You know about Whitey if you've read the dedication in this section of the book. He was a teacher and a coach.

Beaudreault became a CPA and is alive and well in Florida, although no less difficult for me to reach.

Droter's ambition was to become an attorney. I never located him. There is a Robert Droter currently running marathons around the Washington DC area. I prefer to think that he's Droter's son, and the tradition continues.

I've never seen any of them since the end of my junior year but they come to mind from time to time. They are hard guys to forget.

Had it not been for Mr. Q. there would have been no great adventure. I saw him a couple of years after I graduated high school when I entered a restaurant in Landover, Maryland with my friend David Miller. Mr. Q. was seated at a table with a group of men, all in suit and tie. I knew he was teaching at Prince George's Community College then. We exchanged nods but I would never have interrupted what looked like an official gathering.

While I was explaining to David who the man was, I looked up and there he stood next to my chair. He was all smiles.

"Charles! How are you?" He asked fondly.

We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and he returned to his luncheon after a few minutes, waving good-bye as he left. That's the kind of man he was. Nearly ten years after we first met he still remembered who I was and he still made me feel special.

I cherish that memory.

When Mr. Q. died in an auto accident a few years later, I cried for the students who would never know him. He was a teacher who truly cared.

The good do die young.

Mr. Warnock, the man who located my brain, received frequent visits throughout my high school daze. It was great having him just across the parking lot and he always acted pleased to see me. He was one of those glorious teachers who loved what he did and took it seriously. Of all the teachers I had, Charles Warnock was head and shoulders above the rest.

He made learning exciting.

A year after I graduated high school, and while touring the Air Show at Andrews AFB with Mike Smith, one of my track mates, we came upon Mr. Warnock. I suppose Mike wondered why he bothered going with me, because I left to walk and talk with Mr. Warnock for the rest of the afternoon.

He seemed to enjoy my company as much as I enjoyed his. I never found the words to tell him how I felt about him but I think he knew. How do you tell a man he has altered your life in such a overwhelming way and you can blame him for my ability to write. I do not know where Mr. Warnock went or where he is today. The first story I wrote for publication, "There's A Brain In There", I sold to Scholastic Inc. It was the story about him teaching me how to read. A longer version of that story appears in "On Winning Book One."

Tommy Reynolds married Bonnie and they had a beautiful daughter and later on a son. He will always be my "best friend." He was the first and without his support and encouragement, I doubt I'd have stayed on the track team or had much to write about. I imagined back then, if I went to the dictionary and looked up the word friend, Tommy's picture would be there.

Coach Becker is still "Coach" and always will be. We still talk from time to time and he continues to help me keep my facts straight. These two books are my recollections. I had little experience with people at the time I joined the Suitland Track Team. My views, thoughts, and ideas are therefore limited and I've written it as I experienced it at the time.

Coach Becker doesn't coach or teach any longer but I know what an impact he had on my life and I'm sure thousands of other lives as well. If asked to describe him with a single word, I'd say, "Gentleman." He treated us like we were gentlemen and he always was one, never once putting himself in front of his boys.

In my senior year I was the only three-year man on the Suitland track team. I was elected co-captain with Terry Huff and earned my third letter. It was a big team, over twice the size of my first team and we were moderately successful.

Suitland had established a track tradition while I was there and it was continuing. My senior year was nothing to write home about. It started off fine but shin splints and bronchitis caused me to bench myself and I almost left the team, but Coach Becker would have none of it, and so I returned but I didn't run. I did find some satisfaction in passing on my pearls of wisdom to the younger sprinters, who were all ears whenever I spoke of Whitey, Beaudreault and Droter, who had become a part of Suitland lore, and after they had gone it was never the same for me.

I did run one final time my senior year at the State Championships. As usual, we managed to run out of guys before we ran out of events, because of restrictions on the number of events a participant could run. I told Coach Becker I'd run the 4x100 relay if he needed me. He gave me my anchor position back and I ran for the first time in six weeks.

When I got the baton I was told we were in fifth place. Ronnie Powell and I hooked up on one of those perfect baton exchanges, although we'd never practiced it, and we won the heat, albeit the slow heat and we came in fifth place over all in the event.

For the first time in three seasons I ran without pain. I'd say it was magnificent if that didn't sound so hokey, but it was magnificent. For 10.5 seconds I was Whitey Sheldon and my last race was the best race I ever ran, even surpassing the last race of my junior season, when we won when the odds were against us even finishing the race.

A week later I graduated high school.

I returned to Suitland a couple years after I graduated. I'd just taken a job as the youngest routesalesman in Harvey Dairy Inc., history. I didn't even know what a routesalesman was when I answered the ad, but I went to work early and had afternoons off and I decided to go see an old friend.

