Crawl of Fame

by Julie Moss

  What happened next tested Armen’s priorities to the limit. “I came home with the offer,” he says. “Dede and I were living in North Park [San Diego] in a two-bedroom house with two dogs, two cars, and she’s working for California Leisure Consultants, a big-time event management company. We were both twenty-nine years old and making about $60,000 between us. We had a pretty good life going. When the mag calls me, it’s the dead of winter in New York. The city was then a hellhole, all the drug problems, rampant crime, the whole Son of Sam situation [the murder spree of the late 1970s serial killer]. Dee was eight months pregnant with our first daughter, Kristen. She told me in no uncertain terms, ‘There’s no way I’m moving to New York City in the dead of winter, eight months pregnant. You can’t take this job.’

  “So I had to tell a magazine I’d been spending the better part of a year pursuing that I can’t take the job. Those jobs came up about once in a blue moon. People just didn’t leave.”

  Little did Armen know that fate was merely postponing his moment. Through the Phillips Organisation, Armen found himself inside the triathlon world just as the sport was picking up steam. A pair of athletes with business sense, Carl Thomas and Jim Curl, visited the office looking for a sponsor for their new baby: the United States Triathlon Series. All of the triathletes in San Diego—pretty much every significant triathlete, minus Dave Scott, who lived in Northern California—were excited about the possibility. A Phillips vice president (and later TV producer) Frank Pace, used his various connections and brought Bud Light to the table. The sponsorship coup immediately put the USTS on the map. “I remember writing a feature on Scott Tinley for City Sports magazine in San Diego,” Armen recalls. “I was starting to acquaint myself with this burgeoning triathlon movement. I was involved in a peripheral fashion, setting up public relations for the USTS. At the same time, I was figuring out what I was going to do next.”

  “Next” was the story on me. After our day at the beach, Armen went to Mission Valley, to the San Diego Union offices, where he laid down one of the longest sports features in that paper’s 150-year history. Like an athlete who knows a great race or game is brewing, a feeling he recognized from college baseball, Armen sensed something about my race and what he would do with it. His biggest concern: Would the Union cut down the story’s 4,500-word length, an opus in a world where 1,500-word stories were often considered too long? He hoped not, because this piece felt different than any he’d written.

  “I wrote it fairly quickly. I didn’t struggle with it. For me, writing goes one of two ways—I can either struggle over something and rewrite it to death; or it comes out in a burst,” he says. “This was a burst, a long burst—a lot of words. It was inside me, finding its way out. I write emotionally, and I’m pretty vested. I’m not the guy you want to hire to do the deadline piece, but feature writing has always been my forte. Having an ability to be empathetic to the subject has been a gift, in some ways. I think that empathy, and having been an athlete—though certainly not at Julie’s level—gives me an understanding.”

  Fortunately, the Union’s sports editor, Barry Lorge, was an East Coast transplant who preferred a more literary sportswriting approach. Lorge often got ribbed from hardboiled sportswriters who liked their stories and paragraphs short and their words simple. But whenever Lorge saw a story that needed to be told in layers rather than confined to a strict column inch count, he opened up the room.

  “It took an excruciatingly long time for him to edit my story, with me sitting there on the terminal, waiting,” Armen says. “Barry was notorious for being a stickler, very meticulous. I’m thinking, ‘For fuck’s sake, he’s tearing it apart.’ Or, ‘he hates it,’ or ‘he’s rewriting it.’ As a freelancer, I was in no position to ask him what was taking so long, but it took over three hours. He went through it with a fine-tooth comb. I knew my story was good, but it was so long. I had no idea what they were going to do.

  “Finally, Barry came over and said, ‘This is an incredible story. We’re going to run it at full length. And we’re gonna run it tomorrow.’

  “Holy cow! I looked at my story after he finished. I know what I wrote, and outside of a few grammatical changes and tightening a few words, he didn’t edit it much. To his ever-loving credit, he knew it was special, and he wanted to protect it, to make it really shine.”

