2

The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.

—BARON DE COUBERTIN,
founder of the modern Olympic Games

IN THE NARROW concrete tunnel, Wes Santee stuck to his position in the seven-man line, waiting to move forward as the first athletes on the American team marched into Helsinki's Olympic Stadium through the Marathon Gate. The applause from the stands reverberated in the tunnel, sounding as if the whole of mankind had come to watch the opening ceremony parade. Santee, his feet more accustomed to cowboy boots or track spikes, stepped ahead in white patent leather shoes. His outfit was a departure from his typical attire of western-style shirts and jeans. Like the rest of his teammates, he wore a dark flannel jacket with silver buttons, gray flannel slacks, and a poplin hat, whose brim he had folded to make it look more like a cowboy hat.

The twenty-year-old University of Kansas sophomore towered over most of those around him. At six foot one, and with much of that height in his legs, he looked the part of the clean-cut American athlete, buzz cut included. His shoulders were wide, and he bristled with energy. His face easily lit with a smile, and he almost always said what he thought, with a midwestern twang. One had the sense that he wore his emotions out in the open, but that this vulnerability had a limit buttressed with steel.

That afternoon of July 19, he was nothing but a bundle of nervous anticipation as he moved toward the tunnel's mouth. Rain streaked across the opening. He peered past it into the stadium, where hundreds of athletes circled the track. They were dressed in a kaleidoscope of colors and styles: pink turbans, flower-patterned shirts, green and gold blazers, black raincoats, orange hats. It was impossible to tell where each team was from because all the flags were in Finnish. Santee could not even pronounce the translation for the United States: Yhdysvaltain. The Soviets were already settled in the infield, wearing their cream suits and maroon ties and lined up as neatly as an army regiment. It was their first Olympics since 1912, and they had made no secret of the fact that they were out to beat the Americans.

Finally Santee cleared the tunnel and moved in file toward the track, his head swiveling about to take in the three-tiered stadium and its seventy thousand spectators. It was an awesome sight, like nothing he had ever witnessed. So many people from so many places, charged with excitement and speaking so many different languages. And they had all come this afternoon simply to watch the athletes march around the track, not even to see them compete. On an electric signboard, the likes of which Santee had seen only a few times, were the words Citius, Altius, Fortius —Faster, Higher, Stronger. He had made it. He was an Olympic athlete representing his country.

After marching around the mud-soaked track, he followed the row of athletes to his spot on the infield for the ceremony's beginning. He felt as if his eyes weren't wide enough to take in everything happening around him. This was a long way from Ashland, the farming town deep in the southwestern part of Kansas where he was raised. The size of the Helsinki stadium alone was enough to marvel at. He remembered arriving at the University of Kansas for the first time and going to the big auditorium for freshman orientation. He was with his teammate Lloyd Koby, who also came from the kind of small town where electricity was just on its way in and a rooster's crow was the only wake-up call one knew. Koby looked across the numerous tiers of seats and gauged the height of the rafters; he turned to Santee and said, "Boy, this building would hold a lot of hay." It was less a joke than a reference to the only context they knew. But that auditorium was nothing compared to this place, its steep concrete stands seeming to reach the sky.

At a rostrum on the track in front of Santee, the chairman of the organizing committee began to speak, first in Finnish, then in Swedish, French, and English, about the Herculean efforts that had gone into these games. His countrymen had cleared forests, put up hundreds of new buildings of stucco, granite, and steel, enlisted thousands of volunteers, and opened their homes to strangers from around the globe. The stadium in which the opening ceremony was taking place had been the chief target of Russian bombers at the start of the Second World War because of its symbolic value. Now it was once again alive with people, who were anxious for the competition to commence.

The chairman finished his speech by introducing Finland's president, who stood at the microphone and announced: "I declare the Fifteenth Olympic Games open!" To the sound of trumpets, the Olympic flag with its five interlocking circles was raised on the stadium flagpole. Then a twenty-one-gun salute boomed. As its echo dissipated, 2,500 quaking pigeons were released from their boxes to swoop and pivot in the air. Santee looked skyward as the pigeons escaped one by one, carrying the message that the Olympics had begun. Before the last pigeon soared away, the scoreboard went blank and then appeared the words: "The Olympic Torch is being brought into the Stadium by ... P-A-A-V-O N-U-R-M-I."

