The Front Runner

discipline and hard work had helped me suppress it, but now it was boiling up again. On the excuse that we weren't getting along, I stopped having relations with Mary Ellen, and used prostitutes and pickups while traveling.
    I went to meets with a throbbing excitement that devoured me. Outdoors under the sky, or indoors in the smoky arenas, I devoured the sight of those other fine-looking young men. They were stretched out in full flight, gleaming with sweat, as their muscles and tendons strained toward the unattainable. Now and then I'd see someone whom I found so attractive that he gave me that hurting, wanting feeling that Chris had.
    I quickly got discontented with reporting because it didn't get me really inside the sport. I n 1961 I heard about a coaching job open in a Philadelphia high school, St. Anthony's, applied and got it. It paid less, but it opened up a whole world to me. That very first year, I fielded a crack little team that burned up the Penn Relays and attracted a lot of attention.
    The drawback was that I didn't like high school stu-
    dents. They were noisy little animals. The next year, my beloved Villanova offered me a post as assistant track coach, and I fell over my own feet accepting. College boys were more comfortable to be with, because they already had a sense of self.
    In fact, I felt too comfortable with them. It was in 1962, that first year of coaching at Villanova, that I finally had to confess to myself that my feelings had a name: homosexuality.
    It's hard to convey the intensity of the suffering I felt. Everything in my upbringing made me see myself in the worst possible light. Runners are men, my father had said. A Marine is a man, the armed forces had said. A coach is a man. For chrissake, even reporters were men. The reporters I knew were a raunchy, whoring bunch.
    What puzzled me most was that I couldn't see in myself the mannerisms that society said were the mark of homosexuals. I. knew all about "queers," or thought I did. Queers were ballet dancers, interior decorators and actors. They were effeminate, pretty, fluttered their hands, wiggled their rears and talked in high, breathless voices.
    Every day I was in the locker room with those beautiful naked bodies, close enough to touch.
    Those Villanova runners used to do some pretty wild horsing around. Supposedly it was all just manly fun and games to grab at somebody else's goodies in the shower. But now and then I'd divine some real feelings there. You can't bring together a bunch of high-spirited young men full of all the urges, and teach them the cult of the body, and throw them together nude in a locker room, in such a physical sport, and not have a few random feelings happening.
    Runners are the most highly conditioned and shamelessly physical of athletes. They have a love affair going with their bodies: how the body responds to training, how it doesn't respond. Runners t alk obsessively, like little old ladies, about their injuries and illnesses and bowel movements and mineral deficiencies. They are more avid about physiology than sex researchers. Runners even swear that they make better lovers than
    other men because they have stronger hip muscles. They are so addicted physiologically to running that if you take it away from them, they climb the walls like junkies. Their very hormones are intimate in the gush of power they put out: male hormones with strength, female hormones with endurance.
    A man's body is good to look at only when he is conditioned, because of the muscling. So it follows, as the night the day, that sports harbor as much homosexuality as anywhere else in American society—possibly more. But everybody goes on pretending that sports are the bunting-draped sanctuary of the straight American he-man. Once in a while somebody is brave enough to hint at the truth, as Jim Bouton did in Ball Four, and he quickly gets shouted down as an enemy of sport. Homosexuality is the great skeleton in the closet of American athletics.
    So there I was in the Villanova locker rooms with all those fine-looking male bodies.
    Now and then I saw a boy who—I sensed—might respond if I chose to start something. In fact, I knew two at Villanova who were carrying on, because I caught them at it, just as Gus Lindquist would. By threatening to reveal their activities to the head coach, I could have blackmailed them into bed with me. But I let them off with a Marine-type lecture about moral purity. Unfortunately, they were both so