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| Kyle Keiderling is the author of ‘Olympic Collision – The Story of Mary Decker and Zola Budd.’ This dual biography examines both athletes’ backgrounds leading up to the unfortunate incident in the 1984 Olympics, much about the reality and perception of what happened, and their lives afterward through interviews with over one hundred people. It's a book about two of the greatest female middle distance runners of the past half century who are remembered primarily for their worst athletic moment. ‘Olympic Collision’ achieved the status of an ‘Amazon Hot New Release’ and has been recommended by many news and sports outlets as one of the top sports books of 2016. Kyle has written four previous books that were all related to the sport of basketball. As a youth and into his early twenties he was an athlete who participated in baseball, football, basketball and Golden Gloves boxing. Starting at age thirteen he covered sports for a local weekly newspaper and in high school wrote for papers in Philadelphia and New York City. After pursuing and retiring from a career as an investment banker, Kyle has combined his passions for sports and writing to produce in-depth looks at great events and figures in the world of sport. More information can be found at http://keiderlingbooks.com. He lives in Henderson, Nevada with his wife, Barbara, of fifty-two years, and is already researching his next project. |
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| GCR: | You have written several books in the basketball genre including, ‘Shooting Star: The Bevo Francis Story,’ ‘Heart of a Lion: The Life, Death and Legacy of Hank Gathers’ and ‘The Perfect Game: Villanova vs. Georgetown for the National Championship.’ How did you decide to move into another sport and to consider this topic of Mary Decker and Zola Budd which had its climax in their collision in the 1984 Olympics? |
| KK | As you said, I had written four previous books, all that were basketball-related, and that was kind of my comfort zone. Like almost everyone who is old enough to have watched the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, I remember the incident in Los Angeles in which Mary Decker and Zola Budd were involved in a collision. It has been called and, I believe rightly so, the most memorable moment in modern Olympic history. So it wasn’t a great stretch for me to remember it and I was also looking for something a little different than what I had been doing. To be perfectly frank with you, like most Americans my attention on track and field is probably limited to once every four years. I had a lot of learning to do. It was a very interesting project for me from the standpoint of learning about the two women behind the incident, although Zola at the time was only about 18 years old. What I found in my research was kind of fascinating. It kind of snowballed from there and I kept going with it as it ended up being a dual biography of the two women. |
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| GCR: | How long did it take to do the research? |
| KK | It took almost two years. I had to track down people. When Mary ignored my requests for an interview I had to go way back and I went all of the way to the beginning. I found her first coach, Don DeNoon, and started from there. When you don’t have access to the person you are writing about, you have to find people who knew her at different stages of her life and in different capacities. So it took me quite a bit of time. I did have access to Zola Budd and that went rather fast and much better. When you write non-fiction you can’t make stuff up, so you have to get the facts. |
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| GCR: | Since you were switching from books on basketball stories to an entire different area, did you have a book deal and publisher first or start writing and figure you would find a publisher later? |
| KK | I’ve done every one of my books the same way. I figure if the subject interests me it will interest someone else at some point. When I have the first draft done I give it to my agent who starts marketing it and eventually we get a publisher and the book comes out. |
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| GCR: | The media loved to hype Ali-Frazier, Palmer-Nicklaus, Ryun-Liquori, Borg-McEnroe – was this another case where the media found the next big duo to hype and the hype was going to be greater than almost anything which could happen until this tragic collision made it even bigger? |