Pandemonium ensued. Santee had passed the bronze statue of Nurmi at the stadium entrance and had seen his classic figure on posters wallpapered throughout Helsinki, but few had expected to see the man himself. Peerless Paavo, the Phantom Finn, the Ace of Abo. Nurmi was a national hero in Finland and the godfather of modern track and field. At one time he owned every record from 10,000 meters down to 1,500. At the 1924 Paris Olympics he claimed three gold medals in less than two days. Put simply, he was the greatest. Bald-headed, slight of stature, and fifty-five years old, Nurmi ran into the stadium in a blue singlet with the torch in his right hand, his stride as graceful and effortless as ever. Photographers maneuvered into position. The athletes, Santee included, broke ranks, storming to the track side to catch a glimpse of the unconquerable Nurmi.

The fire leaping from the birch torch Nurmi held had been lit in Olympia, Greece, on June 25, and had since weathered a five-thousand-mile journey across land and water. When Nurmi finished his run around the track, as athletes and spectators alike jostled one another to get a better look, he passed the flame to a quartet of athletes at the base of the 220-foot-tall white tower at the stadium's south end. While they ascended the tower, at the top of which another Finnish champion, Hannes Kolehmainen, waited, a white-robed choir stood to sing. The stadium was reverently silent. Kolehmainen took the torch and tilted it to light the Olympic flame, which would burn until the games ended.

Santee and the other athletes returned to their places in the field. From a distance each team looked uniform, its athletes dressed in matching outfits and standing side by side. On closer inspection, they were an odd assembly of men and women: stocky wrestlers, tall sprinters, wide-shouldered shot putters, cauliflower-eared boxers, miniature gymnasts, crooked-legged horsemen, and weather-beaten yachtsmen—all with their own ambitions for victory in the days ahead.

As Santee stood in the middle of this medley of people, looking at the Olympic flame and hearing the jumble of voices all around him, the strangeness of the scene overwhelmed him. He had been overseas only one other time. Except for traveling to athletic meets, he had never left the state of Kansas. Now he was in this enormous amphitheater in a country where night lasted only a few hours. He didn't have his coach with him and had few friends among the athletes. Not only had he rarely faced international competition, but he was scheduled to run in the 5,000-meter race, even though the 1,500 was his best distance. Filled with these thoughts, Santee gulped. The tightness in his throat felt like a stone. Indeed, he was a long way from Kansas now.

If his father had had his way, Wes would still be pitching hay, fixing fence posts, and plowing fields back in Ashland. Most fathers want their sons to have a better life, but Wes Santee didn't have such a dad.

David Santee was born in Ohio in the late 1800s. He lived a helter-skelter childhood, never advancing past the second grade. He was a keen braggart and adept at the harmonica, but his only employable skill was hard labor. Over six feet tall and weighing 220 pounds, he had the size for it. After his cousin married a ranch owner named Molyneux in western Kansas, David Santee went out to work the eight thousand acres as a hired hand. He met Ethel Benton, a tall, gentle woman who had studied to be a teacher, on a blind date. They were soon married and shortly after that were expecting the first of three children. On March 25, 1932, the town doctor was called to the ranch to deliver Wes Santee. He came into the world kicking.

Santee was raised on the Molyneux cattle and wheat ranch five miles outside of Ashland. It was practically a pioneer's existence, with an outhouse, no running water, no electricity. If you wanted to listen to the radio, you had to hook it up to the car battery. Farm life was vulnerable to the .often cruel hand of nature. The Santees lived through the drought of the Dust Bowl years, when sand squeezed through every crack in the house and made the sky so dark that the chickens went to roost in midafternoon. They survived tornadoes and storms of grasshoppers that ate everything they could chew, including the handle of a pitchfork left out against a fence post. In good times and bad, Mr. Molyneux ruled the ranch. He liked the Santee boy's spirit and was more of a father to Wes than David Santee ever was. Molyneux was a successful rancher and businessman; he owned Ashland's dry goods store and enjoyed taking the boy into town to buy him a double-dip ice cream cone at the drugstore. Molyneux died when Wes was in the fourth grade, and his happy childhood ended abruptly. From that point forward he was his father's property, suffering his bad temper while working a man's day on the ranch. His only freedom was running.

