June 15, 2018
George,
Want to report that Australian George Scott of the U of New Mexico passed on Friday June 15th. He was 81. He won every WAC conference title in Cross Country and Track and beat Bob Day’s NCAA 2 mile record running 8:34. He was never acknowledged by the Australian T&F community as were many Australian athletes who competed in the US.
I have been in contact with George over the years. We trained together in the late 60’s and early 70’s. We trained with Lazlo Tabori in 1972. He moved back to Perth, WA (Western Australia) in 2003.
He came to San Francisco in 2015 and we got together. I met his niece last September in Los Angeles as she was putting his affairs in order. She emailed me of his passing. Friday.
George trained in Albuquerque at altitude and should have been added to the 1968 Aussie Olympic team. He could have crossed the Border into Mexico and flew to Mexico City for maybe $100.
Very good friend of mine.
John
John
Ned Price contributed this photo of George Scott, Dan Shaughnessy, Bill Silverberg and probably Deacon Jones.
 |
| Dan Shaughnessy #54 (CAN/Southern Illinois) Deacon Jones Bill Silverberg #13 and George Scott (Oklahoma City U.) #46 |
Our photographer, Ned Price also sent the second photo and though it is 6 years older I decided to include it rather than lose it in my files. ed.
Also attaching a photo from 1958
AAU meet that Al Lawrence won in 1958. Max Truex is wearing the dark glasses. Temperature 12 degrees.
This notice of George Scott having left us struck close to home as I well remember him from my running days at the U. of Oklahoma. He was a 24 year old Freshman at Oklahoma City University in 1962. That was a time when a number of Aussies began arriving on the Southwest shores of the US to dominate US distance running for a few years. The Australian track higher ups saw it as a 'brain drain' and eventually put a stop to it by threatening to ban any Aussie athlete who defected to run in US colleges. Those Aussie administrators in retrospect appear to be as short sighted as the US AAU administrators of the day and definitely as bigoted after refusing to select Peter Norman for the 1972 Olympic team after he had supported Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the awards stand in Mexico City in 1968.
Johnny Morris the coach at Houston got a number them out before the Kangaroo Curtain descended. Those at Houston included Al Lawrence the 10,000 meter bronze medallist at Melbourne, Pat Clohessy, Geoff Walker, Barrie Almond, and Laurie Elliott, Herb Elliott's baby brother. High Jumper, Colin Ridgeway matriculated at Lamar Tech. Oliver Jackson corralled John Lawler at Abilene Christian, and Jack Daniels managed to rope George Scott at OCU. Not only did Johnny Morriss get the Aussies, he also picked up an Polish army defector, John Macy after he jumped ship at the European Track Championships in Switzerland. Before the Kenyans started turning up at universities across the continent,these guys had walked in and were clearly better, more seasoned runners than most 18 year olds coming into the American colleges at the time.
For a good read about those times in a very humorous vein, clik on John Lawler's Summertime Chronicles
followed by Lawler Go West Young Man
followed by Lawler Off to Work We Go
followed by Lawler: A Banana and a Dime
followed by Dial M for Murder
I remember that George Scott seemed even older than the average, like maybe 35 years, he just had a rather aged appearance, but boy could he stride out on the cross country course. Daniels was just establishing himself as a knowledgeable coach at Oklahoma City. Somehow that program went away, and he went down to San Antonio to be part of the coaching staff for the national pentathlon team. He had been on the Olympic pentathlon teams in 1956 1960 winning a bronze and a silver medal. While at Oklahoma City he was participating in endurance studies with Bruno Balke at the Federal Aviation Administration in Midwest City, OK. We distance runners at OU and his boys were asked to do Max VO2 treadmill tests as part of an early study on cardiac rehab. I guess we were providing data on what hightly trained runners were capable of producing as far as oxygen consumption capacity was concerned. I don't recall them taking blood samples. We were being compared with people on the other end of the spectrum who had had myocardial infarcts. Balke, a German of the old school had participated on Himalyan expeditions in the 1930s. He would stand there and scream at some of the cardiac patients to keep going on the treadmill while the undergrads cringed and hid behind filing cabinets. Apparently he never lost a subject during the testing. Anyway I'm sure that Jack Daniels learned alot in those days from Dr. Balke. One thing we knew he was doing was a lot more overdistance work than we the traditionalists were doing. So to try to match George Scott and his gang, our coach Bill Carroll took us all out on Interstate 35 twenty miles from campus and let us off there to run home on a hot Oklahoma Fall afternoon. On the flat prairie, we could see the campus high rises for the last 15 miles of that run. We ran along the median or on the side of the Interstate for almost the full twenty with cars flying by at 80 mph, no water, and wearing old thin soled canvas running shoes. Somehow we all made it in, but didn't feel much like running for about a week. Only one of us had ever run more than ten miles prior to that day.
