ON TRACK WITH BILL TOOMEY : ’68 Decathlon Champ Has a Lot on His Mind

Bill Toomey, 50 years old and fit as a bass fiddle, sits at a large desk wearing a fresh, blue, button-down shirt with a pair of impeccably pressed pleated khaki pants and a rep tie.

The subject at the moment is physical conditioning. But before Toomey is finished talking this morning, the range of topics he addresses will include drugs, potentates, pain, Peter Pan, Jean Paul Sartre, Margaret Mead, Ben Johnson, Andy Granatelli and dirt--great big Caterpillar steamshovels full of dirt.

Toomey digs life. And he is that rare living archeological find--an eclectic who knows what the word means and how to spell it. He is also electric, free of charge. And he is even mildly eccentric. Pleasingly so, actually.

Behind him on an office wall are two commendations from former President Richard Nixon and a framed rendering of a crinkled athletic supporter captioned by these words:

“ There’s nothing sadder than a washed up jock .”

Toomey was a 29-year-old schoolteacher when he won a gold medal in the 10-event decathlon for the United States at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The year after, he ran 10 decathlons and broke the world record on his 10th try on the 10th day of December at 10 in the morning at UCLA.

“I knew when I walked out that gate after setting the world record that it was all over,” he said. “I felt kind of like Peter Pan. It was time to grow up. Time to leave Peter Pan behind. Time for the rest of my life.”

Right now that life consists of heading up the corporate fundraising for the U.S. Olympic Training Center/San Diego. He has been living here since November, laying the groundwork for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s third such facility, the other two being Colorado Springs and Lake Placid. He is on loan from a chain of hotels for which he is a vice president.

Toomey is “washed,” as in well-scrubbed. He is “up,” as in high energy. And he is a dedicated supporter of the Olympic movement.

But he is not a washed-up jock. Just look at him. Just listen to him.

“I work out every day,” he begins. “I let myself go for a while. But somehow the image and the mental process didn’t seem to be in sync, so I decided to watch what I eat and always work out, regardless.

“Being 50 was kind of scary for a guy who was going to be 29, my Olympic age, for the rest of my life. It’s like James Dean. He never got old. Every picture of James Dean is going to be a young picture. Right?”

Anyhow, Toomey continued, “It’s kind of fun to be in shape because people don’t expect it. We live in a Sansabelt mentality. You know, if it doesn’t fit, repair it.

“If you start looking real bad, get a vest. If that gets rough, get a sweater. And then there’s always the Andy Granatelli look--with a trenchcoat--so you’re pretty well covered until your face looks like a reject from a Lakers game. That’s when you got to start taking care of detail. And that’s why I did.”

Toomey doesn’t jog. “Boring,” he says.

But he does pullovers and sit-ups--1,500 sit-ups a day.

And he wishes. And he thinks.

“If you had a magic wand,” he is asked, “and you had 30 seconds, and you could fix one thing about the Olympics, what would it be?”

“Eliminate the drug problem so that it doesn’t face the kids,” he says. “So that they can focus on the important part of what it’s all about. I can deal with the politics because that’s part of life. Everybody says get politics out of the Olympics but politics are fine.”

Drugs are something else. It was that dark look in Ben Johnson’s eyes that scared Toomey when he saw the Canadian sprinter for the first time in Seoul. Then he looked at Johnson’s body. Then he watched him run.

“He looked like a runaway beer truck,” Toomey says. “This guy was huge. A physique like that makes an impression. The guy was an animal.”

Toomey says he feels sorry for Ben Johnson. He says he also feels sorry for athletes such as Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who have been indicted by drug innuendo because of the pall Johnson has cast.

“I think it’s easy to fall into the gossip trap,” he says. “I tend to believe in the good old American theme: innocent until proven guilty.

“Florence Griffith Joyner is a fine athlete. She did cross-training and under the testing standards that were set, she was fine. There’s just no evidence (against her) that I know of outside of hearsay. And that’s not admissible in any court.

“Until someone proves otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, she was straight and narrow. I’d be a bum if I selected any other prose on that one.”

But Toomey says the financial and psychological pressures confronting track athletes today are entirely different than the ones he and his merry band of itinerant gypsy-buddies faced back in the ‘60s.

“These guys make $250,000 for one 100-meter race,” Toomey says. “I never had those types of economic decisions. We were in a fraternity of guys who did it because it was a great idea.”

That doesn’t mean he didn’t take his sport seriously. One year he stationed himself overseas to train with the Germans. The hardest part was the day he picked up a paper with results from a meet back in the States.

