Raising the Roof for Olympians : Ex-Decathlete Toomey, 50, Brings a Special Flair to Funding Effort

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

The subject at the moment is physical conditioning. But before Toomey is finished, he will discuss drugs, potentates, pain, Peter Pan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Margaret Mead, Ben Johnson, Andy Granatelli and dirt--steam-shovel loads of dirt.

Behind Toomey on an office wall are two commendations from former President Richard Nixon and a framed rendering of a crinkled athletic supporter captioned: “There’s nothing sadder than a washed up jock.”

Toomey was a 29-year-old teacher when he won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. A year later, he competed in 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 raising corporate funding for the new U.S. Olympic Training Center here. He has been living here since November, laying the groundwork for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s fourth such facility, the three others being at Colorado Springs, Colo., Lake Placid, N.Y., and Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Mich. He is on loan from a chain of hotels for which he is a vice president.

He also spends time training. He is no washed up jock.

“I work out every day,” he says. “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?

“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 trench coat--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 chin-ups and sit-ups--1,500 sit-ups a day.

And he wishes. And he thinks.

If he could change 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. He said 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 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.”

But Toomey says the financial and psychological pressures confronting track athletes today are entirely different from the ones he faced 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 trained with athletes in West Germany. 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.’ ”

Late one moonlit night, Toomey packed three sweat suits in the trunk and drove his used Mercedes-Benz to a nearby field covered with snow.

Using the car’s odometer, he measured 300 meters. Then he turned the heater up, left the lights on and the car running.

After the first 300 meters, he hopped back into the car and changed socks and sweat suits. After the second 300 meters, he did the same. The third 300 meters was both 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. Toomey, who grew up on the streets of New York and suffered an injury that partially paralyzed his right hand when he was 12, says he needs only his own spirit to get high.

When he speaks at schools he tells kids there are no easy answers.

“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 hell of a hole.

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

Toomey adds: “Margaret Mead said frustration fuels creativity. 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.”

And Toomey is not afraid to take a chance. Three years after his last decathlon, he took an assumed name to Santa Maria, where he qualified 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.’ ”

Not only did he complete all five events the second day, he scored an astonishing 7,700 points. But that was his last decathlon.

Bill Toomey has traveled to 70 countries, worked for the Peace Corps and once had an office in Brazil. But Rafer Johnson before him and Bruce Jenner and Daley Thompson after were decathletes with bigger names.

Comparing decathletes from different eras is difficult. Still, Toomey would have loved competing against Jenner or Thompson.

“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 knows 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.”