-soaked
streets of their city. And it came as no great surprise to
them when this great athlete from Canada proved his mettle
anew and won their race for a third time.
Drayton and Cierpinski ran
shoulder to shoulder for the first half of the race, until
passing the turnaround point near Fukuoka Airport on the
outskirts of the city. Then Drayton took command. Not once
during the long run back to Heiwadai Stadium was he seriously
challenged. Warm weather slowed his winning time to 2:12:35
but it was fast under the circumstances. To Japanese sports
fans he was a genuine hero.
Ironically, his status with
Fukuoka organizers quickly took a drastic plunge. The reason
was a small incident that occurred the following day at a
reception for Drayton and other visiting marathoners. A
Japanese speaker talked during the ceremonies of the
"disgraceful and dishonorable'' performance of Japanese
runners in the Montreal Olympic (91)
and expressed embarrassment that they seemed unable to do any
better at home in Fukuoka. His spleen vented, the man sat down
and promptly fell asleep, awakened only by a burst of applause
sometime later.
Annoyed at hearing runners
disparaged, Drayton made a speech of his own, defending the
Japanese marathoners and expressing surprise at hearing them
attacked. His hosts listened in stony silence, angered that a
guest would voice such criticism. Nothing further was said but
the incident was not forgotten. Drayton was not invited back
the following year.
"I think the tone of what I
said got lost in the translation. I was being sincere but it
sounded harsh from their point of view.''
The athletic peak Drayton
reached in this period carried over to the Boston Marathon of
1977. After four unsuccessful marathons in Boston, the best
being a third-place finish in 1974, he finally won the world's
most celebrated footrace. Success when it came was almost
casual. After Fukuoka the previous December, Drayton went back
to the track, concentrating on his speed at three thousand
metres. Only four weeks beforehand, less than half the time he
would have set aside normally to prepare, did he decide to run
Boston. It was testimony to his remarkable athletic confidence
at the time that he believed he could be competitive. He
discussed it later.
"The confidence comes from my
physical fitness,'' he said. ''When I go to a race like Boston
or Fukuoka, if there were no injuries in the last three or
four months and my training has gone well, I'm very confident.
As far as my training is concerned I know what I'm doing. I
know the different phases of training, the time frames for
each and the order within each phase. I know how to map out a
program for myself. But you have to have Lady Luck on your
side too — no injuries and all this. I have been having a lot
of luck lately. And when I know that I have gone through the
whole cycle of my training, and I come toward the end and
reach the rest phase, then I taper off and get this
rejuvenated feeling that sweeps through my body. You can sense
it, you can feel your body coming to a peak."
(92)
The romantic appeal of Boston
was something that had always escaped Drayton. He ran the race
because of its reputation but he rarely enjoyed it. The
rolling terrain, with its net drop in elevation, clashed with
his running style. Coming down the hills he landed hard on his
heels, putting a strain on his thigh muscles. In 1970, after a
fierce battle with Ron Hill, he dropped out at ten miles. In
1975 he held on for twenty-four miles in a memorable race with
Bill Rodgers but again was forced to quit. His legs had turned
to cement. Drayton also disliked the casual attitude of the
Boston Athletic Association toward the organization of the
race.
Although the Boston field had
grown with the running boom to a cast of thousands the BAA
still ran things in the same way it always had. Crowd control
was loose, vehicles sometimes got in the way, water stations
were set up irregularly. On the morning of the 1977 race, as
the first bus prepared to leave Boston for Hopkinton, Jock
Semple stood at the door, stuffing two-dollar fares into a
carpetbag. The night before a reporter had tried without
success to get information at the press room.
"The Boston Marathon is like a
fire,'' he was told. "We don't know what's going to happen.
You don't ask for press information before a fire.
(93)
Drayton was used to Fukuoka
where the Japanese ran things with military precision and the
sole concern of the runners was running. Boston hardly seemed
worth the effort. The weather in 1977 only made matters worse.
Patriot's Day was bright and clear and the mercury soared.
Three thousand runners thronged
to Hopkinton that morning, half again as many as the year
before despite the stiff qualifying standard of three hours.
