A 1968 snub still haunts a ‘Nova legend
The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics will occur Friday morning in Japan. If Dave Patrick is not out for a run, he may click on the telecast and watch.
There he will see a parade of some of the world’s greatest athletes, proudly marching beneath their national flags.
There he will see potential, and spirit, and hope.
There he will see competitors rewarded for what they have achieved just to be able to call themselves Olympians, no matter what they may achieve in the Tokyo Games.
And there he will see all of what he was denied in a weird Summer of 1968.
He’ll watch.
He’ll remember.
He’ll try not to be angry. A middle-distance-running blur, Patrick was a track superstar in 1968, competing for Villanova and legendary coach Jumbo Elliott. Eight times an individual national champion, eight times an All-American, three times a vital member of a national championship team, he held three indoor world records. And for most of the Summer of ‘68, he was convinced he had won the right to represent the USA in Mexico City. That’s what he was as
sured, anyway, after unloading a 3:43.6 in the 1,500 meters at a June qualifying meet at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
“Then, they pull the rug out from under you,” he said, 53 years later. “It was ludicrous.”
Jim Ryun, who was believed to have been America’s greatest middle-distance runner, was hit that year with mononucleosis. That’s when Sports Illustrated chose Patrick for its cover, with the headline, “On the heels of Jim Ryun.” Assured of his spot on the Olympic team, Patrick spent the rest of the summer pushing himself into top shape, skipping the European circuit to rest a stress fracture so painful that he had to check himself into Bryn Mawr Hospital.
“They talk about ‘cross training’ now,” he said. “If Jumbo told me to do cross training, I would have thought he wanted me to go to the chapel and pray.”
By September, prayer may have helped. That’s when the U.S. Olympic Committee stumbled upon the intelligence that Mexico City had an altitude of 7.382 feet and decided to shred the results of the June meet in L.A. Instead, there would be a second qualifying event at 6,224 feet in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. So convinced was Patrick that he would be on the Olympic team regardless of the Tahoe results, he’d sent $100 to his family in Baltimore, money he made by doing some odd jobs in the summer, to help with their travel expenses to Mexico.
Tom Donnelly, who would become the legendary track coach at Haverford College, was Patrick’s teammate and Villanova roommate, and remembers assistant coach Jack Pyrah accepting a call from Tahoe with the results of the second qualifying meet.
“Jack kind of froze on the phone,” Donnelly recalled. “He said, ‘Dave finished fourth.’ I went out for a 10-mile run. I literally was sick about it the whole way.”
With that fourth-place finish, there would be no Olympics for Dave Patrick in 1968.
“But Marty Liquori was there,” said Patrick, of another Villanova legend. “And his uniform didn’t fit right. So he used a pair of my shorts. So I didn’t make the Olympics. But at least my shorts did.”
Even if only his shorts made the Olympics, Patrick’s legend was secure. Earlier that year, he was the captain when the Villanova runners voted, 16-0, to boycott the celebrated New York Athletic Club meet in Madison Square Garden because the organization at the time was closed to Black members.
“As close as our teammates were at that time,” says Patrick, whose image already had been on the program cover, “that made us even closer.”
That team was close then, and it was close 40 years later, at a get-together around the Penn Relays. Liquori, Frank Murphy, Noel Carroll, Erv Hall and Larry James, who represented the USA and Villanova in Mexico City, were there. So was an unannounced guest: Payton Jordan, then 91, who was the 1968 USA track coach. In a surprise announcement, Jordan corrected a wrong and formally named Dave Patrick an Olympian. Ever since, all Villanova literature listing Wildcats Olympians has included his name.
“It was really a nice night,” Patrick said. “They were all happy for me. They wished me congratulations. And it was a nice honor. I can forgive. I just can’t forget. That’s all. It’s something that will never, ever leave me.”
Patrick, who will turn 75 in August, still runs regularly, often around Stone Harbor, N.J., in the summer. It remains his second favorite pastime, behind watching his granddaughter, Payton Patrick, play soccer at the University of South Carolina or his grandson, Hunter Patrick, kick for the football team at Maryland.
Often when he returns from a morning jog, he will check the mailbox. Every few months, he will fish out another large, flat envelope. Invariably, there will be a 1968 Sports Illustrated stuffed inside, with a request for an autograph. He always signs.
“It’s nice,” he said, “that they remember.”