The Front Runner

felt overcome by memories and pain.

    The moment I first saw the Oregon three, I felt a vague unease. They sat, or sprawled, in my office. I had shut the door and hung out my COACH IN CONFERENCE DO NOT DISTURB sign. They gazed at me in silence. I gazed back. I knew their faces well from all the photos I'd seen in Track & Field News, Runner's World and Sports Illustrated.
    They looked like three travel-stained rock musicians who'd been busted flat in Memphis. They had hollowed eyes and beards. I thought with a twinge of nostalgia of the 1950s, when every runner had a crewcut and a clean shave. Even I didn't insist on crewcuts any more.
    The superstar of the three was miler Vince Matti. He was also the best-looking. He was twenty-two, from Los Angeles, tall and rangy, as a miler should be. He had wavy coal-black hair down to his collar, insolent brown eyes, and a little scar under his right eye. He wore faded Levis, a torn Air Force jacket and mountain
    boots. He owned a 3:52.19, the third-fastest U.S. mile in history. He also owned a pair of injury-prone legs that kept him from running like that about half the time. He was, I knew, very free with his elbows in a race and very hot-tempered.
    My eyes moved on to Jacques LaFont. He was twenty-one, from Canton, Illinois. He wasn't in Vince's class, but he was a top miler and half-miler. The track magazines characterized him as a screwball and a cut-up, and also as sensitive and highstrung. He was a shade more muscular than Vince, as a half-miler might be. He had exuberant frizzy auburn hair and beard, and wore a plaid headband and a motorcycle jacket. His bright blue eyes wavered between lively and anxious.
    My eyes came to rest on Billy Sive. He was twenty-two, from San Francisco. He had been one of those spectacular California high-school distance runners. When he got to Oregon, he ran a 28:49 10,000 meter, but he seemed to have stopped improving. I wondered why he had not fulfilled that early promise. Maybe he had burned himself out.
    Billy sat easily in the oak armchair where Joe had sat earlier. He looked calmly back at me through his gold-rimmed glasses. Behind those glasses were the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen in a man. They were a clear blue-gray. But they were beautiful because of their proud, spookily candid expression.
    Vince Matti was snapping his gum in a way that already irritated me.
    I pointed at the wastebasket. "Your gum in there," I said.
    Vince hesitated. Then, possibly because he felt that the main thing at the moment was getting on my team, he obeyed.
    My eyes went back to Billy Sive.
    He sat there looking straight through me. He was wearing a faded, tattered blue-quilted Mao jacket. His brown leather pants must have been expensive—they were bagged and worn now, but they still displayed his long racehorse legs. My coach's eye measured his slender body at five-foot-eleven and weighed him at
    around 138 pounds. On his feet he had worn-out blue Tiger racing flats. I thought of him standing beside the icy highway in those thin-soled shoes.
    "Well," I said to them, "Lindquist canned your asses for 'disciplinary reasons.' What am I supposed to do with you? If you know anything about me, you know that I'm just as authoritarian as Lindquist."
    "Yeah, sure, the press said disciplinary," said Sive. Quiet as he was, he seemed to be their spokesman. "Lindquist was afraid to tell the truth to the press."
    "So?" I said.
    "So we'll tell you the truth," said Sive. "Then you can issue us tracksuits if you want, or tell us to split if you want."
    "Okay," I said. "What's the big dramatic truth?"
    The two others looked down, a little uncomfortable. But Sive's extraordinary blue-gray eyes never left mine. I had the spooky feeling that the kid knew everything about my life. (As it turned out, this feeling was correct.) His face, I thought, was young American Gothic. It was pleasantly handsome, fine-cut, with high cheekbones, a high forehead, a blunt nose, a good mouth. His mop of light brown curls looked like it had been through a wind tunnel.
    "We're gay," he said to me.
    I felt as if somebody had hit me in the stomach with the thirty-five-pound shot. After a moment, a prickling sweat of panic broke out all over my body.
    Outside, my girls' freshman track team was going off for practice. The hallway echoed with girls' shrieks, laughs and giggles as they trooped past.
    Sive was still talking. He pointed at Vince and Jacques.
    "Lindquist caught those two fooling