It was my first trip back since graduating. During my visit, Coach Becker said to me, "I have a lot of inexperienced boys. It requires more time than I have to coach them all. How would you like to coach my sprinters for me?"

And so, I got an extra track season and met guys like Boher, Blakely, Templeton and Mike Rummel, who remains my friend still. I did enjoy the experience of coaching and the fact I got to know Coach Becker in a different way.

Harvey Dairy went bankrupt, hopefully not because of me, and I became the youngest driving instructor at Easy Method Driving School. I left there for a truck driving job and later became a cross country trucker, becoming the first owner operator in North American's fifty year history to be featured on the cover of the company magazine in a story unrelated to North American Van Lines.

I visited schools with my truck and I got to teach kids what the workaday world was all about. I had a bumper sticker that read, "I touch the future. I teach," a quote from Christie McCauliffe, now a permanent member of the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

An accident in the early nineties ended my trucking career and I was left wondering what to do with the rest of my life. I wrote "Charlie Can You Hear Me," selling it a month later to Scholastic Inc.

I decided to become a writer. I started writing "On Winning" almost immediately. After spending ten years practicing my craft, this is the result. "On Winning" is the story I always needed to tell.

All the opinions are mine alone and I wrote it as it happened to me and as I remember it with some clarifications and corrections in facts coming from Coach Becker, but don't blame him. It's my story. I suppose it is a sports story, but to me it is a human story about a kid who found the perfect people to save him from himself.

Certainly, if this is a sports story, it has all the elements of being a good one. A boy who never intends to join a team at all, does, and finds himself among a collection of losers. Determined to find a reason to quit, he doesn't, electing to stay just a little while longer.

There were two boys who shinned, Whitey Sheldon the athlete and Beaudreault, who might be considered a bit of a geek in today's parlance. I was an observer who ran and got mixed up with them on a relay team that was at the heart of the team at large. The track team's fortunes seemed to rise and fall with "my" relay team. One week winning everything in sight and setting records and the next week falling a part when one boy is injured.

We added maybe a dozen boys to the team my junior seasons and no one could have foretold that these additions were the perfect compliment to the boys who remained from last year's team. The losers who couldn't win were transformed into the winners who couldn't lose and we had a near perfect season until an injury derailed our track express.

It may well be a pure sports story but it was never the sport that kept me on the team. It was the people as well as what we became when we ran together. For the first time in my life I felt like I was a part of something, and it was never about winning for me. It was always about the people. We had become a unit and in the end the unit decided to stick together against all odds and we beat those odds in our final race together as "The Team."

It might not be the perfect sports ending we've been programmed to expect, but we did beat the odds. We could have won the day if Whitey hadn't been injured and we could have gone on to win state if he had stayed healthy, but that isn't the story. So as a sport's story it falls short of total victory, but as a people story it's pretty neat. People do get injured, teams lose when stars fall, but the stars have names and they are greater than the sport they claim. This story is about athletes who were greater than the sum of their parts. My favorite memory of all, came just before we ran the last race The Team, my relay team, ran together. I'd fallen and I hurt my hand. Coach Becker said, "I can't let him run. He's injured."

The guy on the team I knew the least said what needed to be said. "I want to win. Let Charles run."

"My legs are fine. My hand isn't. What if I muff the handoff? My hand closes on the baton, but it doesn't want to open."

"Whitey, run third leg. Let Charles anchor. Problem solved," Beaudreault said.

"I've got no kick," Whitey said. "Let Charles anchor."

There it was. It was mix and match, but The Team found a way to run one last time. We won that race against the team that beat us in the 4x100 relay that day. It was the first relay race we lost that year. We had something to prove. Montgomery Blair was the biggest powerhouse in Montgomery County. Beating them wouldn't be easy.

When Blair beat us, they won by a step in the 4x100. Whitey had no kick, and he couldn't out kick Blair's anchor and we lost. We all wanted revenge and this would be the last chance we had to get it. When Whitey Sheldon came toward me on the back stretch, I couldn't believe my eyes. He was first. Blair was thirty yards behind him. Our handoff went fine, and I prayed I wouldn't screw it up. I finished thirty yards ahead of the Blair boy.

They nipped us in the 4x100. We destroyed them in the 4x200.

I anchored and broke the tape at the finish line for the first time. It was the first time we changed the order of how The Team ran. It didn't matter. We were lightning in a bottle. I was part of it.

I ran with three of the fastest sprinters in Maryland. As cockeyed as my life had been, these are my favorite memories from school.

The End



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