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INDIANAPOLIS
- USA Track & Field announced on Tuesday that Don Bowden, Bill
Carr, Jimmy Carnes, Johnny Gray and Bernie Wefers have been elected to
the National Track & Field Hall of Fame. Below are recent
interviews with the living inductees.
DON BOWDEN
Q: What was it like for you to learn that you had been elected to the National Track & Field Hall of Fame?
A:
I was just thrilled -- thrilled to death. It's one of the highlights of
my life, really. It's really a culmination of my track career to be
honored that way. It's really a thrill and I'm very thankful. I have a
lot of old friends that had been wanting this to happen and it's
wonderful to be included.
Q: How did you get started in track and field?
A:
I was born in San Jose, California, and went to Lincoln High School,
and the football coach was also the track coach at that time. I was 6-2
and 140 pounds back then, and I wanted to be a football player,
although I could run pretty fast. The track coach told me that I had
running ability and that my father was his dentist. He said that if
something were to happen to me on the football field, he'd have serious
problems (laughter). He said 'We're going to make a runner out of you,
besides, the first time you'd get hit on a football field it would take
a mop and a big bucket to pick you up.' That's how I got started in
track.
Q: Most people know you as a 1,500m/mile competitor. Is that how your track career began?
A:
I was really a half-miler. That was my best race and that's what I ran
in high school. I set the national high school record in the half-mile.
Actually I never ran a mile in high school, and in those days people
were very afraid of running, thinking it would affect their heart. My
mother always wanted me to go to the cardiologist to take tests to make
sure this was going to be OK for me and that I wasn't going to extend
myself.
Q: How did things go for you once you enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley?
A:
My father had gone to Cal, and I went to Cal because it was a great
academic school, but I primarily went there because of Brutus Hamilton
(National Track & Field Hall of Famer), who was a longtime coach
there, who was a wonderful gentleman and a great man. He believed that
an athlete should participate in sports as just part of his life. He
wanted you to have an active social life and to do well academically,
and do well in track and field. He wanted me to graduate as a
well-rounded individual and not just put all the emphasis on athletics,
and I appreciated that.
He was from the University
of Kansas, where he coached Glenn Cunningham (National Track &
Field Hall of Famer). Coach was a decathlete himself and finished
second at the 1920 Olympics. Those are the reasons I came to Cal. I ran
the half-mile for him, and then one day he suggested that I run the
mile at the end of my freshman year, and he trained me for it. I ran
4:11.7, and that was the fastest that an 18-year old had run the mile.
It was a freshman record. That was the only mile I had run up to that
point in my life.
Q: You qualified for the 1956
Olympic Team by barely finishing in third place in the 1,500 meters.
What do you remember about that race?
A: That was
unbelievable. I think the Olympic Trials is the toughest race of all,
because the pressure is so great. You train for years and years and you
know that they take one through three (place finishers), and everyone
else stays home. That's real pressure. I had an Achilles tendon injury,
so I hadn't worked out much that year. So I was really concerned about
that. The 800, which is my favorite race, was loaded with talent, so my
best chance was in the 1,500, which had some great runners in that as
well. I just kind of hung in there and I dove at the end and I think I
got on the team by an inch.
Q: What was your experience like at the Olympics in Melbourne?
A:
It was fantastic to be part of the U.S. Olympic Team. I met some great
people and it was really a great experience for me all the way around.
I had made a deal with my dad when I went to Cal that I would run track
and graduate with my class. The problem came in 1956 in Melbourne that
the seasons are reversed and the Olympics are in October and November,
and Cal was on the semester system, so I would miss the fall semester
at Cal because I would be gone too much. So to stay with my class I
went with double summer sessions, which went on all summer. I trained
and would run on weekends someplace, and I came down with
mononucleosis, and I was just recovering in time to go to the Olympics.
I could run, but in the Olympics the heats are run so fast, and it's
not just the fastest person that wins at the Olympics but the strongest
person that can get through all those heats in the distance races. I
wasn't strong enough, so I didn't beat too many people there, but it
was wonderful to be there.