They engulfed the town and caused a chaotic jam on Hayden Row
where the starting line was located. Even the elite runners
struggled for room at the front. The noon gun to begin the
race was fired, so far as Drayton could tell, without warning.
Two rows of runners leaped away before he had time to react.
Someone grabbed his shirt. He was kicked and elbowed. For a
moment he feared he would be trampled. Matters were not helped
by the sharp right turn onto Main Street only yards from the
start. Drayton managed to regain lost ground and take his
place with the leaders but other problems lay ahead.
The first and most critical was
water. Although the BAA had arranged for eight aid stations
along the route they were useless to Drayton. Most he never
saw. Those he did were stocked with Gatorade, a commercial
preparation that upset his stomach. From previous years he
recalled a water table at Ashland, the first town down from
Hopkinton, but this year it was nowhere in sight. He turned to
Bill Rodgers, the idol of the masses, who already had been
handed one drink by his wife.
"Don't they have any official
water stations?" Drayton asked.
"No, you're sort of on your own
here,'' said Rodgers. ''You have to depend on the spectators."
The thermometer at that point
was nearing eighty degrees at the asphalt level along Route
135.
"I just became enraged,"
Drayton recalls. "If I would have seen one of the Boston
officials on the sidelines I would have gone over and squeezed
his throat. I tell you, I was just livid. At that moment the
whole scene just became unpleasant to me. Here I am trying to
pound twenty-six miles in the blazing heat and it's up to me
to find water."
Drayton managed to snatch a cup
from outstretched hands here and there but he never knew what
it would contain. Rodgers provided the only fluid he could
trust. On a couple of occasions the blond-haired favorite
shared his water with the thirsty Canadian. Yet it was
Rodgers, not Drayton, who eventually succumbed to the heat.
Dehydration struck as he entered the Newton Hills with about
eight miles to go and soon afterward he dropped out.
When it happened Drayton
suddenly realized that the race was his. He and Rodgers had
built up such a lead on the rest of the field that Drayton
knew he would not be overtaken unless forced to quit himself.
For the rest of the way he ran at a pace that was just fast
enough to maintain the lead, not much different than one of
the regular long Sunday runs he logged over the trails and
hills of High Park back in Toronto. He concentrated on finding
water, scarcely aware of the throngs that cheered his passage.
Hal Higdon wrote later in Runner's World magazine that the
Boston crowd of 1977 was the largest ever to watch an American
sporting event. He compared it to those he had seen at the
Indianapolis 500 auto race.
"It is very much an Indy crowd.
The pot smokers, the girl-huggers, the boy-huggers, the drunks
clutching beer cans are out in force, and the race becomes,
for them, what's happening today. The race offers a reason to
party, and today they cheer, wildly and with sincere
enthusiasm, for those funny people in shorts. Tomorrow they
may roll down the window of their Plymouth Road-Runner cars
with dual carburetors and hurl abuse and empty beer cans at
us, but for now crowd and runner become one."
(94)
Drayton swept unchallenged into
Boston, his destination the tall beckoning Prudential Centre
off Boylston Street in the distance. Packed thousands sent up
a cheer that rattled downtown Boston as he swung into view at
the intersection of Hereford and Boylston, then turned into
the finishing chute and came down the incline to victory, the
red maple leaf on his singlet drooping with perspiration. The
winning time was 2:14:46.
A Boston policeman took
Drayton's arm and tried to lead him to the victory podium
where Mayor Kevin White was waiting with the laurel wreath.
Drayton, spent, waved him off and sat down by a pool of water
on the asphalt. He pulled off his shoes and soaked his feet.
No joy was evident in his face and he felt none inside. When
questioned about the race at the press conference that
followed he was critical.
"I won't be back to defend my
title or to run Boston again under these circumstances," he
said. "You'd figure that after eighty-one tries here they'd
set up official watering tables. It's just unfair. What's the
point of training for this event when you can get beaten by
circumstances beyond your control. Basically, the organizers
have to make up their minds if they want quantity or quality.
I don't understand the three thousand entries. If you want to
make money out of it . . ." (95)
He had gone too far. Jock
Semple, who had first run Boston in the 1930s and had been
bound up with its history ever since, interrupted.
