Track and Field Needs Almost a Miracle to Recover From Neglect in the U.S.

Contrary to the popular mythology, track and field in America has not gone to the dogs. According to one veteran U.S. track promoter wishing to set the record straight, it has been superseded by the dogs--and a seafaring orangutan named Sam.

Trying to drum up some publicity for his Los Angeles Invitational indoor meet last February, Al Franken and his son, Don, set up a pre-meet photo op with sprinter Maurice Greene, then the sport’s reigning World’s Fastest Man, soon to become the world-record holder at 100 meters.

“We only got two TV crews for Maurice Greene,” Franken says. “Donald did a boat show in June with an orangutan driving a boat and pulling a water-skiing dog. He got six TV crews. Including one in a helicopter. For Sam the orangutan and Duke the water-skiing dog.”

Of course, Franken notes with a beleaguered laugh, Sam and Duke did something many top American track and field stars do not.

“Both of them showed,” Franken says.

This is how longtime U.S. track advocates and aficionados take their sport today. Cried out long ago, they are now down to laughing to blot out the pain. They used to be disgusted; now they try to be amused.

By now, they are numb to the news of yet another track crowd in the hundreds. Or, in the case of the St. Louis Grand Prix meet in May, in the dozens.

“A friend of mine did a head count,” one promoter says with near-perverse fascination. “Two hundred forty-eight.”

A reporter phones the head of Nike’s track division for an interview on the state of U.S. track and field and his request is interrupted with laughter.

“I’ve been involved with this thing for 40 years,” says Steve Miller, still chuckling. “Just use what I said in last year’s article.”

Track in this country has been foundering for so long, unable to capitalize on two U.S. Olympics in 12 years and an all-star roster of talent that is the envy of the rest of the world, it has become, well, a running joke.

It ranks among the most clumsily botched marketing opportunities of the last quarter-century: How a sport with the likes of Greene, Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Michael Johnson, Marion Jones, Dan O’Brien and Gail Devers--buoyed by the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 and the Atlanta Games of 1996--can take such a windfall and turn it into a pastime scrounging for crumbs on cable television and in the back pages of most sports sections.

“You take a look at some of the ratings in this country, and the top 60 or 100 sports watched on TV, and track and field has historically not been ahead of certain activities like motocross and tractor pulls,” Nike’s Miller says. “Why is it that happens? Why is it that we have not been able to convince young people that winning a 5,000-meter race is important?

“If it can be done with tractor pulls, it should be able to be done with some of the best athletes on the face of the planet.”

Case in point: Marion Jones. In Europe, Jones is revered as the greatest female athlete on the planet, the current world leader at 100 and 200 meters, with stated aspirations of winning five gold medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. But in America, in her home country, she is a less familiar face than half the starting lineup of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, both of the tennis-playing Williams sisters and more than a few WNBA professionals.

“If I walked through a restaurant in the United States with Lindsay Davenport,” Miller says, “there would be a significant number of people who would know who she was because of TV and Time and Sports Illustrated and newspapers. But if I walked through the same restaurant with Marion Jones, that would be a little bit of a reach at this point.”

Or take Greene. Through no fault of his own, his year to date reads like an anecdotal chronicle of all that ails track and field in this country in 1999:

* In April, Greene is scheduled to run at the Mt. SAC Relays. So is club teammate and running mate Ato Boldon, who ran a 9.86-second 100 meters at Mt. SAC in 1998. It looms as quite the marquee matchup--Greene versus Boldon at 100 meters--except Boldon enters the 200 meters instead.

“Maurice and I have a pact,” Boldon explains. “We run different events here, instead of beating up each other and then taking on the rest of the world.”

Then, Greene tweaks his leg and can’t run, Jon Drummond is hospitalized because of meningitis and, in the words of Mt. SAC director Scott Davis, “My 100 just blew up on me.”

