For the Glory Page 3

  Athletics meetings during McKerchar’s early days pulled in crowds able to gamble openly.6 Only the Streets Betting Act of 1909 evicted the bookmakers, making considerably poorer some of those who regularly made a cash-killing either by winning or by deliberately losing. Immediately after the Great War, the carnival and social atmosphere of these meetings continued nonetheless because the organizers became more eager than ever to create it. The country was desolate, discontented and in debt. Those who didn’t come back from the fighting were later described by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the men of promise born during the eighteen-nineties whose promise was not fulfilled’. Those who did were initially seduced by the catchy, alliterative slogan of ‘Homes for Heroes’, a glib pledge stirring expectations no government could ever meet. There was anger and a sense of futility when conditions after the war were found to be no better – and often far worse – than those before it. Spectator sport offered escape from all this. So even brass bands blared away to accompany both track and field events to provide more razzmatazz. Sometimes this dissolved into farce. One Edinburgh high jumper, unable to concentrate, had to ask for a particularly brisk, jazzy tune called ‘The Hitchy Koo’ to stop before attempting to clear the bar. When another band began playing at the very start of a one-mile race, the competitors found it impossible to run because the rhythm of their stride was incompatible with the rhythm of the over-loud military two-step thumping around them; only a ‘frantic waving of arms’ silenced the music.

  The athletes themselves were a sober-looking lot. Shorts were never above the knee. Spikes were always black. T-shirts rather than vests were worn. Instead of today’s Lycra, Spandex or shiny, luminous-coloured tracksuits with fancy piping and sponsors’ names, the runners draped a double-breasted overcoat over their shoulders like a heavy cape. To combat the north-easterly winds of Edinburgh, woollen gloves and extra-long scarves were vital too. The scarves were wound like cladding and then knotted tightly. Ex-servicemen were conspicuous: each wore a military greatcoat with brass buttons that caught the light like the eyes of a cat.

  In the thick of everything, McKerchar was known among the university athletes as a coach who didn’t take short-cuts; who didn’t tolerate time-wasters, late-comers or shirkers; and who didn’t waste sentences for the sake of them, as if wanting to prove that Shakespeare was right to say ‘men of few words are the best men’. He also liked to get as close as possible to the action, frequently appearing as a starter for races in which his athletes competed.

  He put his faith in proper preparation. It wasn’t common for runners to ‘limber up’ in advance of an event; McKerchar, though, insisted on the procedure. He saw the relationship between himself and the athlete as an equal collaboration of talent and, like the good teacher nursing the promising pupil, he cared about general welfare.

  What also set him apart from the pack was an innovative spirit.

  Pupil and master. A particularly slim and youthful-looking Liddell and the dapperly dressed Tom McKerchar.

  In the early 1920s, there were coaches who believed the size of the heart and the capacity of the lungs wouldn’t allow a human to run a mile in under four minutes. Reaching that mark was as unthinkable to them as the prospect of rocketing to the moon. But McKerchar knew his athletics history. He was not only aware of how athletic performance had evolved, but also appreciated that the athlete of tomorrow – through better nutrition, better sports science, better equipment and technology – would always be fitter and faster than his predecessors. He embraced the future. When massage and physiotherapy were dismissed as crass fads, McKerchar championed them. When the mechanics of coordination could be inspected through sequential photography and slow-motion film – after the photographer Eadweard James Muybridge pioneered them – McKerchar benefited from it, spotting weaknesses in a stride pattern or deficiencies in arm and upper body movement. When new training methods were introduced elsewhere, particularly in Europe, McKerchar adopted them rather than wailing – as a platoon of insular coaches did – that importing them was unnecessary because nothing could possibly trump the superiority of British thinking.

  This attitude and approach matched those of two of his contemporaries.7 The first was the quixotic Sam Mussabini. The second was Alec Nelson. Mussabini was an eccentric, his mind sparking a dozen ideas between breakfast and lunch and then another dozen before supper. Nelson was a different personality, less boisterous and more methodical. He’d been a professional half- and three-quarter-miler before becoming coach at Cambridge University, orchestrating Varsity dominance over Oxford. He had an especially dry humour. His instruction to one less than promising high jumper was the laconic ‘Throw your leg over the bar . . . and follow it as soon as possible’.