"Don't kid yourself, lad," he
snapped. "There's no money to be made out of this.''
Never had a champion seemed so
ungracious, so devoid of pleasure in victory. The Boston media
reacted with shock. Television plucked out his angry quotes
and aired them again and again. Newspapers ran sensational
headlines. 'He won but he's angry,' one read. 'I shall not
return,' said another. The massive coverage surprised Drayton.
As far as he was concerned he had done nothing more than speak
candidly about circumstances. It had been the most frustrating
race of his career. Even as he spoke at the press conference
the bad luck continued. The large trophy he was awarded on the
victory stand, where he also received the traditional laurel
wreath and gold medal, was stolen. It was never recovered.
The Boston Athletic Association
was bitter.
"I am very disappointed," said Will Cloney, the long-serving
BAA president whose affiliation with the marathon ran as far
back as Semple's.
Drayton should realize that
Boston isn't Fukuoka. Boston is for the average marathoner,
too, which is one of the reasons we won't lower the time
standards (e). If I wanted
another Fukuoka, all I would have to do is raise money from
Boston businessmen and hire the Draytons and Shorters to run.
But that isn't what Boston is all about.
(96)
In retrospect it is arguable
that Drayton did more than any other single person to push
Boston into the modern marathon era. Once the hurt feelings
caused by his remarks subsided the BAA set about making
improvements. Little by little conditions were upgraded. Five
years after the fact, Drayton's role was acknowledged by Joe
Concannon of the Boston Globe.
"When Drayton was brash enough
to suggest that the race could 'turn into a disaster' if its
administration remained amateurish he was saying what people
didn't want to hear but what had to be said," Concannon wrote.
(97)
Drayton did return to Boston in
subsequent years and the improvement was evident. The start
had been moved from the cramped confines of Hayden Row to the
main street of Hopkinton. Aid tables were conspicuous and
looked after by droves of Boy Scouts. The race had a better
feel. At the high school gym in Hopkinton a room was set aside
for top runners. Semple was manning the door once when Drayton
arrived. For a moment he failed to recognize the runner behind
the sunglasses that Drayton so often wore.
''You can't go in there,"
Semple blared.
Drayton laughed and pulled up
his sweater. Underneath was the same white shirt with the red
maple leaf that he had worn in 1977.
"Jock!'' he said. ''Don't you
remember me?''
Semple almost laughed but not
quite.
"Oh, you again," he said. ''You
give me a lot of trouble.''
When Drayton ran Boston that
year, and in subsequent years, injuries rather than
organization were his undoing. Twice he dropped out; once he
limped to the finish line in two hundred and fiftieth place.
The problem was the hamstring muscle in the back of his right
leg, just below the hip. In every marathon the pattern seemed
the same. The leg was fine at the outset but tightened with
frustrating regularity in the latter miles. After running with
the leaders for much of the distance Drayton was forced again
and again to ease up and let them go. No amount of training
seemed to change things. The most frustrating episode occurred
at the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. The leg forced him
to scratch altogether from the ten thousand metres race in
which his chances of winning were strong, and then cost him
victory in the marathon.
Run on a clear August evening,
and televised live across Canada, the marathon followed an
out-and-back course from Commonwealth Stadium. Those watching
saw Drayton pass Toronto Olympic Club teammate Paul Bannon at
thirty-nine kilometres and pull into the lead. What they could
not know was how much the leg was hurting. He was running at
maximum pace, unable to increase his speed further should
anyone challenge. With less than a kilometre remaining someone
did. Gidamas Shahanga, a pencil-thin Tanzanian runner, unknown
before the games, appeared as if from nowhere. Scarcely one
minute away from the stadium, where crowds waited in hopes of
seeing Drayton finally win a major marathon in his own
country, Shahanga swept past and ran to victory, crossing the
finish line in 2:15:39. Drayton, assured of the silver medal,
slowed to ease his leg, finishing in 2:16:51.