| KK | We all remember from our younger days the duels in the Western movies. There was a guy with a black hat who was the villain and the guy in the white hat was the good guy. There is only room in a duel for two people. But in this particular race in the L.A. Olympic Games there were twelve people. The media focused on Mary Decker because her back story was fascinating. She was not eligible to compete in the 1972 Olympic Games because her birthdate was several months beyond the eligibility date. So she missed the 1972 games despite having the fastest 1,500 meter time in the United States that year. Then in 1976 she was injured and couldn’t run. In 1980 she was healthy, she was running well and she had a new coach, Dick Brown, up in Oregon and then the USA boycotted the Games. Next, 1983 came around, Mary was healthy for her, Dick Brown managed to get her in peak condition and she wins back-to-back 1,500 meter and 3,000 meter World Championships. So here comes the 1984 Games and, lo and behold, they were going to be held in the United States and, even better, in Los Angeles where the film community could be involved and it was in Mary’s back yard. She grew up in Orange County, California after moving from New Jersey when she was ten years old. The back story and the media attention given Mary were great. The media had been following Mary Decker since she was twelve years old – little Mary Decker, as she was known then, in braces and pigtails, was running faster and further than anybody her age had ever run. By the time she was thirteen or fourteen years old she was beating older women and was competing against the Russians who were the best runners in the world. At the L.A. Games she is finally going to get her chance to be coronated because, by this time, after her 1983 season she was the queen of track. She was Queen Mary, America’s sweetheart. Little Mary had grown up and all of the attention was on Mary. |
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| GCR: | So, as we know and you have summarized, Mary was quite the darling of American track and field. Consequently was Zola Budd the perfect foil? |
| KK | In order to have a duel, you need someone else. Zola Budd, unfortunately, was chosen as that other person. If you look at the people who were in that race and if you picked one to be the antagonist against Mary, the protagonist, it wouldn’t have been Zola Budd. Her race times weren’t anywhere near the times of Maricica Puica of Romania, but Puica didn’t speak English, she had the Secret Police of Romania around her all of the time so she was not very available as a villainess to pit against Mary Decker. And Zola Budd had been the subject of tremendous press coverage and controversy for four or five months over in Great Britain prior to the Los Angeles Games. In January she had also broken the 5,000 meter World Record held by no other than Mary Decker. It wasn’t recognized because she had done it in South Africa and that country was still an outcast in international sports because of their apartheid policies. So the media focused on Zola Budd who had virtually no international experience. Being from South Africa, she couldn’t compete against runners from outside of her country. So, she had essentially raced against the clock for two or three years and that was it. The media focused on these two women and it just became so big a story that it overshadowed every other runner in that race, and there were great runners. It became THE event of the 1984 Olympic Games. The audience that watched on television worldwide was estimated to be two billion viewers and the audience that viewed that event in the United States was the largest American viewership of any day of the Olympic Games. It just became a media-hyped event since all of the trappings were there and Mary was going to be coronated and then the collision happened and they are forever linked – Zola and Mary in our collective minds. |
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| GCR: | They both were on top of the world at different times in the mid-1980s … as you mentioned, Mary a year earlier with two Golds at Worlds and Zola the next two years with two World Cross Country Championships which were huge when you look at women like Grete Waitz and Lynn Jennings who were winning those races. Do you think it was better for Zola to have that success afterward versus Mary who had her best success before the Olympics? If Mary had won World titles the next year, do you think it would have been any better if they were after the Olympic disappointment? |
| KK | I don’t know. Zola will tell you that she was against going to Great Britain and racing for that country. She didn’t think it made any sense at all. She didn’t think she was ready for the Olympics for the reasons we mentioned. She was young, she was a kid and she had no international experience. She was thrown in with the best in the world and she just wasn’t ready for it. The problem with Zola was that, in my opinion having look at all of the things that occurred, there was never an athlete at any time anywhere in any event or any sport that was subjected to the kind of treatment that 17 year old Zola Budd was subjected to in Great Britain and then later in the United States when Mary went down in the race. Ninety thousand predominantly Americans booed Zola Budd. She was targeted by the anti-apartheid lobby in Great Britain. When she had first arrived in Great Britain the next day the newspaper headline read, ‘Zola Go Home!’ That was only the beginning. Her life was turned upside down. She was 17 chronologically, but socially I’ve been told she was more like a 13 or 14 year old with stuffed animals in her room and Raggedy Ann dolls. Her best friends were her pets. |
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| GCR: | How crazy is it that the press that is supposed to have some enlightenment or some impartiality blamed a 17 year old girl from a rural area for apartheid when, from what I’ve read, she didn’t even know who Nelson Mandela was? |
