Track sports, like other athletics, have tended of late years to become so nearly synonymous with college track sports, that the work of non-collegiate athletic clubs in the introduction and furthering of the games of field and cinder path has been obscured and almost forgotten, and, to the present generation of undergraduates, almost unknown. The growth and the clarifying of the amateur spirit, coming as it did side by side with the degeneration of so many athletic clubs into mere circus aggregations for professionals, together with that polite glamour which our so-called "return to the country" has cast on all branches of sport, have made the non-collegiate follower of athletics a less important and interesting figure in the public eye.
When, however, Mott Haven was yet a name unknown, and a cinder path—without which no cross-roads boarding-school is complete nowadays—could not have been found behind a campus in the country, and when an undergraduate who could run a quarter mile in a minute flat would have been regarded as a Mercury by his classmates, little crowds of young fellows working in the cities, who had no time to spare, and no motive except love of exercise and sport, were getting together in the clubs which succeeded so tremendously for many years, and whose members made so many of the records now down on the books. It was the plain, ungilded crowd—young fellows who had to work all day behind a counter or a desk, and train at night—who brought track athletics into this country and put the sport on its feet. Of these clubs, the New York Athletic Club was in many ways the pioneer. It was the New York club which built the first cinder path, and brought the first spiked shoes into the country, which held the first real track meet, and which acted as the pattern and the stimulus for similar organizations in various parts of the country.
The New York Athletic Club was organized in 1868. William B. Curtis,—"Father Bill" Curtis,—now dead and gone, and his friends and fellow-athletes, were behind the movement. It was "Father Bill" who, with John C. Babcock, drafted the circular which was sent out to give the athletic public an idea of what was proposed. There had been desultory running going on for years, of course, the formation of athletic clubs in England had been watched with interest over here, and there was a considerable body of what one might nowadays call sportsmen of the old school who were glad to hear of such a scheme. In a letter to the writer telling something of these early days, that veteran of the track, Mr. H. E. Buermeyer, gives a few words of personal history, which would apply equally well, doubtless, to many another man of the same tastes and the same generation. "I have been interested in sports ever since I was fifteen years old," he says, "having rowed in a boat race in 1854, and I can recollect reading about foot races in Bell's Life and the New York Clipper more than fifty years ago. I had several sporty English acquaintances, who were much interested in wrestling, pugilism, pedestrianism, etc., and that's the way I got interested in those things as a boy, and have kept it up more or less ever since." The reply to the circular was prompt and enthusiastic. The club was organized. J. Edward Russell was elected president, three hundred members were soon enrolled, headquarters were secured in what is now Clarendon Hall, East Thirteenth Street, and on November 8, 1868, the club's first games were held at what was then the Empire Rink, at Third Avenue and Sixty-third Street. It was at these games that spiked shoes were first worn in competition by an American amateur. Mr. Buermeyer, who was treasurer of the new club and present at the games, gives the following history of these shoes, which were worn by "Father Bill" Curtis himself: —
"Curtis learned from Davis, a professional champion sprinter of that time, that there was an Irish shoemaker in New York who had imported some spikes from England, and who had made shoes for a few of the professionals. Curtis got Davis to make him a pair, and he wore them at the games. The only difference between these shoes and the kind they wear nowadays was in the weight; the old style were heavier and much stronger." These games were crude enough, according to our present-day standards—the sprint was started with the tap of a drum—but they stirred up a lot of interest, and the membership of the club rapidly increased. In the following spring an outdoor track was found, and outdoor games were held, but it was not until 1871 that the club acquired land at Mott Haven, and there built the first cinder path in America. At the spring games that year there were five events—the one-hundred-yard dash, the half, one-mile, and three-mile runs, and the three-mile walk—and the fact that the half was done in 2.23 and the mile in 5.25 gives an indication of the crude development of running at that time. The performances may have been poor, but there was plenty of spirit behind them, and the energy that had put the club on its feet made it for many years a leader and pioneer. It was the New York Athletic Club which held the first winter indoor games, in 1878, in what is now Madison Square Garden, and it was under the same auspices that, in 1877 and in 1883 respectively, the first steeplechase and the first cross-country race were held. Not only was this club the pioneer of such organizations, but it was destined to increase in wealth and importance for many years, and to survive with at least a measure of its acquired prestige when many of its later rivals had succumbed to a decline in interest in club athletics or the blight of professionalism.