"They say a runner takes
twenty-six thousand steps in a marathon," Drayton said
wearily. "If that's the case I must have died thirteen
thousand times with my bad leg." (98)
Years later he would learn that
the problem was the imbalance in leg size that back to the
bone graft surgery of his youth. The right hamstring was
weaker and tended to pull under heavy stress, often not much
but enough to cause a small tear. Over time the damage became
so extensive it caused scar tissue to form over much of the
muscle. By the time it was finally corrected his best athletic
years were behind.
Arguably, Jerome Drayton could
be ranked the finest Canadian athlete of the 1970s. Three
times he ran to victory at Fukuoka, regarded in all but
Olympic years as the world championship of marathoning. He won
the Boston Marathon and earned a silver medal at the
Commonwealth Games. He first set the Canadian marathon record
in 1968 and subsequently lowered it by more than six minutes.
His fastest marathon, 2:10:08 in 1975, remains the Canadian
record. After fifteen years atop the national standings, and
in the face of an unprecedented boom in marathon running, a
Canadian has yet to equal his accomplishments.
The marathon is no ordinary
sport. It is as old and arduous and universal a sport as there
is, demanding exceptional physiology and extraordinary
commitment to excel.
Drayton is a physiological
marvel. His pared down body contains a mere five per cent fat.
A normal male would have at least fifteen. At five-foot-nine,
he weighs just one hundred and thirty pounds. An average
person might be able to feed thirty millilitres of oxygen a
minute through the lungs, heart and bloodstream to the muscles
for each kilogram of body weight. Drayton can process close to
eighty millilitres, one of the highest readings on record.
Conversely, his resting pulse is one of the lowest. So
powerful is his heart, so much blood can it pump at a single
stroke, that his pulse dips occasionally to twenty-eight beats
a minute. For other athletes the low might be fifty, for
ordinary people seventy. Asked what it was like to inhabit
such a body Drayton once replied that it was like driving a
car without rattles.
Since he became a serious
runner in the 1960s Drayton has averaged one hundred miles a
week, sometimes covering up to one hundred and seventy-five
miles. He runs once a day at least, most days twice, a short
run at noon, a longer run after work, summer or winter, rain
or shine, at home or away. Nothing interferes. He trains in
disciplined phases, six in all, that can last up to eight
weeks each. The first consists solely of long, slow runs to
build up his aerobic base. Occasionally he will travel more
than thirty miles in an outing. Hill work follows. Three times
a week he will pick out a hill on his training route and
assault it repeatedly to toughen the workload. In the third
phase he varies the routine not with hills but timed
quarter-mile intervals on the track. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen
times he will circle the track at a pace that takes him to the
edge of his anaerobic threshold, the point at which his body
begins to slip into oxygen debt from the stress. This usually
occurs with laps of about 65 seconds, a 4:20-mile pace.
Between each interval he walks to recover.
In the fourth phase he
deliberately pushes his body into oxygen debt, running
quarters at maximum effort with almost no rest in between. So
stressful is this form of training that it can exhaust an
athlete of Drayton's stature in fewer than half a dozen laps.
At least two, often three, track workouts a week are included
in his schedule. Then follows the fifth and most taxing phase
in which Drayton combines both aerobic and anaerobic intervals
in the same session. Quarters that previously took sixty-five
seconds to cover without going into oxygen debt he now flies
through in just fifty-seven seconds, the pace of a world-class
miler. Through all these phases his total training rarely
drops below one hundred and thirty miles a week.
The sixth and final phase comes
when Drayton "rests" by tapering back to about seventy-five
miles a week and substituting short weekly races for the
speedwork of the track. Competition sharpens him mentally and
prepares him for the ultimate challenge toward which all
phases of the cycle have been directed, usually a major
marathon. It is in this phase that he reaps the reward of his
discipline, that all the effort and sacrifice pay off. That
sweet feeling of rejuvenation sweeps through his body and all
the stressed comers of his being come together in climactic
unison. The sensation is one of vitality and strength that few
human beings know.
In the more than fifteen years
Drayton has been a serious distance runner he has logged
something like seventy-five-thousand miles, the equivalent of
a yearly trip across Canada or three times the circumference
of the earth at the equator. To anyone but an elite marathoner
such mileage is difficult to comprehend. Drayton no longer
bothers to keep track of it. One hundred miles a week is
simply the amount he must average to remain at the top of his
physical powers. The cost has been a solitary life that few
would accept. He married early in his running career but it
lasted scarcely two years. "I wasn't ready to take on the
responsibilities of husband and father," he admits. Running
filled his needs instead.
