Article on the Hawk from the Torrington Rag
Athlete, coach, voice..Legend
PETER WALLACE, Register Citizen Staff03/29/2005
If you don’t know Brent Hawkins, there’s a possibility you’re not trying.
If you’re a Litchfield High School athlete or parent, you’ve seen him coaching his way to six cross country championships in 12 years. If you’re an adult runner, you’ve heard him call your name on the way home at the annual Litchfield Road Race. And when the dust gets to your throat in Litchfield this summer, Brent Hawkins is apt to be the one serving you up a cold one at the Village Restaurant on the square.
Are you surprised he’s had an interesting life so far? No, you’re not.
Start, maybe, with the fact that Hawkins owns just two autographs, one by Jesse Owens from when Owens was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame. The other is from Muhammad Ali, following an hour’s conversation between him and Hawk at a Howard Johnson’s on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1976.
"That’s when he called me cocky," says Hawkins, quite seriously.
Or maybe we should go at it chronologically, back to the days in the ’70s when Hawkins ran on a three-man track team that won a national championship for the 15K, along with two national champions.
"I grew up in a tough town (Unionville, Pa. -- exactly 500 miles from Litchfield)," said Hawk, as intro to one of many true stories. "My Cub Scouts leader held up the Gallitan National Bank and got three to five years (in prison)."
But Hawkins had athleticism and the kind of personality that could engage total stranger Ali in an hour’s worth of happy conversation, at the height of Ali’s career. Hawkins played basketball and ran cross country and track in high school, then track and cross country at West Virginia University, where his steeplechase record stood for 10 years.
Hawkins was the captain of the Mountaineers’ cross country team his senior year and joined a premier group that didn’t want to quit running when they graduated. The West Virginia Track Club ran all over the country in an era when track rode high but struggled with concepts of amateurism versus professionalism.
"If we were good enough, we’d get a pair of shoes every now and then from a shoe company," Hawkins said. "The rest was research and development, where you got a stipend for filling out reports on performance. Brooks was just coming out; Adidas came on a couple of years later. If you didn’t make the Olympic team, Adidas cut you off. I didn’t make it, so that was it for Adidas. I’d get a little travel money."
Hawkins couldn’t crack Olympic levels, but ran in a "solid second tier" to teammates like Carl Hatfield (an actual member of the Hatfield clan of Hatfield-McCoy fame) and Alex Kasich, who had the fastest four-mile time in the world in 1978.
"Those were the glamour days of track," Hawkins recalls. "Track was huge. Frank Shorter...Dave Wottle...Marty Liquori...Bill Rodgers. These guys are all my friends. For me, at the time, it was like being in Hollywood and getting a line in a movie, or like being in the major leagues as a utility man."
Still, in the 70s, there was no money in it for most, including Hawkins. Like Hollywood hopefuls, Hawkins was stuck making money any way he could. Liquori bought an Athletic Attic franchise in Unionville, and Hawkins managed the store for three years.
But they were lean times for the entire country, especially in coal country, Pennsylvania, where "everybody was on strike."
"One day, we sold one pair of shoelaces all day. I remember them - they were orange. The next day, the guy brought them back."
At West Virginia, Hawkins majored in broadcast journalism, so the next move, all while still training hard, was to a local radio station as the sports and news guy, plus morning disc jockey, while writing a weekly running column for a nearby paper.
"I loved it, but you didn’t make any money in western Pennsylvania if you’re not working for a huge major market station. Another friend had a store, and I worked for cash."
In track, "I worked as hard as I could - sometimes too hard. I blew my back out when I was 26, and I’ve been going to a chiropractor ever since."
So, yes, there were lots of struggles amid the fun of running with the big dogs. The biggest of them all, Ali, came in 1976, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike - a Howard Johnson restaurant stop Hawkins made on his way back from the coast. A big black Rolls Royce with New Jersey license plates sat out in the parking lot. Inside, Hawkins recognized Ali at the counter, with his wife.
Hawkins asked, then did a Howard Cosell imitation. That started the conversation, as Ali said, "Cosell gets paid for being an idiot; what’s your excuse?"
Somebody told Ali that Hawkins ran track. When Hawkins answered Ali’s question, reporting his 4:10 time in the mile, Ali said he once ran a mile in five minutes.
"We can’t all be great," Hawkins grinned, breeding Ali’s comment about him being cocky. Nobody appreciated cocky as much as Ali. "If you don’t have confidence in yourself," he told Hawkins, "nobody’s going to have confidence in you."
The conversation lasted an hour, complete with an Ali poem about Joe Frasier: "I got the speed; I got the endurance. When I get through with him, he’s gonna need insurance," Ali recited for Hawkins with a tap on the shoulder on his way out.
That same kind of Hawkins charm is responsible for his landing in Litchfield. Running the Falmouth Road Race in 1988, Hawkins partied with some Litchfield Hills Road Race people. They got along spectacularly, flew Hawkins in for the race that year, and the rest is local history.
"I came up here and thought it was perfection," says Hawkins, from his tough town days. "No gun shots...no sirens."
He moved here in 1990, complete with his usual assortment of jobs, including weekend radio and the Village Restaurant. Road Race organizers asked him to announce at the Litchfield Hills in 1993, the same year he started coaching runners at Litchfield High School.
His own running career ended for good with a broken hip in 1997, but he’s at more running events than ever - as the in-person announcer.
"There aren’t many people who do this," he says. "I’m a hospitality engineer. I help people have fun. Any time I have a mike in my hand, it’s a new experience. I try to make whoever is doing it feel better. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes, it’s not."
This month, Hawkins was in Boston announcing for more than 8,000 runners in the Run to Remember. Other regular announcing stints besides Litchfield include the New Milford 8-Miler, The New Balance Moonlight Run 5K (New Milford), The Elby’s Wheeling Distance Classic (Wheeling, W.Va.), The Danbury News-Times 10K (Danbury), Saint Barnabas Road Race (Pittsburgh, Pa.), The Falmouth Road Race (Falmouth, Mass.), The James Joyce Ramble (Dedham, Mass.), the New Balance Boston Indoor Games at the Reggie Lewis Center (Boston, Mass.) and Hartford Fox Force Professional Tennis (Avon, Conn.).
And, oh yeah, another outdoor high school track season begins next week, with 66 kids out for the team at Litchfield. "It’s our biggest team by far," Hawkins said. "Next year, we’ll have a track, and we should be really good.
"I’m loving it," he says of a career with more running in it than ever from a place he loves. "I like what I’m doing; I really do. I like the people I work with. I work a lot, but I like being busy."
If you haven’t met Brent Hawkins yet, you might not be busy enough.
©The Register Citizen 2005