RACING THE ODDS : John Marino Tries to Build Stature of Race Across AMerica

Somewhere in New Jersey, John Marino, a bowlegged ex-baseball catcher with a bad back, climbed off a bike and onto a choice piece of Garden State pavement.

After riding across an entire country, and just 60 miles short of his destination--New York City Hall--he had discovered that his attempt to break the transcontinental record he had set the year before had failed.

Demoralized, dehydrated, degraded and not at all happy, he found he couldn’t pedal another foot.

Ten years can pass fairly quickly when you’re inventing and keeping alive a sport that claims the continental United States as its playing field.

It was in 1979 that Marino found himself stuck in the swamps of Jersey. Today he finds himself wedged between filing cabinets, copying machines, cycling posters, water bottles, boxes of this, shelves of that, in a cramped piece of Tustin office space dedicated to one purpose: Race Across AMerica, a bike race from one shining sea to another, perhaps the ultimate of the ultra-sports that have gained popularity in the 1980s.

And Marino, who has kept the race going, will watch the eighth edition take off Sunday from the Orange County Fairgrounds. In the last couple of months leading into the race, it’s not unusual for him to work 20-hour days and go without sleep some days as he coordinates more than 1,000 volunteers along checkpoints 30 miles apart across the country. There are programs to be printed and sponsors to be swooned.

If there is anyone who will stick to this quest it is Marino, whose capacity to persevere is intense but is belied by his mild manner.

“Bulldogs don’t bark much,” said Paul Cornish, whose transcontinental record Marino broke in 1978.

Race Across AMerica is having unqualified success in attracting participants--qualifying races are held around the country to come up with about 30 racers. But this will be the race’s third year without a television contract, which makes it hard to draw big-money sponsors.

The United States Cycling Federation will not allow its members--the top cyclists in the country--to compete in RAAM. And some say Marino’s creation is closer to a TV mini-series than athletics.

Asked what’s tougher, dealing with the race or riding in it, Marino smiles, “You know, I’d have to rate that a push.”

Marino made his first transcontinental ride in 1978. An unlikely feat of course, all the more unlikely because Marino was not a cyclist. He was a catcher who had played baseball at San Diego State and had been drafted by the Dodgers.

But a chronic back condition--he compressed vertebrae weightlifting--ended that career. Depressed, he fled to Europe for two years. Cycling was an economic consideration more than a pleasurable activity.

Soon after his return to the United States, he hit upon the idea of riding across the country. He had been taking some self-improvement classes from Gordon Smith, a Santa Ana man who spoke six languages and had been a Marine pilot and concert pianist.

Through methods that included listening to audio tapes, Smith claimed a human being could do just about anything. With loose ends dangling from his dream of a life in sports, Marino set his sights on running the Boston Marathon. But no tape can cure compressed vertebrae and that project was scratched.

Looking through a Guinness Book of World Records one day, he happened upon the record for riding across America. The record of 13 days 5 hours 20 minutes was held by Cornish, who happened to live in Tustin.

Marino looked up Cornish’s number in the phone book and gave him a call.

“I answered the phone and this guy says, “Hi, I’m going to break your record,’ ” Cornish said. “I asked him how much cycling experience he had? He said practically none. I said, ‘Good luck.’ ”

But Cornish, who had made his transcontinental ride just because he said he could and a friend said he couldn’t, admired Marino’s chutzpah .

“I knew this was a guy who was going to work at it,” he said. “I didn’t think he’d make it, but I thought he’d make a credible attempt.”

Cornish set up a work program for Marino that started out with the relatively infantile distance of 20 miles a day. Two years later, Marino was riding hundreds of miles a week. In 1978 he set out on his ride.

He was soon miserable. No amount of training could prepare him for the drudgery of riding the plains of Kansas, fighting a head wind, just trying to make it to the next grain silo.

His support crew was lying to him about the time and about how long he slept. They knew that Marino couldn’t ride as fast as Cornish, so he would have to out-endure him.

“They’d tell me I’d slept six hours when I’d only slept two,” Marino said.

He was miserable.

