Roots: A Column by Len Johnson

In The Perfect Mile, author Neal Bascomb relates at one point how Les Perry would give his copies of Track & Field News to John Landy, who would in turn pass them on to Geoff Warren, and so on around the Melbourne distance running community.

“Somehow the dog-eared copies eventually found their way back to Perry,” Bascomb wrote.

I was introduced to the US magazine in pretty much the same manner by Chris Wardlaw, who would pass his copies around the Saturday morning training group which would gather at his suburban home to do a hilly, Saturday morning 11-miler. Coincidentally, this was not far from where Les Perry lived in Ringwood; some of the terrain we trained over was no doubt covered years earlier by Les and his mates.

Anyway, the story of how Track & Field News was prized by succeeding generations of athletes seems more relevant with the news this week of the death of its founding editor, Cordner Nelson, aged 91. With neither pretension, nor false modesty, T&FN proclaimed itself “The Bible of the Sport”.

I took out my ‘sub’ (still running) in 1983. I never read much of Cordner Nelson, at least not in the magazine. I was more familiar with the work of his younger brother, Bert Nelson, especially his Of People and Things column. Bert Nelson’s cogent and compelling arguments demolishing US President Jimmy Carter’s case for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics were a great source of comfort to those of us running a similar line in Australia (unfortunately, they failed to carry the day in the USA).

I do have two of Cordner Nelson’s books. The Great Ones (published 1970), profiles a baker’s dozen of Olympic champions from Paavo Nurmi to Peter Snell; The Milers, co-authored with Italian statistician and athletics historian, Roberto L. Quercetani, is a history of mile and 1500 metres running.

I also share, along with every T&FN reader around the world, Nelson’s wonderful gift of the annual merit rankings, the top 10 in each event, each year as ranked by a panel on three criteria _ honours won, head-to-head record and sequence of marks. We may pick the rankings apart, wondering how the rankers ever arrived at athlete A over athlete B as number one, two, three or 10 _ my one, intemperate, never-published letter to T&FN in 26 years concerned Steve Moneghetti’s non-inclusion in the 1997 world marathon top 10 _ but how we loved them, and still do.

Despite numerous alternative lists now being published, some on similar lines, others more akin to popularity contests, a top-10 Track & Field News ranking still carries more weight and greater prestige and credibility than pretty well any other.

These days, with so much of our information coming electronically, the role of monthly, even weekly, magazines as primary sources of news is much diminished. Rarely, if ever, is T&FN the first place we read about developments in our sport. But it is still one of the best for analysis and behind-the-scenes coverage, and its columns carry corresponding authority.

Even if, like me, you never knew Cordner Nelson, as a track and field fan you are almost certainly in his debt.

Nelson’s life work was communicating the world of elite track and field to its fan base, which is apt as a couple of recent happenings prompted me to consider what we might call grass-roots athletics.

First was Craig Mottram’s decision to go back to club competition for his return to racing from achilles tendon problems. Mottram pulled on his Deakin University club singlet and ran a solo 13:50 in flats, his first track race since the Beijing Olympic 5000 metres heats.

Ironically, Mottram’s return was at Landy Field in Geelong, a venue named for an athlete who ran most of his famous races in interclub competition. In John Landy’s day, club competition was pretty well all there was. Even when he ran invitational meetings, Landy ran in the colours of his Geelong Guild club. His breakthrough race _ the 4:02.1 mile in December, 1952, was for Geelong Guild, as was his final race, an interclub 880 yards early in 1957.

Then, a few weeks earlier,  I was chatting with Tamsyn Lewis at the Melbourne marathon. Now Tamsyn has often attracted controversy, but you can’t deny that she runs for her club almost as often as Landy ran for his. Racing is an integral part of her training program and doesn’t seem to have done her any harm at all.

Finally, while doing a bit of research for a future project, I delved into the Coe and Ovett files. Now these two great milers infamously did not race against each other that often, but what struck me was the number of times they raced, usually for their clubs, in what would now be viewed as decidedly low-key competition.

Now the trend is the other way, more training and less competing. Just as in the ‘old’ days, this clearly produces results in some cases, clearly fails in others. If there’s statistics to suggest the new way is superior to the old, or vice versa, I’m not aware of them. But it certainly means we see less of our top athletes at the grass-roots’ level, and value it more highly when we do.

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