Military Kid Finds His Stride At Air Force Academy,

Bursts Onto World Scene

By Marc Bloom for DyeStat

Part One of Two | Part 2

Somewhere out there, possibly in the vicinity of Montgomery, Alabama, there’s a woman in her early 60s who can take pride in a childhood achievement few could savor or even imagine.

It was about a half-century ago when the girl of about 10 would take her marks on the streets of an African-American section of Montgomery, with cheering throngs assembled on both sides of the road to witness her race against a neighborhood boy of the same age.

“We were the two fastest,” the boy, now a man of 62, told me recently. “We would challenge each other.” 

Who would win?

“She was faster than me, the better athlete,” he said. The boy won some, the girl won some.

The two speedsters fought one another with lunging strides and swinging arms, the street language of “who’s-fastest,” for the better part of five years. 

In due time, the boy would have track teams, championship events and the Olympics to shoot for. The girl: nothing. It was a few years before the federal Title IX legislation. Athletic girls could do little with their talent.

Eventually, the young lady could perhaps experience a vicarious thrill when, a little more than a decade later, the boy she would often outrun on the street, would win the Olympic gold medal in the 400 meters at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

“We were in the same grade,” Alonzo Babers told me. “I always felt she didn’t have a chance to excel. She was very competitive but there were no opportunities.”

With the Paris Olympics around the corner, and this being the 40th anniversary of L.A., I sought to learn more about Babers’ seemingly improbable dash to the gold medal in such a short period of time — basically from 1983 to 1984 — and, likewise, his exit from the sport months later with his gold medal barely dry, he said, “to fly planes.”

Babers, a 1983 graduate of the Air Force Academy, was like football’s Jim Brown retiring at his peak. Babers always had an uncanny knack for knowing where he stood, whether on the track or in the air, and how to proceed systematically one stride at a time to reach his goals.

When I caught up with Babers between flights — he now flies commercially for United Airlines — I found him at home in Potomac, Maryland, practically around the corner from the Bullis School and a certain 400 phenom, the 16-year-old Paris Olympics team member Quincy Wilson, chosen for the relay pool after his sixth-place at the Trials.

In 1984, I was putting out The Runner magazine and covering the Olympics with flushed abundance, supported by a crack staff of writers, editors and photographers. We were crafting a special issue devoted entirely to the Games.

My own “Olympics” started the year before during the U.S. vs. East Germany dual meet at the L.A. Coliseum, the Olympics track venue. (The GDR was one of 15 nations that would become part of the Soviet-led boycott in ’84; payback for the U.S.-led boycott — more than 60 nations — of the 1980 Moscow Games, ostensibly for the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan.)

While covering the ’83 dual meet, I scouted out photo positions along the Olympic marathon route that I would convey to our crew, while also managing to rent quarters for our entire team for the Games in a building ideally situated in shadows of the Coliseum. 

The marathon route was essential for reconnaissance: one could hardly expect a 1980s media “photo truck” to be close to the fields when the big moves were made. On the two marathon days, I had photographers stationed at elevated platforms along the route, as though a presidential motorcade were forthcoming.

For those of us steeped in the marathon’s crown jewels, it was presidential. To add spice to The Runner’s coverage, I enlisted Frank Shorter (an L.A. honoree) and Bill Rodgers (an ABC-TV commentator) to provide expert analysis.

Indeed, the running boom of the 1970s had urged marathon ascendancy worldwide, and by 1984 depth was remarkable. The big names in L.A. included ’83 world champion Rob de Castella of Australia, ’83 New York City titlist Rod Dixon of New Zealand, three-time New York winner (80-81-82) Alberto Salazar, ’83 Fukuoka champion Toshihiko Seko of Japan, and the cross-country specialist, Carlos Lopes of Portugal, winner of that year’s world title at the New Jersey Meadowlands.

It was also the first women’s Olympic marathon, and all that history was much to keep up with — how would Joan Benoit fare against the Norwegians Grete Waitz and Ingrid Kristiansen — along with the exploits of Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses, and the made-for-TV showdown in the 3,000 between the favorite, Mary Decker, and the barefoot Brit by way of apartheid South Africa, Zola Budd.

With it all, I left L.A. knowing next to nothing about Alonzo Babers.

I would guess most journalists, and most fans, would say the same. There was no flamboyance to the men’s 400, no particular glamour, no controversy, only, for a wow factor, a semifinal muscle-pull and miraculous mid-race recovery by Babers’ chief rival, the Jamaican 1983 world champion Bert Cameron.

Babers might have spent more time racing his young female rival in Montgomery than he did preparing for the Olympics. Then again, five years of sprinting at a formative age was a piece of foundational work to hold fast to, something like the Kenyan upbringing of running to school.

Babers and his young rival had much in common. In Montgomery, their fathers served in the military at Maxwell Air Force Base. They lived in a community that was an annex of base housing for military families about a mile from the main base. Alonzo’s father was a chief master sergeant, career military, serving for 33 years. Alonzo was the boy among four children.

While Maxwell’s fighting men were sent around the world to defend democracy, right next door, communities were on fire amid the throes of racial upheaval and civil rights clashes. 

