Crawl of Fame

by Julie Moss

  I spent my first post-race hour trying to get it together in the medic tent. I knew Diana Nyad was waiting to interview me for Wide World of Sports. Diana had established quite a name for herself as an endurance swimmer—in 1979, she swam 102 miles from the Bahamas to Florida. Then in 2013, at age sixty-four, she swam the 110 miles from Havana to Key West without a shark cage . . . and people think Ironman triathletes are crazy? As I think back to our interview, I still love what I said: “This is the first time I’ve found something that I wanted so bad, I was willing to crawl on my hands and knees to get it.”

  I meant it. I’d been knocked down by my broken relationship before flying to Kona, and I needed something to validate myself. Why? I had used my relationship to try and find validation through someone else. The Ironman provided a new and memorable source of validation. All but the messy ending, of course.

  During my brief prerace get-together with Reed, I sought closure. In return, I learned something about anchoring in your own authenticity: it’s not about anybody else. What am I going to do? At the crucial stage of my race, no one else could have influenced me physically, psychologically, or emotionally. Kathleen was pressing me to go harder than I wanted, but there was a point where she didn’t exist in my mind. That’s a pure thing about athletics; maybe that’s what I saw on the faces of the athletes on Wide World of Sports the year before, when I kept wondering, “What is pulling me in here?” The journey of wanting an experience from your deepest heart transforms into a pure love and belief in yourself. Validation comes from within, this whole thing of, “It’s okay. Keep going. Keep going deeper. Keep diving in. Your truth and trust come from within.”

  I wanted to convey this to Diana, but didn’t. I didn’t have the words yet.

  The other thing about my race is that I didn’t take advantage of any established swimming, cycling, and running communities, fledgling though they were. And I certainly didn’t have any mentors or support group once I flew home to Carlsbad. Even though the sport had existed for eight years, I still had to spell “triathlon” to nearly everybody. Plus, men’s winner Scott Tinley, a triathlon purist through and through, was initially concerned the “freak show” was taking away from the real athletes.

  I was the “freak show,” of course.

  After the post-race interview, my mother and brother took me to dinner. All I wanted was a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake. But they didn’t serve milkshakes. I took two bites of the hamburger, looked at my mom, and said, “I gotta go.” We headed back to her condo, and I slept. My body was still revving hard, loaded with adrenaline, still inwardly listening to the “push, push, push” command it had obeyed faithfully until it could obey no more. Decompressing from a long race is never easy. By the following morning’s sunrise, I did manage to get to sleep.

  The next evening, we arrived at the awards ceremony in the Kona Surf Hotel ballroom. They called up the top five overall women, from fifth place to first. Two women tied for third place in 11 hours, 51 minutes: Lyn Brooks, who would eventually become the first woman to complete twenty consecutive Ironman World Championship; and Sally Edwards, the reigning Western States 100-mile champion and second-place finisher in the 1981 Ironman. She would create six companies (including Fleet Feet Sports, a national shoe chain) and write more than twenty books on endurance sports. She’s a legendary endurance sports athlete, and deservedly so. That startled me. How in the world did I beat someone who won a race that scrambled up, over, sideways, down, and through the High Sierras and California Gold Country, its nasty river canyons, rocky trails, and high heat, a race that featured over twenty thousand vertical feet of ascents and descents? When a good friend told me he’d paced someone for thirty-five miles at Western States, I told him he was fanatical. The pot calling the kettle black, right? That’s how I feel about ultramarathons. They’re beyond what I can do. Yet on my new turf, Kona, I’d beaten a 100-mile champion. Definitely a “wow” moment.

  When the emcee called my name, something incredible happened: the capacity crowd of about two thousand stood up and gave me a standing ovation. Word had already started to get out about my race. I soaked that up . . . it was like, yeahhhh. A little adulation never hurt anyone, right? I was amazed that so many people seemed to know what had happened. When they called Kathleen, everyone remained standing as the 1982 Ironman champion strode to the stage. She didn’t quite know where to stand. She walked to the opposite side of me, so that we bookended the other three top finishers.

