malmo wrote:
A couple of notes here.
1) Harvard made nationals perhaps once in 10 years.
2) Yes, UMass had a reputaion as the best in New England until 1974, when UMass last defeated Providence for the IC4A title. But UMass drew on 18 year old American kids, not grown men from the UK. While the UMass program pretty much died after 1976, they certainly would have been the biggest blip on Legere's radar during his high school years.
Northeastern? You're kidding me. Like Harvard, I don't recall them ever doing anything at NCAAs?
3) I'm not sure how you could conclude that Legere himself had misrepresented any facts, but since you are compelled to divert the thread towards politics and stolen valor, how do you feel about John Kerry's bizarro Boston Marathon fabrication?
1) I didn't say that Harvard had a national-class team. I said that they had some very good runners (although not, perhaps, by your standards), that they didn't need any 4:28 milers or 9:45 two-milers, and that I don't believe that a high school runner with those times would have been a very attractive recruiting candidate for Harvard. It is, of course, certainly possible that the coach at Harvard, Bill McCurdy, send Legere a letter or talked to him about applying to and running at Harvard, and that Legere then either chose not to apply to Harvard or selected UMass/Amherst over Harvard.
2) As I said, I wasn't aware that UMass/Amherst would have been especially good when Legere decided to go there, but it's certainly possible that he believed that it was still where the best runners went. Northeastern's top three runners -- the Flora brothers and Bickford -- dominated collegiate distance running in the greater Boston area back then, and also had an excellent middle-distance runner, Mark Lech. As you suggested, Providence had a different recruiting pipeline, generally well-established runners from Ireland, and they didn't necessarily stay there very long.
3) I didn't conclude that Legere misrepresented any facts, and specifically said that "I understand that these kinds of inaccuracies and distortions can arise as information gets passed from one person to another, and perhaps that happened here." One can question whether it was misleading for him to say that he was a "very successful athlete" who "wanted to go to the Olympics as a runner," and someone else wrote that he said that he ran about a 4:15 mile and a nine-minute two-mile, but I never heard that. He's obviously very dedicated to the sport and has given much to it, and he has run some very good marathons for his age and in light of his business and other obligations.
When you said that I was "compelled to divert the thread towards politics and stolen valor," I assume that you're talking about my reference to the case of Paul Ryan. (I'm not aware of Legere's political views.) I didn't mention Ryan for any political reasons, would have preferred to refer to someone who was not associated with politics, and was hoping that no one (especially you) would see it as some political dig. But it wasn't. It was simply a case that I was very familiar with, and was especially striking to me because Ryan's statements were made in such a public forum and at a time when he was probably under more scrutiny than almost anyone else in the country.
In Kerry's case, I'm familiar with his statement that he once ran the Boston marathon. I'm also aware that people have questioned his claim and have talked about his lack of any qualifying race times or a finishing time in the Boston marathon itself. But hordes of people, including many college kids, used to "bandit" that race, and -- although fussy runners like me thought that they were wrong in doing so -- it didn't seem to carry any stigma in the broader community; they were expected to start behind the official entrants and not interfere witih the race. I don't believe that many of them cared about their finishing time, and I don't even recall if the timers at the finish line were still operating when the mass of unofficial participants got there in those days. So it didn't strike me as an implausible claim, but perhaps there were some circumstances that I am not aware of and that raised legitimate doubts.
By the way, I hope that I never refer to false claims about marathon times as cases of "stolen valor," although I understand the analogy.