* In early June, Greene runs in the pilot event of the Track and Field Assn., an American professional track league with plans for a five- to eight-meet season in 2000. The meet is held on Long Island on same weekend as the Belmont Stakes, the Met-Yankee “Subway Series” and the Knicks taking on the Indiana Pacers in the NBA playoffs. The meet draws an announced crowd of 3,184.

* On June 16 in Athens, Greene breaks Donovan Bailey’s three-year-old 100-meter world record with a scintillating time of 9.79 seconds. The Times of London heralds the news with this lead paragraph the next day:

“In the city where he was crowned world champion two years ago, Maurice Greene, the so-called Kansas Cannonball, last night became the new world-record holder for the 100 metres. Yet there is a persuasive argument for delaying celebration until after the result of the mandatory drugs test is known.”

* In late June, Greene is entered in the 200 meters at the U.S. championships in Eugene, Ore. So is Michael Johnson, the world-record holder. It is billed as the head-to-head showdown of the meet--until Johnson pulls out, claiming a leg injury. Less than a week later, Johnson is in Lausanne, Switzerland, winning a 400-meter race in 43.9 seconds.

* Two months after his world record, Greene has yet to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the front of any cereal box, a television commercial of any variety. Greene’s 9.79 is the track equivalent of Mark McGwire’s hitting 70 home runs--and Greene ranks among track’s most personable and media-friendly personalities--yet, by present-day media and endorsement standards, the feat largely has been treated as a one-day wonder.

Nike, the shoe company that sponsors Greene, insists it will feature Greene in a promotional campaign “closer to the Olympics.”

Emanuel Hudson, Greene’s agent, says, “People want to do a commercial with Maurice now, but we can’t because it conflicts with his [running] season. Maurice has basically been in Europe since the end of June. It’s been very, very difficult for us to do things of that nature.”

Athletes dodging head-to-head matchups.

Meets snowed under by competition from better-publicized sports.

Athletes claiming injury and bailing at the last minute.

Record-setting performances tainted by the ever-present specter of performance-enhancing drugs.

Lost opportunities on the marketing front.

Too many meets in Europe and too few in the United States.

Listening to those involved in the elite level of the sport in this country, that’s pretty much the working short list of major millstones hanging around the aching neck of American track and field.

(The long list would include alleged negligence on the part of the U.S. track federation, too much power exercised by the shoe companies, too many agents who can’t see the big picture over the short-term cash-in, too many promoters who promise what they can’t deliver, athletes feuding with or refusing to cooperate with the media, not enough collegiate track scholarships, confusion over the metric system, the rise in popularity of NASCAR, professional wrestling and the X Games, and a new generation of stick-and-ball sports editors who don’t remember the glory days and get their fill of track and field every fourth summer.)

So many hurdles, most of them self-imposed, for a sport so simple, so easy to comprehend and appreciate.

“It’s the purest of all sports,” Davis professes. “How fast can you run, how high can you jump, how far can you throw? The gun goes off and the guy who hits the tape first wins. Period. It’s still the same piece of business it was 100 years ago.”

Or as Miller puts it:

“At the end of the day, two kids standing in a field will always race from one tree to the other. Or they will find something to jump over. Or they will find a rock to throw. So in spite of all of us, in spite of all our stupidity, in spite of all our arguments, in spite of all our pontifications, it’s the kids who end up saving us.

“Somehow, we should be able to find a way to capture that almost primordial, instinctive activity and package it.”

Slow Out of the Blocks

Hollywood has not ignored U.S. track and field. In the last three years, two movies have been released focusing on the same American runner, Steve Prefontaine.

Tellingly, Prefontaine has been dead for 25 years.

He ran during the end of U.S. track’s last boom period, an era that culminated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sport boasted such household names as Jim Ryun, Bob Seagren, Bob Beamon, Al Oerter, Randy Matson, Frank Shorter and Dwight Stones.

Hudson, 42, remembers that period as “the glory years. . . . I remember ’68 and Mexico City and the golden days of track. Back then, as a kid, I knew as much about track and field as I did about American football.”