  What a story, indeed! When I saw it, I felt exactly the same as the day I watched my race on Wide World of Sports—totally blown away, overwhelmed by what I’d just unleashed, and astonished that someone would write a piece like this on me. If that wasn’t enough, here is how Armen introduced me to San Diego Union readers in his story:

  All you could think was, “Oh God, she’s going to fall again. She’s 15 feet from the finish line, 15 lousy feet from all the glory she deserves, and she’s going to fall again. Dammit, she’s not going to make it.”

  For nearly 12 hours, she had given everything the human spirit can ask of the human body. The race, this 140.6-mile torture test called the triathlon, had been hers since five miles into the marathon. She had passed the previous tests—the 2.4-mile swim in the Pacific, the 112-mile bike ride. Now, with 15 feet to go in the 26.2-mile run, her world was falling apart. The finish line was almost close enough to touch, but she looked as if she couldn’t possibly get there.

  A few paragraphs later:

  This happened February 6. Thirteen days later, in living rooms across America, millions of people watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports saw the tapes of this utterly compelling spectacle and sat stunned, collectively thinking the only possible thought: “If anything is fair in this world, let Julie Moss get up right now. Let her walk, stagger or crawl those last 15 feet. Let her finish. Let her be the women’s winner of the Ironman World Championships. Please . . .”

  In the background, a haunting, beautiful instrumental tune played on . . . there was nothing left to say now. It was only Moss and that mysterious music. All the crowd could do was hope . . .

  No one can describe the sight of an athlete such as this, beyond the limits of exhaustion, crawling to a finish line. Nobody tried. Only the music played on.

  Later in the piece, I tell him, “Have you ever seen pictures of dead people? When I saw the picture of the finish line, I thought, ‘That’s what dead people look like.’ But you know what? My eyes were closed, but I was smiling. I knew, finally, it was all over.”

  But it wasn’t over. It was just beginning—for both of us.

  After Armen’s story ran, he sent the clip to Bambi Bachman at Sports Illustrated, hoping against hope she would find a desk for him. He’d noticed name-shuffling again on the SI masthead, during his personal weekly tea-leaf reading. In those pre-Internet, pre-PDF, pre-links days, you sat and waited for the mail to arrive . . . then prayed, hoped, cajoled, and did whatever else to will that phone to ring. Armen wanted badly to grab the phone and follow up, but that could be construed as the act of an overly anxious, insecure writer—not the poise you want to show The Greatest Sports Magazine on Earth.

  So he waited. Ten days later, the phone rang. “Armen, it’s Bambi.”

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Well, we have another opening, and we want to offer you the job.”

  “Great!”

  Then she added this missive: “We’re not going to ask you a third time.”

  “Got it.”

  “I went back to Dee,” Armen recalls. “Kristen had been born on Feb. 18, but now it was early April. Dede felt a lot differently about going to New York, now that our daughter was born and warm weather was coming. My first day at SI was on June 6, 1982.

  “There’s no question that my story on Julie clinched my being hired by Sports Illustrated. That was the catalyst for them to come back after my turn-down. Would they have come back had that story not run? I don’t know, but looking at the scheme of things, how they work at SI, probably not. Plain and simple, the story changed my life.”

  There was more. Not only did Bambi Bachman like t
he story but so did the editors at The Sporting News, a St. Louis-published magazine that many hardcore sports enthusiasts preferred, particularly for its baseball and football coverage. Sports Illustrated added atmosphere and the majesty of events to its coverage, while The Sporting News was all about the x’s, o’s, and effort. Very down-to-earth.

  Imagine lightning striking you twice—rapidly—and changing everything. I had my “double taps” with the Ironman finish and media explosion that followed. Now, the lightning found Armen for its second strike.

  “A few months later, I got a call, kind of a muddled voice, saying, ‘Hey, it’s The Sporting News. We’ve got your story on Julie Moss, it’s in the book, and we’re sending you $250,’” he recalls, deep memory transmitting the visceral excitement of that moment into his elevated voice. “It’s like, wow, getting $250 just to put my already-written story in their Best Sports Stories book? I was thrilled to be included. I religiously pored through that book every year; after all, it’s the best sportswriting by the best sportswriters, and I was a sportswriter.