  McKerchar was an ‘amateur’, sandwiched between these two ‘professionals’, only insofar as he took no payment. He nonetheless punched equal weight alongside them, and the triumvirate respected one another unequivocally. Tips and gossip were amicably traded and one coach was freely able to offer advice to another’s athlete without generating friction.

  Eric Liddell always saw them as a trio.8 ‘What these three trainers don’t know about getting their charges fit, and telling them how to run their races, isn’t worth knowing,’ he said. He was convinced nonetheless that timing and geography had serendipitously given him the best of these sages. He called McKerchar ‘my friend’. In return McKerchar would call him his ‘wonderful boy’.

  The admiration began in June 1921.

  McKerchar could be found almost every weekday evening at one of Edinburgh’s two stadiums, Craiglockhart or Powderhall, where he observed training discreetly and then gave his impressions at the end of the session. Craiglockhart was a spacious expanse of grass, a throwback to the pre-cinder era.9 The track was lime-marked. The focal point of the arena was a mock Tudor pavilion with twin gables, a central white-faced clock and a shallow tier of black wooden seating. Powderhall was the pros’ domain, the dark grey cinder making it so. There was a rickety low grandstand and a banked ridge surround. Edinburgh’s castle and the outline of the Old Town were a single dark shape in the distance. Scotland was searching for another Wyndham Halswelle, winner of the 1908 Olympic gold in the 400 metres. Halswelle, while born in London, was an adopted Caledonian. He’d trained in Edinburgh, where Powderhall became his natural habitat. Halswelle won his title in a walk-over. The final had to be controversially re-staged after an American rival was disqualified for elbowing him in the ribs during the closing stages. The two other Americans in the race, peeved at the decision, refused to run again in a display of solidarity. Halswelle, who’d broken the Olympic record during qualification, consequently had the track to himself. The Americans complained the team had been ‘rooked, bilked, cheated, swindled and robbed’;10 Scotland merely saluted its champion and expressed contempt for the cheat. A sniper’s bullet during the battle of Neuve Chapelle in France killed Halswelle in 1915. He was only thirty-two.

  McKerchar made it his business to know every runner who came to either Craiglockhart or Powderhall, for the next new face might be the next Halswelle.

  It didn’t take him long to pick out the choice candidate.

  Eric Liddell was Edinburgh University’s reluctant athlete.11

  He had been seen running occasionally – purely to stay fit – and looked impressively fast. A friend approached him at the rump end of his second term. Would he compete in the Annual Sports at Craiglockhart? There were only six weeks to train for it, and Liddell initially said he was too ‘busy’ to swap bookwork for track-work. There was ‘no time for that sort of thing’, he added. Within twenty-four hours, however, he realized his mistake and chastised himself for it. For someone who prided himself on filling every one of Rudyard Kipling’s unforgiving minutes with sixty seconds’ worth of effort, his original answer began to strike him as a feeble and fatuous excuse; and to hide behind it had made him appear idle as well. ‘The very words I used seemed to startle me,’ he remembered. ‘Busy?
Work? These two words were new to me. They seemed to be strangers trying to settle down in a home that wasn’t their own. They were soon dislodged.’

  The young athlete. Eric Liddell (extreme right) is part of the Edinburgh University team.

