Jerome Drayton

(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 November 1997.)

CANADA’S BEST. The fastest marathoner in Canadian history now walks with a limp. The once-gaunt look of a marathoner is gone as a result of inactivity brought on by a year-long knee injury.

The once-black hair is fading toward white, the result of his 52 years. Gone are the mustache and sunglasses that gave him a look of mystery and menace as he ran.

The Jerome Drayton of today doesn’t square with the 1970s image I had of him. I didn’t really know him as a person then, only as that image.

That’s the problem we speakers all had when Rob Reid of the Royal Victoria Marathon asked us to help honor Drayton at this year’s race. “What do we say about him?” we wondered. None of us really knew him in his glory days, and we didn’t quite know what had become of him since.

He might have become the Frank Shorter or Bill Rodgers of Canadian running. Drayton has a faster PR than Shorter’s and is within 40 seconds of Rodgers’, but he has never shared his history with admirers as they have. He truly retired from the sport when his racing ended in 1981.

Drayton seemed to prefer it that way. His running was never a popularity contest, and it wasn’t his way to joke or make small-talk. Ask him a question and he’d give an honest answer, usually brief.

We speakers in Victoria knew him mostly by what we’d seen and read: that he was a European immigrant who started racing under one name (Peter Buniak) and finished under another… that he won the Boston Marathon in 1977, then picked apart the race organization afterward… that he ran in shades before Oakley and others made it cool (and profitable for an athlete-endorser).

Drayton has held the Canadian marathon record longer than most of the runners in the Victoria audience have run, and longer than some have lived. He set his first one in 1968, his final one in 1975. That 2:10:08 has stood ever since.

He ranked number-one in the world and held a world record (for 10 miles on the track). He won the Fukuoka Marathon three times when that race was the unofficial world championship, and he ran in three Olympics – placing sixth at Montreal.

This was all pretty good but not good enough for him. He tells how “the insole of my new Tiger shoe came unglued late in my fastest race, and this kept me from breaking 2:10.” He caught cold before the 1976 Olympic race and thinks it cost him a medal.

That never-satisfied thinking made him as good as he was. So did the seriousness that caused him to say in Victoria, when asked to recall any humorous incidents from his career, “Nothing funny ever happened to me when I ran.”

Given this attitude, I wondered how he would react to the gentle roasting he would receive at the Victoria dinner that honored him. I looked over at Drayton as, one by one, the runners at the head table made jokes at his expense. His face reddened and tears ran down his cheeks, but not from anger or embarrassment.

He was laughing at all this. While little emotion came to his voice as he stood up to respond to the other speakers, he spoke volumes when he said, “I’ll never forget this night.”

Jerome Drayton doesn’t say what he doesn’t mean. He was genuinely moved at being remembered after all these years of not trying to be.

UPDATE. At this book’s publication, Jerome Drayton’s Canadian marathon record of 2:10:08 had stood for more than 40 years. No other man from his country has won a Boston Marathon since he did in 1977.

[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 Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, 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.]