Gunned Down By The Wrong Kiwi

John Walker and Filbert Bayi regard each other with respect, great affection and awe. When they met in San Diego last weekend they reacted in a sense like lovers who had become estranged for reasons imperfectly understood. For despite their undeniable desire, they have not for a year been able to jointly savor the rhythm, the urgencies and momentary death of a race. They have tried. Walker, the mile world-record holder, helped plan a trip to his native New Zealand for Tanzania's Bayi, the 1,500-meter world-record holder. But a change in New Zealand's policy toward athletic competition with South Africa and the subsequent admission of a South African softball team to the world championships held in New Zealand so offended Tanzania that Bayi was kept home. Next they agreed to meet on neutral ground, or boards, indoors in the U.S. Then Walker, running his last race in New Zealand before the American rendezvous, a splendid 3:35.6 for 1,500 meters, a race which in better conditions would have approached Bayi's record of 3:32.2, strained already sore Achilles' tendons. On the advice of coach and doctor, Walker withdrew from his U.S. races. But he came to California anyway, to visit friends, to consider post-Olympic business options and to find Filbert Bayi.

They met in a San Diego coffee shop and ate dinner at the counter, looking at each other curiously, wondering if they might end this forced dance of avoidance before next summer. They are the two best milers in the world by such a margin that the next best two, Rod Dixon of New Zealand and Marty Liquori, are now preparing for the 5,000 meters in the Olympics instead of the 1,500. Yet Walker and Bayi are so evenly matched (their 3:49.4 and 3:32.2 records are virtually equal) that the prospect of a race tantalizes. Comparing pre-Olympic plans, they discovered they would not meet before Montreal.

They talked of their training, of their afflictions. Walker's tendons are balanced by Bayi's malaria, which had sent him sweating and voiceless to bed in Africa 10 days earlier. Bayi's coach for this trip, a gracious man named Erasto Zambi, formally apologized to Walker for the cancellation of the trip to New Zealand. "We know you have refused invitations to race in South Africa. We understand you are just one individual, a good man. I am sorry we couldn't go, but it is our stand. We couldn't."

"I know," said Walker softly.

"But we will come, someday, when the politics are settled. Maybe not in your time...."

Walker snorted, grinning, and said he would go to Tanzania after the Olympics. Later he allowed that the Games are not that far off, that Montreal would certainly be the appropriate setting for their long-awaited meeting. He was most interested in what he had learned of Bayi's training, of hard 11-mile runs every morning at 5 o'clock, of daily intervals on the track. He was relieved that it was so vigorous, so similar, in fact, to his own. "Nobody can run 3:32 without a bloody lot of training," he said with satisfaction, ridding himself of the myth of the African as inhumanly gifted, a running animal.

On a warm, roseate dawn, the morning of the—so help us, it's the name—Jack in the Box Indoor Games, Filbert Bayi, dressed in a full sweat suit with its hood tightly drawn about his narrow face and overwrapped with a rain suit, ran on the grassy waterfront of Harbor Island. His footfalls were silent. The only sounds were the burbling of cormorants on the bay, the rhythmic slither of his nylon parka. With each step, it seemed, he accelerated, soon floating over the grass at a pace of better than five minutes per mile. After 2� miles he stopped and stretched, his perspiration only a dewy sheen across the bridge of his nose. Used to the 90� heat, 90% humidity of Dar es Salaam—even there he never runs shirtless—he shivers in California.

The run warmed him just enough to talk. "I have no plan for this race," he said. "I will just run." Told that Paul Cummings, a BYU graduate student who had done 3:57.6 in the Millrose Games, seemed his strongest opponent, Bayi turned to the sea, annoyed. "There are many who run. It is foolish to single out one." A front runner—and Bayi is the best who ever lived—does not mull over contenders; he races the whole pack. Yet Bayi's front-running indoors differs from his slashing first laps outdoors. On boards he leads more to control than to kill. "The turns are sharp and it is hard to pass, and in the pack runners are thrown together," he said. "I run in front because I don't want any disturbances."

There are disturbances for any Tanzanian traveler to the U.S. In Dar es Salaam it took Bayi and Zambi and 5,000-meter runner Suleiman Nyambui a week of standing in lines to assemble visas, tickets, funds and permission to depart. "The government wants to make sure you don't owe it any money before you leave the country," Zambi explained. So the coach and runners submitted to tax audits. Then there was a 36-hour succession of flights across the equator, the North Pole, and back down to California. "Filbert has a sore back," said Zambi, "and he has lost his appetite." Zambi, whose advice Bayi has put to good use in other races, as in 1973 when he first beat Kipchoge Keino with his now characteristic searing early pace, this time offered none. "I have never seen an indoor meet," he said. "Filbert knows more about this than I." Bayi, after a quick trip to buy $100 worth of stereo albums, spent the day in bed.

Rod Dixon, Walker's compatriot and the world's best 5,000 man last year, prepared for the San Diego mile in a way somewhat divergent from Bayi's, but vintage Dixon. "I got up at 10 and annoyed my wife by turning on the TV," he said the day of the race. "Well, you can't do that at home—have TV in the mornings. After breakfast I played those electronic pinball games, and then we went to the zoo all day. Before dinner I tried to take a run. It lasted seven minutes. The leg was hurting." The injury, a chronic one, strained two weeks earlier, is an unusual tendinitis deep in Dixon's left shin. "I've just been resting it, taking a holiday really. It's been a chance to take Debbie away. I haven't prepared. I'll just be running on my strength, I guess."