On THE Road

WITH Roger Robinson

MELPOMENE WORE PINK

WALT DISNEY WORLD, ORLANDO, FLORIDA, January 11— Hercules is the starter, a godlike hunk with rippling biceps, taut headband, blond locks, and a sexy little miniskirt. It makes a change from Mayor Giuliani, I guess.

In attendance are the minxish Megara in Ancient Greek tailored nylon; a troop of long-legged Romano-Amazonian legionaries in curving cuirasses, plumed helmets over flowing hair, cuffs, boots, and high-cut microskirts, all in glittering white and gold; some slaves in historically imprecise lingerie; a fat emcee whose name I didn’t catch (Dionysos, probably); and, to represent the arts, the Muses, including, to my astonishment, Melpomene. I thought nothing was going to surprise me at Walt Disney World, but what on earth is the Muse of Tragedy doing here?

Four 12-foot-high Doric pillars, floodlit in soft pink, impressively frame the startline. It’s 26:00 a.m. start, so it’s very dark, apart from a huge spherical moon that glows through the trees. The thought crosses my mind that it may be a laser image projected from nearby Epcot Center.

After two days in this setting of hightech fantasy, I am beginning to lose my grip onreality.Are- fi assuring conif- J erous forest, c ’ fo for instance, ¥ . id surrounds the { | start on Epcot Drive. It takes an effort to remember that these northern pines and firs stand where barely 20 years ago the snakes and the alligators played.

Now stirring music pulsates around the dark start area: “Go the Distance!” Hercules makes an inspiring speech about how all the runners who go the distance will be going from zero to hero, as he has done, mythic Greek embodiment of the American Dream. Megara seductively lures the runners to glory and wiggles her gown. The legionaries do a disco dance, their gold-fringed skirts swinging. Melpomene wears pink.

Is all this themed antiquity real? What are runners doing here? What happened to the simple, sweaty, earthy, effortful old sport of running Thave loved so long? Then in the grey edges of the floodlights I see lines of guys in running gear peeing into the forest. And I know I’m home.

May/June 1998

They call Disney’s the most magical start you’ve ever seen, and from my privileged position as a roaming journalist with a disregard for barricades, it’s colorful and fun. I’m close enough to see that the legionaries actually wear flesh-colored bodystockings under their skimpy armor, so the predawn air feels real and cold to them, too.

Unfortunately, most of the runners see nothing of all this. My wife was there in the middle of the pack, and later when she came across my closeup photos of the long-legged legionaries dancing on a floodlit stage, they came as a perplexing surprise. I quickly turned to the pictures of her finish.

She did see the fireworks, though. When the gun booms, the tops of the pillars explode upwards, whooshing and sizzling, giant Roman candles spectacular against the night. The runners cheer as they surge forward, Hercules roars huskily, and I leap aboard the funny little open-topped, fake-old-fashioned bus (“The Berliner”) that (I think) is the designated media vehicle. There’s a moment of confusion as Marty Liquori and Hal Rothman, who have a TV show to produce, try to establish which of the three funny little open-topped buses will go the route they need, but nobody seems to know, and then we’ re away, hotly pursued by Keith Brantly.

After a minute or so of darkness we pass Epcot, where crowds line the course clapping and cheering and shouting. Doubt intrudes again. Are

May/June 1998

these real people? Or has Disney trucked out a few hundred animated wax dummies from Magic Kingdom and Epcot, reprogrammed for the day to clap and shout “Lookin’ good! You can do it!””?

The rides I did the day before at Epcot showed that Disney could easily handle such an illusion. Butat 5:07 for Brantly’s first mile, there was nothing illusory about the wind chill on the upper deck of the media bus. I hunker down for a long ride.

The idea of a marathon at Walt Disney World has seemed appealing since I heard about the first one five years ago. As anon-American, I can’t claim an inward view of such an essentially American cultural phenomenon, but the Disney achievement is not to be underrated. In some ways their creation of a huge-scale popular culture committed wholly to the values of peaceful collaboration, wellbehaved pleasure, and education is similar to the achievement of 20thcentury sport. So the alliance between Disney and running is potentially an important one.

Anyway, I’ve always liked Disney. Like most people, some of my best early pleasures and learning experiences came from Disney movies — Dumbo, Bambi, and Snow White for my generation.

Apparently, I persuaded my poor mother, struggling to keep a home together in war-battered Britain, to sit twice through Bambi. I still laugh at the memory (at least 50 years old now) of a Goofy short where he gets

terrified by inexplicable sounds that follow him downstairs at night— which, in fact, are his own dangling suspenders. The wicked witch in Snow White is still eerie to me, and (like most people) I can’t hear “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” without seeing Mickey Mouse’s army of menacing brooms in Fantasia.

