chubb wrote:
The quote I heard, although not first-hand was "I'll kill that bastard if I ever see him, anywhere."
The dumb part is that Byers would have had a shot at the team with his speed if the pace had been average or slow. I'm not sure why he had confidence issues and went out at a suicidal pace.
That MAY have been a little strong for Slicker, but he was very, very pi$$ed at Byers. I seem to remember a lot of F'ng Byers, F'ng Byers.....Slack did have a very good shot at making the team,but maybe shouldn't have let Byers influence
his own performance as much as it did. I'm not that familiar with racing at that distance, so maybe Byers did really screw up Mike's chances. I forgot what the times were, but Byers definitely influenced the outcome of the race. I still think Mike had a good shot at 5,000 and 10,000, as he was very strong and obviously quick. I always felt that Slick was as talented as BJ, but BJ got more notice. Mike was definitely faster than Garry (don't believe BJ ever broke 4 for the mile, but was close). Garry ran some great marathon times, which Mike could never do. As someone earlier mentioned, it's hard to have that wide of a range, ala Dixon, Quax and a few others. We all felt that Slack could run a good marathon because he was very formidable at 20-25K, but he just couldn't handle 42K, I guess. No question about it, though, Slack was very talented and a very colorful part of racing in that era. He and Garry did some hellacious workouts together, and raced well around the country in the mid-to-late 70s.