| KK | She had never heard his name until she got to Great Britain. But it wasn’t just the press. This girl was debated about in Parliament. The Mayors of communities talked about not allowing her to run in their towns. She was picketed. She was spat upon. She was lobbied against. She was labeled as a known racist by a subcommittee of the United Nations. It was horrible. The reason why the press in Great Britain did this is because her father sold her ‘life story’ to the Daily Mail, a tabloid with political ties to the Margaret Thatcher administration, for one hundred thousand pounds. Her father had told people before this that what he wanted the most in life was to make a hundred thousand pounds and to have tea with the queen. When his daughter broke Mary Decker’s record in January of 1984, from then on he looked at his daughter and all he saw was dollar signs. She was no longer his daughter, but she was a commodity that he could trade and he did just that. What he did to her led to the horrific treatment that she received in Great Britain. The reason she received that treatment is because her father gave the Daily Mail exclusive rights to her story. So if you worked at the Telegram or the Mirror or the Times, you couldn’t talk to her. They essentially retaliated against the Mail, but it was against poor Zola Budd, whom the mail had locked up in a house under virtual house arrest to keep her away from the other media. It was a horrible, horrible experience for her. |
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| GCR: | If we focus again on the fact that there was a fall in this Olympic race, there have been other incidents where top runners tripped and fell such as Jim Ryun in a 1972 Olympics 1,500 meter qualifying heat, Hicham el Guerrouj in the 1996 Olympic 1,500 meter final and Morgan Uceny two years in a row at 1,500 meters in the Olympics and World Championships. It was terrible for all of them, but did Mary’s reaction afterward, whether it was a day later, a week later or five years down the road, make her situation worse and worse? |
| KK | You know a lot more about track racing than I do, but from what I can tell from talking to women who compete at the elite level for years and years all over the world, in middle distance running there is inevitably bumping, jostling and elbowing as there are twelve runners trying to get in one lane. It happens in every single race. What happened in that race, Mary would later say, was Zola Budd’s fault. She blamed Zola for the incident that led to her being knocked to the infield in the race. When I talked to the other women in the race, who had the best vantage point of anyone including the 90,000 people that blamed Zola immediately, it was not Zola Budd’s fault. And Marty Liquori, who was unfortunately doing the television analysis for ABC, had his Director screaming in his ear, ‘What happened? What happened?’ Poor Marty was up there watching this just like you and I were and he had to make an instantaneous decision. So he more or less implied that Zola had cut in a little early on Mary. That is what we heard on television. To his credit he went back to his room, watched the videotape, determined that it was not in fact Zola Budd’s fault and went on television the next day when no one was watching anymore and said as much. But what we viewers got was that instantaneous analysis he was forced to provide us with. Following that Mary held a press conference at which she blamed Zola Budd and this was a prevarication that she continued to utter – not for a week or a month – but for ten years thereafter. The interesting thing about this is that in the recent documentary film, ‘The Fall,’ the Director asked both Mary and Zola about the incident. Mary Decker said, ‘I think about that incident every day of my life.’ It’s never left her. Zola said she was at peace and had moved on and it was like it had happened to somebody else. That’s the difference in these two people. |
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| GCR: | In many ways these two were much more similar than different in terms of success at a young age, the spotlight on them, others taking advantage of them. What are your thoughts in this area? |
| KK | The most interesting thing to me about these two women born eight years and 8,000 miles apart was that they had eerily similar careers and lives. Both came from dysfunctional families. They both used early emotional trauma as motivation to run. Both were estranged from their fathers. Both were teenage phenoms in their respective countries. Both were two-time World Champions. And both were at one time banned by the governing body of the sports, albeit for different reasons. And neither one of them, despite everything they accomplished, would ever win an Olympic medal. They both also married men that had the same birthday. |
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| GCR: | With all of their similarities, If there hadn’t have been that incident, at some time during or after their careers, could they perhaps have developed a friendship since they could have empathized with each other? |
