It's No Baloney: Can Webb Save Millrose?

by Marc Bloom

Arthur Lydiard died a few weeks ago. The Millrose Games almost died a few weeks ago. I see a connection.

I loved Lydiard-well, maybe not the man himself because I certainly did not know him that well. I loved what he stood for: honesty, no baloney, real running, no gimmicks. Substance, not style. What you see is what you get. The values most of us have in running. The values that got us started in the first place.

The last time I spoke with Lydiard, last spring, I woke him up in the middle of the night. He was in his native New Zealand and I couldn't compute the time difference. I was working on an Olympic theme story about Peter Snell and wanted to check on a couple of anecdotes Snell had told me. Even though he was not in good health, Lydiard was glad to talk, and we compared notes on Snell.

When the running boom gathered steam about 30 years ago, you couldn't utter a sentence that did not include "Lydiard." It was the Lydiard Method or Lydiard Training. Lydiard said this, Lydiard said that. Who was this guy anyway?

The first time I met Lydiard, in the mid-70s, he was on one of his U.S. speaking tours, the same kind of tour he was doing, admittedly for the last time, in December when he died. Lydiard had come to Staten Island where I was then living, at the behest of a local coach, Jim O'Neil, another true-blue runner who disdained the idea that you had to water down running to attract the masses.

Lydiard, of course, was for none of that. Ironically, his fundamental ideas of jogging, brought to the U.S. by Bill Bowerman, gave rise to mass appeal; but Lydiard was not big on creature comforts or running fads. When vegetarian ideas swept through running, Lydiard said, eat steak. When running shoes got fancy and expensive, Lydiard came out with his own shoe, a no-frills model with, frankly, little of the newly-designed support.

On his Staten Island stop, Lydiard spoke to us runners at a track. Where else? We gathered on the infield and, with absolute assurance, Lydiard debunked just about any running idea we had ever heard. There was the Lydiard Way or the highway. That was okay. This was the guy who "invented" running.

I thought about Lydiard when the future of the Millrose Games appeared in doubt. The meet, which has gone through sponsors like a starlet goes through boyfriends, was in its heyday during the period when Lydiard's star rose in the '60s and track was a marquee event in America. The track universe, from New York to Auckland, made headlines. Millrose was like the Kentucky Derby or Indy 500.

But, ultimately overwhelmed by a Super Bowl world and even by track itself as its focus shifted away from indoors, Millrose suffered major attendance losses at Madison Square Garden. A meet that could promote itself for decades simply by being what it was now needed gimmicks. You can't out-gimmick the Super Bowl world. Whaddaya gonna do, have the sexy high jumper Amy Acuff bare her breast during the National Anthem?

Alas, Millrose will be held at the Garden on Friday night, Feb. 4. Last year, Millrose survived on Marion Jones. We all know where that stands now. Who's left? Alan Webb of course. Perfect for the revived (after recent embarrassments) Wanamaker Mile. I don't want to tell Webb what to do. But he has to run Millrose. Webb's the man, our Olympic hope, our Jim Ryun.