  “The book comes, and the check arrives. I’m looking in the main body for my story; I don’t even bother looking at the award-winning stories. What would that have to do with me? All of a sudden, I see my name listed with John Underwood, John Schulian, and Thomas Boswell, three sportswriting legends. Three Mount Rushmores of sportswriting—and me. And I won the damn thing [as Best Feature of the Year]! I had no idea—I just thought I was getting $250 and a book with my story included.”

  Armen took the fullest advantage of seven years at Sports Illustrated, working his way into what has become a monumental journalism and writing career. I see the importance of the subjects he’s tackled and stories he’s written (and corrupt programs, coaches, and systems he exposed, as well as the countless wonderful pieces on athletes and newsmakers) as his greatest legacy. But through it all, after four decades of deadlines and many hard-edged stories and books, he remains the same empathetic, loving, and deeply perceptive man who committed himself to greatness and impeccable integrity, and then made it happen. But I still don’t want him knocking on my door if I did anything wrong!

  Armen and I are the bookends of an exclusive mutual admiration club. We are joined at hip and heart by what happened to our careers as the result of my race and his story, which he recently compared with the thousands of events he has covered.

  “It ranks right up at the top. I was at the Tour de France for five of Lance Armstrong’s seven victories, I’ve covered two Super Bowls, seven Final Fours, college football title games, been to the Masters, the Indy 500, and seen Mike Tyson bite Evander Holyfield’s ear off,” Armen says. “I’ve been to a lot of big events, but for pure drama in the essence of sport, just finding yourself, somehow, some way, in the most demanding of circumstances . . . there’s a reason this story has stayed with me all these years, and why millions of people still can instantly recall Julie’s finish in that race. I feel like I was merely a carrier of her story.

  “It’s almost like surviving a tsunami. You survive something that wipes out one part of your life and moves you into another part. She came out the other side with a deep appreciation for what she’d experienced, and she was protective of it even then. She wasn’t giving it away. That to me was very real, very impressive.

  “I remember thinking I wanted to do justice, to honor her in the way she deserved. There are not a lot of Julie Mosses in the world. Since then, God knows I’ve seen people suffer in sports, and in the Tour de France, you see suffering that’s almost unmatched in athletics. But I don’t think I’ve seen courage like hers in a sporting setting.”

  Now I had to figure out a way to bottle the momentum and notoriety I’d achieved from the race, expand my reach, and make a living at this sport that called to me—and was sending me into a future beyond anything I had imagined.

  CHAPTER 6

  Training Wheels

  And though she be but little, she is fierce.

  —William Shakespeare,

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Like nearly all kids in 1960s America, I got my first sense of speed, distance, focused intention, and the power of my own efforts on a bicycle. It started the day my dad, Don Moss, decided that my older brother, Marshall, was old enough to ride on two wheels, so he removed his trainers—but not mine. I didn’t quite see the fairness in that. Since Marshall was only fourteen months older than me, I wanted my training wheels to come off too. So I asked Dad with the singularly focused passion and attitude a four-year-old girl possesses, which is to say a lot. He complied. I was determined to start riding on two wheels that day! As my family members recalled, I didn’t just try to keep myself balanced and upright a few times and then pack it in. I stayed with it for hours. I wouldn’t come inside until I figured out how this bike worked and how my body worked to keep it balanced so I could ride as fast as the other kids screaming down our hilly streets on their Western Auto-bought Huffys and Stingrays.

  Finally, just before dark, I came in, red curls flying in all directions and my knees bloodied. I was all smiles; I’d figured it out! Part of my effort came from trying to get the approval of my dad, who I imagined would be thrilled and delighted to see his baby girl, only daughter, and youngest of two children racing down the streets on two wheels, “war wounds,” Chatty Cathy dolls, and Easy-Bake Ovens be damned. In order to win his affection, I wasn’t coming in until I knew how to ride the bike. My parents watched me struggle, but they never swooped in to “make it all right.” They let me have those moments to figure it out. That became a fundamental building block. I will be forever thankful to them for that.