| KK | I doubt that. They are very different people. They are joined in our collective minds because of this incident, but it is really, really strange that these two women had these similar lives. Mary Decker underwent thirty surgeries and her life was this alternating tapestry of triumph and tragedy. She was either really, really great or she was on crutches somewhere. Zola Budd had the same thing happen as she was used, abused, mistreated, misguided and everything you can think of and yet she overcame all of that as you said earlier to become two-time World Champion. So their stories are inspiring to people. When people e-mail me now and call me and talk to me about what they got out of the book, these stories resonate with readers. It’s because of the resilience both of them have displayed in their lives. You can make an argument that Zola Budd, who had to overcome so much, may be a more sympathetic character than Mary, but Mary doesn’t get short shrift in the book. I made it plain that she was the greatest middle distance runner America ever produced without any question. And yet she had to do it pretty much from the time she was fifteen years old in pain and agony. She has a great story as well. These two women lived lives that made the Kardashians look normal. |
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| GCR: | When I interviewed Jack Fultz, who won the 1976 Boston Marathon, he was a big proponent of focusing on the process of training which would then yield race results, versus Mary Decker’s apparent focus on race results which led her to coming off recovering from an injury and then short-circuiting gradual improvement as she went to warp-speed in her training. So it was almost a forgone conclusion and outcome that she would get injured again. If she had focused on the process could she have had a smoother trajectory in her running career or was she so intense that she wasn’t capable of this? |
| KK | Mary was obsessive to the ‘nth degree.’ Even at the age of twelve years old, based on speaking with two men I interviewed who were training on the track with her at that time, on this one day they were fooling around and giving her an elbow when they passed her and she just sat down on the track and started screaming. They said her coach, Don DeNoon, came up and he told them, ‘You can’t do that to Mary Decker. Mary always has to be first.’ Later when I interviewed Rick Castro, who coached Mary for two years at the University of Colorado, he told me of going out on training runs with Mary and he was still a pretty good runner at that time. He would tell her the pace they were supposed to run but it didn’t matter as she had to be ahead of him and run faster and farther than him. It never stopped. The only person who was able to reign in Mary Decker was Dick Brown and that is when she ran the best in her career. Dick Brown had inherited her when Bill Dellinger couldn’t coach her anymore because when you were coaching Mary there was no time for anyone else. She had to have all of your attention all of the time. Dick convinced her finally that beating yourself up day after day when you were injured didn’t work. He put her in the swimming pool for parallel training. She trusted him more than she trusted her other coaches and he got the best results anyone could get. For three or four years she was just spectacular. She was the best you could imagine. She held every American Record from 800 meters to 10,000 meters. It had never been done and probably never will be done again. |
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| GCR: | How amazingly talented were these two, because both Zola and Mary could race any distance from 800 meters to 10k, Zola was outstanding in cross country and Mary even ran a 3:09 marathon at age twelve? It seems that these were possibly the two most talented runners over a variety of distances who ever faced off against each other. |
| KK | Mary was the greatest female runner this country ever produced. Zola was the greatest that South Africa ever produced. Mary was the Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Decade. Zola was South Africa’s Athlete of the Century. These were two spectacularly talented women who both share the same running style. These women ran from the front. When I talk to runners and coaches, this is supposedly suicide, and you aren’t supposed to do this as the pacesetters seldom last and are caught in the stretch. But these two women employed that style successfully. In Mary’s case it was her obsession with being first as she had to be first. Zola was running for a different reason. Zola Budd grew up in a house with palpable sadness all around. Her older brother died as an infant at about a year old. There were pictures all about the house, but nobody would talk about him. When you put a kid in that type of situation there is always a concern that they will never be able to replace the lost child and that’s what she grew up with. Her older sister, Jenny, essentially raised her and it was Jenny that took Zola out for runs and got her to run. Then her sister, Jenny, died when Zola was 11 or 12 years old and that is when Zola really began to run. Zola ran for Jenny and that was her motivation and spurred her on. She was going to run for Jenny and she did. Their stories are very interesting from a lot of different angles. |
