For a certain slice of the sport-loving public, Africa doesn’t immediately summon mental images of devastation by AIDS, ethnic strife, desertification or hunger. For devotees of distance running on road and track, Africans are the graceful, superbly fit athletes who dominate their sport in an almost unimaginable way. Moroccan, Ethiopian and, to an astonishing degree, Kenyan runners are the perennial champions of the most ancient and elemental athletic contests of them all. Never should we minimize the traumas of that deeply abused continent, but it is good to see Africans as winners and heroes.
Yesterday, at the Boston Marathon, Kenyan Robert Cheruiyot won for the third time. His countrymen came second through fourth, and have won the classic race fifteen of the last seventeen years. I became a fan of Kenyan running during the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, at each of which Kipchoge Keino won a silver and a gold medal on the track, from 1500 metres to the steeplechase. (And while we’re only a couple of days from remembering Jackie Robinson, here’s another brilliant athlete who is even a greater man. Please click here for more on Keino.)
So, go, Africans, go, but that isn’t even what I wanted to write about today. For me, and for a lot of Canadians, especially the down-home friends on the Six Nations reserve, the Boston Marathon yesterday was most importantly the 100th anniversary of the record-setting run of the great Tom Longboat. (There was a very fine Longboat tribute by James Christie in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Highly recommended.)
Though he ran so long ago, now, Longboat’s career arc is a fairly familiar one to us. It was all the more so in the days when an athlete’s already brief career was an insistently amateur one: to be an Olympian, or to defend his Boston Marathon victory, there was to be no salary, no endorsements. There were severe competitive restrictions for those who “sullied” their sport by accepting prize money. Indeed Longboat, still young and having trained largely on his own, was not welcome on Heartbreak Hill in 1908 because he had made a few dollars with his feet. His fall from grace was also accelerated by the enduring racism and privation experienced by Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. We love to kick our stars when they fall, and Longboat took an especially spirited beating. (Published references to him, even when he was winning, are, by today’s lights, cringe-worthy in their ignorance and stereotyping.) Longboat was a source of enormous national pride when he was winning and was ignored, or openly despised, when he no longer was. His reputation, badly damaged in early- and mid-century, is being redeemed, thanks largely to the efforts of a more contemporary running man, the quiet Canadian hero of sport and equality, Bruce Kidd. Kidd’s 1992 biography offers a modern and more sympathetic view of the Onondaga athlete.
I loved the Globe’s photo. There’s Tom Longboat in knee-length khaki shorts with a black leather belt and black high-top shoes. It is a picture, though, of a body made for running. The legs are thin and unusually long, the shoulders broad and well-muscled for a distance runner, perhaps because of the lacrosse and other tough sports that he loved to play. And it’s a familiar face, somehow. I went to high school in Caledonia, just after the graduation of more local Six Nations running legends named Anderson or Bomberry. But we all knew about Longboat, in a hazy sort of way. Some reports referred to him as the “Caledonia Cyclone”, as one of his earliest successes came in a race at the town fair, but he wasn’t from town.
Years later, teaching and coaching in that same school, I had a young Longboat on my basketball team. Reading a frustrated account of a Canadian sportswriter trying to interview the tight-lipped Tom, I couldn’t help but remember coaching young Todd – a relative, I’d guess from the Globe photo, though I was never able to find out – and feeling good whenever he was sufficiently at ease to smile. I don’t know if I ever got a complete sentence out of him, and I never knew exactly where he lived. He wasn’t an outstanding basketball player, but he ran his guts out and rebounded hard against far bigger guys. Our school didn’t do much with track and field, so I don’t know how well Todd had inherited the running gene. He was tough, I know that, but here’s another Longboat I need to find out more about.
So here we are, 100 years after one of the greatest victories in the history of Canadian sport, remembering with greater justice and comprehension the career of a magnificent athlete. It’s far too late for Tom Longboat, of course, who died in 1948, but idealism compels me to wonder out loud: where are the young native athletes who can be inspired, as the youth of Kenya were by Keino, by the legend of “Cogwagee”? History knows him as Tom Longboat, a young Onondaga man who ran the rural miles of Grand River country and made himself the best in the world. I hope that we shall see the likes of him again.