"I'M BASICALLY A COMPROMISER," BILL Rodgers was saying, sitting on the patio outside his Phoenix condominium. "If a bad situation came up, I always preferred going around it to colliding with it. And the last thing I ever wanted to do was collide with a $30-billion bank."
It was a balmy day in January, and Rodgers was enjoying his annual mid-winter desert sabbatical, far from the snows of New England and the aftershocks of a corporate disaster. In eight weeks' time he would be back home in Boston, tuning up for this month's 92nd running of the Boston Marathon, the oldest and most hallowed of American road races, one that the man dubbed "Boston Billy" had won four times in his prime. This year, having turned 40, Rodgers would be competing for the first time in the marathon's masters division, and he was clearly relishing the challenge: enough to be putting in 115-mile training weeks, despite an aggravating case of tendinitis and some dark storm clouds hanging over his financial future.
While returning to Boston was not in doubt, he could not be so sure it would feel like home this time around. In many ways, "home" had become a tenuous concept for him, thanks largely to the collision he alluded to, a collision that was both fierce and final. Indeed, when the clothing company that bore his name staggered across the finish line a year ago, drained of cash and oxygen and wobbling on its last legs, it looked less like a veteran marathoner than the victim of a street mugging. On April 7, two weeks before the 1987 Boston Marathon, the Bank of Boston had laid a billy club to the head of Bill Rodgers & Co. (BRC) by calling its loan, padlocking its doors, and selling off its inventory at fire-sale prices.
After shutting down the ailing business, the bank subsequently opened even deeper wounds for Rodgers and company president Rob Yahn. To guarantee the company's loans, both had pledged personal assets as collateral, including second mortgages on their houses. Now, the two were being held accountable for an estimated $700,000 shortfall, and Rodgers's 17-room house in Dover, Mass., was under imminent threat of foreclosure. For Rodgers, who had neither a business background nor, he admitted, a meaningful role in the management of the company, the sense of helplessness was acute. There was pain in his eyes and strain in his voice as he recounted the sequence of events leading up to and through the liquidation of his company. Doubts about Yahn's judgment mingled with an air of disbelief that the bank could have pushed them so hard to the wall -- and then just kept right on pushing.
"If I come off sounding overly emotional," Rodgers said, "you have to understand what we've been through. First there were the tough times with the business. Then there were tough times with Rob. Finally there were very tough times with the bank. I'm tired of the struggle. Tired of meetings with bankers and lawyers, hassles with creditors, the whole deal. That isn't me. I'm an athlete, not a businessman. My total goal was to be the best marathon runner on the planet."
As he spoke, Elise Rodgers, 2, sprinted through the doorway and crawled into her father's lap. "I've been to Japan several times," he continued, "and over there, you know, company managers make it a point of honor to take full responsibility for their failures. Maybe that's part of this story -- how nobody wanted to take responsibility. It's sad, really. I wish I knew where to place the blame, but I don't. See, it was never a black-and-white thing. It was always . . . shades of gray."
He shook his head. "The bank must realize that," he sighed. "Or am I still being an optimist?"
WHAT HE WAS, A DECADE OR SO AGO, WAS one of the stardust twins of American distance running: a fair-haired schoolteacher from Everett, Mass., who burst to the forefront of his sport with dramatic victories in the Boston (1975) and New York City (1976) marathons. Three times in five years Rodgers held the world's number-one ranking in the marathon. Together with Frank Shorter, winner of the 1972 Olympic Marathon in Munich, he helped spark the distance-running craze that swept America in the late 1970s.
The Shorter-Rodgers rivalry was a spirited one, both on and off the roadways. The two men did not particularly like each other and were not bashful about saying so in print. If a common purpose united them, however, it was their effort to lead road racing out of its economic Dark Ages and into the realm of free enterprise. This was not always easy to do. At the time, there were severe restrictions on appearance money, personal endorsements, and other for-profit arrangements that might "compromise" the standing of amateur athletes. To a runner like Rodgers, trying to make the 1976 Olympic team on a schoolteacher's $10,000 salary -- and schedule -- compromise was not the overriding issue. Survival was.
"I knew how the best runners in the world trained," he explains, "and I knew what it would take to compete with them. There came a point when I couldn't do that and keep my teaching job. At the same time, you had to be real careful how you set up any [business deals] or risk losing your amateur status."
Rodgers's first business venture was Bill Rodgers Running Center, a retail clothing-and-shoe store on Chestnut Hill Avenue, facing the Boston Marathon course near the 23-mile mark. Opened in 1977, the store was capitalized with $40,000 put up by Bill and his then-wife, Ellen, and managed by his brother, Charlie. In addition to becoming Bill's training headquarters and a hangout for serious runners, the store was a modest commercial success, spawning a second venue at Boston's Quincy Market and eventually grossing as much as $1 million yearly. As the financial strictures on amateur athletes were relaxed, Rodgers also retained a personal agent -- Drew Mearns of the International Management Group -- to represent him in licensing arrangements.
