Portland Magazine Autumn 2012

Next up, the 1960 Summer Olympic Games.

“In Rome, on the bus from the Village to the stadium, Wilma Rudolph would sign her name over and over again on single pages of a tiny spiral notebook. Keeps me from standing around too long at the track, she said. Boy, was she cute. Tall and thin. Wilma Rudolph ran like a cross between a human and a deer. She already had a bronze from the 1956 Olympics. In Rome she won gold in the 100 and 200 meter dashes. Then she made up for a fumbled baton pass — remember that? — on the last leg of the women’s (4x100) relay. Three gold medals. Wilma had polio when she was a girl and died in her fifties. Anyway, I flirted with Wilma on the bus until a guy named Cassius Clay started in on her.” Cassius Clay, as Muhammad Ali, would later be Sports Illustrated’s Man of the Century, but “on that plane home from Rome,” says Grelle, “he sat by himself.

He talked to his gold medal. I’m not sure what all he said to his gold medal.

Cassius just knew he was great. He was born to win. It’s like Steve Prefontaine. Like, who’s coming in second?

But that’s another story…” In Rome, Grelle finished eighth in the 1500 final. Australia’s Herb Elliott took the gold in a world-record 3:35.6. Eighth in the world. The top seven metric milers were older. Grelle did the numbers. He had four years to prepare for the next Olympic Games, 1964, in Tokyo. He moved to L.A. and joined the L.A. Track Club, where the Hungarian guru, Mihali Igloi, ratcheted up his training regimen from crazy to insane. He ran 100 miles a week, most of it with sub-four-minute milers, including Igloi’s protégé, Laslo Tabori.

At Mount San Antonio College, in the spring of 1962, Grelle ran his first sub-four-minute mile. This was the beginning of a six-year stretch when Grelle ran more sub-four miles than any other American. He didn’t win them all. Often he came in second while pushing yet another guy to his personal best. But deep into the 1970s, long after Grelle quit competing, he held the record for most American sub-fours.

In the summer of 1962 he married Jean Keenan of Ashland, the beauty he’d pursued since they were at Oregon. Jean, who later taught in the Beaverton School District, began her Summer 1962: for the first time in history, four American runners break four minutes in the same race: Jim Beatty (3:57.9), Jim Grelle (3:58.1), Cary Weisiger (3:58.1) and Bill Dotson (3:59).