On THE Road

WITH Roger Robinson

BACKSTAGE AT BOSTON

BOSTON, Friday, April 17″, 9:00 A.M.—“The marathon? It’s great. I love it. All kindsa people run it. I’ve got friends who have run it. Two of them even had numbers.”

He was a college graduate, that articulate and friendly young cab driver, an ex-linebacker with bad knees. We talked football, marathons, and knees all the way from Logan Airport to Copley Square. His punch line, “Two of them even had numbers,” gave a glimpse of the Boston Marathon’s life in popular culture. The official race, with its qualifying times, lavish commercialism, invited stars, and microchip technology is still somehow the property of those pragmatic, sports-loving New Englanders. They watch it, cheer it, even run in it, but enter it officially? That’s like trying out for the Red Sox. I must remember those grass roots, I thought, as I stepped from the cab to enter four days in the refined air of elite running and sports journalism.

10 a.m.—I enjoy being an occasional sportswriter. As a boy Ibecame hooked on English magazine stories of sleuth reporters with raincoats, trilby hats, and notebooks who clambered fences to watch secret training sessions in windswept soccer grounds or dusty boxing clubs, and then took

trams back to their overheated typewriters. Not in 1998, notat Boston.

The race hotel is the Fairmont Copley Plaza, with alobby more opulent than the ballroom on the Titanic. The walls and ceiling ooze gold and glass and glitter, and high above the lobby chandeliers twinkle. But today the people below are not the preening aristocrats this setting seems to require. Business people in suits check in and check out, but among them stand clusters of men and women in bright blue and yellow jackets, carrying clipboards and talking excitedly into cell phones. Other clusters are of quiet people in sports shirts, jeans, and running shoes, meeting and greeting and moving toward the inner room where coffee beckons. And weaving among this crowd, in and out, up and down the lobby, swerving around potplants and luggage carts, small, lithe men and women in tracksuits are running—yes, running, quietly, unobtrusively, but nevertheless purposefully running from one end to the other of this long, high, palatial corridor. It

September/October 1998