My late father - a terribly abusive guy who abandoned me and my brother in our teens - and who was a well known track coach in the 60's - claimed to have been on the Rome Olympic team and a NCAA champion. Both are false. The odd thing about it is that he was a NCAA finalist in the javelin despite picking up the event for less than a year. I thought his actual truth was impressive, especially since he was on his third college (he was kicked out for bad conduct for the first two) and adjusted to the turmoil by rapidly becoming a NCAA Division 1 finalist. I felt bad that he could not feel good about the truth. The truth impressed me. I used to take the javelins out of the garage and felt lucky if I could throw them 40 feet!
His roommate at his second school was Jim Beatty, and my father became an Igloi disciple. (I am not sure he had running talent - I had some, running a 4:09 mile in high school). But he fancied himself a talent the likes of Tabori, Beatty, etc. Hardly the case. He used this Igloi experience to great success in coaching the high school ranks, with outstanding national level runners at his then age of 24 as a coach. But the Olympic team thing and the NCAA champion claim (I think Al Cantello, the long time revered Navy coach, was the NCAA champion in his year) persisted. I asked one of his former athletes who thought I was wrong about the matter to contact Willie May, the Evanston Illinois High School coach and just a superb guy, to verify my father's assertions - Willie May was the Rome silver medalist in the 110M hurdles. Of course Mr. May told the truth - and to give you a measure of the kind of guy he was in terms of looking out for young people, he always treated me and my brother incredibly well despite having obvious misgivings about my father. The falsehoods carried through to my father's recent obituary, where it was mentioned again, I did not have a relationship whatsoever with him (he became very successful in business after he was forced to leave coaching for conduct reasons), and I didn't attend his memorial service, so I didn't feel compelled to directly correct the record to his friends, but the whole thing strikes me as sad. He had plenty to be proud of, at least on non-family matters, yet the fiction persisted.
I was always disappointed that the track and field world did not put limits on his conduct. Or maybe it did, and I was just too young and stupid to notice it. Then again, I would have never known about his passing in any kind of timely manner but for one of his ex-athletes, who very emotionally reached out to call and let me know. A reminder that the track world has a number of good people.