  Liddell tore into his training. But, at nineteen, without a coach and ignorant of how to approach a race, he committed a dumb error. ‘I was only a novice then,’ he admitted. Less than a month beforehand, Liddell set off on a six-day cycling holiday to Ben Nevis – a round trip of nearly 350 miles and a climb of almost 4,500 feet to the mountain’s summit. He expected to see the sun rise spectacularly across the landscape. What he saw instead were banks of unbreakable clouds. ‘One of those days in which the sun did not rise,’ he remarked. Liddell also expected to come back from his break far fitter than before. It never occurred to him that the combination of a hard saddle, repetitive pedalling and a bone-shaking bike on winding, unmade roads would leave him feeling as tender as a piece of pulverized butcher’s meat. Nor did he understand that the pull on his leg muscles – especially strenuous on Ben Nevis’s steep gradients – was incompatible with sprinting. ‘I went to see if I would be able to run,’ he said after returning home. ‘I was stiff.’ As well as the soreness, Liddell said he lost his ‘spring’ as a result of his rashness. That he managed to regain it so soon was a pointer to his potential. He would never be so blithely cavalier about his physical condition again.

  Dressed in white vest and longish black pants, Liddell won the Annual Sports’ 100 yards in 10.4 seconds, half a yard ahead of the field. He came second in the 220 yards, losing so narrowly that only inches denied him a double. A fellow competitor described him as ‘just a slip of a man’ who on that late May afternoon established himself in only two races as a ‘new power in Scottish athletics’. Tom McKerchar recognized it too. Liddell had beaten seasoned runners on a grassy surface that didn’t flatter the gift of speed and necessitated a standing, rather than a crouched, start.

  Preparation at Powderhall came next for him. ‘It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a cinder track,’ said Liddell, making the sight of it sound like one of the undiscovered Wonders of the World. Dropped into an unfamiliar environment, he felt awkwardly self-conscious and looked askance at the pros, who trained alongside – and were scornful of – amateurs such as himself. Liddell said he watched them dancing on their toes ‘as if stepping on hot bricks’, and digging ‘big holes’ like trenches to practise starts. He didn’t want to make ‘a fool’ of himself like that, he explained, before adding: ‘At first I felt that every eye was turned on me when, as a matter of fact, there was nobody watching me at all.’ Tentatively, he began to dance as well and also to work his shoulders and then copy whatever else was happening around him, such as back-bends and running on the spot, stretching and sharp 10-yard dashes. ‘The exercises seemed unimportant at first,’ confessed the callow Liddell, convinced that he could run without them.

  To survive, let alone progress, Liddell was aware he needed a coach. McKerchar’s civilian attire was a three-piece suit and a trilby. His working clothes at Powderhall were flannel trousers, a sweater or a towel tucked into the neck and a bobble hat or flat cap. Sometimes he puffed hard on short-butt cigars. In a crowd, he was easy to find. He also lived less than a mile from the track, which allowed him to wander in and out. Liddell summoned the courage to introduce himself, as though McKerchar couldn’t possibly have seen him in the Annual Sports and had no notion of what he’d achieved during it.

  In an attempt to coach himself, Liddell had read a book called How to Become a Great Athlete.

  The book, published in 1911, was written by the Austrian-born naturalized German Max Sick, who made his living from his physique. He was a 5-foot-4-inch-tall strongman, a weightlifter, a gymnast and also a side-show, circus-like entertainer who liked to study nature and quote the writings of poets, philosophers and scientists. He drew crowds to variety halls after learning to make his muscles twitch in synchronization with music played from the orchestra pit. He adopted the stage name Maxick. As a child, he grew up puny and undernourished. As an adult, he made even Charles Atlas look weedy. How to Become a Great Athlete dealt with the science of athleticism in relation to muscular power. An athlete without strength, said Sick, was ‘useless’. He illustrated the manual with photographs of his own body, which he boastfully said made him ‘the most wonderfully developed and strongest man of my weight’. What impressed Liddell was Sick’s desire for constant self-improvement. Certain that strength came from muscle control, Sick insisted readers of the book should know thyself. ‘There must be knowledge of the sets of muscles which are to be used in any particular effort.’ These, he continued, ‘should become the object of your mind’. Sick was adamant that any athlete needed to research his sport ‘deeply’, should ‘only pay attention to the advice of those who do things’, and ought to ‘leave those who theorise severely alone’. Sick’s number one rule was: ‘Practise with your superiors – never with your inferiors. If you can’t practise with better men, watch them.’