As a young parent, I discovered the delight of escorting my kids through the Los Angeles Disneyland. T persuaded them to go twice round “Pirates of the Caribbean.” My one regret about their growing up is that I no longer have that excuse. Somehow I can’t bring myself, at nearly 60, to stand in Disney lines alone. When I confessed this during the day at Epcot to my new friend, Sacramento marathoner Gary Jensen, he wisely said, “Wait till you have grandchildren.” It’s good to have “Pirates of the Caribbean” to look forward to again.

“Don’t confuse fantasy with reality; there’s nothing ‘make-believe’ about this marathon,” the race shirt declares, and the program follows the same theme. The start may be magical, but a marathon is hard. OK, that’s a good message for runners, but in Walt Disney World it’s not always so easy to tell fantasy and reality apart.

Gary and I shared a relaxed day at Epcot, while our wives were confined in a business conference. Astonishingly life-like models enact the history of “Spaceship Earth,” fearsome three-dimensional snakes and cats strike out at you all too convincingly

in “Honey, I shrunk the audience,” and on the far side of the lake, you recover by strolling through exact replicas of the Doge’s Palace, a Kyoto temple, and an English village, and by drinking German beer on a German street. It was a day of diverting illusions, a half-fantasy world where everything is safe, clean, friendly, and fake—and you keep buying things.

By contrast, the open top of the media bus was all reality. I don’t like to complain, as the race was well organized and the 10,000 runners all seemed to have a ball. Butif the marathon is intended in part to generate good public relations for the theme parks, it seems short-sighted to put the media on a vehicle that was too big to drive through the entrances. The result is that we saw nothing of the only interesting parts of the course.

Along dark and featureless highways we chugged patiently ahead of the field, but when they turned eagerly into Epcot, Magic Kingdom Park, Disney-MGM, and the rest, we were shut out, like Dumbo or Quasi or any of those marginalized underdogs Disney is so fond of portraying. Tam told there were fireworks, lights and lasers, castles and characters. But while the runners got high on these attractions, our driver had to put his foot down to take us the long way round. We sliced through the cold misty air, and froze.

Hard-bitten journos clung to each other for warmth and comfort, and I lay prone on the floor with my ring binder meagerly sheltering my head.

May/June 1998

All we needed on that windswept upper deck to complete the experience was Captain Ahab in the bows. So don’t expect me to describe Cinderalla’s Castle. The best I can do is quote another disgruntled upperdeck passenger: “I was there yesterday with my kids. The castle is all pink, decorated with candy canes and all that stuff.”

Iam left with one special memory, a visual effect that out-Disneyed Disney. The sun was reluctantly rising (journalists were desperately chanting, “Come up, sun!”’) and its low light struck the lingering mist. Coming over the crest of a low hill at about eight miles with the sun behind, Keith Brantly suddenly appeared gigantically enlarged, a titanic shimmering shape suspended magically in mist four feet off the ground, striding hugely toward us in a great halo of shining light. Talk about godlike. Neither Disney nor Spielberg could have beaten that one.

Being an ungodlike, ordinary mortal (even, Iadmitit, a zero), [abandoned the media bus at the half-marathon finish and scuttled into the nearest square of sunshine. Had I stayed aboard the bus I might have gone down in history as the first person to die of cold in Orlando.

Ahead on the full marathon course lay Disney’s Wide World of Sports, which I had visited at length two days earlier. It’s the Xanadu of world sport—expanses of fertile ground, stately architecture, measurelessly superb facilities. Living partly as Idoin

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a little country with meager sporting resources (six all-weather tracks in the whole of New Zealand, and none indoors), I was overawed by the quality, the scale, the beauty, and the impeccable condition of the Disney complex. I’m tempted to say that the running track is surfaced in compressed $100 bills, but I don’t want to make fun of a commitment to sports and their role in modern society of which Tentirely approve.

The “fieldhouse” is a kind of temple of sports, its architecture a postmodern mix of art deco and Spanish church. There are facilities for more than 30 different sports, indoor and outdoor, all good enough to stage major events. Baseball alone has a “quadriplex” of four world-class fields.

Naturally I gravitated to the training track, where young athletes from Dennison University, one of the many visiting groups who use the facilities, were working with their coaches. I watched groups of runners, young female pole vaulters, a sprinter running bursts while towing a heavy metal yoke across the manicured infield. I may have seen more of the future here than I did the next day at Planet Earth.

Sport, I believe, is among the modern era’s greatest achievements, and Disney’s Wide World of Sports gives this achievement physical expression, a great setting for a great human activity, as the stadium and the theater of Delphi were in their day, to return to the Greek theme.