Today, one week before the 128th Boston Marathon, we go back in time to when the sport of marathon running was in a state of a flux, no more so than in the city of Boston.

The 87th running of the great race took place on Monday, 18 April 1983. On one of those perfect days for running, 1979 women’s champion Joan Benoit smashed the world record by 2:46, running 2:22:43, while Michigan native and Boston resident Greg Meyer topped the men’s field in 2:09:00. Two months later on June 6th, the Boston Athletic Association gathered for its annual meeting at the Lenox Hotel in Boston’s Back Bay.

While the BAA members were meeting upstairs, Boston Globe sportswriter Joe Concannon and I, host of the Runners Digest radio show and running writer for the Boston Herald, waited in the dark-paneled lobby bar (naturally).

Finally, after the meeting broke up, Joe and I buttonholed 38-year-old Tim Kilduff, the then volunteer race director of the Boston Marathon. Tim had stepped in after long-time race director Will Cloney, 70, was forced to retire in June 1982 following what came to be known as “the Marshall Medoff Matter”.  

After decades of selfless service, Will Cloney found himself caught in a public relations nightmare. His hiring of immigration lawyer Marshall Medoff to sell sponsorship for the Boston Marathon had come to public light in a blaring Boston Globe headline on January 27, 1982. 

BOSTON MARATHON FOR SALE! 

Caught as unawares as the public, the BAA board of governors was upset that, a) Medoff was hired without their input, and b) the contract with Medoff gave him exclusive rights to sell the marathon sponsorship in perpetuity, which the BAA board did not see until after the fact.

The following transcription was taken directly from an audio recording for my old weekly Boston area radio show, Runner’s Digest.

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Toni Reavis: OK, Tim, I mean, what can you say in two and a half hours up there?

Tim Kilduff: I think what you’re seeing is the backlash from what happened two years ago. (Race Director Will Cloney’s secret deal with Marshall Medoff’s International Marathons, Inc., to sell sponsorship to the Boston Marathon.)

“I think people are just unsure of the actions of everyone. They’re unstable, they don’t feel comfortable with people. I think that’s what happened tonight.

“I think you do you want to make sure the process was clean and proper and appropriate, and some people felt uneasy with that.”

TR: When we were waiting at the bar, we would individually go up just to make sure that you guys were still up there.  Joe (Concannon, Boston Globe) went up first, and when he came back down he said, ‘we saw two guys, one a young guy the other an older guy. And the young guy said, “We need direction”.  And the other guy said, “we are in the same boat you are.”

And Joe and I sort of laughed about it, but it seems to be, in a capsule form, what it’s all about.”

TK: I talked to you a number times about this. It was easy, it was relatively easy, to get direction when you were putting on a single event.  Now, what you’re looking at is the reorganization of an entity that is almost 100 years old (the B.A.A. was formed in 1887). There’s a difference.

“You can put on one event and get people focused on the marathon. But now they have to broaden the membership. At one point, the BAA had 2000 members.  And that’s that’s what you can begin to see now. There’s probably a struggle for who, in fact, ought to be in control, and what direction the BAA ought to go. There’s gonna be a lot of that sort of thing now.”

TR: 38 people signed up for this meeting. I saw the sheet.  How many people potentially could’ve been there?

TK:  70. Right around 69, 70, somewhere in there.  

TR: What’s that tell you?

TK: One of the things is, if you look at the membership list, you see that there are a lot of people who, in fact, live outside the Massachusetts area.  So that’s one thing, and they send in proxies. It’s also a big night in the city and there are a lot of people that are at the receptions all over the place. 

“That sounds like an excuse and it’s not meant to be. But people have other commitments. And we have to put it in perspective.”

(Not only did the BAA once have 2000 members, but it also used to have a five-story clubhouse, ironically, right across Exeter Street from the Lenox Hotel where the modern wing of the Boston Public Library now stands. It also used to stage an indoor track & field meet in the Boston Garden every winter. By the 1970s, all those elements were gone. Only the Boston Marathon remained.)

TR: OK, so what happened that was news-worthy up there tonight? Is there a different configuration to the board?”

TK: No. you still technically have an 11-person board with the nominating process that, after it was discussed, decided to hold off, regroup, look at the people that were available to run, and have the nominating committee meet again. I guess it’s a simple as that.”

