Danny was my college teammate, fellow UCTC vagabond and friend. He was so much more than just a very good runner. As a 400m hurdler, I didn’t interact with him much on the track, but I watched him do some pretty mind-boggling things. He was very quiet and managed to keep a low profile even on a small campus like Wheaton, where I believe he is the best athlete in the school’s history. Fortunately, I ended up traveling to meets with him post-college and really found out what a great guy he was.
I suspect that anyone who reaches the level that Danny did has friends who tell stories about the superhuman things they did along the way, some of which are actually true. I have a ton of them, but here’s one I can fully document. In the summer of 1978, we traveled together to Eastern Europe with about 30 guys and ran in about a dozen meets. Danny made the leap from being a very good DIII runner to whatever the next level is on that trip. He ran 14:11 in Belgrade one evening, rode a bus across then-Yugoslavia the next day and then ran 13:50 in Celje, which stood as the all-time DIII record for over 40 years. I on the other hand ran a 400m PR in the first meet and followed that up with just about the worst 400 IM race of my life. Danny was all kinds of tough.
Danny did not like being typecast or defined by his running but his running demonstrated a depth of character and courage that few people have. Great runners are not always great guys as anyone who has ever entered that world could attest to. And guys who try to accomplish great things often fail very publicly. Danny accomplished much more than most, risked crashing and burning to get better (right Jon Lederhouse?), and remained a genuinely kind-hearted, gentle guy through it all. Count me among the many who will miss him greatly.