Those were the conditions Ollan Cassell inherited in the late 1960s when he became executive director of the U.S. track and field federation, a position he held for 31 years, until 1997. His tenure coincides with track and field’s slow, painful fade from view in the United States, a reign many American track observers regard with the same warmth as baseball old-timers reminiscing about the Chicago Black Sox scandal.

“Track stood still while the whole sports-marketing business was invented and grew up all around it,” says Craig Masback, who succeeded Cassell as executive director of USA Track and Field in 1997. “There are literally whole college courses on marketing in sports--and I guarantee you there are no case studies on track in terms of a success story.

“Look at where the NBA was at in the late ‘70s, with the NBA finals tape-delayed and televised at 11:30 at night. At that time, the NCAA [track] championships were televised live on the ‘Wide World of Sports.’

“It was a combination of track not doing for itself and other sports aggressively reinventing themselves--changing their rules to be more TV-friendly, becoming more entertaining as live spectator events, consciously marketing superstars--the whole Bird-Magic phenomenon the NBA created.”

Masback notes that “there was no substantial impact by NASCAR in the ‘60s. There were no [American] professional soccer leagues. Hockey was much more a regional game. The NBA was far weaker and less important. Even the NFL was a shadow of what it is today.

“And that’s not to mention professional lacrosse leagues and arena football and the rise of college sports and high school sports promotion. If you just go on a [newspaper] column-inch basis, the opportunities have shrunk for us. At the same time, we didn’t have a proactive public relations activity in this office.”

Add it all up and, Masback says, “I don’t think it’s a mystery at all” why track and field has plummeted in popularity in the United States.

“It’s a mystery that it hung on at all.”

But not all the blame can be laid at the porch of the Cassell regime. For if ever there was a sport reared on and ruled by runaway self-interest, it is track and field.

Put a shot or fling a discus anywhere and you’re likely to hit a guilty party:

* Agents who are in the sport only for the commission.

* Athletes who compete only for the best available payday, or in the event that best preserves their world rankings.

* Promoters who guarantee the appearances of athletes who haven’t yet signed contracts, trying to pump up the gate while praying for a last-second signature.

* College coaches under pressure to win despite a limited number of scholarships, so they recruit superior foreign talent at the expense of developing rawer American athletes.

* Shoe companies that demand greater control of the sport because they are, by and large, footing the bills for the athletes’ training.

* Federation types who complain they can’t properly promote the sport without handouts from the shoe companies and other deep-pocket corporate sponsors.

“It’s a sport that, by its nature, is easy to be a little selfish,” says Mark Wetmore, an agent for such American track professionals as Melissa Morrison, John Godina and Antonio Pettigrew.

Consequently, finger pointing has become the hot new field event when assessing blame for the sport’s present predicament.

“Agents have been a divisive factor,” says Al Franken, who has promoted track meets in the United States for 40 years. “It’s so hard to get the matchups, so damn tough. The agents get in the way.”

Adds Franken’s son and partner, Don, “The agents are impossible. A nightmare. The athletes are great, but the agents have no clue how to deal with the media. Without the media, you can win every damn race in Europe and still be unknown here. They just don’t get it.”

What say the agents?

Hudson: “So, some joker says, ‘You know what? I just booked the San Jose Stadium and we’re going to have a track meet now, so everybody come and participate. And if you can’t come for this amount of money, you’re the bad guy.’ That’s ludicrous.

“Because we don’t have that standard in any other legitimate business in America, or any other legitimate sport in America. So why should track and field do it? It’s an agent’s fault because an athlete didn’t compete because the price wasn’t right? Isn’t that America? I mean, excuse me.

“I think that’s what Michael Jordan does, and what Drew Bledsoe does, and what Steve Young does, and what Mark McGwire does. They don’t play unless they get paid what they are supposed to get paid and have a certain amount of reasonable assurances they are going to get paid. Why should it be any different for track and field?”

And the shoe companies? Why do they keep dragging their feet? Why can’t Nike, say, do for U.S. track and field what it did, with such spectacular success, to the U.S. women’s World Cup team?

