College sports -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Sports stories; Track and field -- Fiction
Angus belonged to one of the Boston clans, and naturally chose these
Caledonian games for his first appearance, working hard, training
faithfully, and saying nothing, for a very quiet chap was Mac. If all
the men I have trained had been as easy to handle as MacLeod, I should
have one or two less gray hairs than I now possess. Unfortunately,
church members are not in as large a percentage as I would wish on the
cinder-path.
Now, I had at first no intention of pulling a dollar out of the affair,
except my regular fee for training. Even this I at first declined,
wishing to help my friend purely out of friendship. Mac would not have
it, however, and as his pay was high, I allowed him to have his way.
I had now been making a business of training athletes for nearly a year,
getting a good living out of it, and had at the beginning a nice little
nest-egg in the bank, ready for a rainy day.
Exactly how this was accumulated I do not care to say. These tales are
in no sense confessions, and I shall avoid the "strutting I" as much as
possible.
After my defeat of "Chipper" Simmons, at Hacking's Brighton track, there
were a couple of years passed not at all to my liking, though profitably
enough for one of small ideas. I took on matches wherever they promised
a dollar. I ran everybody, and every distance, from a fifty-yard dash to
a mile run, and almost invariably won, largely because of the pains I
took with myself, and my careful training. I learned all the tricks of
the trade, gave close finishes always, did an artistic "fainting act,"
and made myself a subject of regretful, not to say painful, remembrance
to a large part of the sporting fraternity.
They stood it all right for a couple of years, but the summer before I
met MacLeod I suddenly discovered I had about squeezed the orange dry.
They had, very naturally, grown more and more shy of me, until it had
become impossible to obtain a match, except under prohibitive
conditions. I tried giving good men eight yards in the "hundred" and one
hundred yards in the mile for a while, but discovered it was a hard
business, with nothing in it. My only profit, as far as I could see, was
to run crooked, and fake a race or two, but at this, though not
over-nice, I drew the line.
I was willing to underrate my powers, and fool the fancy on my
condition; to win by a scant yard with pretended effort, in order to
pull on my opponent to another race; but to back him on the sly and lie
down, to pull money from my friends, I could not. A gentleman I might
not be, but honest I would be still. Indeed, despite the "winning way" I
had, my reputation was of the best as a rare, good runner, as a square
man who gave his backers a straight run for their money, and as the most
knowing man in the States concerning work and training for the
cinder-path.
On this last I made up my mind to trade. I announced my absolute
retirement as a contestant, and my intention to make a business of
training and handling others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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