For Santee, running was play. He ran everywhere. "I just don't like to fiddle around," he said. "If I was told to get the hoe, I'd run to get it. If I had to go to the barn, I'd run." The only bus in town was a flatbed truck, so instead of riding, Santee ran the five miles to school. When he returned in the early afternoon, he ran from his house into the fields to help with the plowing or to corral one of the four hundred head of cattle. At dusk, when his father called it a day, an exhausted Santee didn't walk home for supper. He ran—fast—wearing his cowboy boots. As the distance from his father lengthened, a weight lifted from his shoulders, and by the time he washed up and changed clothes he was as fresh as if he hadn't worked at all. Later, when a remark, a look, or seemingly nothing at all set off his father's rage, this freshness was torn from Wes. He took the brunt of his father's anger, saving his younger brother Henry, who suffered from rickets as a child, and his younger sister Ina May from the worst of it. David Santee dispensed his cruelty with forearm, fist, rawhide buggy whip, or whatever else was at hand—once it was a hammer. Wes considered himself lucky that his old man didn't drink or the situation could have been really bad. Some sons of abusive fathers want to become big enough to fight back; Santee wanted to become fast enough to get away.

Very early he recognized that he had a gift for running. He was never very good in the sprint, but if the game was to run around the block twice, he always won. In eighth grade the high school coach came down to evaluate which kids were good at which sports. That was how a small town developed its athletes. The coach threw out a football to see who threw or kicked it the farthest, threw out a basketball to see who made a couple of jump shots. Then he told Santee and the other twenty kids in his class to run to the grain elevator. Within a few hundred yards, Santee was all alone and knew he had the others whipped. This was "duck soup," he said to himself as he ran to the grain elevator and back and took a shower before the others returned. Most walked half the distance.

When a new kid named Jack Brown, who was rumored to be quite a runner, arrived in town, the townspeople urged Santee to race him. The first day of his freshman year Santee joined Brown at the starting line of the half-mile track used for horse races and had almost lapped him by the finish. It felt good to be better than everybody else at something. What had started as fun—running to chase mice or the tractor—and then became a way to escape from his father's clutches, was now a way to excel. Each race he won bolstered his pride.

J. Allen Murray was there to help him on this path. Murray was Ashland's high school athletics coach (as well as history teacher and basketball/football coach). He believed Santee could be the next Glenn Cunningham, the most famous U.S. middle-distance runner and a Kansas native. The problem was that Santee barely had enough time for classes, let alone running, because his father wanted him home to work. Murray told Wes that if he didn't have time to train, he should just continue to run everywhere he went. That was fine with Santee.

Finally the time came for his first track meet. Scheduled for a Saturday, the meet was delayed until Monday because of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, Santee worked on Mondays, and he knew his father would object to losing an afternoon of his free labor. Murray told him he would take care of it.

The next evening Coach Murray walked up the steps to the Santees' house. He had invited himself to dinner. His father normally greeted visitors with a .22-caliber pistol and an offer of five minutes to get off his property. This time David Santee at least pushed the door open, but his hospitality ended there. Through dinner and dessert, Coach Murray explained to Wes's parents why they should allow their son to attend the track meet—how it was good for the boy to be challenged in competition. David Santee didn't utter a word the entire evening: not a yes, not a no. Murray left without an answer, and Wes disappeared into the fields afterward. Alone in the dark, he clawed at the dirt and grass, wondering how he would get out of this place. If he hadn't learned to hate his father before this night, he did so now.

