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| Ted Nelson, front and center on 1965 National Champion WMU team. other members Coach George Dales Front Row Keith Reed, Ted Nelson, Steve Smith Back Row Roger Plont, Wolfgang Lugauer, Mike Gallagher, Gary Myers |
Yesterday I heard from several Western Michigan Alums that one of their own , Ted Nelson , had passed away in Ann Arbor , MI. As some of you old timers may remember, Western Michigan, was a powerhouse of middle distance and distance running in the late 1950s and 1960s under Coach George Dales. The likes of John Bork, Jared Ashmore, Richard Mach, Dick Greene, and Dick Pond struck terror in the hearts of many collegiate distance crews in those days. Ted Nelson was a member of that noble group of runners and was on both their national championship teams in 1964 and 1965. None of those members of the 64 and 65 teams shone as individually as the aforementioned runners, but their team of better than average guys really put together a season that should be an example of what a bunch of very dedicated young men are capable of achieving. The Mid American Conference was a hotbed of great distance runners in the 60s, with Miami of Ohio, Ohio U, and Western Michigan leading the way on any given day.
In looking for more information about Ted Nelson I found the following article to share with our readers. It is long, but it merits taking the time to read. It covers well that 1964 season and the current fate of the program which has been sidelined along with many other running programs in the Mid American Conference.
My personal connection to this team was through Mike Gallagher who beat me in the state high school mile race in Ohio in 1961. It was in the days when state officials decided it was easier to run three separate races in the mile and compare times, assuming the fast heat would produce the winner. They were wrong , big time, and Mike who was in the second heat won the race, besting my time in the fast heat.
Let it also be known that the reader should not confuse Western Michigan's Ted Nelson with two other Ted Nelson's who were outstanding runners as well. I'm referring to Ted Nelson, the half miler out of Mankato State in Minnesota, and Ted Nelson, the quarter miler from Texas A&M.
George Brose
How Upstart Western Michigan Won NCAAs 50 Years Ago
Alumni reunite to remember a cross country program that won two national titles in the ’60s.
Published
October 2, 2014
Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, George Dales, the head coach of Western Michigan University’s cross country team had his team captain, Bruce Burston, write letters to all of his teammates. Dales wanted his athletes coming back to school ready to run hard, not overweight and undertrained. Burston dutifully wrote the letters and Dales made him pay the postage. When training began in the fall, no man mentioned any letter, but from the start of that season Burston sensed a shared, unspoken belief that they could do something special if they worked hard enough.
The cross country team meant a lot to Burston, who had moved to Kalamazoo from Australia for a running scholarship. He had been one of the best high school runners in Australia, but only considered himself “good, not outstanding.” In college, he found he loved the camaraderie of the team—“mateship,” as Aussies call it—and he respected the tradition of strong distance running Coach Dales had built since arriving at the school in 1953.
By senior year, Burston had solidified his reputation as the team’s top scorer, but his hopes for team gold outweighed his individual ambition. He was not an overbearing leader, nor was he obsessed with winning. After the first meet of the season, one of his teammates, Larry Peck, recalls drinking his first ever beer out with the guys after the race. Jim Carter, a junior, raised a glass and said, “Here’s to the NCAA champions.” Was he serious? “I think he was,” Peck says. “Kind of.”
Standing on the line at the NCAA championships in East Lansing, about 80 miles from WMU, that November of 1964, Burston thought again of the fate of the team. The skies were clear and the course was covered in snow, but this might play to guys’ advantage. They had run in all kinds of weather, all season long. They were ready. No man had outright said, “Let’s win it,” but some of the guys were thinking it. Beyond the usual prerace encouragement from coaches, no one else seemed to expect much of them during the race. They hadn’t even won their conference meet. Fifty years later, Bruce still insists, “None of us were stars.”
When the gun went off, Ohio University’s Elmore Banton took off like a shot, establishing a lead that he would never relinquish. Burston, on the other hand, made a mess of things. He hadn’t sprinted fast enough to get out near the front so he found himself surrounded for the first mile. As runners trekked through the snow, he ran around groups of them, passing as many as he could on the side.
At one point he felt a bit of a stitch but ignored it. “This was a team thing,” he remembers thinking. “I was running for the other guys as much as for myself.”
A modest number of spectators flanked the course, including a pack of Western Michigan runners who hadn’t made the top seven but had skipped class to come out and cheer their teammates on. Greg Bishop remembers watching the guys run west and make a left turn that led to a climb. By the time the runners returned to where the spectators were stationed, after about two miles, the leaders were strung out in single file and there were packs forming after about 20th place.