"During the first Olympic
preparation period I realized that my running was not solely
limited to competition. Running was a world unto itself and it
became part of me for the rest of my life. There's something
about it that you can't explain. Trying to explain the
non-competitive attraction to a non-runner is like trying to
explain colors to a blind person. It's a question of discovery
— the discovery you can only make when you reach a level of
running that is physically comfortable for you. Running gives
me an opportunity to step outside the rest of the world. I
reflect on, assess, or solve matters relating to my
professional, personal or athletic life — with the added
comfort of knowing that I'm moving toward some competitive
goal." (99)
Another time he put it this
way:
"I like the solitude. I like
this one to two hours to myself once a day when I don't have
to do speedwork and I can go for a long run. This mental
activity has helped shape my attitude toward life. I've come
to the conclusion that people who are involved with a high
degree of consistency, in a high-level activity such as
sports, they just seem to enjoy life more. They seem to have a
zest for life." (100)
The media have found Drayton a
perplexing figure, often portraying him as a moody recluse who
seems happiest with the world shut away. A magazine writer who
visited his apartment after his victory at Boston noticed the
drapes drawn and concluded that he was obsessed with privacy.
The image is too narrow. Those acquainted with Drayton know a
more rounded person.
"When he's out with a bunch of
people,'' says Paul Poce, '"he's the person who always sits in
the background. He's with the group but he's not a part of it.
Then once in a while he'll surprise everyone with a thought or
suggestion and everyone will be following him. He's a really
friendly fellow when you get to know him."
(101)
When not cast by the media as
stiff and ascetic, Drayton has been portrayed as angry and
unforgiving, the way he was that day at Boston, or lacking
heart, a suggestion that wounds his pride. Just before the
1976 Olympics, with his career at its peak, Track and Field
News called Drayton an erratic runner ''inclined to quit when
the going gets tough." He was stung by the words. Cited in
evidence was his failure to finish several races, going back
to the 1968 Olympic marathon in Mexico City.
"They never bothered to ask me
why I dropped out of those races. When I drop out of a race it
is because I have reached a point where further competition
could mean permanent damage. I know the philosophy about 'good
old Joe' who kept going until he was no longer fit to compete.
He didn't win but he got a pat on the back and probably never
was able to run again. I don't buy that."
(102) Another time he said simply,
''I won't put anything above my health."
(103)
Physically, Drayton is a
classic ectomorph, that body design identified by psychologist
William Sheldon as thin, bony and linear. Sheldon believed
that the human race was composed of three basic body designs,
endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic, and that each
possessed a distinct personality. Sheldon's theories have been
revived and popularized in running circles by George Sheehan,
a New Jersey cardiologist, author and marathoner. Where the
endomorph tends to be round and fleshy, loving of talk, food
and comfort, and the mesomorph tends to be muscular and
confident, outgoing and built for action, the ectomorph is
none of these, Sheehan believes. Instead, as his slight,
furtive structure suggests, the ectomorph is apt to be
detached, tense, anxious, private, introverted, reflective,
precise and reserved. (104) Any of
the adjectives might be applied to Drayton.
A writer once said Drayton
could get lost in a crowd or hold up a bank and witnesses
would give police ten different descriptions. The same writer
thought him frail at first glance and then changed his mind.
''Look more closely and the impression of frailness
disappears. He is all coiled springs and simmering energy."
(105)
Drayton plans to remain a
serious athlete until he is certain that no attainable peaks
in world class competition have been left unscaled. He could
excel in the masters category, which begins for athletes at
age forty, but the prospect holds no attraction. When he is no
longer an elite athlete he plans to run simply for fitness,
perhaps as little as five miles a day.