The next day Coach Murray told him to get up early on Monday to do his chores; he would pick him up at seven o'clock. Santee rose at four, hauled feed, milked the cows, and did everything required of him before his coach arrived. Santee's father was working in the fields and thought his son simply left for school. It was the first time Wes had left the county, and although he was the youngest in the mile race, unaware of tactics of competition, and scared of having disobeyed his father, he placed third. Awarded a red ribbon, Santee could barely stand still from the excitement. But then he had to go home. When he entered the house, his father was sitting at the table. From the grim look on his face, it was obvious that he knew that Wes had gone to the meet.

"I won third place," he said with sheepish excitement.

"If you have time to miss school and do all this," his father bit off each word, "then you have time to get all the rest of the plowing done."

For the next twenty hours Wes Santee sat on the tractor, plowing miles of fields without a break for lunch, and certainly not for school. His throat burned from thirst, his spine ached from the jarring movements of the tractor on uneven terrain, and his hands were rubbed raw from gripping the wheel. Working from dawn until ten o'clock at night, Wes finished two days of plowing in one. For a boy who spent most of his youth laboring on the farm, he would remember that day as the hardest he had ever endured. When he finally returned to school, Murray asked if he was all right. Santee nodded. Murray then asked him if he wanted to go to the next meet in Mead, Kansas. Santee said yes.

After Wes left, Murray called the ranch to say one thing to Santee's father: "I want you to bring your truck in and haul some kids to Mead." David Santee didn't reply, but the tone in Coach Murray's voice made him understand that he didn't have a choice in the matter. Like most bullies, David Santee folded when someone finally stood up to him. The next week he showed up on time with his truck, and though it angered him that his son was wasting time that would be better spent on the ranch, he never got in the way of Wes's running again. Over the next four years Wes Santee scorched up tracks throughout Kansas. He won two state mile championships, broke Glenn Cunningham's state high school record, became the favorite son of Ashland, and was targeted by college track recruiters from coast to coast. He had found his way out, and there was nothing that could stand in his way. He trained as much as possible, studied hard to keep his grades up, and decided not to let things get too far with his high school girlfriend because recruiters were not interested in athletes with wives or children. Shutting himself down with her was not easy, but he had to get out of Ashland.

When Bill Easton, the University of Kansas track and field coach, offered him a scholarship in 1949, Santee accepted. Over the previous two years Easton had won Santee's confidence, probably because he was everything Santee's father was not: he wore a coat and tie, spoke intelligently, won friends easily, and backed up his words with action. Under Easton's guidance and encouragement, the KU track team had become one of the country's best.

The summer before he left for college Wes had his last confrontation with his father. While he dug yet another six-foot-deep hole in the hard ground for the soon-to-arrive electricity poles, his father started pounding on his back with his fists because he was digging too slowly. That was it. The seventeen-year-old, his shirt soaked with sweat and his hands blistered from the work, stormed back to the house, informed his mother he was leaving, and said good-bye to Henry and Ina May. In the stable he saddled Bess, the horse his father had given him, and put a halter on a second mare, which Wes had yet to name. A local farmer had given her to Wes in exchange for breaking some horses. He led his two horses toward the front gate. A cloud of dust from their hooves trailed behind them.

Suddenly his father appeared from behind the barn and blocked his way. "You're not taking that horse anywhere," he said, gesturing toward Bess.

Seeing the coiled violence in the way his father stood rigid in front of him, Wes grimly said, "Okay," and then unstrapped his saddle from Bess. He then threw it over the other horse, which had never been ridden before, and led her through the gate, leaving his father without a good-bye. When he was two hundred yards away, Santee carefully hoisted himself up on the horse and rode into town. He stayed with a friend who owned the local ice plant and had once told him that he could stay with him if things ever got too bad at the ranch. Santee lived there until college began.

In Lawrence Santee fell under the protection of Bill Easton. The coach invited the youth, who had almost nothing with him but the clothes on his back, to stay at his house until his dormitory was ready. Santee may have been bold-talking and powerful, but he needed someone to care for him. The first morning, over a breakfast of bacon and eggs, Easton told Santee that he needed to set a good example and help lead the team. Easton spoke to him like an equal, and Santee listened.