TR: There was supposed to be a vote on the new board tonight, but it didn’t happen?

TK: That’s right. The nomination committee met to prepare a report, and the report, in essence, was tabled and they’ll go back to the drawing board.

TR: Why?

TK: I can’t answer that.

TR: What was the fight? There had to be somebody complaining about something.

TK:  Well, basically it was a discussion about the process.  And there were enough people that were argumentative relative to the process. They didn’t like it. So they said, “let’s do it over again”. And they prevailed.  So, they put it off.

“And the process is important, especially in this city. Those people who listen to your show  (Runners’ Digest) may not understand, but in the city of Boston the process of how you go through something, how you treat people, is very critical. And sometimes it’s more important than the final results.  

“And I learned that from you while working at the Marathon. Co-opting people and getting people involved, all of that process was important. I think people felt uneasy with the process.”

TR: What makes you believe that when they go back, they’re not going to just come up with the same results they came to you with tonight?”

TK:  They may well do that.  But I think the membership that was there will probably feel better about it. At least they would have had to rethink their position. You’re gonna see people come out of tonight probably in a little different stance. They’re gonna be a little more thoughtful about how they approach nominating somebody for this organization, which is becoming a very newsworthy event. And rightly so.”

TR: How many openings are there now with Scott McFetridge, for one, retiring?”

TK:  Scotty retired. Technically, that’s the only resignation we had since the Marathon.  So, I guess, at this point, the board stands at 11 members with Scotty‘s position not being filled.  But I would say that now, technically, everybody on the board has to be renominated, including myself.”

TR:  So, when is all this happening again?  

TK:  I don’t know. We didn’t talk about a follow up meeting date.  

TR:  Well, what does that tell you? How much up in the air is this thing?

TK: I’ve got my feet on the ground. (chuckles)

In 1985, after John Hancock Financial Services came on as the marathon’s saving sponsor, and one-time Prudential employee Guy Morse was hired as race director, Kilduff was out. Today, Tim continues his involvement with sport as the president and founder of the 26.2 Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization with community roots in Hopkinton, MA. They make investments in programs that promote education, fitness and health. 

*

But there you had it. The entire Marshall Medoff matter, as it came to be known, uncovered the lack of communication within the BAA amidst the tectonic changes that were altering the landscape of the Marathon world in the 1980s as the sport underwent the transformation from its amateur past to an open, perhaps fully professional, future. (Sadly, that never came to pass.)

The BAA was out of touch, and didn’t particularly care, or so it seemed, since almost all the board members had nothing to do with the running industry. And when they were confronted with disgruntled runners seeking change in light of what was happening in the rest of the world, the BAA reflexively retreated into their hard patrician shells like indignant turtles.

‘You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know.” they said patronizingly. “It’s just not our way.” 

Long-time race director Will Cloney had come to the conclusion that the marathon had nothing, in fact, to sell, a position shared by Rod McDonald, VP at Prudential Insurance, the underwriters of the marathon, which finished on their property on Ring Road adjacent to Boylston Street.

So, when Marshall Medoff saw the opportunity via Mr. Cloney, he promised the BAA a $400,000 windfall. That sounded great to Cloney. But the problem was, any other sponsorship beyond that initial $400k would stay with Medoff. And as we now know, that could’ve been millions of dollars. 

And while Medoff had no background in sports sponsorship sales, or the world of marathoning, he was an astute immigration lawyer. So, he wrote the contract to his benefit. And Mr. Cloney, an old-fashioned New England Harvard gentleman, saw the good in people, and did not anticipate either Medoff’s sales success, or his self-serving greed. 

For their part, the BAA board thought they had only given Cloney the go-ahead to investigate the possibility of acquiring sponsorship, not permission to sign a contract with someone to actually go out and attain it in their name. When the contract was made public by the Boston Globe’s Will McDonough under the blaring headline, “Boston Marathon For Sale” on February 27, 1982, the board felt blindsided. 

There was a huge backlash against both the secrecy of the contract, and what it promised for both the BAA and Medoff. 

