‘I Can Forgive. I Just Can’t Forget.’ Stone Harbor’s Dave Patrick and His Olympic Injustice
Dave Patrick running on the beach in Stone Harbor.
Every month or so, Dave Patrick will dig into to his mailbox and extract another flat, yellow envelope, large enough to hold a magazine. With that, he’ll smile. With that, he’ll know they still remember.
Not everyone remembers.
Anymore, too few do.
Patrick will occasionally think about that on his regular runs around Stone Harbor, whether on a sunny morning along the beach, or in the refreshing cool of the evening, down toward the bridge, where he will enjoy the view of the lights of Wildwood. He will think about how he was once the greatest middle-distance runner in the nation, how a spot on the 1968 Olympic team was taken from him, about the boycott he once led of an indoor meet in New York, and about that time 54 years ago he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, photographed in full stride, proud in his iconic Villanova uniform, the sleeveless white top, the deep-blue shorts.
“The magazines still show up at the house,” Patrick says. “People still want signatures.”
He was, in his time, a superstar. Running for the legendary Jumbo Elliott, he helped Villanova win three national team championships. Four times, he was an individual national champion, eight times an All-American. He set three indoor world records. He blasted to a 3-minute, 56-second mile.
“A great, great competitor,” says Tom Donnelly, Patrick’s former Villanova roommate and teammate, and the longtime Hall of Fame coach at Haverford College. “Hugely talented. One of the most talented guys I have ever been around.”
Even though he will turn 75 in August, Patrick can still uncork a 9-minute mile when challenged.
And, yes, sometimes, he is informally challenged, a younger runner hustling up behind him on Second Avenue, or 96th Street, or on the smooth, damp ocean-side surface.
“Trying to keep up with those guys is the challenge now,” Patrick says, laughing. “But I still have that competitive instinct. There are some guys who come up, and I’ll say, ‘You know, I think I’m just going to try and hang with him for a while.’ Then after hanging with him, I’ll think, ‘You probably shouldn’t have done that. You’ll have to pay for it later.’
“But I don’t think you ever forget that competitiveness that you are born with.”
Patrick was born in Baltimore and still resides in Maryland for most of the year. But his wife, Michele Pollard Patrick, had been a Stone Harbor homeowner since 1986, and by 1997, they had purchased a house at First Avenue and 94th Street. There, they spend most holidays and much of the summer, including nearly every weekend. For every reason, including his determination to never stop running, Patrick has found it ideal.
“Stone Harbor is quaint,” he says. “It’s kind of like a jewel.”
Every morning he spends at the shore, Patrick will check the tide levels, determining when the ocean will recede and leave behind what he has found to be the perfect running surface, not too hard, not too soft. Then he will consider the wind, careful to begin his 3-to-5-mile run with a breeze at his back, all the better to enjoy its soothing, cooling charms on the return trip.
“It’s a heavenly run there,” says Patrick, who typically runs five days a week. “I enjoy the time for reflection, for solitude, thinking about things or thinking about nothing. It’s just a great time to be out on your own and enjoying the moment.
“Of course, anymore, I have to run twice as hard to go half as far.”
In the historic year of 1968, he did not have that problem. That year, as Jim Ryun battled mononucleosis, Sports Illustrated would identify Patrick as America’s best hope to win the 1,500-meter “metric mile” at the Mexico City Olympics. When he uncorked a 3:43.6 at a June qualifying meet at the Los Angeles Coliseum, he was told he had won a spot on the team. So assured, Patrick would spend the rest of that summer pacing himself toward what he’d hoped was gold-medal shape, skipping races on the European circuit and resting from some injuries, including a slight foot fracture that once pushed him to check himself into Bryn Mawr Hospital.
“They talk about ‘cross-training’ now,” he said. “If Jumbo told me to do cross-training, I would have thought he wanted me to go to the chapel and pray.”
By September, that might have helped. That’s when the U.S. Olympic Committee, stumbling upon the intelligence that Mexico City is at an altitude of 7,382 feet, shredded the results of the June trials and reopened the competition in Lake Tahoe, Nev., altitude 6,224 feet. Still convinced he was an Olympian whether he finished in the top three at Tahoe or not, Patrick even mailed $100 to his parents to help with the cost of travel to Mexico.
“Then, they pull the rug out from under you,” he said. “It was ludicrous.”
Donnelly remembers being at Villanova when the news broke, assistant coach Jack Pyrah taking the phone call from Elliott from Nevada, never expecting what he was about to hear.
“Jack kind of froze on the phone,” Donnelly recalls. “He said, ‘Dave finished fourth.’ I went out for a 10-mile run. I literally was sick about it the whole way.”
In that era, there was nothing Patrick could do. He had no lawyers. There was no 24-hour, talk-show mania to give the injustice proper exposure. The Los Angeles results had been tossed. The Tahoe results were official. And Patrick would have to squint at the Olympics on a black-and-white TV.
“But Marty Liquori was there,” Patrick says of another Villanova legend. “And his uniform didn’t fit right. So he used a pair of my shorts. So I didn’t make the Olympics. But at least my shorts did.”
By then, Patrick had done enough to impact track history in 1968. He was the team captain when the Villanova runners voted, 16-0, to boycott the prestigious New York Athletic Club meet at Madison Square Garden because, at that time, the organization was not open to Black members.
“As close as our teammates were at that time,” says Patrick, whose image already had been printed on the cover of the program, “that made us even closer.”
In 2008, there was a reunion of those Wildcats, who were represented in Mexico City by Liquori, Frank Murphy, Noel Carroll, Erv Hall and Larry James, later the longtime dean of athletics at Stockton College. At the get-together, surprise guest Payton Jordan, the 1968 U.S. track coach and by then 91 years old, corrected a wrong and formally named Patrick an Olympian.
“It was really a nice night,” Patrick says. “They were all happy for me. They wished me congratulations. And it was a nice honor. I can forgive. I just can’t forget. That’s all. It’s something that will never, ever leave me.”
Patrick enjoys watching his granddaughter, Payton Patrick, who plays high-level soccer at the University of South Carolina, and his grandson, Hunter Patrick, a kicker for the Maryland football team. And he’ll never stop autographing magazine covers or enjoying Stone Harbor, no matter who fails to recognize him as one of America’s all-time track greats.
“Just tell him to run a little faster,” needles Tom Donnelly. “He’ll be recognized then.”