Chat: Marty Liquori, Part 2

Marty Liquori is one of only four U.S. high school runners to break the 4:00 mile barrier. He was ranked number one in the world for the mile in 1969 and 1971 and number one in the world for 5000 meters in 1977.

Marty Liquori who missed Olympics through injury; is making a comeback. He won mile in ultra-mod tra
Frank LennonGetty Images

Marty Liquori is one of only four U.S. high school runners to break the 4:00 mile barrier. He was ranked number one in the world for the mile in 1969 and 1971 and number one in the world for 5000 meters in 1977. Liqouri was the youngest finalist in the Olympics 1500 meters in 1968 at age 18. He won three straight NCAA one-mile titles from 1969 to 1971. In 1971, he beat Jim Ryun (at the time the world recordholder) in the "Dream Mile" in Philadelphia. Liquori held the American records in the 2000 meters, the two-mile, and 5000 meters. His best mile was 3:52.2, and his best 5000 meters was 13:15.1. Liquori also has had a successful career as a sports commentator, covering sports events such as the Olympics, the NYC Marathon, the Boston Marathon and Ironman Triathlons. Liquori was interviewed after his induction into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame. This is the second half of a two-part interview.

Runner's World Daily: At your web site, you list "the athlete", "the producer", and "the musician". One of the things I noticed about you as an athlete is that you seem to be snake-bitten at the Olympics. You were the youngest to run the 1500 meters in 1968. Did you get the stress fracture actually during the finals?
Marty Liquori: No, I think I got it in the semifinal. So I thought if I iced it down before the final, I would be okay, which was a miscalculation. But the stress fracture was coming on for a couple of weeks; between the Trials and the Olympics, it came on. I had a long year. That was a problem, but I wouldn't have come in the top six finishers at the Olympics anyway. But the next one (1972) hurt, because I was in a position to win, when I had torn ligaments in my foot that took a long time to heal, almost a year before they were right again. That was a case of over-training. I tried to train through it, and it just hung on. It was a plantar fascia thing, which in the old days people didn't know that much about it. It probably would be treated a lot better today.

RWD: Then in 1976, you had a problem?
ML: In 1976 I pulled a hamstring training on a golf course. It just wasn't right for the Trials; I didn't make it through the Trials.

RWD: And then 1980 were the Olympics that never were for America. What did you think about the U.S. decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics? That was your last shot, right?
ML: It was a bad decision politically. Carter didn't really, I think, know what he was doing there. The Olympics had been fairly politically free before that. But I think it really damaged U.S. track and field because a lot of people quit after that. Some distance runners, who might have hung around for 1984, were not willing to do that in light of what happened in 1980.

RWD: Going back to the 1972 Olympics in Munich, that's when you started your broadcasting. What was it like being at the 1972 Olympics where there was the massacre of the Israeli athletes? How did it affect you?
ML: Strangely enough, being in Germany and not speaking the language, basically being in a hotel room while all of this was happening, trying to watch German TV, I was a lot less informed than the average people at home (in the U.S.). Of course, we did not have the Internet in that day. So to this day, I think people who were in the United States and glued to their TV sets and to Jim McKay know more about it than I do. I was able to recently see the Munich film by Spielberg. I didn't think it was very good, but I learned some things for the first time. I would say I wasn't as affected as some people at home were.

RWD: May 16, 1971. The Martin Luther King International Freedom Games at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. Let's go back to your Dream Mile against Jim Ryun. You wrote in your book "On the Run" a great description of the race lap-by-lap, and I also read it on the Internet. I am curious: what were your feelings like the night before and up to the start of the race?
ML: You hit on something there. I didn't feel so prepared. It was the middle of May, and I kind of felt like it was sprung on me kind of early. Jim Ryun had run much faster times than I had going into it. I definitely was feeling like an underdog. It was a lot more stressful for me than any race I did before or since. The thing I remember, now that I think about it, my phone was ringing off the hook. I had requests from reporters who had been good to me for many years. I felt I had to talk to them. What I think now is that people like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan have a weekend like that every week. I had it once in my life, and it was overwhelming. So I really feel for some of these professional athletes who go through this week after week. I don't think people realize what it is like.

RWD: You started a shoe store for running shoes only, which at that time was very rare.
ML: Yes, it was rare. It was probably the first athletic shoe store. There was a chain in Pennsylvania called the Athlete's Foot, and our chain called Athletic Attic, that both started at about the same time selling only athletic footwear, which the sporting goods industry or the malls who were renting to us thought was a crazy idea. You couldn't have a store that just sold shoes. You had to have fishing poles and baseball bats and everything like that. So we were probably the first ones to do that. We were really gearing it towards running, and just a place for us to meet. It was almost like a clubhouse in the beginning.

RWD: How did you determine it might be a success?
ML: We had just returned from the Olympics in Munich, where we had seen people wearing athletic shoes and warm-up suits all the time for leisure, whereas Americans were still wearing jeans and black shoes. The other thing I felt was important was that the athletic shoes, which at that time cost $20, were what people wanted to wear in their leisure time because they were much more comfortable than the Florsheim shoes that they were paying $80 for. A lot of it was based on the comfort factor and the changing dress codes that were about to hit in America.

