He Finds a Whole New World : Runner Takes Big Strides to Overcome Handicaps

It was 4:20 on a recent Wednesday afternoon, and 20-year-old Craig Hawley descended the stairs of his Fullerton home dressed in light-blue running shorts and a striped tank top. Two of the distance runner’s coaches were to arrive in a matter of minutes to put Craig through his regular workout, a three-to-six-mile run in the Fullerton Hills.

Craig flopped on the family room sofa. His mother, Gloria, sat beside him, put his running shoes on his feet and tied them in double knots. The television set was tuned to “Sesame Street,” and soon Craig was on his knees, calling out to the Muppets, who gamboled about on the screen: “Snuffy, friend. Snuffy.”

“He may be a runner,” Gloria said, “but he’s still retarded.”

When Craig Baldwin Hawley was an infant, doctors told his parents that he would never walk or talk, if he survived. Plagued with cerebral palsy, mental retardation, water on the brain, a curved spine and a sunken chest bone, he seemed destined to be locked into the isolated world of the multiply handicapped.

Skilled Runner Now

Now Craig Hawley is a skilled distance runner, competing against--and often beating--many able-bodied athletes in 5- and 10-kilometer races around Southern California.

Today he will participate in his first invitational race, the seventh annual South Coast Classic, which raises money for Childrens Hospital of Orange County and is billed as a “Run for Kids Who Can’t.”

It has been a long and difficult struggle not only for Craig but for his parents, Chan and Gloria Hawley.

Their first child, Laura Jeanette, suffered a brain injury in childbirth that was exacerbated by an early failure to diagnose the problem. At 28, she cannot communicate, cannot groom and dress herself and must be cared for constantly.

The Hawleys underwent genetic counseling and were reassured that they would never have another disabled child. When Laura was 8, her brother, Craig, was born.

Doctors’ Guess Wrong

Although he was pronounced perfect at birth, Craig did not develop normally. He was bright, but he couldn’t sit up. He didn’t crawl; instead, he rolled. Throughout his first year, doctors kept insisting that Craig was fine.

“Then there came a day when no one could deny it,” Gloria Hawley said. “I went into a stupor for two years, took care of my kids and took pills.”

It was, Chan Hawley said, “an intense disappointment, the realization that nothing could be done to help my children.”

Craig’s life became one round of therapy after another, strengthening his body so that by the age of 4, he took his first steps. He learned to communicate to a limited degree. But Craig, like Laura, must still be dressed, showered, groomed and cared for by his mother.

The Hawleys eventually joined the First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, where Gloria started a Special Olympics program in 1982 for the disabled children in the congregation. Craig joined, loped along, had fun.

Emotional Performances

The Rev. Paul Sailhamer said Craig’s Special Olympics performances were heartfelt, but far from stunning. “At first, if it was time to start the race, he might not want to run,” Sailhamer said. “He might wander off the field (or) stop when he didn’t want to run anymore.”

When Fred Dixon, who competed in the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, began coaching the team, Craig began to change.

“I noticed Craig enjoyed the running and had a great time at it,” Dixon said. “Craig has more ability than most of the kids, who are very much physically impaired. . . . He has an easy, loping kind of stride that’s well suited to distance.”

The more Dixon worked with the boy, the more Craig’s talent developed. Eventually a cadre of other runners joined the training effort. When Craig was 19, his church sponsored him for a kilometer in the Torch Relay leading up to the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In April, 1984, Craig began training for the relay in earnest, running several times a week with his coaches and working out with weights and exercise machines at a Fullerton health spa that gave him a scholarship.

‘It Seems to Work’

The biggest hurdle was Craig’s inability to communicate.

“Craig communicates in a different way than most of us do, and trying to understand that was the biggest difficulty,” said Randy Berg, one of his coaches. “You have to do a lot of sensing and feeling with Craig. It’s irrational and unscientific, but it seems to work.”

It worked well enough for Craig to be ready when the torch reached Fullerton on July 26, 1984, on its cross-country course to the Los Angeles Coliseum.

To Chan Hawley, his son’s run along Harbor Boulevard was his proudest moment as a father. “I didn’t sleep at all that night,” he said.

At the end of his kilometer, Craig and his family were surrounded by a crowd of tearful onlookers and reporters, and Craig became separated from his parents.

“I looked around for Craig, and there he was, surrounded by all these people, signing his name, ‘Craig ‘84,’ ” Gloria said. “I didn’t know he knew how to write. I said, ‘He can’t do that.’ They said, ‘Yes, he can.’ ”

Enters 10-K Race

Craig’s progress did not end with the torch. On Aug. 26, 1984, a month after the Torch Relay, his coaches entered him in a 10-kilometer race sponsored by the Fullerton YMCA.

Craig was running well until about the sixth mile, when he suddenly stopped, started screaming and “threw a fit as only a 4-year-old, 6-foot-1 guy could do,” his mother said. No one could figure out what was wrong, and his coaches decided to take him out of the race. But before they could, Craig began to run again and finished the race at a sprint.

“When I went upstairs to shower him, I discovered that his left sock was covered with blood,” Gloria said. “I determined that one of his toenails had gouged flesh out of the other toe every time he took a step. It literally cut out a chunk.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Craig, you ran with a hurt?’ And for the first time in his life, he straightened up, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘I 10-K man.’ ”

Since that day, he has run a 10- or 5-kilometer race every month, and Gloria Hawley contends that the experience has changed her “big, likable, retarded kid.”

‘Has an Identity Now’

“He has always been a person, but he’s come into self-worth and self-recognition,” she said. “He has an identity now. He used to be Craig in his own little world, but now he gets out in a world I know nothing about. For him, running is more than mileage.”

“So many of the people Craig runs against don’t know he’s retarded,” she said. “You know why?” They think: “ ‘Retarded people aren’t loose out here. Retarded people don’t run. Retarded people don’t look that good. And retarded people do not pass me.’ ”

Craig and Laura’s mother “will never be the mother of the bride,” she said. “No one will come along and make Craig complete. No one will come along and protect Laura. But I can’t think about that all the time.

“I do think about what they teach me, though,” she said. “Craig shows me hope beyond disaster. Laura shows me patience beyond despair. In their limitation, they awaken with joy, and that’s an endless lesson.”