TRACK AND FIELD : America’s Best Make Rare U.S. Appearance

Come as you are. Come early and stay late. Bring friends. Bring acquaintances. Bring anybody. Pul-leeese.

For the sports of track and field, one way out of this mess is to beg. A better way is to provide the kind of circus that is coming to town Wednesday. This year’s nationals, known as the USA-Mobil Outdoor Championships by the marketing types and as TAC--for “The Athletics Congress,” track’s national governing body--by the athletes and coaches, can’t help being the best meet in this country since the 1988 Olympic Trials.

For the first time since those Trials, all the best of the eligible American athletes will compete in the same domestic meet. They have to, because this is the qualifying meet for next month’s World Outdoor Championships in Tokyo, which the athletes generally consider equal to the Olympics. So it’s safe for you to set foot inside a track stadium again. (When’s the last time you did that for an outdoor meet?)

Yet the approaching show exudes less of a happy-days-are-here-again feel and more of a last-chance saloon sense. One big, satisfying drink here, and it’s back to the desert again for American track, while American athletes are off looking for their oases overseas. “Outdoors, there’s much more money in Europe,” said Allan Steinfeld, whose New York Road Runners Club was instrumental in bringing the national championships back to the city for the first time in 25 years.

“Money,” said former world-record sprinter Jim Hines, “has destroyed track and field in America. Destroyed it.”

When the nationals were last run in New York -- at Randalls Island in 1968 -- Hines was regularly winning 100-meter races. For next-to-nothing. Now, he said, “The top-flight athletes here in America won’t run unless there’s money. Carl Lewis won’t run unless there’s money. That means he almost never runs in this country. And that means youngsters aren’t able to see their so-called role models. The athletes now are money-hungry. And the crowds don’t show up to the meets if the big guys aren’t there. So the track and field fan in America is dying out. Track and field is dying in this country.”

For a long time, track has been dying in this country. And for a lot of reasons. It needs more visibility, people say. It needs to develop a credible drug-testing procedure. It needs more college scholarships. It needs to emphasize a “final score.” It needs more match races between the top-ranked runners. It needs shorter, more compact meets. It needs to revive its grass-roots participation. It needs more emphasis on domestic competitions in non-Olympic years. It needs more relay carnivals. It needs marketing and television.

And, as Steinfeld said, “It all takes money.”

M-O-N-E-Y. Money could save the sport if it doesn’t kill the sport first. Before money was officially welcomed into the sport in the 1980s, “We lived,” said former shot-putter Brian Oldfield, “on rumors ... and beer.”

Since money has become available, it has made a few stars rich and left the majority feeling disenfranchised -- or looking for a serious payday in a sport such as football or basketball. “The way the money is distributed,” said Bob Hyten, a longtime volunteer coach in Edwardsville, Ill., and veteran of TAC rules committees, “it certainly hasn’t made anything better.”

By way of clarification: Lewis and the others will run and jump here this week without being paid. But only because the meet is a World Championships qualifier; in all other instances separate from Trials and Olympic Games and major qualifying meets, the big guys in fact are not there if they are not paid.

The problem, said TAC executive director Ollan Cassell, is that “we’re involved in a global sport. We’re not the NFL; the NFL doesn’t have to worry about what goes on in France or Germany or someplace else. So there has to be a rule by the IAAF (International Amateur Athletics Federation, track’s worldwide ruling body). Something like a salary cap.

“For instance, (1990 track athlete of the year) Michael Johnson recently was supposed to run in Oslo and didn’t show up, then showed up in Barcelona the next day and ran, and the rumor was that he got more money to go to Barcelona. If a guy doesn’t show up after he’s committed to a meet, there have to be suspensions.”

In the late 1970s, TAC was at the forefront in establishing “trust-fund amateurism” within the IAAF, allowing so-called amateurs in capitalist nations to take enough money to continue their careers beyond college, while supposedly banking excess money in a fund not to be touched until athletic retirement. That way, they could compete with state-supported communist-bloc athletes without working at “real” jobs.

But the trust funds were immediately elitist in this sport of the masses; Lewis and Edwin Moses were making six figures in no time while income for the also-rans dried up. “If a meet promoter has $100,000 to work with and three guys want $20,000 each to compete, that hurts the sport,” said former Olympic pole vaulter Bob Seagren, like Hines a trackman from a previous life (the 1960s and early ‘70s.).

“Ninety-nine percent of the athletes now are running because they’re getting paid,” former world-record hurdler Renaldo Nehemiah said. “It’s not setting a good example for the kids.” Of course, Nehemiah was a pioneer of the run-for-money emphasis; he was the first to relinquish a college scholarship to sign with an independent running club (for a “salary”) while still enrolled at Maryland, and he admits that track is “how I make my living.”

Seagren remembers the athletes of his day “used to compete in 80 meets a year. We had to, in order to survive” on the pittance of under-the-table appearance money and equally humble shoe-company arrangements. “Now, there’s no visibility to the youth of America, because our big-name track and field athletes don’t participate in U.S. meets -- and that’s because of where the money is and isn’t.

“I can remember when the stands would be full for track meets, kids wanting autographs. I look back on the days of the Coliseum Relays in Los Angeles -- 35,000 people in the stands,” Seagren said. “And the high school meets were well-attended. The other day, I went to my daughter’s high school meet, and there were so few people there, I thought I was at the wrong place. There wasn’t even a parent in the stands for each kid.”

When this year’s Penn Relays -- as much a festival of spring as a track meet -- drew 41,612 on a single day in April, it was the 16th largest non-Olympic crowd in U.S. track history. The bad news is that the Penn Relays would have been canceled if not for a six-figure donation from comedian Bill Cosby, the year after a similar bit of charity from George Steinbrenner. The bad news is that the first 15 largest non-Olympic crowds all dated at least to 1964, when track’s long slump, in terms of spectator interest, began to take hold. Former TAC president Leroy Walker recently noted that his sport was ranked 17th among spectator sports by a public opinion poll. “Behind bowling.”

Cassell insists the sport is doing fine in America. He argues that the way to judge U.S. track is by how American athletes perform on the international stage, but even that isn’t a solid argument: At the 1987 World Championships, Americans won only eight individual gold medals in the 38 men’s and women’s events. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, they won only 11 golds. In total track medals won at Seoul, both East Germany (25) and the Soviet Union (23) did better than the Americans (22).

According to Track & Field News, the share of world records set by Americans has crashed from more than 50%, around 1960, to barely above 10%. Furthermore, while American track fans could see roughly half of the world records set on U.S. soil in the 1960s, they saw none here between the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the ’88 Olympic Trials.

This week’s nationals are an antidote to all the track gloom and doom. The sponsoring Metropolitan TAC has worked mightily to promote the meet, and has offered 10,000 free tickets per day to inner-city children, in hopes of showing the youngsters a sport with which they barely are acquainted, at a rare time when all the top performances are available.

Come one, come all. No RSVP necessary. Just show up.