Long runs and long hair have given way to balding pates and balky joints. Such is the passage of time. But the ensuing four decades cannot dim the shooting star that once was the Greater Boston Track Club.
It began as a band of vagabond runners who held a passion for their sport and an equal dedication to the camaraderie that earmarked their college careers. It was too good to pass up. And they haven’t stopped running.
GBTC members will gather tomorrow (2-6 p.m.) at Boston College’s Corcoran Commons to swap stories and trade memories of the group’s founding 40 years ago.
“I wish we weren’t reflecting on 40 years. That’s a true sign of age,’’ said Quinnipiac College athletic director Jack McDonald, a former 4-minute miler and one of the founding members of the GBTC. “It was as great a running fraternity as there ever will be.”
The GBTC began in 1973, riding the wave of the burgeoning running boom that took off across the United States in the wake of Frank Shorter’s epic gold medal marathon run in the 1972 Munich Olympics. The GBTC went on to capture the 1979 national cross country team championship, and featured three runners — Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar and Greg Meyer — who won the Boston and New York marathons a combined 13 times.
“We knew Bill (Rodgers). We trained with him. We weren’t that far off. You knew you were semi-equal and you weren’t in awe,” Bob Hodge, who finished third in the 1979 Boston Marathon, said of the close-knit competition.
The GBTC success came in the pre-money era, before the emergence of the mammoth shoe companies. It was not unusual for five or six runners to share an automobile ride or hotel room. On one return trip from the prestigious Penn Relays in Philadelphia, GBTC athletes ran short of money. At each toll along the Mass. Turnpike, they would jump from the vehicle and retrieve errant coins other motorists had flung at the toll box in order to pay their share. After arriving back at famed Back Bay watering hole, The Eliot Lounge, the tired and thirsty athletes collected enough loose change to purchase one pint of beer. They ordered three straws.
“If it wasn’t for the GBTC, distance running would be archaic in America,’’ said legendary GBTC coach Bill Squires. “No one, including myself, realized that a single club could have such an impact on distance running in America. We never received our just due. We were the ‘No Name’ club and the no-money club. How did our little club of about 50 guys do what we did?”
It all sprung from a Harvard-Yale vs. Oxford-Cambridge meet that was held in a torrential downpour at Harvard Stadium. Afterward, the English athletes were eager to have another go-round under more favorable conditions.
“I was just out of college and I was cleaning the locker rooms at BC during the summer for (athletic director) Bill Flynn. He received a call from the Harvard AD asking if (Flynn) could set something up at Jack Ryder Track. So within 24 hours I went from cleaning the toilets to calling coaches like Bill Squires at Boston State, Bill Smith at Boston University and Chris Lane for the officials,” said McDonald, now 62.
“We put on the meet and the following day, I thought to myself, ‘Great. Let’s keep this going.’
“At the time, the BAA, a great organization, was primarily a distance-running group. There really wasn’t a track organization around,” McDonald added. “So we made some calls and formed a team and we called it GBTC because we were all from local colleges and we also knew that we needed a place to run and that’s why we ran indoors at Tufts and outdoors at BC.’’
McDonald credited a hastily assembled indoor meet against UMass for putting the GBTC on the map. “I’ll forever be grateful to (coach) Ken O’Brien for that,” he said.
The early years saw the GBTC focus on indoor meets, especially 2-mile and distance medley relays. Rodgers, who was a member of the BAA, ran unattached for one calendar year (per AAU transfer rules) before switching allegiance to GBTC. Rodgers and Shorter hooked up in a pair of memorable duels at the Falmouth Road Race in 1974-75 and after Rodgers won Boston in 1975 in course-record time, the GBTC had arrived.
Dave McGillivray, the director of both the Boston Marathon and Falmouth Road Race, joined the GBTC during its infancy.
“For me, joining the Greater Boston Track Club in the early 1980s was like a kid going from a Little League team to the big leagues. How could you not be inspired by superstars like Rodgers, Salazar, (Bob) Hodge, (Vin) Fleming, (Dickie) Mahoney, (Fred) Doyle, (Mark) Duggan and so many others,” McGillivray said. “At times, it was intimidating but that just made us second- and third-tier guys try harder, which resulted in getting faster and stronger. And, of course, the secret weapon for us in all of it was the presence of coach Squires.’’
Mark Duggan was a steeplechase All-American and Boston State Hall of Famer.
“The depth we had on the club was remarkable,” he said. “We had a lot of good guys but we were deep, too. You look at how many guys we had that ran under 2:20 or even 2:30 for the marathon. Tom Grilk said that in 1982 we had 100 guys break 3 hours for the marathon. That’s incredible.’’
Grilk, the marathon’s executive director, said of the GBTC: “They made something special here that really hadn’t been seen before, and probably won’t be seen again.”