In the meantime he will go on
training, coping as best he can with a professional workload
that tends increasingly to interfere. The job that began with
part-time contract work has expanded to the point where he now
administers two Ontario programs for elite athletes and acts
as a consultant to the government for eight sports. At times
he lives without a social life, accepting it as a necessary
price. That will come later, he hopes, and with it perhaps
marriage again, and fatherhood. When he has the luxury of free
time he journeys out to the west end of Toronto to visit his
mother and stepfather. The pride they take in their son is
enormous. Yet after two decades as a competitive runner
Drayton has yet to convince his mother to come out and watch
him race. They sometimes laugh about it.
Her reluctance is illogical but
real, probably rooted in the concerns she felt for his safety
when he was still an infant in Kolbermoor. She fears that he
might be hurt. For her it is better to wait for news until the
race is over, to learn then that all is well. Drayton doesn't
press but he would like his mother to see at least one race
before he stops competing.
"If I could plan the perfect
ending to my career, I would run into Olympic Stadium at the
head of the marathon. My mother would be sitting in the stands
and I would win the gold medal."
Jerome Drayton's Marathon
Record
(* winner) (CR Canadian record) (WR world record)
1968
Detroit Marathon (June 2) 2:23:57 *
Guelph to Dundas (August 25) 2:16:11 (CR)
Olympic Marathon, Mexico City (October 20) DNF
1969
Boston Marathon (April 21) DNF
Detroit Marathon (October 19) 2:12:00 (CR)
Fukuoka Marathon (December 7) 2:11:12* (CR)
(Ranked No. 1 marathoner in the world by Track and Field News in 1969)
1970
1970
Boston Marathon (April 20) DNF
Edinburgh Marathon (July 23) DNF
Detroit Marathon (October 19) 2:23:08*
Toronto Ten-Mile Track Race (September 6) 46:37.6 WR
1972
Montreal Olympic Trial (June 24) 2:23: 13*
1973
St. John's, Newfoundland, Marathon (Sept. 15) 2:13:26*
Fukuoka Marathon (December 2) DNF
1974
Commonwealth Games Marathon (January 31) 2:29:20
(Christchurch, New Zealand)
Boston Marathon (April 15) 2:15:40
Detroit Marathon (October 27) DNF
1975
Boston Marathon (April 21) DNF
Fukuoka Marathon (December 7) 2:10:08* CR
(Ranked No. 2 among world class marathoners
by Track and Field Newsfor 1975)
1976
Olympic Marathon, Montreal (July 31) 2:13:30
Fukuoka Marathon (December 5) 2:12:35*
(Ranked No. 5 among world class rnarathoners
by Track and Field News for 1976)
1977
Boston Marathon(April 18) 2:14:46*
New York City Marathon (October 23) 2:13:52
(Ranked No. 7 among world class mararhoners
by Track and Field News for 1977)
1978
Boston Marathon (April 16) DNF
Commonwealth Games Marathon (August 11) 2:16:13
Edmonton
Toronto Marathon (October 8) 2:18:07
1979
Boston Marathon (April 16) 2:14:47
National Capital Marathon, Ottawa (May 13) 2:18:05*
1980
Tokyo Marathon (February 17) DNF
New York City Marathon (October 26) 2:17:58
Maryland Marathon, Baltimore (December 7) 2:19:45*
1981
1981 Boston Marathon (April 20) 2:28:49
1982
Montreal Marathon (May 30) DNF
1983
Toronto Marathon (October 2) DNF
1984
Houston Marathon (January 15) DNF
Footnotes
(a) Portions of this
chapter are based on interviews with Jerome Drayton in 1982.
(b) Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia
won the 1968 Olympic Marathon in 2:20:26, eight minutes slower
than the winning time of the Tokyo Olympics four years earlier
and of the Munich Olympics four years later.
(c) CIarke was a great
Australian middle distance runner and marathoner; Bikila, a
legendary Ethiopian, won the Olympic marathons at Rome in 1960
and Tokyo in 1964.
(d) Armstrong emerged in
1973 as the second best marathon runner in Canada, completing
three marathons faster then 2:14:00. His best was 2:13:30.
(e) The dimensions of the
modem running boom forced Boston in 1980 to tighten qualifying
standards further to two hours and fifty minutes for men under
forty. Lesser requirements were set for others. |