  It was so wonderful to see the twinkle in Dad’s blue eyes after he took off the training wheels. I say that because, sadly, it was one of the few times I can remember him directly approving something I did—or even taking note of it. He was not in the picture long enough, only for my first eight years. We once had a strong connection, but that faded long ago. In many ways, my drive to succeed and push to the outermost limit originated during those early years when he was around to reward me with his smile and pull me up onto his lap. His memory now sits deep in my shadow, behind my rearview mirror, a ghost whose approval and affection I always craved. But rarely received. Except for that day on the bike. It was one of several significant threads from my lively, active childhood that, unbeknownst to me, fed into my becoming a triathlete.

  I know how Dad would view me now: he’d be my biggest fan. He’d also surely take credit for igniting my appetite for endurance and risk. He loved to take credit for me being a girl from his own heart, a tomboy at that. I wonder if he knows that, in some way, he helped start my appetite for endurance and risk. Sports, business and life coaches, and mentors understand that anything we say or any instruction we give, and the way we give it and respond to the result can become the words or encouragement athletes need to believe in themselves—and elevate to the next level. We might think of it as inconsequential, no big deal, but in reality, we’ve just unlocked a gate within that athlete, bringing them one step closer to their greatness. That’s what Dad did for me, but sadly, he never stuck around long enough to see how his baby girl would utilize the gifts of hope and confidence he gave her that day.

  My parents were very much together on October 8, 1958. When my Mom, the former Eloise Julie Carleton, went into labor, they drove to the hospital. The greeting nurse promptly sent my dad to cool his jets in the “Fathers’ Waiting Room.” Remember, this was before Lamaze, birthing centers, and nervous new fathers in delivery rooms became an everyday part of having a baby. My mother waited in her room until she couldn’t handle the contraction pain further. She asked for whatever relaxants and painkillers could help her through.

  Shortly after that, I was born.

  When the nurse gave me to my dad, he wasn’t happy at first to see me. Or my flaming red hair. There was something else too. He told the nurse, “Take that girl child back and bring me my son.” The poor duty nu
rse turned around and took me back to the nursery. My dad was set on having two boys, and already had one, Marshall, who was one year old. Dad even bet the obstetrician double or nothing on my circumcision. I can’t blame him for being so confident; I was the first Moss girl in several generations.

  My parents decided to call me Julie Donna. I was named for my French great-grandmother, Julie; my middle name comes from my father, Don. However, once the birth certificate was signed, my mom thought, why not switch Donna to Dawn? When she asked about getting the name changed, the nurse told her it was way too much work. She said this with such an authoritative, almost ominous tone that my mom accepted it. Institutions and their standard practices were rarely questioned in the late 1950s, almost never by women. As fiercely independent as I am, I’m not sure I could have tolerated an adult life in that Mad Men era.

  Once I was old enough to fully understand the story behind my name, I started disliking it. I can appreciate my mom was in a vulnerable state and not feeling very feisty, having just given birth to a girl when her husband wanted a boy, but I wish she would have fought harder for the middle name. She did fight and prevail when my dad wanted to name my older brother Peter instead of Marshall, a nice triumph for her. I just can’t imagine going up to my brother today and saying, “Hi, Pete Moss.” I thought it was funny though. So did my Dad.

  For those reasons, I associate my middle name with giving up and not fighting for what you want. On a deeper level, I associate it with my father not fighting for me either.

  Carlsbad, California, was an ideal town for any kid. Imagine growing up in a combination of Main Street USA, the beach, ranch- and oceanfront-style cottages and houses, rugged foothills with trails that fanned out dozens of miles in all directions, a eucalyptus grove miles in size that is your personal playground, lagoons that offered fishing, boating, water skiing, and swimming, and vibrant neighborhoods where kids played and parents hung out constantly. Throw in abundant warmth and sunshine, and you had a cozy town of 15,000 that posed very well for any postcard shoot or Beach Boys song. In fact, it posed so well that, beginning in the late 1980s, Carlsbad morphed into a prime tourist resort destination, how it is best known today. It also grew to 120,000, but that’s another story.