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| GCR: | Based on your research and interviews as you built ‘Olympic Collision,’ what are adjectives or phrases you would use that would describe each of the runners? |
| KK | Mary was obsessive, she was determined, she was running to show her father who she believed denied his paternity of her. She ran to be worthy of his attention. Zola was running to be at peace. When I got to Zola’s house the first time there was a bumper sticker on her car that said, ‘Running is cheaper than therapy.’ She is a very private person. She is an introverted and shy person, but she also has a deep faith Running is a very private thing for her – she doesn’t want to talk about it. If you asked her the question you just asked me she won’t give you an answer. |
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| GCR: | You came into this project with a certain amount of knowledge of Mary and Zola and then you learned a great deal about both of them. What is something that surprised you about each of them? |
| KK | First of all, I thought I knew everything about these two women, what had happened and who was the good guy and the bad guy. It didn’t take me very long to figure that I didn’t know anything. Everything was a surprise to me. What surprised me about Mary was that with all she accomplished – Mary Decker, the greatest female distance runner America ever produced – she remains tainted to this day by a failed drug test. Mary was one of the few western nation athletes who spoke up and criticized the Eastern European athletes. A U.S. swimmer, Shirley Babashoff, criticized the eastern European swimmers about drug use. But Mary made statements about the Eastern block runners throughout her career and, what happened when she failed that drug test years later, was that other runners who competed against her voiced suspicions about her. When she was inducted into the University of Colorado Hall of Fame a few years back, there were comments on message boards about inducting a drug user. Mary denies vehemently the results of that drug test, but it’s going to remain there and it mars her legacy and that bothers her. There have been two films about Mary – ‘The Fall,’ and another entitled, ‘Runner,’ which was solely about her, and in neither one is there mention of this drug test failure. In many ways it is unfortunate that this is part of her legacy. |
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| GCR: | You did four interviews with Zola, but didn’t connect with Mary. Do you feel the interviews with those in Mary’s life filled the void for the most, or was there that extra information that is missing because you really needed to go right to the source? |
| KK | I would have loved to talk to Mary directly and I would have asked her a number of things that I couldn’t get from other people. For instance, if you watch the film of that Olympic race, when Mary falls she reaches out and grabs the bib that is pinned to the back of Zola’s singlet and tears it off the back of Zola Budd as she is going down. Was that an instinctive move to try to regain balance or was it something else? And I would have asked her about the drug test. I did everything I could as I interviewed the doctor that the U.S. Olympic Committee used for the drug testing. When I mentioned that she went to the appeals board and won, he said that they lied and that he had it on tape. So I would have asked her more about that. As you know, the first hand source is the best source. I didn’t have it and I did whatever I could to fill in the gaps, but I couldn’t do as well as if I had the chance to direct questions to her. |
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| GCR: | She did appear in the documentary movie, ‘The Fall’ ‘and was interviewed for a different book, ‘Collision Course’ by Jason Henderson, which also was about the same Olympic incident. |
| KK | Jason Henderson writes for the British equivalent of Runners World and declined an interview with me because he was working on his book. He did talk to Mary at some time. |
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| GCR: | Does it seem amazing that with two books and a movie that there such interest in this incident from 32 years ago? |
| KK | It’s not surprising. When you mention Zola Budd’s name to anyone who is old enough to have been around in the early 1980s there is an immediate response of, ‘Oh yeah, the girl who tripped Mary Decker.’ If you mention Mary Decker, you will hear ‘The girl who fell in the Olympics.’ Everybody remembers as it was a huge event. Much to the chagrin of both of these women, they will be joined forever in our minds. There is no escaping it. One interesting thing is that I went to this convention in Chicago that is the biggest booksellers’ expo in the country. I’ve been there before with my other books. In the past, when I would get there, three or four people would be waiting for me and they were all men. This time I showed up about fifteen minutes early and there was a line of thirty or thirty-five or forty people and ninety percent were women. That’s when it dawned on me that sports biographies about men are read by men and that this is a new experience for me. It never dawned on me until that moment. |