“I don’t think it’s the shoe company’s, or any other company’s, responsibility to grow a sport,” Miller says. “The shoe companies kind of take a bad rap for some of this--’If Nike or Adidas did that, we’d all be better.’ Well, what are you doing to get better?

“There’s a responsibility thrust back onto the entity. And you sometimes will invest in organizations that show a certain degree of knowledge, insight, skill and expertise. And you’re not as quick to involve yourself with an organization or a federation that doesn’t get it.

“I think USA Track and Field, historically, for whatever reason, didn’t get it. They’re beginning to get it. But that doesn’t change the fact that ‘getting it’ is a wide swath of things. It not just, ‘Hey, we got stars.’ ”

One Last Chance to Get It Right?

Getting It 101:

Lesson 1: Put the sport on television.

“If it isn’t on TV, it doesn’t exist in America,” USC track Coach Ron Allice says.

Lesson 2: Give the top American track stars more opportunities to compete at home.

Davis, plotting his own course for recovery, says this week’s world championships in Seville, Spain, and next year’s Olympics in Sydney “have to be good meets. Then, we have to give the people who do well a chance to compete here.”

Lesson 3: Once athletes commit to a meet, find a way to ensure they participate in that meet.

“When you buy a ticket to a football game, you know that the 49ers are going to field a team,” Davis says. “Steve Young may be hurt, but you know the red and gold is going to come out that tunnel and somebody is going to run with the ball.

“That isn’t the case in track. And the only thing you can do is sign the athletes to a contract. ‘You have to compete in these meets. Otherwise, your money is going to be decreased X amount of dollars.’ ”

Brian Vandenberg, TFA founder and president, believes he has a product that incorporates each of these edicts, a plan that could resuscitate the sport in America.

According to Vandenberg, the TFA professional track circuit will feature five to eight televised domestic meets and a roster of more than 100 athletes signed to league contracts and assigned to compete in designated meets.

“Athlete schedules will be dictated by a scheduling matrix,” Vandenberg says. “If the athlete buys into it, that ensures the head-to-head matchups the fans want to see.”

Sounds like a plan, except . . .

“I think it’s going to disappear quickly,” Don Franken says. “I think it’s a good idea to have it, but the thing is, you need marketing, promotion and PR. If you’re going to have a meet with a couple thousand people, it’s not going to satisfy sponsors.”

Noting the small crowd for TFA’s debut event in June, Franken adds, “The first thing with all these meets is somehow, some way, putting butts in seats. Because even with us, when we had major sponsors, if there was one year when our crowd was down, despite the TV, you can have quick sponsor exodus.”

Another potential sticking point: The USATF’s Golden Spike circuit, which debuted in 1999 with four indoor and five outdoor meets--each of them televised, Masback proudly points out.

No domestic circuits might not be a good thing for U.S. track, but two domestic track circuits could be one too many. Many believe Vandenberg and Masback are risking confusing the public--or at least dividing its attention--the same way women’s professional basketball did with the ABL and the WNBA.

“Joe Six-Pack, he’s going to spend X amount of dollars on track, and you could have a dilemma.” Davis says. “Does he spend them on the TFA or the Golden Spike tour? If you’re going to have [a domestic circuit], maybe you should have only one tour.”

Wetmore believes it will eventually come to that.

Is recovery on its way, or even possible at this point?

Al Franken declines to call his view optimistic or pessimistic.

“I’m realistic,” he says. “It’s like taking over a losing football team. You just hope you can build it back up.”

World Track at a Glance

* What--World Track and Field Championships.

* Where--Seville, Spain.

* When--Saturday through Aug. 29.

* Who--Top athletes include Maurice Greene, Michael Johnson, Marion Jones, Gail Devers, Hicham El Guerrouj, Mark Crear, Haile Gebreselassie and John Godina.

* TV--Sunday (NBC), Monday-Friday (TBS), Aug. 28-29 (NBC).