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move—the reigning champions making the most of the disaster, finishing in style. All the runners in that hall knew it was over. All except four.
    More than in him, alone an entire backstretch behind the pack, you could see it in the others: the second man already in position, tensed in a sprinter’s half crouch, his receiving arm out, willing the baton to him still forty yards away, his teammates screaming in his ears. They’d never considered lying down; what was possible had nothing to do with it.
    Nothing happened at first. He ran all alone, as if in a different race altogether. Thirty yards back in a relay usually decided by inches or feet, he gained six yards on the strongest sprinters in the city, handed off and fell to the track. By then it had begun: a growing roar like an approaching army, a thousand fists beating in unison on the metal signs that hung down from the rails circling the track. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be.
    Turn, straight, turn—it was like the pack was a magnet drawing him slowly back to them, shrinking the gap. Six runners, spread out now, handed off like well-oiled machines; he passed the baton, ran into the arms of some man who held him up like a limp doll—he’d closed to under twenty and the hall was in pandemonium, roaring like a shell, pounding with a single pulse.
    On the third leg something changed, some magic distance was crossed: the impossible had become conceivable. Thirteen yards, eleven, ten, and he passed the sixth man, handed off, and fell like the others. I hadn’t seen him. I’d been watching the anchor leg. In that sounding chamber—deafening, overwhelming—he was as still as a candle flame in a closed room. And I saw him receive the baton and go, a full eight yards down in fifth place, and he was like a scythe going through grass—gorgeous, ruthless—smooth as a razor cutting into the curves, passing the fourth, the third, out of the last turn edging into second, closing on the leader who seemed to be slowing, tying up because he had to, because by now it wasn’t up to him but the gods themselves, and then he threw himself through the tape.
    I ’VE THOUGHT OF IT SINCE —more than once. And I’ve thought of Ray looking at my picture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists raised on the medal stand in Mexico City, saying, “Yeah? So what?” and I know he was right. So what? This was what they gave you—what they wanted you to have. Go ahead, boy, take it. It’s yours. Take your two-fifty chunk of metal on the purple ribbon and hang it in your room and grow old; you can have the salt shaker—the pepper shaker too—’cause I own the house, the block, your dime-a-dozen soul if you really want to know.
    What fools we were, spending ourselves on trinkets and symbols. We lost, all of us. And when we realized it, we took our love beads and our lyrics and sold them on the street.
    But I’m not the only one who remembers that race. It meant nothing. But it didn’t feel like that. For those three minutes and twenty seconds, as they handed off each to each in the heart of that roar and fell to the track, it felt like it mattered.

I N MARCH OF 1968 I ran the mile in 4:52 on an indoor track at the New York City armory, which was decent for a sophomore. Things were changing for me. A few of the guys from the track team nodded to me in the hallway now. I’d met Ray. Frank and I hung out together. He was big into Jesus and the javelin, in that order, but didn’t really go on much. We’d talk about the team, or classes, or the teachers we hated, and then he’d eat and I’d go back to my book. That was pretty much it. The week I ran my mile, Lieutenant Calley and the boys from Charlie Company did what they did at My Lai. I didn’t know about it. Nobody did.
    People love to tell you afterward how they saw this and saw that. We didn’t see a thing. We heard about Vietnam, we heard about Newark, Detroit, other things—but it was like listening in on