A measure of Al Franken’s clout both within his sport and his hometown was evident on a movie set one spring day in 1953.
Franken, the longtime Southern California track meet director, was parading Wes Santee, the Kansas miler, around Hollywood as part of the promotion for a local meet. Santee was bidding to become the first man to break four minutes in the mile.
In the middle of the filming, Howard Keel, the star of a string of MGM musicals, spotted Franken and Santee, yelled “cut” and walked over to greet the visitors.
Santee was later introduced to another Franken acquaintance–Marilyn Monroe.
Nearly two decades later Olympic pole vault champion Bob Seagren had a somewhat less glamorous Franken-orchestrated brush with show business. Franken was promoting both one of his track meets and a circus at the same time and arranged a photo shoot of Seagren with one of the circus’ biggest stars.
“He had this big ass Bengal tiger in the shot with me,” Seagren said recently, laughing at the memory. “And it wrapped its paw around me and I almost had to go change my shorts.”
If track and field, as often suggested, is a three-ring circus then Franken was one of its leading ring masters for parts of four decades.
“Al Franken,” Jim Beatty, the first man to run a sub-4:00 mile indoors, said “was the best track and field promoter this country has ever had.”
Franken, one of the most influential figures in American track and field’s golden era of from the 1950s through the 1970s, died at the age of 96 Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. Franken was recently diagnosed with leukemia, his son Don said.
“The end of that era,” said Dwight Stones, who set mutiple world high jump records in Franken meets.
Franken put on the Compton Relays and the Coliseum Relays, the meets drawing large crowds to watch the likes of sprinter Tommie Smith, Seagren or Jim Ryun take on Olympic champions Peter Snell or Kip Keino.
But it was indoors where Franken was most influential. Franken invented indoor track on the West Coast, ending an East Coast monopoly on the sport in the 1960s and eventually equaling or surpassing the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden as the planet’s premier indoor meet with world record shattering events in Los Angeles and later San Diego that put the sport and its superstars like Irish miler Eamonn Coghlan on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
“For track and field on the West Coast,” Seagren said “Al Franken was the guy.”
Franken promoted meets produced more than 100 world and American records. The 1986 Sunkist meet at the Sports Arena saw world records set in four events.
“Al,” Stones said, “had a way of getting everybody hyped up.”
For Franken athletes were like family. While he put up Santee at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1953 you were just as likely to find Olympic champions staying at the Franken family home near the UCLA campus, Keino in one bedroom, Finland’s Lasse Viren in another. Oregon distance running icon Steve Prefontaine tended bar at Franken’s New Year’s Eve parties. Stones recalled Franken attending his wedding. Seagren had regular lunches with Franken until recently.
“I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Al Franken,” Seagren said.
Said Beatty, “the one thing about Al Franken was he really cared about the athletes.”
Officials at the Amateur Athletic Union, later the The Athletic Congress, the sport’s governing bodies, often felt Franken was too cozy with his stars.
Stones recalled doing a photo shoot for the Sunkist meet as a barely 19-year-old UCLA freshman and finding a $20 bill in his palm after shaking Franken’s hand afterward.
“I remember thinking oh, ok, I just got paid to be a high jumper,” Stones recalled.
UCI coach Len Miller talked Franken into putting a relatively unknown miler named Steve Scott into a star-studded race at the 1977 Sunkist meet. Scott, Miller told Franken, “was the next great American miler.”
“Al pretty much did him a favor of letting me in the race,” Scott recalled.
Scott returned the favor by breaking four minutes for the first time that night. He would later hold the American outdoor record in the mile for a quarter-century.
Afterward Franken, Scott said, “gave my coach $100 to go buy me something. I wasn’t sure that was legal or not.”
But it was under the table payments with several more zeroes in them that frequently got Franken in trouble with the sport’s governing bodies in the so-called Shamateurism era before the hypocritical prohibition of paying track athletes finally ended in 1981.
