Dr. George Sheehan

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from April 1993.)

SHEEHAN NIGHT. What if someone threw a party in your honor and no one showed up? That was George Sheehan’s fear when local friends approached his son George III about organizing a dinner for The Doc (as they called him).

Young George then broached the subject with his dad. Dr. George’s first reaction: “Definitely not.”

“Fine,” said the son. “It’s your call.”

The next morning “Dad came to the office with 10 pages of notes. They told where the party could be held, what the program might be and who should be invited.”

Later Dr. George started to worry that no one would come. “I gave a recent talk in Florida, and only a dozen people showed up,” he said. “What if that happens here?”

“No chance of that,” the son reminded the dad. “We’ll draw a crowd with the Sheehans alone.” Just to be safe they extended the invitation list and published an announcement in local newspapers. By the time I left home for New Jersey, the guest list stood at 300 and was still growing.

Young George said, “We could top 400.” The crowd would grow to 500.

The event frightened Dr. George but attracted him too. Doors at the Shore Casino didn’t officially open until five o’clock that Sunday, but he couldn’t wait that long. We got there almost an hour early.

Tim McLoone, the evening’s MC, and George Hirsch of Runner’s World, a key speaker, tried to shoo Dr. George away as he walked in on their rehearsal.

“He won’t even notice,” I told them. “He’ll soon be too busy talking.”

And so he was. The crowd – his crowd – couldn’t wait to get there either. Long before the official opening, the room was well on its way to full.

I knew few of these people. This both surprised and pleased me, because it showed George to be much more than a running specialist.

He had traveled in many circles: family, running and writing circles; medical, school and community circles. These circles all joined here for perhaps the first time.

We talked, we drank, we ate. This all took three hours but was only a warmup for the marathon to follow.

Paying tribute to George Sheehan took a long time. He had lived almost 75 full years, and the program planners couldn’t leave out any of his phases. The program took another three hours to cover them all.

Finally, on the far side of 10 o’clock, George himself took the stage. His voice came out quiet, slow and hoarse at first.

Then as he warmed to his topic and his audience, this became the George Sheehan we’d always known: lively, eloquent, funny and heartfelt. Everyone else had taken care to avoid the subject that brought us all here. George himself didn’t hesitate to mention what everyone knew he faced.

He said, “Dying [of advanced prostate cancer] is my current experience. I’m going to face it and find out what it’s all about.”

The night ended with an emotional showing of family slides, set to music on videotape. Then the guests took another hour saying their good-byes to George, who along with the other Sheehans, nearly 60 of them, were last to leave the casino.

This was a relatively modest count by Sheehan standards. He said, “When my mother died, she left 76 grandchildren and a total of 135 survivors. Someone said it sounded like a plane crash.”

With his finish line in sight, George felt fortunate. He’d had an early wake of sorts, when he could be there to enjoy it with 500 of his nearest and dearest. We should all be so lucky.

UPDATE. All 500 of us wanted to be there that night. But none of us quite knew what to call the event we were attending.

We couldn’t call it a “farewell” because none of us was ready to let go. A “celebration,” a “party,” a “roast”? None of these labels quite fit.

George himself wryly suggested, “Why not call it ‘the last supper’? After all, it’s on Palm Sunday.” But that sounded too final.

Maybe we should have called it a “thanksgiving dinner.” This was George’s chance to thank his family, friends, running companions and co-workers for their love. And it was our chance to say the same to him.

George died later that year, a few days before his 75^th birthday. More than 20 years after his passing, George’s words keep informing and inspiring runners, via his books that remain in print. He would delight in the irony of this.

In Dr. Sheehan on Running, the book of his that I still like the best, George explained his penchant for quoting the master thinkers of history – from Socrates to Santayana – in his own writing and speaking. “My family rarely gives me any credit for original thought,” he wrote. “When a topic comes under discussion at the dinner table, someone is likely to turn to me and ask, ‘What would Bucky Fuller say about that?’

George himself became a valued source of quotable quotes. He gave voice to what other runners thought or felt or sensed, but couldn’t find the words to express as well as he did.

Name any subject related to the running experience – and many subjects far removed from sports – and this master thinker had found just the right words to describe it. His friends and fans would ask ourselves, “What would George Sheehan say about that?”

His words survive. To a wordsmith that’s the ultimate form of winning.

[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 Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, 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.]