Conditions were less than ideal. The meet hosts at Michigan State University had plowed a path around the golf course, but the ground was still slippery and the wind whipped. “The snow made it difficult to pass because everybody was trampling down the same path, and if you wanted to get off the path to pass, you’d be in two inches deep of snow,” Bishop recalls.
Banton of Ohio maintained his lead, passing the 3-mile mark at just over 15 minutes. Burston knew he was well back, probably in the top 50. But he quickly made his way past dozens of runners, including a few of his teammates. Bishop and his buddies stood near the finish line, where they waited anxiously for the runners to return. “You didn’t really know what was happening out there until they were coming down the last couple yards,” Bishop says. Finally, Banton came striding in. He won the race handily, setting new NCAA and meet records. The pack of WMU supporters counted jerseys as they came in and cheered as the seven guys made their final kicks.
The end of the course was a 200m straightaway, a feature Burston had faced every year at the NCAAs. His vow: Nobody would pass him on that straightway. When Burston tells this story he proudly admits that someone did pass him that day, a guy in a Miami singlet by the name of Jack Bacheler. Bacheler went on to run in the 1968 and 1972 Olympic Games.
Burston had finished the four-mile race in 11th place in 20:33.4 but he didn’t know how the rest of the team had fared. Don Clark, a quiet Canadian, crossed the line a few places behind him, in 18th, and he was followed by Steve Smith 10 seconds later, in 28th. Another 12 seconds after that, Jim Carter crossed the line, in 43rd. Carter had been a decent high school runner but was regularly beaten by a guy named Tom Sullivan, who could run a 4:02 mile and was the hot shot recruit to come out of the Chicago area. As Carter made his way through the finish chute, he threw his thumb over his right shoulder and gestured to his teammates and coaches. Right behind him was Tom Sullivan, of Villanova. Carter had beaten him by less than a second.
But the breakout performance of the day came from Mike Gallagher, who had run the race of his life to finish seventh. Gallagher, an unreliable junior who had barely made the team after a summer of skimpy training, had almost not been entered in the race. “He started coming around late in the season,” explained Bob Parks, the team’s assistant coach. “We had a decision to make. Should we put him in the nationals?” Gallagher was a talented runner, but his performances were all over the place. Everyone had expected Burston to be the Broncos’ top scorer, so Gallagher’s seventh-place came as a complete surprise. “We knew that Mike was really running out of his head that day,” Bishop says.
When Bob Parks took a new coaching job at Eastern Michigan University, he employed “the Gallagher Rule;” that is, the right to make a wildcard choice for a meet’s seventh man.
In 1964, scoring the team results of a cross country race took time as officials had to remove individual runners from the tally and deal with any disqualifications. Burston’s hopes were up, fueled by the thrill of learning how well Gallagher had placed, but he didn’t know for sure if the team championship was theirs. Someone from the small pack of supporters came up to the runners to say, “I think we’ve got it,” but he wasn’t entirely confident in the calculations.
Photo Courtesy of Wolfgang Lugauer
Burston was worried about Oregon. One of the WMU guys, Jim Flaminio, brazenly tracked down Oregon’s coach, Bill Bowerman, and asked to see his numbers. “He was very gruff and wasn’t going to give us any information,” Bishop recalls. But eventually Bowerman reluctantly showed them his papers.
“We’ve got it! We’ve beaten Oregon!” Flaminio called out to his teammates. The Broncos had won the NCAA championship with 86 points, besting Oregon with 126.
“It was all a bit surreal,” Burston says. “Here was this little dinky school that had knocked off Oregon and knocked off Miami.”
After the official results came out and the team received their first-place trophy, pictures were taken and a guy from Stanford—Harry McGalla—who had finished just behind Burston in the race, came up to the guys and shook all of their hands. Soon after, they all piled back into cars and drove back to school.
The champions were hardly treated like heroes upon their return. “Everybody expected us to be one of the better teams but I don’t think anybody expected us to win,” Parks says. “When we came back, people didn’t even know where we’d been. The athletic director asked where we were this weekend and I said, ‘At nationals. And, well, we won.’”