Coach Murray had given him the opportunity to run; Coach Easton showed Santee how to turn his raw talent as a runner into greatness. It had little to do with changing his short, clipped stride, which had become ingrained in his youth while running along plow furrows and in pastures where a long stride would have been dangerous on the uneven terrain. Santee did not bring his arms back in a normal long arc, nor did he drive to the extreme with his kicking foot, as most distance runners did. Instead, he had the quick arm swing and knee action of a sprinter. But with his native speed, coordination, long legs, strong shoulders, and ability to relax, he was able to sustain this sprinter style over long distances. Easton was convinced that reshaping his stride into a more classical motion would do more harm than good. Rather, Easton taught Santee to harness his power through training, pace judgment, and focus. Soon enough, seniors on his team struggled to keep up with him in practice and competition.

Led by Santee, the freshman squad won the Big Seven cross-country and indoor championships. He set the national collegiate two-mile record in 9:21.6 and began to win headlines as the "long-legged loper" who would "play havoc" with most, if not all, of Glenn Cunningham's records by the time he was finished. In the spring of 1951, at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Championships, he took seventeen seconds off the 5,000-meter record in the junior division, and the next day he placed second in the senior division. By the end of his freshman year his mile time hovered in the four-minute-teens (4:15, 4:16, 4:17). He earned a spot on an AAU-sponsored tour to Japan in the summer and found himself running in Osaka, Sapporo, and Tokyo. There he met the American half-miler Mal Whitfield, who had won two gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games. While some athletes were hesitant to share a hotel room with the black track star, Santee gladly jumped at the opportunity. Whitfield taught the young miler to make sure to keep his toes pointed straight ahead when striding so as not to lose even a quarter-inch of distance with each stride. He also taught Wes that in the mile race there was time for only one offensive and one defensive move, so it was of utmost importance to run strategically. When Santee returned to Kansas in August, he felt certain that he was ready for more international competition. He announced to local reporters, "I want to make the Olympic team and go to Helsinki, Finland."

In his sophomore year this "sinewy-legged human jet," as one reporter described Santee, proved that he was on his way. Some began to compare him to Emil Zatopek, the Czech star who ran everything from the mile to the marathon at world-class levels. This was the level of enthusiasm that Santee generated on and off the track. He loved racing in front of large crowds and never tired. His talent just barely outmeasured his confidence.

On a flight to a meet a Jayhawk teammate held out a newspaper article to show Wes. "Look what it says here . ..Billy [Herd] hasn't been beaten in any kind of a race for almost two years. That includes relay carries. ... He's gobbled up some pretty good boys too, Wes."

Santee stretched his boots out into the aisle. "Yeah, he's a good boy. But he hasn't tried to digest me yet."

In two-mile races during his sophomore year Santee lapped his competitors. In cross-country meets he was slipping into his sweats before other runners had finished. During the indoor season he set record after record in the mile, leading his team to a host of dual meet victories. It was almost too easy. On campus he ran from class to class, and professors set their watches by the precise time he started his training sessions.

In April 1952 at the Drake University Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the year's most important outdoor track meets, Santee anchored the four-mile relay for his team. When the baton was passed to him, Georgetown's Joe LaPierre was sixty yards ahead. Santee blazed three sixty-two-second quarter-miles, yet had trouble gaining ground because LaPierre was running brilliantly. As Santee sped into the first turn of the last lap Easton yelled out, "He's wilting in the sun." Santee was finally gaining. Stride after stride he closed the gap. When he burst through the tape yards ahead of LaPierre, clocking a 4:06.8 mile, he had officially arrived. "Santee's not human," said the Georgetown coach. The Des Moines Register quipped, "Santee stuck out above every other athlete like the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea." And the national papers picked up the best quote from the Drake coach: "Santee is the greatest prospect for the four-minute mile America has yet produced. He not only has the physical qualifications, but the mental and spiritual as well."

