Track season was over and Jack McDonald, a senior miler at Boston College, was cleaning out lockers as part of his work-study job in May 1973 when the athletic director called him to his office.
A group of track athletes from Oxford and Cambridge in England were in Boston to compete in a meet at Harvard. But it had rained that day, the track was a mess and performances were terrible. The teams wanted to get in another meet before they went home. Could McDonald organize an exhibition at BC’s state-of-the-art track? In two days?
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Sure, McDonald said — he wasn’t sure how he’d do it, but it got him out of cleaning lockers. Somehow, he did.
The exhibition meet went off wonderfully. The British and American athletes socialized afterward; everybody had a great time.
“Here we are, Monday morning, everyone’s raving about this great event we had … and it’s done,” said McDonald, a Cheshire resident who has been the athletic director at Quinnipiac University for the past 17 years. “I thought, ‘So let’s keep it going. Let’s start a track club.'”
Thus was born, in the summer of ’73, the Greater Boston Track Club. It wasn’t so much a distance running club at its inception; it was more of an all-inclusive club where throwers and hurdlers and sprinters all were welcome. But the distance runners — Bill Rodgers, Bob Hodge, Randy Thomas, Alberto Salazar — started migrating to BC on weeknights for workouts, too.
And that is how, two years later, on Patriots Day in 1975, McDonald found himself climbing a tree on Boylston Street to watch Rodgers — wearing a hand-lettered GBTC shirt — cross the Boston Marathon finish line first, setting an American record in the process.
“As he came by, down Boylston Street, I’m up in the tree, holding on to the tree and trying to clap my hands at the same time, screaming,” McDonald said. “And then you look to the finish line — 2:09:55. An American record, at the time.
“It’s like, ‘I know that guy. He’s my friend. I drank beer with him two days ago.’ It was a lifetime memory.”
McDonald, 60, ran Boston three times, completing it twice, the last time with two of his brothers in 1980. He became the track coach at BC, got married and had four boys with his wife, Linda.
He never ran Boston again, but he always thought of the 26.2-mile course from Hopkinton to Boston as one of the iconic cathedrals of sport — right up there with the likes of Wimbledon, Fenway Park and Churchill Downs.
And he always wanted his four sons to run, to have the experience he and his brothers did. Monday, the four McDonald boys — Brian, Jim, Jack and Dave — all will all run the Boston Marathon.
Jim, 27, and Jack, 26, ran at Quinnipiac; Brian, 28, was a lacrosse player and Dave, 23, ran track in high school.
“Dave was probably the toughest to pull into it,” the younger Jack McDonald said. “But there’s no way he’s not doing it if we’re all doing it.”
Their parents will be there to watch, although it probably won’t be as hectic as the day Jack watched Rodgers win for the first time.
McDonald and his friend Don Ricciato, another club member and Rodgers’ friend, didn’t go to the marathon starting line on that cold and rainy day in 1975, but planned to drive around the route and cheer for their GBTC teammates at various locations.
On the car radio, the announcers were talking about the race — some guy named Bill Rodgers was leading, from the Great Britain Track Club.
“I was pretty ticked off about that,” McDonald said, laughing.
They went to Speen Street in Natick first, then to the Newton fire station at mile 17, then to Cleveland Circle.
“At the finish line, we had to park the car and get to the finish line,” McDonald said. “Thank God we were athletes, because we were running everywhere. I probably ran 10 miles that day myself. We got to the finish line. We climbed a tree because we couldn’t see him.”
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