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| GCR: | You spoke about Zola seeking peace from running. I also have interviewed her and Zola seemed to be one who would have been happy just running barefoot on dirt roads and in the woods. Does she seem to be happy now running mainly for fitness and coaching others? |
| KK | She is totally at peace. I asked her how she ever got through this as I don’t know how anyone could survive what happened. She says that she has an ability to disassociate. She must have the greatest ability to disassociate as this was horrible. But she is at peace and I mean really at peace. She runs for the sheer pleasure of running. |
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| GCR: | On the other hand, you mentioned that Mary says she thinks about the incident every day. Is there any chance for Mary that the ‘unfinished business’ of winning an Olympic Gold medal will ever go away? |
| KK | She always thought there would be another chance. And time just runs out. Mary never got what she wanted most desperately and that she thought about getting from the time that she was thirteen or fourteen years old. That goal of the Gold Medal eluded her and haunts her to this day. |
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| GCR: | I watched a promo for ‘The Fall’ with Mary and Zola and their interaction appeared a bit awkward, though cordial. My main thought was feeling sorry for both of them. How about yours? |
| KK | Zola told me that they both probably needed that interaction. For both of them the incident in the Olympics left an unfinished story and we will never know how it might have turned out. Mary and Zola raced together four or five times after the 1984 Olympic Games and in the early 1990s they were on a television show in Australia that is similar to our ’60 Minutes’ program. They were sitting on either side of the hostess. Mary said she blamed Zola for the incident and Zola just was shaking her head. I think that when they brought these two women together in Los Angeles 32 years after the 1984 Olympics that they both saw it as some way to gain a measure of closure. In Zola’s case I know that she was glad she did it. |
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| GCR: | ‘Olympic Collision’ has been available for purchase for a bit and critics and the public are reading it. We are always our own biggest critic. When you look at the book are you pleased or is there anything you might have done differently or are you pretty satisfied? |
| KK | As I said earlier, I wish I had been able to talk to Mary and I think it would have been a better book if I had that chance. ‘Olympic Collision’ has received very favorable reviews. I don’t know how I could have done any more. The format I used of alternating chapters between the two women put some people off as it isn’t popular, but it ended up being the same format the producers used for ‘The Fall,’ and it worked there also. In this case it seemed the best way to organize the book. There had never been a biography of Mary Decker or Zola Budd published in the United States, though there was one of Zola published in Great Britain years ago by the Daily Mail. She also did one in the early 1990s in South Africa. But the book is doing well. It was the ‘Hot New Release’ on Amazon. |
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| GCR: | If you had the opportunity to interview Mary in the next few years and could use that for a revised edition of your book, is that something you would welcome and consider? |
| KK | I would, but I doubt that she would. I suspect that she has heard about the book by now. I had no agenda going into the book and the way it turned out is as accurate as I could make it and it is what it is. You don’t hear my voice in the book as I keep my voice out of it. |
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| GCR: | Let’s talk about your background - what was your athletic background as a participant, did you read a lot of sports books as a child and how did you decide to pursue journalism? |
| KK | I was an athlete. I played football, basketball and baseball. I also boxed in the service. Athletics has always been a part of my life. I started writing about sports when I was thirteen years old. I had my first byline in a weekly newspaper. I always wanted to do it until I found out how little money you made. So that altered my career path. I ended up with a career as an investment banker and was able to retire early. Then I started doing what I really wanted to do all along and that was to write. I always wrote as an investment banker, but they were investment letters and articles about the economy and were just a sideline. |
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| GCR: | You’ve written ‘Shooting Star: The Bevo Francis Story,’ about the Evansville basketball team, ‘Heart of a Lion: The Life, Death and Legacy of Hank Gathers’ and ‘The Perfect Game: Villanova vs. Georgetown for the National Championship.’ How do those books compare to ‘Olympic Collision?’ |
| KK | The first book is one I had wanted to do for twenty years. The good thing about the current book is that nobody died in it. Hank Gathers died, and the Evansville basketball team had that plane crash, so those books were pretty emotionally draining. |