Q: You're known primarily for being the first American to break the 4-minute mile barrier. Could you talk about that experience?
A:
I was primarily running the half-mile, which was my best race. Roger
Bannister first broke the barrier in 1954 and I was still in high
school then. Three years later in 1957 no American had run under four
minutes, and my coach Brutus Hamilton said, 'I really think this is
something you can do.' The race where it happened was my last mile of
the year at the Pacific Association Championships in Stockton on June 1st.
It was a strange situation because I had taken an Economics final
earlier that day and they were having the high school championships at
Edwards Stadium right next to where I was taking my final. There were
times when I would hear the gun go off and I would jump (laughter). I
got through the final and it was one of those beautiful nights and it
just seemed that there was more oxygen in the air for some reason, and
it was a beautiful track. They were giving me the lap times on one side
and Brutus was on the other side, and he kept saying 'You're right on,
you're right on, you're right on.' And it was just one of those days in
sports when everything goes right and it was really a hard race,
because there really wasn't any competition, and I ran pretty close to
60 seconds per quarter if you look at the lap times. I came around that
final backstretch and Brutus yells 'You got it, go for it!' I turned it
on and ran as hard as I could run and was very fortunate that I did it.
Q: What was your reaction after it happened, and what does that accomplishment mean to you all these years later?
A:
It was a great thrill. It's always a great thing when you can really
work for something, set a goal and accomplish it. It was great that
Brutus and I as a team had worked together and overcome a lot of things
and reached a goal. We worked for it and made it happen and whether
it's sports or business or anything else, it's always fantastic when
you can do that. I had great support and stability from my family and
my coaches, and it's been really a great thing all my life. I've
maintained a lot of great friendships with my teammates at Cal, and its
fun when people tell me that's one record they can't take away from you.
Q: What were the qualities that made you such a good middle distance runner?
A:
I think I was blessed, really. I think Brutus put it the best when he
said, 'Don, you're divinely gifted,' and I think that's a nice way to
present it. I had a very efficient cardiovascular system. I could just
process things more efficiently, I guess. You have to work hard and
have the right attitude, and there are a number of factors, but unless
you have the physical ability and gifts to start with, you can't make
it, it doesn't work. I had a good coach and mentor to bring me along at
the right speed, and that's when you're fortunate when everything comes
together.
Q: Could you talk about your life after track?
A:
I've really had a great life. I've worked for several large
corporations, starting with the 3M Corporation, and I worked a lot with
Hall of Famer Bill Nieder (shot putter) from Kansas. We worked together
at 3M when they invented the Tartan track, so we were there right at
the start at the first synthetic track that was ever used, and I spent
several years there before working with Allied Chemical. Later on I
went to work for a company out of Wichita involved with tennis court
re-surfacing as their export manager. These days I represent a number
of manufacturers in that business in the export market.
JIMMY CARNES
Q: What was your reaction when you found out you had been elected to the Hall of Fame?
A:
I was excited, because I knew that I had been nominated and on the
ballot a couple of times, so it was wonderful news. Bill Roe, who I've
known for so long -- and I had presented him with a President's Award
years ago -- called me and it was just wonderful news. It's a great
honor and something I hoped would happen some day.
Q: Could you talk about how you first got involved with track & field?
A:
It's a wonderful memory. I had won the intramural high jump at Mercer
University. We didn't have a track team in high school and when I won
the intramural high jump I had been playing basketball. So the
following track season I decided to go out for track and field. I was
never on a track team before. I was a senior in college and just
decided that if I was going to teach Physical Education, I should try
some other sports other than basketball. It wound up that I had a coach
who was a wonderful human being. He was a basketball coach, who really
didn't do any coaching. So I got a book and started reading about track
and field so that I could perform in the high jump, and then I picked
up the javelin, which became really the best event for me, which wasn't
very good. So I studied all the events and for the following year,
after performing the best I could over a small period of time, I went
out to coach basketball and they assigned me to coach track and field.
Fortunately I was really enthusiastic about. At Druid Hills High School
in Atlanta, we managed to win six state championships, 52 meets in a
row and 27 total district, regional and relay championships without
losing, and that's how it started.