  Liddell took note.

  Sick claimed to be ‘mentally possessed of so strong a will’ that he could live frugally. He argued that those who aspired to be top athletes should never over-eat and that ‘tea, coffee, alcohol and tobacco’ should be labelled as ‘poisons’. An ‘occasional sip of Bovril’, he declared, was perfectly permissible, as if advertising the brand. Liddell agreed with other Sick suggestions, such as the need to ‘keep warm’, and also his haughty contempt for the ‘Spartan like treatment to which many physical cultural enthusiasts subject themselves’. Sick waved them aside as being ‘little short of madness’. He made one recommendation in particular that Liddell repeatedly followed: ‘If your sport requires speed, avoid weightlifting as you would the devil.’ He thought too much bulky muscle was like trying to run with a sackful of coal lashed to each leg. Where Liddell and Sick differed was in the matter of massage. Sick was generally in favour of it, though emphatically not in the days immediately before an event. Liddell believed massage was ‘essential’ in the hours before competition. McKerchar thought so too.

  Looking back on those initial attempts to prove himself as an athlete, Liddell said that he went to McKerchar with pre-conceived theories of how to run and also how to prepare for running. McKerchar threw a lot of them out, like unfashionable clothes from a wardrobe, before dressing Liddell anew. ‘He taught me where I was going wrong,’ he said, which was a polite way of putting it because the account of their first meeting scarcely seems like a cosy togetherness of matched hearts and minds. McKerchar comes across as spiky and irritable. Liddell comes across as thoroughly ticked off. The exchange between them seems more like scolding than instruction. ‘He told me that my muscles were all too hard. They needed to be softened by massage,’ said Liddell. Without it, McKerchar cautioned that ‘one day’ one of his muscles would ‘snap’ on the starting line. The coach got to work. ‘He pounded me around like a piece of putty, pushed this muscle this way and that muscle the other way in order to get me into shape,’ said Liddell. McKerchar ordered him to complete a short run. At the end of it Liddell pulled up suddenly, as if colliding with an invisible wall. ‘I asked him what he thought of it,’ he remembered. McKerchar’s utter horror at what he’d just witnessed sounds in the telling as though Liddell received a shock akin to the angry crackle of electric current. ‘He answered that if I wanted a breakdown I was going about it in the best possible manner . . . one must never stop abruptly on reaching the tape.’

  There are winces of pain in Liddell’s recollection of how dispirited he became afterwards. He said he’d been ‘thoroughly humiliated’; that his ‘reputation had been dragged through the mud’; and that his ‘self-respect was . . . wallowing in the mire’. He worried that every muscle in his body was about to ‘give way’, and that he’d ‘remain a physical wreck until the end of my days’. But he also conceded that McKerchar had begun putting him into ‘a fit mental condition to start an a
thletic career’.

  These were baby steps, and the greatness of McKerchar as a coach is evidenced in them. Liddell was an athletics dunce. He didn’t know how to start from the holes. He didn’t know how to dip at the tape. He didn’t know how to train either, and he’d relied on a book by a vaudeville performer to hone his body. He also had that terrible arm-jerky, head-back style – the worst in living memory; so bad it seemed sometimes as though the top half of his body didn’t belong to the bottom half. Most coaches – despite the explosive boom of that raw, ravishing speed – would have made an excuse and left Liddell to it, thinking his component problems were so dire that no whole solution could ever be found to conquer them. But McKerchar was a man of mettle, and perseverance was always prevalent in his approach. However much criticism he fired at him, Liddell was never a lost cause; he put him through the wringer only because he believed his talent was worth the bother.

  Having learned that personality was reflected in performance, McKerchar made it his business to explore his athlete’s past and family history. He only had to scrape the topsoil off Liddell’s to conclude there was a solid base beneath. The teenager in front of him knew all about loyalty, service, self-sufficiency and self-reliance and also commitment. He’d been brought up not to let anyone down. That is why McKerchar agreed to coach him.