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| GCR: | What did you learn during this process and how did you grow and improve as a researcher and writer that possibly made you feel after each book that it was your best one? |
| KK | I learned to shut up and listen. The more I listen, the better I write. People tell me that this book is better than any of the other books I’ve ever written. They’ve read them all so it’s hard for me to judge. The Hank Gathers book was selected as the sports biography of the year. This book has been picked by many different publications or newspapers as one of the best sports books of the year, so I guess I’m doing alright. It is hard for me to be objective. We immerse ourselves and live these lives essentially for a couple of years while we are researching and writing |
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| GCR: | What are you considering as upcoming projects? |
| KK | I started doing research about a month ago on a new book that I hope to finish in a year and a half. It is about a pivotal game in basketball that occurred in 1968 in the Astrodome. It has a lot of very interesting subplots including racial attitudes in the southwest and the NCAA’s attention to televised games. |
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| GCR: | Do you see any other duels between two persons in track and field or another sport which could be an exciting project for you to research and write about in the future? |
| KK | I just love sports. There have been great track and field books written about Coe and Ovett and ‘The Perfect Mile’ by guys who really understand the sport. I had to get tutored by great runners who were helpful to me in understanding this sport. When I interviewed great runners for ‘Olympic Collision,’ I started every interview by telling them I was relying on them. I think they were more forthcoming with me than with someone who covered track and field regularly as they tried to help me to understand nuances of running at an elite level. What is really interesting to me about track and field is that these women I interviewed were great runners, but they all knew that they weren’t going to win every race. They were going to lose more times than they won. They had to have a mindset that even if they couldn’t beat the Eastern European runners who were full of steroids, that they would be the best in the west. Or they would run their best time. Almost every single woman was very interesting and it was an eye-opening experience for me to get into the mindset of these elite runners and to see how they handle the fact that defeat would be more prevalent than victory and yet they were all great runners. |
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| GCR: | How similar do you think that is to players in the NBA who were each ‘The Star’ in high school and college and now most of them are not ‘The Star’ and they have to be their best and contribute to their team. Since they may just come off of the bench to play ten minutes a game and contribute to a team win, is this similar to a runner knowing that their best may just be getting to a final or winning a Bronze Medal and that these athletes in different sports now must just strive to reach their potential? |
| KK | I think so, but the guys on your home team in the NBA, the Orlando Magic that are playing ten minutes a game, they have been told since they were probably eight years old that they were the greatest thing to come down the pipe since sneakers. That’s how it is in basketball and many of them just go to college for one year. The odds are against most college players going to the NBA. I was talking to mainly women runners so maybe I didn’t get a complete picture, but their attitude toward their sport was pretty healthy. If I was racing and only winning one out of twelve times I wouldn’t be very happy with that. But they find a way to handle it and I think it is remarkable that they do so. They are very fascinating people. |
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| GCR: | Do you have any final words of wisdom, thoughts about your book or comments about Mary and Zola to wrap up our chat? |
| KK | The thing that sticks out in my mind after I finished up with everything and wrote the book, 150,000 words later, is here we have two spectacularly talented runners by any measure. Both are two-time World Champions. But here we are thirty-two years later and they are remembered for their most embarrassing moment which is kind of sad. It’s unfair but, nevertheles s, it is true. |
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| | Inside Stuff |
| Hobbies/Interests | Golf is my pursuit now. Hopefully, I’m getting better at it, but it doesn’t seem to translate to my scores |
| Nicknames | ‘Ky’ was my nickname |
| Favorite movies | I like ‘The Searchers.’ It’s an old John Wayne movie probably from before you were born. It is from the 1950s |
| Favorite TV shows | I’ve been Netflix binging since my son set me up on that. The series I’m watching now is ‘Damages’ with Glenn Close and it is really fascinating. It’s a television series I didn’t know about until it came out on Netflix |
