Marathon Dollars Help Bring Bill Rodgers Back to Boston

For 11 years, Bill Rodgers and the Boston Marathon enjoyed a mutually beneficial union.

And after a three-year estrangement, the runner is relieved the separation was not permanent.

Rodgers has been conspicuously absent from the past two Boston Marathons--the race that made him famous--because the Boston Athletic Assn. had refused to join other major marathons and offer prize money.

With the world’s best runners flocking to young and wealthy marathons, the BAA finally responded to the cries of Rodgers and other elite runners who warned the race would rapidly lose its prestige.

Boston now sports an innovative $250,000 prize-money package and has thrust itself back on top of the marathoning world.

After uncontested, lackluster races in 1984 and 1985, the Boston Marathon has been rejuvenated by a 10-year, $10 million infusion, compliments of the John Hancock Life Insurance Co.

The elite are scurrying back to Boston for the 90th running April 21, with 1983 winner Greg Meyer leading the way. Also competing are 1983 world champion Rob de Castella of Australia, 1985 American champion Ken Martin and 1984 U.S. Olympic Trials winner Peter Pfitzinger. And Rodgers.

Rodgers sees his “no money, no me” attitude as a simple matter of economics. It’s not a question of selfishness, but a question of feeding his family.

“Runners are just like everyone else, with bills to pay and everything,” Rodgers said. “So when someone comes along and they’re offering you a good payday and this other marathon says, ‘No’--as much as you’d like to run Boston, you know you just can’t make those sorts of (financial) decisions.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

If there were no Boston prize money, Rodgers and other top runners would be somewhere else.

“I owe too much money to too many different banks,” he explained. “I have to run, and the prize money is a major factor.”

The Boston running community is experiencing an aura which disappeared after 1983, when Meyer ran to victory with a 2-hour, 9-minute effort. Last year Geoff Smith wanted a world record, but instead literally walked across the finish line in 2:14:05 after faltering with leg cramps around 21 miles. Smith’s was the slowest winning time since 1977.

“Last year was a joke. It was terrible,” said Rodgers, who didn’t mind letting the BAA know he was being paid somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000 just to show up for the inaugural New Jersey Waterfront Marathon. He finished second.

Rodgers passed up a return engagement at New Jersey when Boston announced it was coming out of the Stone Age. Smith is taking his place there.

“Everywhere I go (around Boston) there’s excitement,” Rodgers said. “I walked into an ice cream shop and people were saying to me ‘good luck’--everywhere I go people are saying to me ‘good luck’--I feel like telling them I might be 3 minutes behind the winner, I might drop out.”

Rodgers is realistic. For most 38-year-old athletes, the glory days are past.

“I’m a little bit nervous people will think that I have a chance to win or something. My chances are very, very, very slight to say the least,” he said. “I haven’t won a race--a big race--in a long time. I just hope I feel decent. I’m excited about it and I approach it very seriously. After the race, if I run great, I’ll just feel like dynamite. I’ll feel great.”

Feeling great translates into breaking 2:12. “I’ll be celebrating all night. I’ll have some champagne and some gin and tonics and I’ll have a good time,” he said.

Rodgers reminds everyone 1984 Olympic Marathon winner Carlos Lopes of Portugal was 39 when he set the current world record of 2:07:12 in Rotterdam last spring.

Steve Jones, the world’s top-ranked marathoner, withdrew from Boston because of a leg injury, making the race a closer duel between Meyer, de Castella and Rodgers.

“I never give up,” Rodgers said. “I don’t care if Steve Jones came in--I’d expect him to beat me and all--but when we get out there, I would run to try to beat him.

“I’d try to run strategically myself, but I’d never give up.”

At least that’s been his policy since April 16, 1973--the date Rodgers first attempted Boston--his first marathon--at the prodding of Amby Burfoot, his former Wesleyan University roommate and 1968 Boston winner.

At 21 miles, Rodgers stopped and the marathon obsession began.

Boston’s lure is definitely not the course. No one, not even the world’s best marathoners, honestly enjoys 17 miles of flat asphalt followed by 5 miles of gut-wrenching, aggravating--nay, heartbreaking--hills.

Ask anyone who has run Boston. The downhill finish is no compensation.

Rodgers, like thousands of runners wooed by the thoughts of succumbing to Boston’s unrelenting beating, learned to let the crowds carry him along.

“Sometimes you think of it as a painful kind of help because you kind of want to quit--and you would rather quit half the time,” he said, noting howling crowds sometimes shattered his concentration.

“Sometimes I even get mad at people yelling at me ‘keep going.’ Sometimes you just get mad and you feel like saying ‘to hell with it.’ ”

But Boston’s crowds are inspirational, especially when a runner’s spirits have long since rolled back down the wrong side of Heartbreak Hill.

“It helps a lot. You say to yourself, ‘This is Boston. I can’t quit.’ ”

Spectators help a race succeed as much as runners do. Boston’s scenery is almost entirely made up of faces and bodies--fans standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the course.

The best athletes bring out the largest crowds, no matter what the sport. And running is no different. In their arguments against prize money, the BAA claimed the fans lined the streets to see the 5,000-plus middle-of-the-pack runners.

“The tradition has always been here to have the top runners in the world,” Rodgers said. “That is the way it was. The BAA shouldn’t have ignored that. And the unfortunate thing is, it cast the runners into an adversarial position, which the runners didn’t want.

“All the runners wanted to do was have the race continue in a very successful way. And the only way it could do that was through prize money.”

So with one cause in the bag, Rodgers moves onto another. In less than two years, he will join the swelling ranks of “master” runners, those over 40. And when he does, he’ll be looking for added prize money in that category.

And to topple some records.

“I’m pretty certain I can get the American record. In fact, if I have no major injuries, it should be no problem,” he said of Barry Brown’s 2:15 U.S. mark.

“I want to get it at Boston.”

The world mark is a little tougher, 2:11:19, set by Jack Foster at the 1974 Commonwealth Games. “I haven’t run that fast since ‘83,” said Rodgers, a veteran of almost 50 marathons. “It’ll be tricky.”

But the obsession will take over. He wants the record.

“I could sort of retire from the marathon if I got the world mark.”