Q: After
coaching at Furman University for two years, you became the head coach
at the University of Florida in 1964, where you started the highly
successful Florida Track Club. What was your vision for the club when
it began?
A: When I got to Florida, several of the
athletes I had recruited to Furman, and great athletes who had left
Florida to go somewhere else, came back to the University of Florida. I
always thought, what a great place for track and field: beautiful
weather, a great university, a beautiful track and the first
all-weather track ever built in the world in 1958. I said 'this is
fantastic!' I couldn't understand why people were leaving the East
Coast to go to the West Coast to train for the Olympics. In 1965, I
grabbed some Florida jerseys and put TC on them for Florida Track Club.
Then I wrote to Track & Field News and had them put a
little blurb in saying that the University of Florida was interested in
graduate students interested in training in track and field. Then I
wrote to every dean of every college at the University of Florida, and
said that we have lots of athletes graduating from various universities
around the country wanting to do graduate work at Florida and train for
the Olympics. I got lots of results and one of the athletes happened to
be Jack Batchelor, and one day he came down to the track with a jersey
that he had painted an orange on it, and that was the beginning of the
Florida Track Club. It was a phenomenal success story. Over a period of
a few years, 55 athletes received graduate assistantships to work on
their graduate degrees, and all of them volunteered to help me coach at
the University of Florida, so I had tons of people helping me coach at
the University of Florida. We created a happening and that's how it was.
Q:
You were very much involved when The Athletics Congress(now USA Track
& Field) came into being, following the passing of the Amateur
Sports Act of 1978 that broke up the AAU. What was it like to create a
governing body?
A: In 1978, we changed the law, so
we had to become an autonomous governing body. That's where Ollan
(former executive director & Hall of Famer Ollan Cassell) and I and
several others came up with a plan to create, what we then
unfortunately called TAC, which I tried to get them to call it USA
Track & Field. Our constitutional congress happened in 1979, and
what was happening was I was involved with the NCAA and I was convinced
that if we brought the coaches together then we could combine the whole
thing, and of course I didn't do this all by myself. Sam Bell and Ollan
Cassell had very important roles in this, and we went out and got
coaches to come together in Dallas, and I believe that's the situation
that happened, and the coaches really got involved. We created the
development committee and got a large number of people that had duties
and they loved it for a long time, and that got coaches involved with
USA track at that time.
Q: Dr. Evie Dennis was
the acting president when TAC started, and then you became the
president at some point after that. How did all that happen?
A:
We determined that with a small group of people that we needed an
acting president to help bring us all together, and we all believed
that Evie should serve as the acting president until we had our
convention, so she did and it was a great thing. She was the acting
president and she definitely did a great job. Then when it came along
to the presidency, she certainly would've been in a position to be
elected president, but she indicated that she did not want to do that
and that I should do it, and so we went from there.
Q: What memories stay with you from your time as the president of TAC?
A:
When we started out we didn't have anything. We had nothing, so Ollan
and Pete (former Media Information Director Pete Cava) and some of the
others moved to the Hyatt Hotel (in Indianapolis), which we had
negotiated with the Indiana Sports Corporation to give us free office
space. If I'm not mistaken, Ollan had to go lease some office
equipment, and it started with a desk and a typewriter and a few more
things, and it was difficult because we had no money. So we worked very
hard to sell some sponsorships and we had some good luck on down the
road. It was nothing like the dollars now. It was a great beginning and
now it's grown to something that is flourishing.
Q: Later on you became the executive director of the U.S. Track Coaches Association. What was that like for you?
A:
The NCAA had Division I, II and III coaches, at the end of every year
they'd have a meeting to discuss things they wanted to do, but then
they would disperse and nobody was really ever in a position to do it.