Now, rather than exploring sponsorship in a meaningful manner, the BAA board focused on fighting Medoff in court. It took two more years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs, before the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Cloney did not have the standing to sign a contract that essentially gave away the BAA’s entire marathon rights to Medoff.

In the aftermath, the board of governors was mistrustful of everyone, including themselves. So, there was a bit of a fratricide that was going on and a recoiling against change of any kind at a time when the sport was undergoing a fundamental change from an amateur past to an open future.

The whole idea of a professional sport was anathema to the history and structure of the BAA, a private men’s club born out of a 19th century sense of noblesse oblige. It never dawned on the old, Brahman institution that money should be involved in any way other than paying for costs of busses, finish line apparatus, etc. Certainly not prize money, which would taint this pristine, linen-white event. 

But a decade earlier, the Boston running community had seen how the BAA board of governors had allowed their 75-year-old BAA Indoor Games to wither and die after the BAA refused to pay appearance fees for top runners to compete at their indoor meet at the Boston Garden every winter. 

When other, newer events around the country started poaching the top athletes, the older BAA meet saw attendance dwindle from a 14,000-fan sell-out, to 12,000, to 10,000, and then less. According to the BAA board, once the attendance fell below 10,000, they had no choice, as 10,000 was their financial break-even point. 

Rather than pay to get the top athletes, which would’ve kept the Garden filled, they simply closed the event down after 75 years!

The Boston running community was acutely aware how that same mentality and its consequences was playing out in the Marathon, as well. The event had gone from 7927 entrants in 1979, at the height of the Bill Rodgers era, to 5594 entrants in 1985, a 30% drop in participation. 84 sub-2:20 performances were run in 1983, only two in 1985, as competition from other big-city marathons offering prize and/or appearance fees was stripping Boston of its prestige.

The only saving grace, as it turns out, was the BAA required city permits to run on the streets of the eight cities and towns the marathon traversed on Patriot’s Day. 

Once Boston Mayor Ray Flynn (1984-1993) got involved and saw how the BAA’s recalcitrance was essentially killing the marathon, and thereby reducing business and tax revenues for the city, there was not much the BAA could do against the power of City Hall. 

Flynn was a recreational runner himself and former three-sport star at South Boston High School. As a collegiate at Providence University, he was the MVP of the NIT Basketball Tournament in New York’s Madison Square Garden his senior year. Members of the running community informed Flynn what the BAA’s intransigence was doing to the marathon and, by extension, the city.

Everything came to a head during the summer of 1985 when Mayor Flynn convened a meeting of city officials and the BAA at the city-owned Parkman House on Beacon Hill to discuss the marathon’s future. That meeting is another long post in itself.

But this 1983 annual meeting at the Lenox Hotel was indicative of how gun-shy and ill prepared the BAA board of governors was to the changing times they found themselves confronting.

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The Boston Marathon has come a long way since John Hancock Financial Services signed on to be presenting sponsor for the 1986 race. The Boston Athletic Association took $300,000 of their sponsorship dollars and put it into a prize purse. But to protect their sponsorship investment, John Hancock hired Pat Lynch, a member of the Boston running community and a former political operative for Mayor Kevin White, a four-term mayor of Boston prior to Flynn, to recruit an elite field with appearance money through what they called their “clinic program”. 

That way, Hancock could ensure that the best fields would come to Boston each spring, as prize money alone would not offset the competition coming from London, Rotterdam, Paris, etc. Hancock also took over the press operation to ensure a fuller dissemination of the marathon’s exploits.

Though the partnership wasn’t perfect, the BAA, mostly via race director Guy Morse (Director from 1985-2000, Executive Director from 2000-2010), and Hancock’s executive VP and eventual CEO, David D’Alessandro (1984 to 2004), worked well together as the sponsorship lasted for over three decades while the Boston Marathon returned to its rightful place atop the elite marathons of the world.

In one sense, there were two marathons being run concurrently in those early years, the B.A.A Boston Marathon, and the John Hancock Invitational Marathon. 

This year, Bank of America begins its sponsorship of the marathon amidst an immediate controversy. Some runners are unhappy with the sponsor’s name being prominently displayed at the bottom of the finishers’ medals. Previously, the year of the event was what had been displayed beneath the BAA’s unicorn logo. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? Good luck to one and all come Monday a week.

END