“Guys were running quick quarters,” he says, “Guys were long jumping 27 feet. And I’m thinking, ‘I didn’t work out today.’ ”

It was dark and late on that moonlit night in Germany when Toomey packed three sweatsuits in the trunk and drove his used Mercedes to a nearby field covered with snow.

With help from the odometer, he measured out 300 meters. Then he turned the heater up full blast, left the lights on and the car running. (Did Carl Lewis ever do this?)

After the first 300 meters, he hopped back in the car and changed socks and sweatsuits. After the second 300 meters, he did the same. The third 300 meters was at once the hardest and the sweetest.

“I’ll never forget it,” Toomey says. “I conquered fatigue, I conquered malaise. I took another big step.”

And he did it, he says, without drugs. Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people. Toomey, who grew up on the streets of New York and suffered an injury that partially paralyzed his right hand at age 12, says he needs only his own spirit to get high.

When he speaks at schools he tells kids there is no easy answer, no fast fix.

“I tell them in order to dig a big hole, you don’t do it in one day. You take a shovelful at a time. And at the end of four years, you got a helluva hole.

“And if you live your whole life like that educationally and physically . . . I mean I’m on my way to China.”

Two steps forward. One step back. Two steps forward. One step back.

“Margaret Mead said frustration fuels creativity,” Toomey says. “Jean-Paul Sartre was asked where he learned his philosophy of life, and he said it wasn’t in the classroom. He said it was on the playing fields because it was there that he found the intellectual and physical process together. It was there he found teamwork. It was a great laboratory for the body and the mind.”

In short, Toomey prefers anthropologists, existentialists and the work ethic over locker room apothecaries.

And he’s not afraid to take a chance. Three years after his last decathlon, he took an assumed name and a duffel bag full of moxie up the coast to Santa Maria, where tried and succeeded in qualifying for the Olympic Trials. He hadn’t trained in two years before the meet.

Things were moving along rather nicely until the 400 meters, which had been his best event in the Olympics.

“You talk about hitting the wall?” he says. “I hit a hamburger grinder. I didn’t walk with dignity after that race.

“And then I started thinking that night: You know, there’s a 1,500 meters tomorrow, and I can always bow out. The assumed name will have the identity of being the loser, not me.”

Of course he completed all five events the second day and scored an astonishing 7,700 points. But that was his last decathlon. Peter Pan had been reduced to peanut butter.

Bill Toomey has traveled to 70 countries, worked for the Peace Corps and once had an office in Brazil. But for reasons not clear, Rafer Johnson before him and Bruce Jenner and Daley Thompson after were decathletes with bigger names.

Comparing point totals is meaningless because the decathlon scoring tables change constantly. But Toomey would have loved competing against Jenner or Thompson, the free-thinking Brit.

“I would have scared the hell out of them,” Toomey says. “I would have been a better vaulter now than I was then, and I would have done the (Fosbury) Flop (in the high jump).

“I don’t want to be characterized as some guy who says, ‘If I only coulda.’ But I think I would have given those guys something to think about. Who know who would have won. That’s sheer fantasy.

“But I do know this. I was a good competitor. And in the end, those are the guys they wouldn’t want to put it on the line with because I didn’t lose. I was faster than they were, and I was as good a jumper. I was a little down in the throwing events. But it would have been fun.”

Certainly more fun than the time Toomey competed in Iran for the Shah. Before the meet began, Toomey told an interpreter he needed to visit the bathroom. There were none inside the stadium. Worse, there was a rule that once the Shah had entered the premises, nobody could leave until he did.

When the interpreter relayed Toomey’s request, a guard bashed the interpreter’s impertinent skull with the butt of a rifle.

“All of a sudden,” Toomey says, “I didn’t have to go anymore.”

Bill Toomey has played tennis with the Kennedys in Hyannisport. And he has shared a microphone with Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

In 1969, he married Mary Rand, the former British Olympic long jumper. She understood him pretty well.

Not long after their marriage, he told a writer he was the “workout king of the world” only to be corrected by his wife, who in great good humor, said, “You’re the tall-tale king of the world.”

Toomey is still a rascal. And his looks are still “boyish” despite half a century of wear. But he is also a father, a coach and a corporate fundraiser.

And the Olympic training facility people in San Diego are thrilled to have him.

“He has opened doors for us that no one else in the world could get their foot into,” says Lisa Lareau, a co-worker.

And they like him because he is full of himself without being full of cow chips.

“I have often said,” Toomey says. “and not embarrassedly so, that I have probably passed more guys in the streets who could have beat me in the decathlon if they knew about it and trained for it than I would really like to imagine.”