Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [15]
I knew I was good, but I didn’t realize how good until I beat the college runners. Yet when I left the stadium with Pete, I felt down. The parents and friends of boys who had placed no better than third consoled and encouraged them. The backslapping and hugging only made me, the winner, feel lonely.
From then on I made sure I invited my parents to every meet. To have them with me made me proud. Winning, I had realized, wasn’t much fun unless I shared it with others.
MY SENIOR YEAR I got elected student-body president and took it easier running, working on my style rather than trying to break records. Pete continued to coach me, and after I graduated in January 1936 I told him my heart was set on making the Olympic team in the 1,500-meter. It wouldn’t be a piece of cake. We both knew there were five great milers in the country, all college graduates, one being Glenn Cunningham, my hero. I’d read about how his legs were badly burned as a child. (One day I’d see the scars for myself, in the showers.) That he ran at all inspired me and made me realize I also had a chance to be a champion.
But Pete said I’d probably have to be patient. “You’ll just have to wait for the 1940 Tokyo games. You’ll be in your prime by then.”
He was right. Cunningham had already run an indoor mile at 4:06:04 and had outdoor times of 4:09 and 4:10. I was still, on average, 8 seconds behind. Eight seconds might not seem like much in most situations, but in a race it’s a lot longer than anyone realizes—about seventy-five yards.
A week later Pete called to tell me that one of the country’s premiere distance runners, Norman Bright, would compete in the Compton Invitational in two weeks. His race was the 5,000 meter, which is just over three miles. “I’m going to enter you,” he said, “just to see how close you can come to Bright, who will most certainly make the Olympic team. But switching from fifteen hundred to five thousand meters is a big step, and you have only twelve days to condition yourself to that distance.”
To build up my strength and endurance, I ran five miles a day and had a fresh miler pace me for each mile. I pushed so hard that I wore out the tip of my toe and blood saturated my socks and shoes. Then I tapered down to shorter distances and finally speed work.
I had no idea what I could do against Bright. Pete had already watched him at a meet in San Diego and realized he ran to conserve energy, saving his strength for a final kick. Pete said he’d let me know when the last lap came so I could move out the entire quarter and, he hoped, take the sprint out of Bright.
During the race Pete miscounted and signaled me with two laps to go. I sped up, as did Bright. We passed each other five or six times in the stretches, and I found it hard to believe I could keep up. Eventually Bright lost his steam and I pulled away for the final two hundred yards. I could see him over my shoulder. The crowd was going crazy.
Then the officials made a big mistake. Instead of telling a runner we’d lapped to get off the track to the left (the inside), they motioned him to the right as I tried to pass him on the right. Maybe I should have cut to the left, but my momentum was already established and I was forced out to the eighth lane, where we collided by the grandstand. I hitch-stepped, went down with one hand on the ground. By then Bright was well ahead of me. I recovered and ran at an angle for the inside lane. The officials got so excited that they goofed again, dropping the tape, then picked it up quickly as I caught Bright at the finish line. It looked like a dead heat, but he won by an inch or two.
I had lost my first race in three and a half years.
When I was a winner my friends would slap my back, my girlfriend would hug