So the NCAA Division I coaches, mainly, decided that they needed to
create an executive director because they didn't have any money. They
went out and wrote letters, and Sam Bell led this a lot, to get each
Division I, II and III, and NAIA school to contribute $100, and they
managed to raise $27,000. They wanted an executive director and I
happened to be, at the time, in a position with a shoe company and The
Sunshine State Games, and bless the governor's hide, I could do
something else if I wanted to, so I told them I would do that
part-time. Fortunately we were able to go out and sell a sponsorship
immediately to some people with The Sunshine State Games, and we raised
enough money, without a salary, to create the United States Track
Coaches Association. It was difficult at first, but it was a wonderful
experience and I guess the thing that I remember more than anything is
what it's grown to now. I read one day in the newspaper about the
College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame, and said 'We don't have a
coaches' hall of fame for track and field.' So we decided we would do
that and we created the first one and had it at the convention, and I
can still remember having one of the coaches go out in the hallway and
try to get people to come in at the luncheon (laughter). Little by
little it's grown and 600 or 700 people go now, and it's a phenomenal
thing for the coaches for recognition. I love to work with the coaches
and I love to promote track and field, so no question it was an
exciting time.
Q: You were the head coach of the
1980 U.S. Olympic Team, but did not go to the Games in Moscow due to
the boycott. What do you most remember about that?
A:
Fortunately I was an assistant coach in 1976, and I at least got the
experience of marching in the stadium and being a part of the team that
year. Then I was elected head coach for 1980, and we had gone to Russia
for a competition in 1979 and we had a wonderful time in Moscow with a
group of athletes. But then came the boycott and it was a phenomenal
disappointment, there's no question about it. My greatest
disappointment was for the athletes who never got another chance.
Q: What are you doing these days?
A:
These days I'm retired and unfortunately I came down with cancer a year
ago, and its spread to the bone. My full-time job is fighting cancer.
It's a disappointing thing but I'm doing OK. Hopefully it'll work out
all right and I'll be around a long time, hopefully.
JOHNNY GRAY
Q: What does it mean to you to be elected to the Hall of Fame?
A:
It's a great feeling. It's nearly as good as the medal ceremony at the
Olympics getting my medal. For one reason, I didn't think I would make
it. I had a long career and I've done so much, but I didn't recognize
it as I was running. I really didn't recognize my accomplishments until
a few years after I stopped running.
Q: How did your track career begin?
A:
My mother and father were separated, and when I graduated to eighth
grade, my mother sent my brothers and I to Oregon to be with my father
for a year to give her a break. After a year my brothers went back and
I stayed a couple more years in Oregon. I took to Oregon and I really
liked it. We had this field day, we called it, at the end of school,
where kids can do all sorts of activities, whether it was throw the
softball, they could run a 200 or a 3,000 meters, and I thought I'd run
the 3,000 for fun. I thought I'd run the first three laps hard and get
way out in front and make it look like I was going to do so well and
then I was going to drop out. However, I didn't drop out. Each lap my
friends were yelling at me to go one more lap, and they kept saying
that until I finished the race and I beat the coach that challenged the
kids to the race, and I ended up beating him, not knowing what I was
doing. I knew that I had competed well and I had won, and that coach
asked me to come out for cross country. I didn't get the chance to go
out for cross country because when I visited my mother she made me stay
back home in Los Angeles, where I attended Crenshaw High, right in the
middle of my 11th grade school year. That's when I met my
coach Merle McGee, who actually got me started in the sport. I was
sitting in the stands watching my brother go out for track and Coach
McGee asked me if I'd like to run. I said 'sure.' He asked me to do
four laps easy and I listened to him as a kid would, and from that day
on my career started back in late 1977.
Q: How did the 800 meters become your specialty?
A:
I started running the 2-mile because of the race I ran in Oregon, so I
wanted to run something that required quite a few laps. I was
undefeated, but I really didn't like it. I didn't want to run eight
laps at every track meet. I met a guy named Jeff West, who was pretty
good in the 880 running 2:01 or 2:02 as a tenth grader. He was built
like me and the 800 requires two laps instead of eight, so I said, 'Why
run eight? If Jeff can do it, I can do it.' My first race was 2:17. I
was able to do it, but I just didn't do it smart. Because I moved down
and it was shorter, I ran harder, and I ran too hard so that I didn't
have a nice finish and I would lose valuable time in the last part of
the race because I would be so dead. My coach made me run cross country
the following year to get more stamina, and my senior year I went from
2:06 to 1:51 in one year and I found myself at the Olympic Trials, and
before you know it I was a runner.
