Cruz Turns On Jets : Ex-Valley Runner Leads Cal State L. A. Into Division II Cross-Country Finals

Benny Cruz never intended to make running a career. In fact, he chose to run as an alternative to a vocation.

“One of my sisters and my mom were always getting on my case to get a job, but I didn’t want to, so I started running,” he said, laughing.

Sure, it’s easy to joke about such things now. Cruz, a former Burbank High and Valley College standout, is the NCAA Division II West regional cross-country champion.

And the Elton John tune, “Bennie and the Jets,” has become the theme song of the Cal State Los Angeles cross-country team, which is ranked third in Division II.

Cruz, a 22-year-old junior, is the bandleader as the Golden Eagles prepare for their most important engagement of the year, the Division II national championships today in Evansville, Ind.

So far, he has measured up to every challenge. He is unbeaten against Division II competition this season. He won the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. finals by 23 seconds and won the West regional by 35 seconds.

Cruz also won a 10,000-meter road race in Century City and placed second in the Fresno, Stanford and Northridge invitationals. Consistency has become his trademark.

“His greatest assets are his mental toughness and his durability,” CSLA Coach John Tansley said of Cruz. “The key to distance running is to keep healthy and stay consistent in training. Benny has been able to do that despite the fact that he trains very hard. Most guys would break down if they tried to do Benny’s workouts all the time.”

Greg Ryan, Cruz’s personal coach, agreed with Tansley’s assessment.

“It’s hard for me to remember him having a bad workout,” said Ryan, who began working with Cruz last summer. “It just doesn’t happen very often. He works hard day in and day out. I’m sure there are runners who can outwork Benny for one week, maybe two, but there are very few runners who can outwork him for three or four months.”

Ryan, who is the coach of the Cal State L. A. women’s team, says much of Cruz’s consistency can be attributed to his personality.

“He’s very level-headed; he has a lot of strength in himself,” Ryan said. “He doesn’t have a big ego. I’m from New York and most of the good athletes back there have an ego to match their talent. But not Benny. If he has an ego I haven’t seen it.”

Cruz is in his first season running for Cal State L. A. after transferring from Fresno State last spring.

Tansley never even gave him a recruiting pitch. He left that to Gretchen Lohr, Cruz’s girlfriend and a member of the CSLA women’s team.

“He came back from Fresno and Gretchen kind of pointed him in our direction,” Tansley said.

Success in cross-country came quickly to Benito Eugenio Cruz when he started running in his sophomore year at North Hollywood High.

Known then as Eugene, Cruz won the City Section 10th-grade championship in 1980 and the varsity title as a junior. He transferred to Burbank High the following year when his family moved and placed second behind Jimmy Ortiz of Barstow in the 1982 Southern Section 3-A Division cross-country championships.

Burbank Coach Dave Kemp remembers Cruz as a fierce competitor and uses the Southern Section meet to illustrate the point.

“Ortiz had a three- or four-second lead on Eugene with 400 yards to go but it almost ended up in a dead heat,” Kemp said. “Most kids would have conceded defeat, but not Eugene. He refused to give up.”

After Cruz ran a 4:19 mile and a 9:13.2 two-mile during the track season, several Division I schools showed interest. He wasn’t sure that he could handle the academic workload at a four-year university, however, and opted for Valley College.

In addition to less academic pressure, Cruz reasoned that he’d have less athletic pressure as well. He was wrong.

Valley Coach Mark Covert, a former Division II cross-country champion, wasn’t about to let a runner with Cruz’s ability slide by without fully developing his potential.

“I liked Benny, but we had different philosophies on how to be successful,” Covert said. “He thought running at the JC level was just like high school. He ran well in high school mainly on natural talent. I knew he could never develop his potential without working harder.”

Cruz didn’t concentrate on training until the summer of 1984, after he had suffered an Achilles’ tendon injury in cross-country and turned in sub-par performances during track season.

He doubled his weekly mileage, running 80-100 miles a week with Covert, and the hard work paid off with state junior college titles in cross-country and at 10,000 meters during track.

That year--1984--was a turning point in Cruz’s career, physically and mentally.

“I was just all over the place in high school and my first year of college,” Cruz said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. With Mark, I started to understand why I was doing certain things, why I was running specific workouts.”

Around the same time, he met Lohr, who was then a member of Valley women’s team.

“If it weren’t for her, I don’t know where I’d be right now,” Cruz said. “I think I’d just be an average runner. She understands what I’m going through.”

Cruz and Lohr were separated temporarily when he chose to attend Fresno State and she went to Cal State L. A., but he returned after one semester. He liked Fresno’s program, but not the isolation of the San Joaquin Valley.

Luckily for Cal State L. A.

“He’s been a great addition to our team,” Tansley said. “He’s really fit in well. He’s a fierce competitor on the track but very friendly and soft-spoken off it.”

Cruz joined the Golden Eagle team with only one goal--to win the Division II title.

He will have to defeat a handful of talented East African runners who have dominated the division in recent seasons.

“I want to give them a good race,” Cruz said. “I don’t want them to just walk away with it. I plan to hang with them for as long as possible.”

That could be all the way to the finish line.