As the Millrose Games turns 100, track & field looks back on a once-grand event and ponders its future

	Gail Devers found the Millrose Games often offered as much activity in the hallways of the arena as there was on the track. Paul Andrew Hawthorne/Wire Image.com

By Brian Cazeneuve, SI.com

In the hallway between the locker rooms in Madison Square is a large photo of Irish miler Eamonn Coghlan breasting the tape with arms aloft -- and eyes closed. By the time he won the Millrose Games Wanamaker mile for a record seventh time, in 1987, Coghlan didn't need to see where he was going. "I could have run Millrose by the sound of the crowd," he says. "The oohs meant I was going to pass someone. The aahs meant somebody was trying to pass me. If somebody just won the high jump, that was another sound. I knew what every sound meant and felt like. The Garden was so alive. There was never anything like running at Millrose, and there won't ever be again."

The Millrose Games -- 145 meters to a lap, 11 laps to a mile -- turns 100 on Friday night and like most centenarians, it has outlived its contemporaries. It is the last of its kind anywhere, an indoor track meet in a cozy, multipurpose, 18,000-seat arena where games with hoops and pucks have aged more gracefully. Millrose is a beloved and glorious dinosaur from an era when track and field was an intimate happening. Fans in the loge can distinguish one panting sprinter from another and are advised not to leave their seats, lest they pitch forward into Lane 4. The steady drumbeat of spikes can be heard even in the balcony.

For years, the meet was the template for a thriving circuit of winter indoor track events that stopped in the Garden twice and also filled large arenas in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New Jersey and Toronto. Athletes set 77 world records at the Games and 121 people became both Millrose champions and Olympic champions since the Wanamaker Department Store first dreamed up a track meet to buttress its business. The best athletes competed and companies eventually ponied up robust fees for title sponsorship.

"In my era, the '60s and '70s, I could make more money indoors than outdoors," says Craig Masback, CEO of USA Track & Field and a former miler. "For the past two decades, that hasn't been true. People will not run on an 11-lap-to-the-mile track anymore unless it's in Madison Square Garden."

These days, indoor track meets have shifted either to antiseptic field houses or to domed stadiums in which shotputters seem elfin and runners look like larvae. Why the move? Athletes feel more comfortable on the standard 200-meter modernized tracks with forgiving inclines. Agents insist on optimal conditions for their clients. Records are easier to standardize in cookie-cutter facilities, and because records are involved, it's easier for athletes to ask for bonus money. TV camera angles are better.

The whole operation is cleaner and more predictable. It just isn't as much fun.

Dog-days and dramatic memories

The distinguishing feature of elite indoor meets was never the roof. It was the way the riot of events infused the arena with energy, filling it to near-bursting: a vaulter's wayward pole that bonked off a miler's shoulder as he ran by; an official trying to measure a long jump mark as an unsuspecting high jumper skipped through the sand pit; the backstage scrambling of world-class hurdlers and high school milers trying to make sure they didn't miss their starts. Fire drills had neater formations. Fire rescues had less frenzy.

"You might miss a lot of things," says Joetta Clark-Diggs, a New Jersey native and four-time Olympian, "but you would never miss that first Friday in February. There was only one place to be."