Back then, almost all students lived on campus, and a bunch of the guys on the team lived in Vandercook Hall, which was nicknamed “Hungry Hall” because it lacked a cafeteria. When Burston and his teammates got back to Vandercook, they were treated to lunch out. By the time they got back, word of the big win had spread to a few more people. A couple of Burston’s lecturers made comments about the victory and the team was commended during a basketball game the next day. The misspelled trophy given to the school—which read “Cross County Champions”—drew snickers. Though the win marked the school’s first ever NCAA title, there were no wild celebrations. “I don’t think the university thought of itself as capable of winning,” Burston says. “I think I appreciate it more now. It was a pretty big deal, and I don’t think we realized it at the time. We were the first to come first in anything.
The next year, the race distance was upped to six miles from four and the race location moved from East Lansing to the University of Kansas. By then, Burston had graduated and Gallagher had broken his arm going into the meet, but the guys ran hard and brought home the championship again, winning by a greater margin than they had the previous year.
“A lot of our guys weren’t all that good in high school, but they were guys that worked harder than everybody else,” Parks says. They ran together in the mornings before practice and they pushed each other during afternoon workouts—hill repeats, half miles, and quarter-loops of a nearby field. On Sundays they met at Vandercook and set off on 20-mile long runs. They were disciplined, reliable, conscientious. They studied after practice and went to bed early, and though they rarely partied, when they did so it was as a group.
The friendships endured long after graduation, even after some team members left Kalamazoo. Some guys got together to watch college races and a growing group of alumni gathered regularly for reunions. The only outlier was Don Clark, a mysterious sophomore who had disliked Coach Dales’ workouts and preferred to run most of his mileage up and down the roads on his own. After placing 18th in the 1964 championship race, Clark fell away from the group and wasn’t even on the squad in 1965. “The fact is, nobody knows where he is,” Burston says. “We’ve been looking for him for 20 years.”
Burston’s glory days were part of a golden era for WMU. No other team in the school’s history brought home a national title, let alone two in a row. Since 1915 there had been track at WMU, but for the years Dales was in charge, the teams dominated. During his 17-year tenure, 14 teams finished in the top 10 at nationals. And as alumni are quick to point out, there are more track and field athletes in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame than from any other sport.
So it came as a surprise when on December 3, 2003, school administrators decided to eliminate the men’s cross country, indoor, and outdoor track teams in order to save the school money. Athletes and coaches from these teams (plus another that was axed, women’s synchronized skating) were rounded up for an emergency meeting at 10 p.m. and told they could finish the current season but not compete the next year. The next day, the news was confirmed at a press conference: “We know that eliminating any sport diminishes our ability to offer a well-rounded college experience,” said Judith Bailey, the university president. “But we must protect our core academic mission, and doing that in this budget climate means making difficult decisions and reassessing how we use our resources.” Revenue-producing sports, like football, were safe, as were the women’s running teams.
Angered by the news, a group of athletes, alumni and others from the running and university communities rallied to get the team back. They gathered thousands of signatures for a petition, printed the slogan “Save Our Sports” on hats and t-shirts. Students raised banners at other teams’ games, and alumni fundraised to buy advertisements in local papers. The efforts proved influential, winning the support of the students and many other community organizations, but were not enough to convince the school to reinstate the team.
Five years later, the group negotiated with a new administration and made further attempts to “bring back track.” This time, alumni and friends were told that if they could pledge $300,000 and promise to keep giving year after year, the team could come back. Though the initial amount was raised, the continuous-giving plan didn’t fly with the alumni, who believed strongly that the university had a responsibility to fund its own sports teams. Today, many alumni of the track and cross country teams refrain from donating, out of principle, until the team is brought back.
Though the men of ’64 and ’65 don’t expect to see the cross-country team revived, they did get some formal recognition from the school, something many felt was long overdue. On October 21, 2009, both the 1964 and 1965 NCAA championship teams were inducted into the university’s athletic hall of fame. After the group was given a standing ovation, Burston gave a speech that lauded the runners’ accomplishments and thanked their coaches. He concluded by saying that unfortunately their grandsons would never have the opportunity they had, so long as there wasn’t a men’s team.
In early October, the men of Western Michigan plan to have a reunion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1964 championship. Burston will be making the trip from Australia. Theirs will be an unofficial reunion, planned and organized by former team members. Bob Parks, who for several years continued to pester WMU’s athletic director with emails about the dropped team, has a suggestion for WMU, leading up to the early October reunion: “If the school wanted to do the right thing, they would announce on the spot, we’re bringing back our men’s cross country team.”
The 1964 Western Michigan cross country team at a 2009 Hall of Fame dinner. (Photo Courtesy of Wolfgang Lugauer.)
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