It's Only A Transitory Analogy

Beautiful, Frank Shorter. Here you come, sloshing down this long straight at Washington Park in Chicago last Saturday afternoon, at the end of a muddy 10,000 meters in the cold and the wind, a good furlong ahead of everyone and winning the National AAU cross-country championship, and still, for all the world, you look like nothing more than a Madison Avenue art director warming up for a Sunday morning touch football game. Well, look at you. There's all of what you call your artsy-craftsy hair exploding every which way from under that Indian headband. And there's your Elliott Gould mustache, the droplets of saliva hanging from it turning into crystals of ice. And this is without the panty hose you wore to ward off the cold when you won the USTFF cross-country championship at Penn State three days earlier.

Sorry, Frank. Despite your contention that it's "only a transitory analogy," since the movie is now a year old, you're still "the pro from Dover," as Gould airily informed the operating room nurse in M*A*S*H. Remember what you said last June after you won the AAU three-mile run? "Everyone's always trying to hassle you with rules. They say, 'No, no, not that way. Do it my way.' I say I'm good. I'll do it the way I want."

And what is that you say about your image? "The people who'll get upset about it, I don't care about them. They need to be shook up a little anyway. And the people I do care about, it just doesn't bother them." Beautiful.

The night before the cross-country race Frank Shorter, the likely favorite in a field of 239, sat in That Steak Joynt, on the edge of Chicago's Old Town.

"Did you ever feel you'd get this far?" he was asked.

"No, never," he said.

"Has it changed you?"

A circumspect man, Shorter thought a moment before answering. "You can figure it out," he said, "I've been training hard for, well, less than a year now, and I'm finding myself getting too serious over it. All this talk is just an attempt to deal with the new pressures of being the favorite. The fact that I have to intellectualize so much about my attitudes and work out all these elaborate schemes is just an effort on my part to deal with the changes."

That he is in a position to deal with them at all is as unlikely a story as the man himself. A year and a half ago Frank Shorter was the alltime record-holding second-place finisher at IC4A and Heptagonal championships. He even was having trouble winning in Harvard-Yale dual meets. Then in May 1969, his studies as a psychology major at Yale completed, Shorter began two-a-day workouts for the first time in his life. "Curiosity," he says now. "I figured I had nothing to lose." Three weeks later he clocked himself for six miles and found his time was better than any collegian's that year. He flew to Knoxville and a week later was the NCAA six-mile champion.

That fall he spent eight weeks in medical school at the University of New Mexico, before giving it up in favor of cross-country and downhill skiing in Denver and finally just bumming around Taos, N. Mex., where his father practices medicine. It was only last March that Frank Shorter moved to Gainesville, Fla., joined Jack Bacheler, the 6'6?" entomologist, on the Florida Track Club and resumed his running career in earnest. "It became a matter of singular concentration, discipline, monomania," Shorter says. "I had to zero in on one thing, I had to make it so nothing else mattered. A distance runner always knows how good he is because he knows the distances he runs, the strength he has. He can't hide anything from himself. He always has the feeling of 'if I worked harder I could have been....' I just made up my mind to work and see how good I could be. I didn't want to quit and say for the rest of my life, 'Well, maybe I could have been.' "