Franken was banned for life at least three times by the AAU or TAC for paying athletes.
“Dad always believed if he benefited then the athletes should share in the profits,” Don Franken said. “He was always at odds with the AAU.”
Each time Franken’s lifetime ban was lifted. It turns out the AAU’s attorney also represented Franken.
Franken was born on April 9, 1925 in Los Angeles. His father took him to the first day of the track and field competition at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
“And he fell in love with the sport forever,” Don Franken said.
He attended UCLA where he was the sport’s editor of the Daily Bruin. Later he worked as the prep editor for the Los Angeles Mirror newspaper. In the 1950s, be began doing promotion work for Herschel Smith, the Compton Relays meet director.
Franken and Smith decided in 1961 to hold at the West Coast’s first indoor track meet, the Los Angeles Invitational, at the new Sports Arena. They rented a track from a meet in Milwaukee, paying $2,000 to have it hauled on a tractor trailer to Southern California.
The investment more than paid off.
On the day of the meet fans line up around the outside of the arena to see Wilma Rudolph in her first competition since winning three gold medals at the Rome Olympics the previous summer. Another Olympic champion, Ralph Boston, set the world record in the long jump that day. Perry O’Brien, yet another Olympic gold medalist, broke the shot put world record.
“That indoor track and field came to the West Coast and flourished was because of Al Franken,” said Beatty.
The Los Angeles Invitational eventually became the Sunkist meet, one of the first, if not the first, U.S. track meets to have a corporate sponsor. Jack In The Box sponsored Franken’s indoor meet in San Diego. The Pepsi outdoor meet at UCLA’s Drake Stadium was for many years the nation’s premier single day track event.
“He was the master promoter,” Scott said. “I never met anybody who knew how to promote his meets better than Al.”
Ron Clarke, Australia’s world record-setting distance runner, was arrested for causing a traffic jam after Franken invited the media to film Clarke running across the Golden Gate Bridge to promote a meet at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Franken paid the fine.
Athletes accounting for 105 Olympic gold medals competed in the Franken’s meets. But his meets’ were perhaps best known for showcasing the mile whether it was a teenage Ryun taking Snell, New Zealand’s three-time Olympic champion, and former Oregon NCAA champion Jim Grelle at the Coliseum, world record-setting races by Francie Larrieu and Mary Decker Slaney indoors or the great duals of the late 70s and 80s at Sunkist or on the hyper-fast, loud orange and yellow San Diego Sports Arena track for the Jack In The Box meet.
A sold out crowd of 12,000 plus watched Scott, former Wisconsin runner Steve Lacy, and Coghlan all finish under the previous world record at the 1979 San Diego meet, the Irishman leading the way at 3 minutes, 52.6 seconds.
“Steve Scott, John Walker (New Zealand’s Olympic champion and the first miler under 3:50), Eamonn Coghlan and (Ireland’s) Ray Flynn,” Stones said, recalling the stars of the epic mile battles of the 70s and 80s “all those mile races were amazing, just amazing.”
But then again Franken and the likes of Coghlan and Scott didn’t have to worry about the weather indoors
Eight months after Santee’s 1953 tour of Hollywood, Franken invited him back to the West Coast, both men then under investigation by the AAU. At the time Santee was in a race with Great Britain’s Roger Bannister and Australia’s John Landy to be the first man under 4:00.
Franken was confident that Santee would break 4:00 in a race he set up for the Kansan at halftime of the NFL’s Pro Bowl at the Coliseum in January 1954. Concerned that Landy was then in top form racing in the Australian summer, Franken believed Southern California’s relatively warm winter weather would give Santee the edge he needed in the race to sub-4:00.
But when Franken picked up Santee at the Ambassador Hotel the morning of the race he had bad news. A heavy rain the night before had left the Coliseum track flooded.
The only running Santee would do that day was a few halftime laps waving to the crowd around a soggy Coliseum field incased by a track under standing water.
Four months later Bannister became the first man under 4:00.