He Won’t Let Labor of Love Go by Boards

They are our best athletes. They run faster, jump higher, throw farther. There’s not an ounce of fat on them. They work out, eat right. They don’t smoke, chew, swear or drink. Their bodies are their temples.

They don’t need a team to do what they do, or a car, a club, a racket, although they might need a pole. Some of them perform barefoot.

They are track and field stars, and by all rights they should be the most celebrated of performers if athletic prowess is the criterion.

They’re not. They’re a hard sell.

Just ask my friend, Al Franken.

Al has been trying to sell track, keep it alive as a viable sport in this part of the country for more than 40 years. He will be putting on his 35th annual Sunkist track meet at the Sports Arena on Feb. 19. Many of the people who will be in the 1996 Olympic Games will be there.

A track tradition was once paramount in this part of the country. It was a legacy of the great USC teams with sprinters Charley Paddock, the original “world’s fastest human,” and Mel Patton, and the great shotputters like Parry O’Brien who put the sport on Page 1. The Olympics were wrested away from Europe by track-crazy local promoters.

Franken is almost the last of them. It hasn’t been easy keeping the tradition alive. The proliferation of pro sports has passed it by. If you’re not carrying or hitting or kicking or dunking a ball, if you’re not getting several million dollars a year for standing out in the field blowing bubble gum, you may be an athlete but you’re not a star. Your autograph is not worth several thousand dollars.

It saddens Franken. Forty years ago, it was nothing for the Coliseum Relays to attract 40,000 to 50,000 paid customers. Next week, he might have trouble filling the Sports Arena with 13,500. “It’s partly the earthquake,” he laments. “They see the pictures of the Coliseum and think the Sports Arena is in the same shape. It isn’t.”

For Al, keeping the sport alive has always been a labor of love. “Lord knows, you can’t get rich,” he grimaces.

He got infected in the early days of the old Compton Relays, a now-defunct sporting event that used to have some of track’s finest moments.

Keeping track on life-support since hasn’t been easy.

“When we started the indoor Sunkist meet, we had one big problem--no track,” Franken says. “So, we contacted Ollie Kuechle, the sports editor in Milwaukee, where they had an indoor track, and he agreed to lend us theirs if we promised to return it and didn’t bust it up.

“That was all well and good, but to fit it in the truck, we had to leave off part of it. We left off the long jump runway. Which was fine--except we had a field full of long jumpers.

“For a while, it didn’t seem as if it would matter anyway. The truck got lost. Or at least, the driver took a few detours. We had a sold-out house, an Olympic field--and no track. It finally arrived the afternoon of the meet. Guys were running on it at one end and guys with hammers were finishing it up at the other.”

The troubles were not always material. Tracksters sometime got lost, too. The great Bob Beamon, the first man (and for 25 years the only man) to jump farther than 29 feet, had trouble making the meet because he forgot where he’d parked the rental car Franken had provided for him.

Franken recalls: “I said, ‘Well, Bob, where are the keys?’ and he said, ‘Keys?!’ He had forgotten where he left the car. I had visions of the daily tab running up and up till it would have been cheaper buying the car, till we finally found the car in a parking lot in San Diego. The next year, I told Bob, ‘Take a cab, even from San Diego, it’ll be cheaper.’ ”

Track was relentlessly amateur in those days. “I got suspended for life three times,” Franken says bemusedly. The AAU once flew out an official (Olan Cassell) to meet a plane on which the African miler, Kipchoge Keino, was arriving, and to tell him he had to turn around and go back, that he would be suspended if he ran in Franken’s meet. Keino laughed. And ran.

The cast of characters in his meets--two indoor meets and an outdoor at UCLA--read like a Track Hall of Fame roster. The great milers--Peter Snell, Filbert Bayi, John Walker, John Landy, Wes Santee, Ron Delany--ran here.

“You paid them off in pocket money,” Franken recalls. “Santee used to get extra airline tickets and cash them in. Wilma Rudolph was the biggest attraction we ever had here. She had just won three gold medals in the Rome Olympics, and the fans literally broke down the doors trying to get in to see her. We had to sweep up the glass. She cost me a plane ticket. Then, my wife, Shirley, took her shopping and bought her a jacket. You would have thought we bought her the Hope diamond. Wilma came from a family of 20 kids and she hadn’t been in too many Saks Fifth Avenues.”

The Frankens used to have to house the athletes in their home in the early days--paying for a hotel room was out of the question. “I would have got suspended for two lifetimes,” he says.

There were disappointments. “We got Lasse Viren, the great Olympic distance runner (who won the 5,000 and the 10,000 in two Olympics in a row),” Franken says. “We moved the event from night to afternoon for ABC. But he never even finished his race!”

Valeriy Borzov, who had won the Olympic sprints at Munich in ‘72, came out for a meet--and didn’t survive the heats!

Some athletes wouldn’t survive the trip. “You’d get a call saying the runner was stranded in Lisbon--he’d missed his plane. I can’t tell you how many times I went out to the airport to pick up a runner, only to watch everybody get off the plane but him.”

Was it worth it? “Oh, yeah,” Franken concedes. “They were a colorful bunch. You had to educate them to the realities of promotion of track in America. In their home countries, they were big idols. Here, they were faces in the crowd. In Europe, track was second only to soccer. The TV rights to the world track meet sold for $45 million. And that’s only the European rights.

“I used to deal direct with the athletes. Now, you deal with agents who are unrealistic. You have to remember track was big--but that was before we had two major league baseball teams, two NFL football teams, two NBA basketball teams and two NHL hockey teams, to say nothing of two big-time college football and basketball programs.”

Franken had to pay Canada’s Ben Johnson $35,000 in under-the-table funds for his (unsuccessful) “comeback” try after his steroid banishment. He ran as unevenly as he was to run at Barcelona in the 1992 Olympics. Johnson, off steroids, couldn’t catch a bus.

“People say they love sports,” Franken claims. “How can there be any purer sports than a guy--or a girl--who runs faster or jumps farther than anyone on the planet?”

They buy the hype. They buy the contact, dig the violence. Sometimes, I think the only track meets in history that broke the charts were the ones where the Christians tried to outrun the lions.

It might be a hard sell, Franken acknowledges. But in his view, it beats field goals, intentional bases on balls, bunts. Foot-faults. And free throws.