“I didn’t want to let my crew down, I knew the only way I could stop with honor would be to be injured,” he said. “So I kept trying to figure out a way that I could fall off the bike and hurt myself without really hurting myself.”

He thought about that all the way to the steps of New York’s City Hall, where he ended his trip in 13 days 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Saddle sores behind him, intoxicated by success as well as TV appearances, Marino prepared for another cross-country ride the next year.

Marino had talked to several people about developing the ride into a sporting event with multiple entrants.

“I knew if my idea was going to fly, I’d have to make the ride again,” he said.

But the 1979 trip was a disaster from the beginning with rainstorms and routes that led to dead ends.

“It was even more miserable than the first trip,” Marino said.

When his crew informed him in Phillipsburg, N.J., that he had just gone over his record, Marino got off his bike and sat down.

“I just couldn’t go on.”

Crew members fretted about the wrath of sponsors if Marino quit for anything short of a broken bone. Somehow a plan, without Marino’s knowledge, was developed that would take Marino to a Manhattan hospital under the pretext of injury.

“They threw me in the motor home, drove me to Manhattan, and when I stepped out there were reporters, cameras, probably 50 people waiting for me,” he said. “My first question was, ‘Where am I?’ But it turned out I was bigger story because I hadn’t made it.”

By 1982, Marino’s dream of a transcontinental race was realized. He set out on the trip, with three other riders and ABC film crew. ABC condensed the show into two hours and won numerous awards for the production.

“They called it soap opera sports,” Marino said. “That kind of bugged me at first, but from their perspective the sport offered a lot of human drama and audiences eat that stuff up.”

So much so that ABC chronicled the next three races. But after the 1986 race, and some personnel changes at the network, ABC let Marino know it wasn’t sure about televising the race in 1987.

“They said they couldn’t tell me for sure until Dec. 31.”

Meanwhile, a certain large fast-food chain--golden arches, clown mascot--was interested in sponsoring the event, but only if the race had a national TV deal.

On Dec. 31, Marino got the word. ABC would not televise the event, the fast-food chain would not sponsor. Happy New Year.

This year’s event also won’t be televised, something that worries Marino and mystifies Peter Rosten, who made an award-winning film about Marino’s 1979 ride.

“When someone performs endlessly, cries, laughs, shows raw emotion, the audience goes ‘Wow,’ ” said Rosten, who was executive producer of the film, “True Believers.” “Pro athletes are so cool, they show nothing, but when an audience sees just a normal guy like them bearing his soul, that character becomes so accessible that they cheer.”

Believing as much, and aware that sports survival depends on on coverage, Marino asks competitors, their families and friends to stage letter-writing campaigns to their local papers and national publications. He claims that recent letter-writing campaign to Sports Illustrated gained race coverage from that magazine.

There are no big-name sponsors still and Marino is barely breaking even personally. In fact, he’s working toward become a building contractor in case RAAM falls through.

And yet, the popularity of the event continues to grow. For the most part, the competitors are in their 30s. Marino attributes that to the fact that racers must finance their own operation--support crew and vehicles, equipment--which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Participants are often professionals who have the time for training.

But why train for something that Cornish calls “the pits of holy hell. A depressing, sickening, deadening experience.”

One reason may be that, like Marino, many of the participants are not lifelong cyclists. Marino says they’re adventurers. Rosten calls them “heroic idiots.”

These are types who take something on because of the challenge. And strange as it sounds, riding across America is a very doable challenge.

“Think of it this way,” Cornish said. “I can study the piano all I want, but if I don’t have the God-given talent I’ll never be a great pianist. But something like this (RAAM) you can achieve just through hard work.”

Marino would like to see the day when top young riders who belong to the United States Cycling Federation are allowed.

He knows that a dramatic race between two top riders might just be the type of thing that could capture audiences’ imagination. The Ironman Triathlon was helped immeasurably when a race between women competitors came down to the wire with one attempting to crawl across the finish line.

“If we could have something dramatic like that, something that people really identify with, it might be enough to push us over the top,” Marino said.

But for now, the race struggles on and Marino remains among the clutter of his little office, feeling at times that he’s stuck somewhere in New Jersey.