  The energy bloom was incredible when I was called up. I can close my eyes right now, and it sweeps through me anew. What a feeling. It came along with the realization that, for the first time in my life, I was truly proud of myself. And to be so honored by my peers? I’ll remember that ovation as long as I live.

  Scott Tinley viewed the awards ceremony, and the thirty-six hours that preceded it, in a manner that is quite interesting when you think about it today. “In one way, Julie’s iconic moment began with the mistake of not taking nutrition,” he said. “If she’d sipped four ounces of coke at Mile 25 of the marathon, the world would be a different place. She wins the race as a budding rookie, a nice little upset over Kathleen, and we wait another four or five years for triathlon to organically grow into a professional sport. Because she didn’t drink, we had the ultimate ‘agony of defeat’ moment that changed our sport instantaneously.”

  As soon as I returned home to Carlsbad following a week of R&R with my family on Maui, Diana called to inform me that ABC had decided to move up the original April airing of the Ironman to the following weekend. Thirteen days after the race. Apparently, everyone at ABC from executives to production assistants were stunned by the footage, which meant they envisioned something else flashing in bright neon lights: high weekend ratings. ST heard the first of those conversations go down from his curbside perch at the finish line. Commentator Jim Lampley, now a legendary sportscaster, told Triathlete magazine, “We got back to New York and knew we had the most extraordinary thing. People in edit rooms were blown away. . . . We knew we had to get it on the air in exactly the right way.”

  Part of “exactly the right way” included dealing with the visual image of me losing control of my body and its functions. For that sensitive discussion, the producers dispatched Diana, who gave me a call.

  “We need to address the fact that you started your period during the race,” Diana said. “Did you start your period?”

  “No, that wasn’t my period,” I said.

  “Oh . . . well, we’re going to show the finish—show your finish—but we will handle it delicately.”

  My thought was to handle it honestly. I felt compelled to tell the truth. It would have been much easier to play the menstrual card, but lying would have dishonored all that I’d been through and all that I’d just discovered about myself. In this case, the authenticity of the moment trumped my ego’s screaming plea to shift the story to something more acceptable.

  ABC handled it very delicately, to the backing music of “Dion Blue” from masterful jazz flautist Tim Weisberg, and with minimal discussion of my humiliating moment. “Dion Blue” conveyed the melodic grace and power to remind you how beautiful our journeys through life can be. It is so uplifting, a transcendent, lovely 3½-minute work of art. You’ve probably heard it on a movie or TV soundtrack. “Dion Blue” marked the first time Wide World of Sports had ever synched a segment to a specific piece of music.

  I only wonder how that scene would have been handled in today’s drama-infused broadcasting world. Certainly, my loss of control would have been brought up and deconstructed on the spot, to create more sensationalism and better ratings. And then broken into small clips, maybe a meme or poo emoji for humor, and blasted on social media, put on Vimeo and YouTube . . . wait. It is on YouTube!

  To prove my point: In 2010, ESPN The Magazine ran a feature story called “The Tao of Poo: It Happens.” My experience kicked off the piece, which also featured Michael Jordan and others who have “lost it”
—literally—in the heat of competition. When “it” happens, I don’t have to explain what that means, or how humiliating it was. But, when you look at who they interviewed for the piece, turns out I was in pretty impressive company.

  On February 19, Wide World of Sports aired the segment. I watched with friends at a packed Dooley McCluskey’s, a popular bar in my hometown of Carlsbad. The co-owners, Bob Burke and Steve Densham, were my first-ever sponsors. They contributed my airfare to Hawaii, for which I’ll be forever grateful: Here, Julie. Take this plane ticket and go change your life. Looks that way now, doesn’t it? A nice group of friends arrived to watch the show with me, along with local newspaper publisher Tom Missett and LA area reporter Chris Mortensen, who would later enjoy a great career covering the NFL for ESPN.