Q: What was it like to be a four-time Olympian?
A:
I was a part of four Olympic Games, but I had the privilege of trying
out for six. I tried out for 1980, which we boycotted. I made the team
in '84, '88, '92 & '96, and in 2000 I went out and I should've made
the team. That's when the winner ran 1:46 and I was 39 years old and I
should've made the team, but I had an injury in my calf (muscle), where
I could walk and I could jog, but when it came to getting on my toes I
had a right calf that would cramp and I couldn't get rid of it before
the trials. It cost me in my competition, so I got frustrated at age
40, and that's when I retired.
Q: Your American
Indoor and Outdoor records in the 800 meters have each been on the
books for a long time without being seriously threatened.
A:
That's why I'm such a good coach these days, because I can vouch for
the kids that hard work does pay off, because I worked hard. I had kids
pretty early. I was 22 when my wife was pregnant, and track provided my
income, so I decided that if I wanted to make this work I needed to
work hard so I could make more money. I didn't plan to run as long as I
did. I just took one year at a time and tried to make the most of each
year, and each year got better and better and more consistent. I had a
wonderful career. When I look back on it and people remind me of all I
did, it makes me realize what all I accomplished, and it makes me feel
great. I look at it all as mission accomplished and I wouldn't trade it
all for anything in the world.
Q: How were you able to remain a world class competitor for so many years?
A:
We have a saying: Proper preparation prevents poor performances, and
that's the one thing that athletes need to know, which I tell them when
I do my speaking engagements. I attribute a lot of this to my coach
(Coach McGee). I had great genes, obviously, but my coach was such a
wonderful coach, and a lot of it took patience and a great work ethic.
He was my coach my whole career. I was fortunate to have one coach my
whole career. We still talk to this day. He's a wonderful man. .
Q: One of your fondest memories has to be winning the bronze medal at the 1992 Olympic Games. What was that like for you?
A:
Everything I did, I did it the hard way. I waited until I got old to
reach my goals. When I was young I just wasn't disciplined. As I
started learning how to run the 800 I was older, and I put it together
back in '92. With 150 (meters) to go, the Brazilian Jose Luis Barbosa
clipped my heel right when I was getting ready to shift gears. I really
should've won the gold that race, but I got tripped and the Kenyans
caught me and I tied up with 120 (meters) to go. Because I was in such
exceptional shape I was able to run to the tape to capture the bronze.
It was one of the best races of my life.
Q: You
were a member of the famed Santa Monica Track Club that featured Carl
Lewis and many other great athletes. What was that experience like?
A:
That group had a lot to do with what I accomplished. It was a group of
very elite athletes, and when one would do well it would boost the next
one to do well. I know, because I was one of the oldest members of the
club. I remember when Carl actually joined the club, I was his
chaperone. I had to show him around and make him feel welcome. I had no
idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea he was going to become the
great "Kind Carl" he became. He was a great teammate. What our team was
about was "team," Together Everyone Achieves More. Our achievements
were done because we were a close-knit team and we did it together. We
took track to another level.
Q: What have you been doing since you retired?
A:
I tried several things. I had no idea what I was going to do when I
retired, and I competed into my 40s. What can a 40-year old man do, who
has never worked in his life, when you just stop and don't have a plan?
While I ran, my plan was just to run and take care of my family and God
blessed me to do that well. I have a couple of sons out of college that
are doing well and I'm proud of that accomplishment, and right now I'm
a head coach at a private high school (Harvard Westlake HS in Studio
City, Calif.) and I also do motivational speaking at some prisons. I
speak with the inmates and motivate them to come up with a plan in life
because that's what I didn't do. I didn't have a plan. I like what I'm
doing because I get a chance to make a difference in their lives. I'm
looking to do more speaking, like going into the juvenile system to
help snap them out of their troubled thinking and come up with a plan
to better their lives.
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