The success of the New York Athletic Club started other clubs patterned on similar lines all about the metropolis. Staten Island, with its fresh air and open country and quiet water, only a ferry-boat's journey from the heart of the city—seemingly a sort of paradise for the office slave—was naturally one of the first to follow suit. The Staten Island Athletic Club was organized in 1876. The boating clubs, which up to that time had represented the athletic activity of the island, were soon, to a considerable extent, drawn into it, and another band of recruits had been added to the now rapidly growing track-athletic army. The Manhattan Athletic Club, subsequently to become the ill-starred Knickerbocker, started up as a strong and active rival of the New York Athletic Club in 1877. The place which the Manhattan Club soon held in city-bred athletics is suggested vividly enough by the mere mention of the fact that Lawrence E. Meyers was one of its runners. There were plenty other men in the club in those days to make it famous—W. Byrd Page, the high jumper, Westing, Copeland, and later Conneff, the mile champion—and its colors were soon being carried to victory against the strongest fields in the country, and not infrequently abroad. It is through one of those ironies of fate that the club-house at Madison Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, which was looked upon as the best in the country when the Knickerbocker Club went into it, is now the home of a twentieth-century woman's club.
The rest of the metropolitan district soon fell into line. The Jersey suburbs organized their clubs, of which the Orange Athletic Club was to become the most notable, and in Brooklyn and in many of the less sophisticated corners of Manhattan small organizations sprang into being, of which those devoted to cross-country running, such as the Suburban Harriers, Prospect Harriers, and Westchester Harriers, were founded perhaps on the solidest and healthiest basis—the desire of vigorous young men to take vigorous exercise in the open air, untrammelled by clothes, gymnasium air, or the toy freedom of a twenty-lap track.
While this was going on in the East a similar activity was making itself felt all the way westward to the Pacific. California, which in many ways has always been less Western than the West, began to take an interest in track athletics at almost the same time that they came into favor in the extreme East. Mr. William Greer Harrison, for many years the president of the Olympic Club of San Francisco, is my authority for the statement that amateur track athletics really began on the Pacific coast in 1877. "In that year," says Mr. Harrison, "the Olympic Club began to foster the sport on an amateur basis. Athletic events had occurred before that, but they had been of a semi-professional character, and did not receive the support of amateurs. There were no spacious outdoor grounds at that time, nor handsome dressing-rooms, with all the appurtenances of an up-to-date training quarters, with attendants, trainer, and rubbers to take athletes in hand after or before exercising. It was not an unusual thing, however, to see a dozen athletes undress on the shady side of a rail fence at the old Bay District horse track preparatory to taking their morning or evening exercise, after which they dressed without a shower-bath or rub-down." The Merion Cricket Club soon became a competitor of the Olympic Club, and in 1884 a team from the former organization entered the coast championship and won out The Merion men repeated the beating in 1885 and 1886, and finally the old Olympic Club, recognizing that discretion was the better part of valor, absorbed the new organization and elected Mr. Harrison, who was at the head of it, president of the combined organization. With the coalition of these two clubs and the appearance in the following year of Victor H. Schifferstein, the sprinter and jumper, and quite the most unusual athlete that the far West had yet produced, a new and lively interest in track athletics spread along the coast. Small clubs began to spring up, and although they were destined to give way eventually to the growing interest in college athletics, Berkeley was still an infant and Stanford yet unborn, and the time far distant when a team of undergraduates from the coast should contest with the college teams of the East, and when California collegians should be winners at Mott Haven. Oregon and Washington followed California, and there were presently cinder paths at Seattle and Portland, and plenty of good men to run on them. Of the clubs of the far Northwest the Multonomah of Portland was and is the best-known and strongest. Owing, doubtless, to the fact that social lines are less rigidly determined in that part of the country, the coast athletic clubs have preserved this prestige more successfully than those of the East, and several of them still have a potency, for their own neighborhoods, social as well as athletic.
At the same time that the Pacific Slope was thus getting into the game, the Middle West, led by Detroit, began to enter the running. The Detroit Athletic Club, which was the centre of Middle Western athletic activity for a number of years, was organized in 1886. It was a success from the start. "Jack" McMasters, the club's trainer, laid out its cinder path and also the foundations of that knowledge and skill which years afterwards were to decorate his watch-chain with little gold footballs. Many capable performers were developed by the Detroit Club, but the most famous of them was John Owen, Jr., and although the prestige of the organization has long since waned, the initials "D. A. C." are fixed in the record books after the name of John Owen, Jr., the first amateur in the country to win the hundred in better than even time. It was at Detroit that the first national meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States was held, in 1888. There were one hundred and twenty athletes entered for this event from all parts of the country. The East sent its best men. Condon, of the New York Athletic Club, threw the fifty-six-pound weight farther than it had ever been thrown before, and all in all the meet was a complete success. Two years later, at the annual meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union in Washington, on October 10, a reorganization of the union was voted; the various branches which now cover the whole country were organized in February, 1891, and on March 18, 1891, the reorganized Amateur Athletic Union held its first meeting. It was at this time, the beginning of the nineties, that club athletics had reached the height of their success.
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