Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe

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СКАЧАТЬ there was no Citgo sign for the runners to pass. On Patriots’ Day in 1897, the Boston Beaneaters baseball club played their first game of the season, losing 1-0 to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Beaneaters struggled in April, earning only one victory in their first seven games. But, led by five future Hall of Famers, they went on to win ninety-three games and capture their fourth National League pennant of the decade.

      The Beaneaters played at South End Grounds, about a mile to the southeast of where Fenway stands today. It would be another four years before the Boston Red Sox, now considered one of the oldest and most established teams in baseball, would begin playing in the newly formed American League.

      The Red Sox and Fenway Park are just one of many modern-day sports and cultural institutions predated by the Boston Marathon. In 1897, the first World Series was still six years away. The Stanley Cup would not be awarded for another twenty. It would be another two decades before the National Football League was formed, another seventy years before the first Super Bowl. The game of basketball had only just been invented, and games still featured peach baskets from which men on ladders would retrieve the ball after points were scored – which wasn’t very often.

      William McKinley, the twenty-fifth American president and the last to have served in the Civil War, had just been sworn into office in March 1897 to preside over a union of forty-five states. Local prospectors had recently discovered gold in northern Canada, but the news had not yet reached America. When it did, in July 1897 in Seattle, it would spark the Klondike Gold Rush. Also that year, Mark Twain announced to a New York newspaper that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” The first patents for automobiles had only just been awarded. Orville and Wilbur Wright were still making bicycles.

      There are few things about life in 1897, in Boston or anywhere else in North America, that are consistent with modern-day existence. But one thread stretches through the years, connecting the late nineteenth century to the present day. In April of 1897, the Boston Athletic Association launched a race that has been run, following almost entirely the same path, every single year since.

      CHAPTER 4

      At 12:15 p.m. on April 19, 1897, Tom Burke scraped the heel of his boot across the narrow dirt road in front of Metcalf ’s Mill in Ashland, Massachusetts to create the starting line for the American Marathon, as the inaugural edition of the Boston Marathon was called. As a reporter described it at the time, Burke called for the contestants and fifteen men answered.

      Burke was the son of a Boston undertaker and still in his early twenties. According to historian and author Patrick Kennedy, when Burke was growing up he was a tall, skinny kid who walked with a crutch because of rheumatism. Doctors feared the condition would be permanent, but as a teenager he won regional and then national 400-meter titles. He took six weeks off from his law studies at Boston University to travel by steamship to Greece, compete in the Olympics, and return home as the first 100-meter and 400-meter champion in modern history.

      It’s unlikely any of the fifteen men he beckoned to the makeshift starting line would have even heard of a marathon two years earlier. While they might have been eager to participate in a race, they didn’t relish the long-distance journey to Boston quite the way tens of thousands covet it today. It’s likely that most of them had little idea what they were in for, having never run even half as far in one stretch as they were about to on that spring day. There would have been no talk of fueling or hydrating, pace bunnies or split times.

      According to a marvellous account in the next day’s Boston Globe, the athletes ate in the dining room of a hotel just before the race, the competitors from New York at one table, those from Boston and Cambridge at another.

      At 12:19 p.m., Burke started the race by simply shouting “Go!” The Globe reported that the contestants went away quickly, “but after going about 50 yards they seemed to realize they had just 25 miles of hard road before them and settled down to a comfortable jog.” So new was this race to its readers that the Globe put the word “Marathon” in quotation marks.

      The crowd in Ashland was strong and supportive: “The sleepy old town rang with the cheers of her lusty sons,” the Globe wrote. Many of the spectators took the morning train from Boston to Ashland to see the start, then returned in time to witness the finish. They stretched in a line from Ashland to South Framingham, along with local residents who waved handkerchiefs from their doorsteps along the route.

      Somewhere beyond Framingham, a convoy of bicycles, carriages, wagons, motorcycles – “in fact, every conceivable form of conveyance” – fell in behind the leaders. It was “as if the heavens had suddenly opened and rained wheels,” the Globe said.

      The course was designed to match the original route in Greece, a race back to downtown from almost twenty-five miles outside the city, over hills and dusty roads. The finish line would be in the Irvington Street oval, a 220-yard track that was the closest thing Boston had to the Olympic stadium in Greece.

      The early lead was shared by Dick Grant, a Canadian student at Harvard, and Hamilton Gray of New York, with John McDermott of New York, the man who had won the marathon in his hometown the previous autumn, in third place. The runners continued to receive ovations along the route, to which they raised their hands or even bowed. The order didn’t change much in the miles ahead, but on a hill between Wellesley and Newton Lower Falls, McDermott caught the leaders, then passed them on the downward slope.

      “He evidently took the heart out of Gray, for he stopped running and walked,” the Globe reported. It would be decades before the heartbreak that immortalized another hill in Newton. Grant continued to chase McDermott and the two raced each other for about a mile. Eventually, at the next big hill, Grant too stopped running, watching the New Yorker disappear around the next turn. Grant then beckoned the driver of a passing street-watering cart. “He laid down in the street, requesting the driver to let the water run over him.” He tried to resume running but eventually gave up.

      McDermott later described Grant as “the hardest man I ever beat. He held me for a mile, although he was all pumped out. If he had trained for the race he would have given me a hard race. As it was it was hard enough to shake him. He ran the pluckiest race I ever saw.”

      It took some effort to keep the road clear of spectators so McDermott could pass. The Globe reported he was running “like clockwork. His legs seemed to rise and fall like a phantom Greek and his little body was bent just the least bit forward, his arms were at full length at his side, and his face was set with determination.” Apparently as McDermott ascended the next hill, he laughed at the cyclists who had a hard time keeping up with him. “He breasted the long hill manfully, still maintaining the beautiful form, and he laughed at the wheelmen who were pounding their pedals in their endeavor to keep their machines in motion.”

      But after twenty miles, McDermott started to experience a cramp in his leg. He stopped to rub the aching limb on more than one occasion, testing it out for a few hundred yards only to halt again. Some spectators thought that he, like Gray and Grant, would have to quit, but a combination of running and walking brought him closer to the finish, where he was advised that another runner was approaching. “He shut his teeth, set his face, and leaning well forward, he dug his shoes into the hard Beacon Street surface and started on his last spurt. He ran up the hill like a half-miler, down the other side to Commonwealth Avenue and across Massachusetts Avenue, breaking a funeral procession and stalling two electric cars.”

      At the Irvington Street oval, which stood just yards from the present-day Boston finish line, the cheers of the crowd were reported as deafening. “Every available foot of standing room in the oval was crowded,” the Globe reported. “The policemen forgot their duty in the excitement, and the track was soon swarming with excited people, all wishing to grasp the hand of the victor of the first ‘Marathon СКАЧАТЬ