Who can forget the shattering images of events like the Bloody Sunday march in 1965, from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, led by Martin Luther King? And, before that, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 led by Rosa Parks.

We witnessed this turmoil via our black-and-white TV screens on the evening news. That, and the body bags of the Vietnam War, our country in chaos, rather like today. One was either for, or against, the War. One was either for, or against, the civil rights uprising.

Meanwhile, before distance running would command widespread attention, and “joggers” could run in the same events with Shorter and Rodgers, the 400 was conferred marquee status. Everyone knew the “quarter”: you sprinted halfway, then grinded through untold pain to the wire. It was a brick-like race, heroic even. Who had the guts — the raw speed and unerring strength — to master it?

Clearly, for a time, the Americans. From 1956 through 1972, five straight Olympics—with Charlie Jenkins, Otis Davis, Mike Larrabee, Lee Evans and Vincent Matthews — the U.S. swept 400 gold. (In the first Olympic women’s 400, in 1964 at Tokyo, no American took a medal or even made the final.)

In Paris, the American men, led by Trials winner Quincy Hall and 2022 world titlist Michael Norman, will seek to re-capture 400 gold for the U.S. after victories by Steve Gardiner of Bahamas (2020), Wayde van Niekerk of South Africa (2016) and Kirani James of Granada (2012) in the last three Olympics. 

(And who knows if Wilson, now down to medal-level 44.20, will steal some precious thunder in the 4x400 relay, especially if he’s put in the final.)

The first round of men’s 400 is on Aug. 4. The final is on Aug. 7. The 4x400 first round is Aug. 9. The final is Aug. 10, ending the stadium events with only the women’s marathon to come on Aug. 11.

When Babers started high school track in the mid-‘70s, he hated it. He’d run some 600s in P.E. class in junior high, but once at Carver High, while good enough to make the mile relay team for state, he despised the coach’s practice regimen. 

“We ran intervals every day, 440s. All were supposed to be as fast as you could,” Babers said, probably echoing the programs of many schools at the time. “You could never train enough to get in shape.” 

The effect of suffering lap after lap with no reprieve did not exactly stimulate in the young man an appreciation of the event’s nuances or any notion of conquering the one lap classic — something akin to cycling’s time trial, or “race of truth” — in his early teen years.

In the elementary grades, on the Air Force base, Babers’ school was almost all white. Off the base, in junior high, his school was almost all black. Too young to fully understand the racial divisions, and strife, that were torturing society, Alonzo did recall seeing separate white and black water fountains and being told by elders what was permissible for black people to do, or not to do, “The Rules,” as he remembered it. 

In time, as stories were told in his Baptist church, Alonzo would “become very aware of the hostilities” while keeping his head down in sports and academics, with the family’s emphasis on getting an education.

The vestiges of Alabama country life and its ancestral links to slavery were never far away. As a youngster, Alonzo would pile onto the back of a white man’s pickup truck with his sisters, cousins and grandmother to pick pecans. It was a latter-day form of sharecropping on land that was likely a plantation with captives a century before.

There were pecan trees as far as the eye could see. The kids would spend the day collecting fallen pecans and putting them into burlap bags, giving their bounty to grandma, who would weigh the take and pay her kin something like 50 cents apiece for their efforts. The woman, in turn, would give the total catch to the white man, receiving her payment, and the man would harvest the crop and sell the pecans at the market, where the real money was.

In the fluidity of the time’s racial gestalt, the track could usually offer clarity and hope. At the 1976 state meet in Montgomery, as the only sophomore on the Carver (as in George Washington Carver, a prominent black scientist) mile relay, Babers got the thrill of his young life when Harvey Glance, a son of Alabama from Phenix City, showed up to greet the fans.

Glance, a four-time NCAA champion at Auburn, would win an Olympic gold medal that summer in Montreal on the U.S. 4x100 relay.

When an autograph line formed around Glance, Babers panicked: he had nothing for Glance’s signature. Ever resourceful, Babers found a paper cup, tore off a swatch, lined up for Glance and got his treasure. 

The memento became a touchstone for Babers. He had it wherever he ran, even years later on the track circuit. It offered sustenance and inspiration as Babers encountered culture shocks at every turn.

After his sophomore year concluded at the state finals, Babers’ father, Porter, was transferred to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany (then West Germany), a huge installation that serves as U.S. Air Force headquarters in Europe as well as a base for numerous other countries and a key position of the NATO Air Command. Ramstein’s security role could not be overstated, then or now.

The Babers packed up their entire family and moved to Germany. Porter Babers supervised personnel that serviced airplanes in a flight line with fuel and other necessities. Alonzo and his sisters, all the children of servicemen and women, attended American schools — most particularly Kaiserslautern High  — which were part of what’s called, Department of Defense Education Activity.

When Babers went out for track, the first thing he noticed was that he was no longer hurting as he had in Alabama.

“My head was not pounding. I was not doubling over,” he said. “It didn’t take me five hours after a race to rest up for the mile relay.”

The reason was twofold. Babers played some basketball, which put in good shape for track. And with the German track coaches knowing next to nothing about track, Babers pretty much trained himself, devising workouts that enabled him to break 50 seconds for the first time, in his junior season of 1978.