| Favorite music | My son was a minor rock star in the early 1990s. He was a heavy metal band member who played bass in Bang Tango. They were around with Guns and Roses, Cinderella, Poison and all of those bands. I’m more of a country music fan |
| Favorite books | I read virtually everything. I’m a big non-fiction reader, but I travel a lot so I read most any of the books I find in airport shops. I even read Janet Evanovich as she makes me laugh. Her books are set in Trenton, New Jersey, which is close to where I lived. But I mostly read non-fiction biographies |
| First car | My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle |
| Current car | My current car is a Volkswagen Jetta |
| First jobs | Cleaning out chicken coops, delivering newspapers – not good jobs. I had some of the worst jobs on the face of the earth. I once made birth control pills for Ortho. Then I was a spray painter on an assembly line. When I got the job with Ortho they interviewed me and told me they had an opening for a pharmaceutical manufacturing technician. I thought that sounded really good and I was almost going to be a scientist. They put me in a space suit with outside air pumped in and I’m making these birth control pills. It was horrible |
| Family | My son is Kyle, Jr. and he lives out here too. He moved from Sherman Oaks. My wife is Barbara and we’ve been married forever – since 1964, so it’s been 52 years |
| Pets | Our latest dog had to be put down a couple of years ago, but he lasted about 14 years. He was a Belgian Malinois. His name was ‘Pope’ |
| Favorite breakfast | Yogurt and a cinnamon raisin English muffin |
| Favorite meal | Pizza with sausage and mushroom toppings |
| Favorite beverages | Iced tea |
| First athletic memories | They started Little League baseball in my home town when I was eleven years old. Prior to that we just had sandlot sports. We picked up an old baseball and taped it with electrical tape. We had broken bats that we nailed back together and we’d play baseball |
| First writing memories | I covered local sports as a young teenager for the weekly newspaper. When I was in high school I worked as what they call a stringer for the metropolitan New York and Philadelphia newspapers covering sports out in my part of western New Jersey. I was paid by the word so you couldn’t get rich doing it. But I did write for a number of the newspapers |
| Athletic heroes | When I was growing up my first name was an unusual name. I was the only one in my circle of friends in the 1940s and 1950s with that name. When I found out about Kyle Rote of the New York Giants he became my hero. I had first heard of him when he played for Southern Methodist University. Fortunately, he was a great football player because the other person named Kyle was a television performer named Kyle MacDonnell and she was a woman. When I discovered Kyle Rote that was it. He was my idol |
| Writing heroes | I read all of the great writers from the New York and Philadelphia papers since I grew up fifty miles away. Roger Kahn, Jerry Eisenberg of the Star-Ledger in north New Jersey, and others were all great and all different |
| Childhood dreams | Of course I wanted to be a football star or baseball star or basketball star. Whatever it was it didn’t matter. I couldn’t conceive of living past the year 2000. I remember that |
| Funny memories | The funniest thing was that I needed a picture of me for this latest book. My son knows this guy in L.A. who knows and photographs all of the rock stars and super models and so my son tells me this guy can do it. I went to the studio and there are all of these famous people pictured on the wall. He sits me down to photograph me and clicks away. Then he puts me in front of the computer to review the photos and asks me what I think. I say, ‘I don’t look so good.’ Next he takes the computer mouse and goes around the photograph to touch it up and then says, ‘What do you think now?’ I told him, ‘I could use a little more hair and a little less chin.’ He looks at me and he said, ‘There is only so much this computer program will do.’ And my photo is not on his wall! |
| Embarrassing moment | The most embarrassing moment to me was when I was competing in the California Golden Gloves boxing tournament in San Francisco in 1961 or 1962. I had a number of victories in a row and I was supposed to win the tournament. I had been on San Francisco television and was interviewed on the same program as the New Christy Minstrels which I thought was a great thing. Anyway, I go into this fight, and the guy is left-handed. The next thing I know, I’m back in the dressing room and I ask my manager what happened. He said, ‘what happened/? You forgot to duck.’ The whole fight lasted less than a minute and, to make it worse, they showed the whole damn thing on television. That was not good |
| Favorite places to travel | I like Ireland when I am overseas. Travel today is not as much fun as it used to be. I don’t care who you are as it is sort of a hassle. I traveled for so many years when I was working in investment banking. I was in an airplane three days a week. Now when I travel I want to get there and stay there a while. I do like to go back east a couple of times a year to the Jersey shore and spend time there. I have friends in South Carolina and I also like to spend time there |
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