Jim Beatty

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from January 1991.)

SMALL WONDER. We remember our early heroes as they were then, not thinking who they might have become since. So when the small, smiling, graying man worked his way along the head table at a Charlotte Observer Marathon luncheon, I took him to be a race sponsor or maybe the city’s mayor. He shook hands with each guest and introduced himself.

He reached Francie Larrieu Smith. She was in her late 30s, an Olympian and not easily awed. But she turned into a star-struck as a teenager in the company of a rock idol at the mention of his name, which I hadn’t yet heard.

“I’m Ron Larrieu’s little sister,” she gushed. “He talked about you all the time, and I’ve always wanted to meet you.” Her brother had been a 1964 Olympian.

Then came my turn to meet him. “Hi, I’m Jim Beatty,” he said. This turned me into a tongue-tied, hero-worshipping kid again. He took me back 30 years to a time when I was most impressionable and he made the biggest impression on me.

Beatty, at 56, was now a Charlotte businessman and former state legislator. But to me his far greater honor was a recent induction into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame.

As the 1950s ended, no one from this country had set a world mile record since 1934 or in the marathon since 1908. No one had medaled at the three longest Olympic distances – 5000, 10,000 and marathon – since 1932. No one had won any of those races for 50 years.

National recovery started when a coach named Mihaly Igloi defected from Hungary. He came to America after the 1956 Olympics and began free-lance coaching in California.

Jim Beatty both led and symbolized the recovery. He’d been a competent runner at the University of North Carolina, then had done what most graduates did then: retire immediately. He had gone soft by 1959, when he unretired to join Igloi.

At first Jim couldn’t even keep up with the locals in California races. But within six months he held the American mile record. He broke it three more times in the next three years.

In 1962 he became the “Bannister” of indoor track by breaking the four-minute barrier in 1962. He also ran the world’s first sub-8:30 two-mile outdoors.

Beatty fell through the crack between Olympics. He hadn’t yet come to top form for Rome 1960 and was past it by Tokyo 1964. Between those Games, though, he did much to cure American distance runners’ national inferiority complex.

They came to believe they could run with anyone, anywhere. By the mid-1960s American Jim Ryun had set a world record in the mile and Buddy Edelen in the marathon. Bob Schul had won the Olympic 5000 and Billy Mills the 10,000.

Coach Igloi provided a model for success unknown previously in this country and too seldom imitated later. He pulled together mature runners and trained them as a group with the highest goals in mind.

From this one California team, first based in Santa Clara and later Santa Monica, came much of the country’s recovery force: Beatty, gold medalist Schul, early sub-four-minute miler Laszlo Tabori (who’d come from Hungary with Igloi and later became a coach himself), Hall of Famer Max Truex, Olympian Jim Grelle and Francie Larrieu’s brother Ron.

Frank Shorter said in Charlotte, “One problem with American distance running is that we don’t have teams like Beatty’s anymore. We need to have our best runners working together.”

It worked for Beatty and the Igloi group in the early 1960s, and for Shorter with the Florida Track Club a decade later. Their way could work again, and would.

UPDATE. As a height-deprived young runner myself, I idolized the smallest runners the most. Only later did I meet them – Johnny Kelley (the younger one), Max Truex, Jim Beatty – and looked them straight in the eyes, literally. None stood taller in my mind than fellow shorty Beatty.

Mihaly Igloi supplied a template for high-performance group training. The most successful American runners since his heyday have often come such groups: Florida Track Club, Greater Boston and Athletics West in the 1970s and 1980s, to Team Running USA, Hansons Brooks and Nike’s Portland and Eugene teams in the 2000s.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]