Recently, I received an e-mail promoting a new book, Anything for A T-shirt: Fred Lebow and the New York City Marathon, the World’s Greatest Footrace (phew!). It sounded like it might be an interesting read, and “Runner’s World” had rated it one of the top 10 Christmas gift suggestions for 2004. So, I shot off an e-mail to the publisher, saying that I was interested in reviewing the book, but would probably have to wait until it hit a used bookstore (so I could justify the expenditure). That same day I received a phone call:
“Hello?” “Did you e-mail me about anything for a T-shirt?”
“No!”
“Are you sure you didn’t e-mail me about anything for a T-shirt?”
“I don’t think so…”
“The BOOK… Anything for a T-shirt… the story of the New York City Marathon?”
“Ohhhh. Yes, yes I did.”
Catchy title, no?
T-Shirt (now that you know what I’m talking about, I’ll refer to it as “T-shirt” and not the whole title) is a wonderful read. The most I ever knew about the NYC Marathon was that one, IT’S HUGE; and two, you can only get in by lottery. I’d heard of Fred Lebow and seen pictures of him before. I may have even seen coverage of the year he ran it (1992), but I never took an engaging interest.
T-shirt follows the life history of Fred Lebow (neè Fishl Lebowitz) from his life in Romania until his death from cancer in the United States, and how he made the New York City Marathon the event it is today.
Lebow was not your typical race director. If you think about any race directors you know personally, they are coaches, businessmen, or even activists. Fred Lebow was a designer dress knockoff artist, who started in running to improve his tennis game.
When he started running with the NY Road Runners Club (the beginnings of RRCA), it was an elitist group, pandering only to top runners. One of their races was a New York City marathon known as the Cherry Tree Marathon, which had about 200 competitors and ran on open streets (naturally in an area with low amounts of traffic). After competing in this marathon in early 1970, Lebow proposed holding a marathon in Central Park (no traffic and more scenic) in June of ’70, and it was a mild success with only some distracting Frisbees being tossed at runners.
This marathon continued to build, with a few sponsors until 1976, when a special course was proposed (for the US bicentennial) that would run through 5 NYC burroughs. Lebow was opposed to the idea at first, and even threw out the notion of an unbelieveable cost estimate (in order to dissuade this grandiose idea) to put the race on (and actually ended up having to raise more than that amount to make the race viable).
Again, when present-day race directors have marathon examples they can point to, Fred Lebow was just a garment worker, but had tremendous chutzpah and the belief that providing a great experience for the marathon runner, no matter his or her ability was the ultimate goal, and so was able to convince sponsors that their participation was economically worthwhile. My favorite parts of the book are the ways in which Lebow gets a wary company to invest by helping them to see what future benefits they could reap (He asked some Buick dealers for $75,000 for the honor of providing the pace vehicles for the male and female leaders. When they turned him down, he offered to pay them $10,000, but in exchange, they would hire an independent analyst to determine the value of their exposure, of which Lebow would take 10% (figuring he would get at least $100,000). They gave him $50,000 and the use of a Buick for a year!) Sometimes these actions seemed really bizarre! Eventually, the NYC Marathon became the 40,000 person day-long party it is today!
The book continues with various chapters about the different people who ran the marathon, his cadre of volunteers, the international elite crowd that still made the marathon competitive, and his continuing dictatorship of the NYC Road Runners Club.
The latter part of the book is about his battle with cancer and how he battled it long enough to be able to run the NYC Marathon at least one time (of his 69 marathons, he ran NYC only once).
T-shirt is very engaging in its writing style; its chapters are split up evenly, so that you are never bored with any one segment. My only complaint is that at times each chapter seems like it was written entirely independently from the last, in that characters that you get to know throughout the book are constantly reintroduced, to the point that I got annoyed (‘Yes, I know that Dick Traum is the head of the Achilles Track Club for Disabled Athletes. Enough already!’). But a few extra descriptions can’t ruin this wonderful story, and my hope is that other long-time marathon directors have equally engaging stories to tell about how they made a local marathon into an exciting international event!
If you are interested in purchasing Anything for a T-shirt, the publisher is offering a 25% discount (which amounts to free shipping) for individuals and a bigger discount if multiple people are interested. Please contact Emmett if you are interested.