When Daniels moved and the program died in Oklahoma City, Scott transferred to the University of New Mexico where he had a very successful career as noted above by John Lawson. GB
This notice of George Scott having left us struck close to home as I well remember him from my running days at the U. of Oklahoma. He was a 24 year old Freshman at Oklahoma City University in 1962. That was a time when a number of Aussies began arriving on the Southwest shores of the US to dominate US distance running for a few years. The Australian track higher ups saw it as a 'brain drain' and eventually put a stop to it by threatening to ban any Aussie athlete who defected to run in US colleges. Those Aussie administrators in retrospect appear to be as short sighted as the US AAU administrators of the day and definitely as bigoted after refusing to select Peter Norman for the 1972 Olympic team after he had supported Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the awards stand in Mexico City in 1968.
Johnny Morris the coach at Houston got a number them out before the Kangaroo Curtain descended. Those at Houston included Al Lawrence the 10,000 meter bronze medallist at Melbourne, Pat Clohessy, Geoff Walker, Barrie Almond, and Laurie Elliott, Herb Elliott's baby brother. High Jumper, Colin Ridgeway matriculated at Lamar Tech. Oliver Jackson corralled John Lawler at Abilene Christian, and Jack Daniels managed to rope George Scott at OCU. Not only did Johnny Morriss get the Aussies, he also picked up an Polish army defector, John Macy after he jumped ship at the European Track Championships in Switzerland. Before the Kenyans started turning up at universities across the continent,these guys had walked in and were clearly better, more seasoned runners than most 18 year olds coming into the American colleges at the time.
For a good read about those times in a very humorous vein, clik on John Lawler's Summertime Chronicles
followed by Lawler Go West Young Man
followed by Lawler Off to Work We Go
followed by Lawler: A Banana and a Dime
followed by Dial M for Murder
I remember that George Scott seemed even older than the average, like maybe 35 years, he just had a rather aged appearance, but boy could he stride out on the cross country course. Daniels was just establishing himself as a knowledgeable coach at Oklahoma City. Somehow that program went away, and he went down to San Antonio to be part of the coaching staff for the national pentathlon team. He had been on the Olympic pentathlon teams in 1956 1960 winning a bronze and a silver medal. While at Oklahoma City he was participating in endurance studies with Bruno Balke at the Federal Aviation Administration in Midwest City, OK. We distance runners at OU and his boys were asked to do Max VO2 treadmill tests as part of an early study on cardiac rehab. I guess we were providing data on what hightly trained runners were capable of producing as far as oxygen consumption capacity was concerned. I don't recall them taking blood samples. We were being compared with people on the other end of the spectrum who had had myocardial infarcts. Balke, a German of the old school had participated on Himalyan expeditions in the 1930s. He would stand there and scream at some of the cardiac patients to keep going on the treadmill while the undergrads cringed and hid behind filing cabinets. Apparently he never lost a subject during the testing. Anyway I'm sure that Jack Daniels learned alot in those days from Dr. Balke. One thing we knew he was doing was a lot more overdistance work than we the traditionalists were doing. So to try to match George Scott and his gang, our coach Bill Carroll took us all out on Interstate 35 twenty miles from campus and let us off there to run home on a hot Oklahoma Fall afternoon. On the flat prairie, we could see the campus high rises for the last 15 miles of that run. We ran along the median or on the side of the Interstate for almost the full twenty with cars flying by at 80 mph, no water, and wearing old thin soled canvas running shoes. Somehow we all made it in, but didn't feel much like running for about a week. Only one of us had ever run more than ten miles prior to that day.
When Daniels moved and the program died in Oklahoma City, Scott transferred to the University of New Mexico where he had a very successful career as noted above by John Lawson. GB
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