The various American high schools at U.S. military bases competed against one another. Babers’ breakthrough came that season in the European U.S. base high school championships, in Naples, Italy.

With competition from about a dozen bases in several countries, Babers captured the 400 in 48.1. He also recalled running legs on victorious 4x100 and 4x400 quartets. (Babers’ basketball team won the Euro title as well.)

“With the culture shock,” said Babers, of entering the school abroad in his junior year, “when you come in as one of the better athletes, it’s easier to assimilate.”

In his senior year, it’s fair to say that everyone knew who Babers was. He repeated as European 400 titlist, running an auto-timed 47.77, in Munich. He was not yet 18.

The young man from Alabama, once wiped clean by the 400, was now a two-time international champion. But Babers himself realized that his European competition was not that deep. Babers would have been 28th on the U.S. high school 400/440 list for 1979. 

Despite his military upbringing, Babers said his father never made the Air Force seem like his son’s inevitable next step. “He only told me, ‘Keep above a B average and go to college. You figure out how to get there.’” 

Alonzo checked all the boxes. He had a 3.8 GPA, track talent barely touched, a keen interest in flying planes and encouragement from various military personnel.

In the end, he was “semi-recruited,” he said, but apparently not by the head track coach, Ernie Cunliffe, who accorded Babers little regard when he showed up in the fall of ’79 in Colorado Springs, to attend the Air Force Academy and study aerospace engineering.

It was the football coach that toasted Babers. The team needed speed. Babers, all 150 pounds of him, said, “Yes, sir,” to all the coach’s entreaties. Babers proceeded to work out with the team while doing his six-week Basic Training. He promised the coach he would try and gain weight.

In the second game of the fall season, at Wisconsin, with Air Force losing 30-0, Babers was put on the field as a wide receiver. While running a cross pattern, Babers was hit hard by a Badgers’ linebacker twice his size, breaking his upper arm. He was put in a cast for three months, then into a “soft” cast to be able to run track.

“I compared my times to what the Air Force guys were running,” Babers recalled. “I thought I could be competitive.”

Coach Cunliffe, a 1960 Olympian in the 800 meters and a 4-minute miler the same year, took some time warming up to Babers. He told reporters then that Babers seemed nothing more than a “skinny football reject.”

Hearing that assessment now, 45 years later, Babers remarked, “That’s fair.”

In his freshman and sophomore years, 1980 and ’81, Babers barely broke 47 seconds.

In 1983, upon graduation with the rank of Second Lieutenant, Babers was supposed to start Active Duty with a year of pilot training in Texas. But he convinced his superiors to allow him to delay Active Duty for a year so he could train; and while training Babers took on part-time work with the sports information department.

The schedule was ideal for Babers. In the early morning he would do some running or go into the weight room. Then he would put in a few hours assisting the SID, Hal Bateman, a renowned track statistician (pictured right). Then, around 2 p.m., he did his workouts, sometimes going to the Olympic Training Center, also in Colorado Springs.

In the ’83 season’s two domestic championship races, Babers climbed into the elite ring of American quarter-milers. 

At the NCAA championships in Houston, Babers took fourth in a PR 45.51 as the victory when to Cameron, attending the University of Texas at El Paso, for the third time, in 44.62. It was the closest Babers had come to Cameron, who’d dominated the Western Athletic Conference meets with Babers pleading from behind. 

At the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, Babers virtually repeated his collegiate effort, placing fifth in 45.50. Hometown favorite Sunder Nix of Indiana took the title in 45.15. Eliot Tabron of Michigan State, Michael Franks of Southern Illinois and Auburn alum Willie Smith followed, ahead of Babers. 

Neither Tabron or Franks was a recruited athlete. Tabron told me that in high school in Detroit he did martial arts, earning a black belt, before running track his senior year. Franks told me he ran distance in high school in St. Louis before taking up the sprints. And here they were, a few years later, going to the World Championships.

The first three finishers from the Nationals would run the 400 in Helsinki. Smith was placed on the team as the fourth man for the 4x400 relay. Babers was on the team as a relay alternate.

One of Babers’ opponents during that era was the former Manhattan College runner Willie McLaughlin, whose daughter, Sydney, you may have heard of. Willie’s family 400 record, 45 flat, appears safe, for now.

Babers, even as an understudy, was now running with the big boys. One of those athletes was his boyhood hero, the sprinter Harvey Glance, past his prime but a key man on relays.

As it happened, Glance was Babers’ roommate at a small, “B” circuit meet abroad that season. Over dinner one night, Babers stunned Glance and the other athletes. He pulled out the sliver of paper with Glance’s autograph from the 1976 Alabama state meet. 

As Babers worked his way toward the 1984 Olympics, the artifact continued to be a talisman. #

The journalist and author Marc Bloom, whose career spans 60 years, contributes historical stories. His books include “God on the Starting Line,” about his experience coaching a Catholic school, and “Amazing Racers,” about the Fayetteville-Manlius cross-country dynasty. In 2022, Marc was inducted into the Van Cortlandt Park Cross-Country Hall of Fame.