RWD: Under "broadcasting" on your web site, it says you handled the Olympics in 1972, 1976, and 1984, you have handled New York City Marathons, Ironman Triathlons, and Boston Marathons. As a broadcaster, what event or events do you enjoy the most to cover?
ML: The Olympic finals are always pretty exciting. In the 1500 or the 5000 or the 800, because you have watched it develop for a couple years. The strategies are pretty complicated, so that is always great. But the Ironmen in their way, in the early years just revealing the depth of what a human body can do, like a Dave Scott, which was pretty incredible. But also marathon races: Alberto Salazar's years or Rod Dixon's years, those were pretty exciting times. Joan Benoit Samuelson's win, those were very exciting times in the sport.

RWD: During Internet searches on your name, I found a couple interesting items. One was a 1985 movie called "On the Edge." Can you describe the movie and your performance in the movie?
ML: It is a movie about a runner who loses his eligibility back in the old days and runs the Dipsea Race (in Marin County, CA). He is played by Bruce Dern, who strangely, at that time, was my favorite actor. He went to the University of Pennsylvania on a track scholarship. For the movie, they called me at the last minute to play myself as a sportscaster. Interesting thing, when I got there, I had the script, and I asked, "do you want me to read these lines just like they are written?" They asked why. I said, "because a sportscaster wouldn't say this. You are really making me sound dumb." So they said, "No, no, just adlib it. Say what you would say (as a real sportscaster)." We kind of threw out the script and I did what I had to do in one day. So it was interesting. For runners, it is a good movie.

RWD: You were asked to be the national spokesperson for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, and six months later you were diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). How did that affect your life, both physically and mentally?
ML: It hasn't affected it that much physically. I've just been out on the mountain bike for two hours five out of the last seven days because it does not affect my red blood cells; it affects my white blood cells. So my aerobic capacity is still pretty good. My heart rate was still 43 a few days ago at the doctor's office. It has not affected me that much physically. It has affected me mentally in that it was a wake-up call to reassess my life and what I wanted to do with my life, which caused me eight years ago to cut back on the amount of traveling I was doing and get back to music, which was my first love. It's worked out very well.

RWD: You have gotten into your jazz guitar, which you had given up at an early age?
ML: Yes, about eight years ago. I play twice a week with different people at a restaurant called Leonardo's 706 here in Gainesville (Florida) in a group called Hot Club de Ville. This is a group that plays the music of Django Reinhardt and gypsy jazz from Europe. (See the web site.)... When I hear somebody gets cancer, I almost want to call them and say, you feel real bad right now, but in a few years you are going to realize this is actually a great gift. It is kind of a shame that people can't experience the wake-up call and reassess their lives without a diagnosis of cancer or something like that. In retrospect, if you get farther down the line, you start to realize a lot of good came out of what seems to be, to a person who is hearing about somebody getting cancer, something that it is all bad. But it is not all bad...

I was on the phone with somebody yesterday, and the thing I told him was one mistake I made, I did have chemo, and the type of chemo I had was a mild form of chemo. I kind of over-reacted, and I said I was going to save my energy for the chemo and not run for six months. I ended up putting on 20 pounds; I have never gotten those 20 pounds off again. So I would say to people, if you feel like you can run, go ahead and do it. Now some people go overboard. I also have friends who have cancer that are going to do their 20-mile run every Sunday because that proves to them that they haven't lost anything. There is a happy medium somewhere between keeping up your old schedule and cutting it out completely.

RWD: Out of everything that has happened to you and everything you have done, what do you feel is your biggest accomplishment?
ML: I alluded to it earlier, and I didn't even realize this until a couple months ago: actually being ranked on the track number one in the mile and the 5000. There aren't a lot of people who have done that. Off the track, or coincidentally, the stuff that has happened with Team In Training has been very gratifying because the charity-based running events are changing the history of medical research with all the money that Team in Training or the Arthritis Foundation have caused to happen. So that has been a very important social movement that maybe I had a small part in.

I think one of my great accomplishments was I kept getting hassled by the press in New York for not running a 4:00 mile in the (Madison Square) Garden. I said the problem is the race is run at 10:00 (p.m.), and by that time, the place is filled with smoke. So some announcer stood up and said, "all right, I'll tell you what I am going to do. On Thursday night, I am going to keep announcing to people if they have to smoke to go under the stands. When I came out to run, the place was totally different. I felt like I had to try to break the 4:00 mile. The point was, after that they started doing that at all the track meets. Through that moment of throwing a challenge out, we got them to stop smoking in Madison Square Garden - which when I think about it now seems unbelievable, the conditions the basketball plays and the runners labored under. It is a lot different now. You can imagine, we would get on the line for the Millrose Games, and the officials would be smoking cigars (laughs).

Read Part 1 of our chat with Marty Liquori

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