The Tributes

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2005. The list of who has most influenced my running the most runs long. It carries the names of coaches I trained with daily and some I’ve never met. I list my running heroes, teammates and competitors, parents and uncles.

But too little public credit has gone to the person who might have helped the most. That’s the one who shares the most DNA with me, my older brother Mike.

He was two years ahead of me in age, and miles further advanced as a young athlete. He played quarterback in football, point-guard in basketball, and ran hurdles and sprints in track.

Then a football knee injury struck. It crippled him athletically, then would keep him from staying active enough after that.

He would grow heavy. He would work too hard and relax too little. He would pick up a smoking habit. He would look old before his time.

My brother would become the type of person we runners too easily laugh at and look down upon. But before you judge him too quickly and harshly, get to know him a little better. You’ll see how much he could help runners without being one himself.

For all the writing that Mike did in his job with a high school athletic organization, he almost never mentioned himself (unlike his brother, who wears out the “I” on his keyboard). One of the very few pieces that told his own story was a biographical sketch requested by his employer.

He wrote this as if talking about someone else. Such as, “In grade school Mike used crayons and dice for ‘play’ track meets complete with scoring.”

From the next bedroom I would hear him announcing these nightly races: “Here comes Orange on the outside... Black is dropping back.” He recorded all the results.

Before his knee blew out in his junior year of high school, Mike was a better athlete than he ever would let on later. Afterward he hobbled along gamely on 1½ legs.

He mainly handed off the football to others. He even did this for his smaller brother in a lopsided game by calling my number twice without success, then a third time while he pushed me across the goal line.

This was Mike. He made a career of pushing others to greater glory while taking no credit himself.

An early example: He found a term paper of mine that I’d written for a high school class and sent it to Omaha’s newspaper, which I wouldn’t have thought to do myself. This became my first full-length article to see print, and created an appetite to write more.

Hard as it is to say now, my big brother also showed me how I did not want to live: physically inactive, working nights and sleeping days, working through his weekends and vacations, going wifeless and childless.

That would seem a sad life if you didn’t know the rest of his story. Mike was a rare and lucky man whose work and hobby were the same.

He found his true course early and stayed on it to the end. He pushed me in that same direction while letting me leave some of his baggage behind.

Later. The Drake Relays is Iowa’s annual Super Bowl of track and field, selling out the stadium in Des Moines each April. For the Hendersons it’s a holiday weekend as anticipated as Christmas.

The meet turned 97 years old in 2005. For more than three-quarters of those years, two generations of our family has watched and worked there. None of us served longer than Mike, and perhaps no one at all ever loved this event more or lived it more completely.

   

Few athletes and fans at the 2005 Drake Relays would have known his name. But most of the supporting cast – the officials, coaches and especially the reporters – knew all that he did for them and valued him for it.

   

By title, Mike was the Drake Relays statistician. He was much more than that: a living history book and human computer for this meet and this sport.

   

Starting in the mid-1960s, he shared the Relays’ statistical load with our late father Jim. Mike later worked with any sport that needed him: at Drake, the girls and boys high school championships, even arena football. But track and field always came first.

   

This was his family’s sport before he was born. An uncle, Charles Henderson, won a Drake Relays title for Iowa State in the early 1930s. I ran there, brother-in-law Elliott Evans won there, and our cousin Bruce Henderson coached winning teams there.

     

Mike not only loved the Drake Relays; he lived for and with this meet. From just after the state high school basketball tournaments in March through the high school track championships in late May, he camped out in Drake Field House or the stadium press box. He never sought praise for this work, and in fact acted embarrassed when told how well he did it.

     

One of his last tasks was to gather information for the Iowa Hall of Pride. His favorite part of the newly opened shrine to the sports achievements of Iowans, the track and field and cross-country wing, now bears his name. The plaque reads:

Mike Henderson (1941-2004) was Iowa track and field and cross-country’s best friend. Mike never ran in a state meet or the Drake Relays, but his many contributions made hundreds of these meets run smoothly for generations of athletes and coaches, officials and journalists. While working as information director at the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union for almost 32 years, his service spread to the Boys Athletic Association, Drake University and wherever else his talent and devotion were needed. Mike’s family and friends ask you, while visiting these exhibits, to relive the rich history of the sports that were his first love.

Mike was loved in return, more than even his family knew. Only when we sat down in Drake Stadium for the 2005 Relays did we learn that a high school hurdles race had been named for him.

We hadn’t been warned that a message from his friends in the press box would appear on the scoreboard during the qualifying rounds and final of that race. It read, “God bless you, Mike. We miss you.”

(Photo: Emily, Anne, Aunt Marion and cousin Dave Henderson gather with me as Mike appears in video at the Iowa Hall of Pride area that honors him.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]