Astonishing Legends of Sport!
By Jay Cridlin
Editor in Chief

It is time for this week’s edition of Astonishing Legends of Sport! in which we spin absolutely true courageous tales of athletic vim and vigor, especially when Cinderella’s back is against a wall near the brink of elimination and all 110 percent of the chips and marbles are down on the line near the whole ball of wax.

This week, we shall recount the astounding true story of the 11th Annual 2001 Steven Rowlett Memorial Road Race, a five-kilometer race that took place Oct. 24 at the Lee County Tobacco Festival in Pennington Gap, Va.

Many of you may be snickering over the irony of staging a 5-K race — which history has proven time and again to be a very lung-oriented sort of event — during a festival named for a product as lung-unfriendly as tobacco.

You raise a good point, and we here at Astonishing Legends of Sport! in no way wish to endorse the use of tobacco or tobacco-related products, such as “chaw.” Therefore, for the purposes of this particular story, the name “Tobacco Festival” will be replaced with “Coal Dust Daze.”

At this year’s Coal Dust Daze, one athlete in particular, in a real gut check of a character test, overcame adversity, stepped up his “A” game and left everything on the field to snatch a pivotal watershed victory from the jaws of defeat.

This athlete had competed in the Steven Rowlett Memorial Road Race in many of its 11 years, only to come away empty-handed. Not that this athlete was bitter or anything, but in the completely unbiased analysis of Astonishing Legends of Sport! the officiating in each race was, as Knute Rockne once said, a big fetid crock of bull hockey.

Really, though, the athlete had no grounds for complaint. Long-distance running had never been the athletic forte of this particular competitor. In fact, this athlete often got winded placing long-distance phone calls. Frankly, it was an Astonishing Legend of Sport! that this athlete even managed to correctly dress himself prior to the race’s 9 a.m. start time.

Even more amazingly, this particular athlete had consumed, just three nights prior, a Goodyear-sized blueberry Belgian waffle from Shorty’s that left him seriously doubting whether he would ever again be able to lace his Pumas, let alone complete a 5-K road race.

So it was with a heart laden with resiliency and cholesterol that the athlete waddled up to the starting line, summoned the spirit of Steve Prefontaine, and, at the sound of the gun, was instantaneously transported via extraterrestrial time warp into dead last place.
But once the race got started and all the runners had departed the bank parking lot, this athlete began knifing in and out of traffic like Emerson Fittipaldi at Indy.

Before long, he overtook an elderly woman who was walking the race for fun, and shortly thereafter, he managed to pass a 6-year-old boy who had stopped to inspect a nearby dog.

As the race wore on and the inclines got steeper, the athlete realized that he was actually not doing that bad. He began to believe that he could compete in the race.

And then he passed the one-mile marker.

From that point on, things are sort of a blur to the athlete. He seems to recall picking up a cup of water, lifting it to his face while running and having none of it enter his mouth.
There were indeed several moments where the athlete felt he was about to yak up his pre-race Pop-Tart, not to mention several meters of intestine.

He is not certain, but he thinks there may have been points in the race in which people gearing up for Coal Dust Daze waved hello to him as he went by, and he responded with some witty rejoinder like “Harrraghaah.”

But somehow, the athlete managed to stumble painfully across the finish line, engulfed in marginal, sporadic applause from family and friends. A Gatorade or two later, he was feeling almost as good as he normally felt, though perhaps he did not smell quite as pleasant.

The crowning moment of the morning came during the ensuing trophy presentation, when the athlete’s accomplishment was officially recognized and recorded in the annals of lore for posterity.

In what was unquestionably one of the highlights of the athlete’s life, he was awarded a trophy for third place in the Males Aged 20-24 category. It was a stunning conquest for an athlete who had exhibited such marvelous zest and verve in (1.) being one of three males aged 20-24 to enter the race, and (2.) somehow managing not to die while running.

Let us not detract from the glimmering glory of this Astonishing Legend of Sport! by relating the athlete’s actual time here. Really, no one wins when we do that. Let us just say that it was more than 10 minutes and less time than it took to erect Mount Rushmore.

The point here is that once again, on the field of athletic competition, things were kicked up a notch and all the stops were pulled and the monkey was finally removed from the back of a courageous competitor. And that competitor is now the owner of a truly impressive-looking trophy that, we are humbly obligated to note, has never been won by Tiger Woods.

Someday, when he is able to move again, he may just show it to you.