  Right before I left my house for Dooley McCluskey’s, my childhood friend, Sue Robison, called me from Laramie, Wyoming, where she was wrapping up her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wyoming. She was in tears. “Julie, you’ve gotta get yourself ready. I knew you were on the show, but . . . oh my God. I had no idea—I can’t believe my best friend just put herself through something like this!” Sue was an hour ahead of West Coast time. She had just seen the segment.

  “Ready? Ready for what?”

  I found out a few minutes later. As the show aired, I started to cry. I wanted to help myself win that race all over again! When I saw myself about 100 yards from the finish, getting up from my second fall, I said out loud, “Just because you can stand up, and you can start to walk, doesn’t mean you have to start running again.” Two weeks later, I’m suddenly a racing expert, right?

  “I’ve known Julie since we were in sixth grade,” Sue recalls. “She was always a little crazy in a fun way, a little bratty, and definitely not someone I’d expect to transform into this incredible athlete. When I saw her on the show, I kept asking myself, ‘Is this really Julie?’ It just was so far removed from the Julie I knew, this thing she was doing, and how she took herself right to the edge. None of my friends had ever seen something like this. Neither had the rest of the world, when you look at the craziness that happened after the show.”

  “I remember being in a hotel room in Santa Cruz, on a sales trip for the surf clothing I was repping,” Jim Watson added. “I watched the segment, and was in tears. Julie? Are you shitting me? You look at Julie now, all her wins and accomplishments, the great athlete she is, and it’s easy to forget that she wasn’t always such a great athlete. I just didn’t know she had it in her. Amazing.”

  Two years later, Sue saw what it was like for me to lead an Ironman up close and personal. In 1985, I arranged for Wide World of Sports to hire Sue as a film logger. She sat for fourteen hours in the ABC van, no stops for food or restrooms, and dutifully logged film canisters and shot sequence times while talking with Diana Nyad. Throughout the bike segment, she rode right in front of me—because I was leading. I ended up blowing up and not finishing, the first of a difficult patch of DNFs (did not finish) that followed the 1982 race.

  But Sue wasn’t done having fun. “One night, Julie couldn’t join us, but ABC took me out to a fancy restaurant, sport coats required, that kind of thing,” she recalls. “I’m not a sports person, but I know how big the careers of Jimmy Roberts and Al Trautwig became. They were my dinner companions. We were having a great time, and then in walks Tom Selleck. This was when he starred in Magnum, P.I. I’ve never been around something like this, and I’m still a young girl, and . . . Tom Selleck? That was amazing, Julie giving me that experience.”

  Back to the segment. I expected to see the typical ten-minute Wide World of Sports segment sandwiched between commercials, with a studio lead-in from Jim McKay and on-site coverage with Jim Lampley and Diana Nyad. Plus Diana’s interview with me. That’s not what aired. ABC totally changed the way they put together the show. Our segment went on and on, taking up twenty minutes of the hour-long format. My final quarter mile was completely played out, warts, chocolate mess, crawl to the finish and all. To cap it off, Jim McKay closed the telecast by calling the twenty-minute segment “perhaps the most dramatic moment in the history of Wide World.”

  The next day, I got a call from ABC Studios. The caller said, “We’ve had such a huge response from the Ironman, we’d like to fly you and Kathleen McCartney out to New York to be in-studio with Jim McKay next Saturday.”

  Really? All for bonking, falling a few times, trying to get back up, and crawling to the finish? While many had already told me how amazing my performance was and how it inspired them (how? I fell and crawled!), I couldn’t imagine how the entire country would feel. I could, however, picture a farmer in Nebraska, or schoolteacher in Ohio, going, “You wonder what these nutty kids are smoking out there in California. Why would someone do that to themselves?”

  As it turned out, “huge response” was an understatement. The ABC Studios switchboard lit up with calls. By 1982 standards, we were going viral! That wasn’t all. Following the telecast, Roone Arledge offered congratulations to his crew, praise he rarely extended. Top executives from CBS and NBC called ABC, both astonished and envious. An ABC spokesman later told Armen Keteyian, “We’ve had more calls on that show than any in recent memory. I can’t remember anything like it. It was an amazing thing . . . it gave people the impetus to go on with their own lives.”