But Santee first turned his sights to the Olympics. As the holder of national titles in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters, Santee by right qualified for the American trial in each. In mid-June he went to California with Easton to spend a week training. They decided together that he would participate in both trials. "I just want to make the Olympic team," he told his coach. "Time or race isn't important." On June 27, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Santee placed second in the 5,000-meter trial, guaranteeing a trip to Helsinki. That night he dined on his customary steak and potato dinner and enjoyed quiet conversation with Easton back at the hotel. The next day, braving one of the coldest June days in Los Angeles history, he readied himself for the 1,500-meter trial in front of forty-two thousand spectators. Santee looked around for Easton but couldn't find him. A whistle was blown, the race was called, and Santee approached the starting line alongside milers Bob McMillen and Warren Druetzler, both of whom he was sure he could beat. In the program listing the qualifiers for the 3:40 P.M. race, Santee was predicted to "win as he pleases—he has all year." He was revved to go.

Suddenly two AAU officials grabbed his arm, shuffling him off the track before he could protest. "Wes, they're not going to let you run," one official said.

"What do you mean? What's going on?" Santee shrugged off their hold on him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton running across the field. Though wearing a jacket, tie, and dress shoes, he was moving fast.

The race starter called, "Runners to your mark!" and then the gun fired. Santee watched helplessly as the trial started without him.

Easton finally made it to his side. "Wes, I'm sorry. We've been in a meeting for over an hour, and they're saying you're not good enough to run both races, and they won't let you drop out of the 5,000 meter to run the 1,500 meter."

This wasn't right. Only the previous week he had run the third-fastest 1,500-meter time in AAU history, 3:49.3. It was the fastest time by an American in years. Santee welled with anger, and with balled fists he looked ready to act out his frustration.

Easton pulled him to the side. The coach had the stocky build of a wrestler, and even then, in his late forties with a fleshy, oval face, he looked capable of stopping this tall athlete if necessary. His voice was calm. "They told me you were only twenty—not good enough to run the 5,000 against Zatopek followed up with the 1,500. I told them we don't particularly want to run the 5,000; we want to run the 1,500. Their only response was 'You qualified for that, and you have to stay with it.'"

There was nothing to be done. Easton knew that no Olympic rule forbade an athlete to participate in two events. If Santee qualified, he qualified. Those were the rules, but the AAU ran the show, and if a rule interfered with what the AAU wanted, its leaders either ignored the rule or changed it. This was the first time the AAU would stand in Santee's way, and unfortunately not the last. Yes, he was off to Helsinki to race in the 5,000 meter, but his best chance of coming home with a medal was in the 1,500 meter.

The three weeks between the trial and the opening ceremony in Helsinki were a whirlwind. Santee nearly died on a flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis when the plane carrying America's Olympic athletes went into a tailspin and passengers were thrown from their seats. When the plane finally righted itself, the preacher and pole vaulter Bob Richards walked down the aisle asking for confessions. After a long layover in St. Louis, they arrived in New York. Santee participated in the national TV show Blind Date, hosted by Arlene Francis, as well as the first Olympic telethon with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He ran in an exhibition three-quarter-mile race on Randalls Island and set a new American record of 2:58.3, not to mention leaving the Olympic 1,500-meter qualifiers far behind. The effort was born of frustration: he wanted to show the AAU officials his speed and prove their decision wrong. After a flurry of press interviews, he flew from New York to Newfoundland, to London, and finally to Helsinki. By the time Santee arrived in Finland he was a jumble of excitement, jet lag, hope, aggravation, patriotism, fear, and confusion—a very different cocktail of emotions from what he needed to perform at his best.

But there he was at the opening ceremony, right in the middle of it all and wanting to prove that he deserved to stand side by side with the best runners in the world. When the ceremony ended, the 5,870 athletes from sixty-seven nations filed out of the stadium, soaked and cold. Santee had only a few more days to pull himself together for his qualifying round. His legs had never failed him before, and no matter the obstacle or his state of mind, he expected them to see him through once again.