  The shockwave spread across the world as fast as a tsunami after a catastrophic earthquake. When you consider there was no Internet, social media, or texting, and people just picked up the phone . . . I was surprised. They called ABC Studios by the thousands and asked questions. What really got me were the questions themselves: “What happened to the girl?” “Was she able to walk afterward?” “Did she survive?”

  The narrator for a separate three-minute Videos4Motivation piece on my finish (available on YouTube) was Phil Liggett, now the voice of the Tour de France and the preeminent announcer in cycling. (I later worked with Phil in a London studio, doing voiceover.) With his crisp British voice offering a subtle flair for the dramatic, Phil described it like this: “Julie Moss crawled to the finish in one of the most memorable moments in the history of ABC Wide World of Sports. Millions of Americans watched, mesmerized by Moss’s courage and determination. Everyone who saw it was moved, and history has shown us that from that day forward, the Ironman would never be the same.”

  Later, I learned something else. Before a network airs major shows, it screens them to producers and staff members for feedback, to work out final kinks, and make sure everyone approves of the telecast. Apparently, the vibe about this segment was a little different. Word got out, and the screening room filled quickly with network executives and staffers alike. Another show in production stopped, and its cast and crew watched. The noise in the room afterward was . . . well, there was no noise. Viewers were astonished and silent. ABC green-lighted the broadcast.

  Meanwhile, before the sports world could start writing that new Ironman history to which Phil Liggett alluded, they had to make sure the damsel in distress was still around, right? Hence, the live interview with Jim McKay.

  For we baby boomers, Jim (who died in 2008) is a sports broadcasting institution, right there with Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, the late Lakers play-by-play man Chick Hearn, and the late Curt Gowdy and Pat Summerall. Jim had much to do with Americans’ views of sports and our interest in them. We might be a nation of rabid sports fans now, but back then, we were also a nation of rabid sports participants looking for new athletic outlets. Wide World of Sports gave us new ideas seemingly every Saturday, when they uncovered yet another sport taking place somewhere on earth. I spent many Saturday afternoons watching Wide World of Sports and listening to Jim’s smooth, engaging way of presenting the weirdest or most obscure sports so informatively that you walked away knowing what that sport was about. Then, if you could, you tried it.

  Since Wide World of Sports premiered in 1961, Jim watched and covered thousands of events as its host. The show continued until 1998, an amazing thir
ty-seven-year run. While fighting back tears, Jim came into our homes and informed us about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich (where another Carlsbad girl, Cindy Gilbert, competed in the high jump just after turning fifteen).

  After flying first-class at ABC’s expense, we arrived for the interview. Kathleen was dressed in a business suit, white skirt, and matching blazer, while I was wearing a jeans and a top . . . a San Diego surfer girl. It was a borrowed outfit, at that. “Just before the show, Julie called me and said, ‘Cindy, I have to fly to New York for Wide World and don’t have anything to wear!’” recalled Cindy Conner, one of my besties. “I was working in the surf industry, so didn’t know what I had, but she came over and we got a few things out that she wore on the show.”

  During the interview, they replayed the Ironman footage. Once again, I welled up. Keep in mind that we’re live on America’s favorite sports show, and I’m in the beginning stages of losing it. Jim McKay said, “Julie, I can see you’re really tearing up here.”

  I tried not to wipe my eyes. It was really hard to watch myself go through that again. Also, people were starting to recognize me as the girl who literally gave everything she had at Ironman. It was all so raw, the power of so many people seeing it, the seismic reaction that prompted ABC to fly us to New York . . . not too easy to hold back the tears.

  I’ve had a chance to think about that moment, and to see Jim McKay—who has seen it all—so visibly moved. I was too nervous to appreciate it then. For the world’s most popular sports host to be moved like that still touches me. I also remember something else about our day: how nice and genuine he was, how comfortable he made us feel, and how our exchange felt as natural and mellow as, well, three people chatting casually about an event they’re all spectating. Except that two of us were the event, in the eyes of ABC.