I've been mulling this for awhile. I keep remembering a stupid episode from Happy Days, where the inerrant Fonzie feels he must apologize. "I was wrrrr..." he says. "I'm wrooo.... I must say that what I did was wrrrrroo."

One thing about publicly reversing my course: Sometimes I've felt foolish afterward, because I was magnanimous in vain. I decided somebody I previously thought was a poop now deserved my praise and admiration, which I gave. Then such person backslid.

I'm not here to judge. I myself am a poop. I have no blind-spot. I know I'm a jerk. Scratch that. Make it egotistical jerk. I accept and embrace this fact. I am unfit, therefore, to rate people on personal godliness.

I'll just say that certain people with whom I might have had occasion to have words have lately impressed me -- or at least I've come to appreciate and recognize things they've done with their life and work that deserves praise. So I'm starting a series, and I don't know how many chapters will be contained herein. But I'll be adding a chapter every day until I'm done. Below are chapters I know I'm going to write, starting today. I may add to the list, but I won't subtract from it. (If you feel I've left you out, please email me):

Jack Caress
Sharron Ackles
Graham Fraser
WTC
Les McD
Murphy Reinshcreiber
David Yates
Mark Sisson
Gerard Vroomen
Steve Locke
Jim Curl and Mike Plant

Jack Caress (PUBLIC APOLOGY #1: PUBLISHED 4.21.00)

I was literally sitting down, preparing to cut loose on race promoters who announce big-time races, get everybody's hopes up, without the hint of a sponsor, only to have the race fall flat and get cancelled-- and here I get this press release from Pacific Sports announcing a major sponsor for the Los Angeles Triathlon.

This took the air out of my sails, because I've had my run-ins with this man, and there have been times when I thought my favorite spectator sport would be viewing the demise of his company. But I'm conflicted about this because -- a little known fact -- when he was a retailer Jack Caress was the first person to believe in QR and take a chance on this new wetsuit company; and, I genuinely, personally, like this guy. He is an absolute delight, on a personal level: witty, charming, fun, amiable, self-deprecating, a great guy with which to spend an evening.

But doggone it I had mounted my dais; the Good Book opened to Leviticus; the staff of righteousness in my left hand (being in my forties, eyesight not what it once was, my right finger was occupied keeping my place in the Good Book); anyway, I was just preparing to speak on the subject of God's Laws for Announcing Triathlons; and then I get this press release. Shit.

To complete this degrading picture, I had earlier announced my own involvement in the USTS Oceanside, a race I founded and ran for three years prior to my departure from QR, only to subsequently announce two months later that I would after-all NOT be participating in the promotion of this race.

So there you have it. Perhaps I was wrrrroo. I think I might have been wrrrro. Oh hell with it.


Sharron Ackles (PUBLIC APOLOGY #2: PUBLISHED 4.25.00)

This woman isn't very happy with me right now. She sits on the board of directors of USA Triathlon, and I've been a virus to the board lately—nothing fatal, but enough to make them itchy. Most of the board would like to rub a little cortisone cream on me and hope I shrivel up and recede. (I may go into remission; I haven't decided yet).

In any case, I'm not apologizing for that. I can't figure out why our board needs to be so secretive, and the reason it needs to operate that way is also a secret. And since they won't tell me the secret of why what they do in secret needs to stay secret, I remain an irritant.

But, there is this other thing I've got to say. Everybody talks about Dave McGillivray and Rob Vigorito and Jan Caille when it comes to big-time race directors, and rightly so. But people seem to take for granted the biggest, baddest, bestest race on the planet, and they figure this thing puts itself on. But it doesn't. Sharron Ackles puts on the Hawaiian Ironman, and she has for quite a few years.

That race starts on this part of town and goes to that part of the island and the bike finishes over there and they run somewhere else and let me tell you, that's a tough way to produce a race. But it gets produced. Every year. Without a hitch.

When I was in high school, we had a track and field invitational. Eighty-one schools. It started at 11 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. On the dot. Fifteen hundred athletes, and it produced the best times in the nation every year. Big race. School buses everywhere. Eighty-one school buses. Where do you put them? Our coach put on that race, every year, without a hitch. I guarantee you've never heard of Paul Wood from Huntington Beach High School, and they don't put on Southern Counties any more. But he was one of the best race directors I've ever had the privilege to witness.

Sharron Ackles is like that. She—along with her hard-working husband, Joe—runs that race with a smile on her face and a kind word for everyone. Never gets rattled. She is grace personified on that day. Just like Valerie Silk was during the years she built the Ironman.

I guess I just want Sharron to know that although that race has had its ups and downs since I first went over to that island to do it in 1981, it has never had a "down" on her watch. And I've noticed that.


Graham Fraser (PUBLIC APOLOGY #3: PUBLISHED 4.25.00)

This one is going to be tough. I really don't like this guy's style much of the time. I don't like the way he approaches the whole pro-athlete thing. Sometimes I get the feeling he doesn't fully appreciate his customers, you, the people who buy the entry fees.

But I've got to come clean on some things about Graham Fraser. A good two-thirds of the heartburn I feel about this guy is just plain garden-variety envy. I tried to get the North American license to the Ironman from him about two years ago. Not only did he keep it, he thrived with it. He has delivered four races where there was just one, filled them all, and built four race organizations around the country. He did a better job with this license than I would have done. And I only think it's proper that, when I take him to task for one thing or another—which I fully intend to do from time to time—I must also acknowledge that he has done a masterful job of giving people exactly what they want: the chance to do a real-live, bona fide Ironman, and a well-produced one at that.

Well done, Graham.


WTC (PUBLIC APOLOGY #4: PUBLISHED 4.25.00)

I thought the sky was falling when Valerie Silk sold the Ironman in 1989. The sky not only did not fall, it got raised a little higher, I think. I further predicted the worst when it seemed that an Ironman was going to be on every block. Brand Fatigue in two years, I predicted. To that I have this to say: Do not listen to stock tips from me.

I was wroo. I may have been wrrrrooo. I was mistaken.

Pain in the arse though I might be to the ITU folks at times, I do believe we are all on the same side in this, and I want them to know that. I will not shrink from telling them when I think they've stepped in it, and I think they know that about me and about anybody else writing for this publication. But all that is against the backdrop of my gratitude for the husbanding of this race, this property, and the feeling one gets when he or she runs down Alii Drive, realizing a moment that has been dreamt about for years.

Here! Here!


Les McDonald (PUBLIC APOLIGY #5: PUBLISHED 4.25.00)

I hope, for the sake of triathlon, that he loses his election tomorrow. And if he does, he should be immediately elected into the Triathlon Hall of Fame, even if it is in San Diego and even if it seems nobody can get into it unless they race for at least eight hours.

Actually, Les has raced long. Hard to believe, but he was an Ironman athlete way back in another life. He's kind of like Darth Vader. There was a time when he was a Jedi knight. It’s just that nobody was alive back then to remember, it was so long ago.

Lately, nobody has been more of a pain to him than I have, and to tell you the truth, he's deserved every bit of it and more. But sometimes I think of him up there under the northern lights, alone, working from 6 a.m. 'til 8 or 9 p.m. seven days a week, with the world flushing a toilet on his head daily and twice on Sunday, and I marvel at the way he's moved heaven and earth to give our sport a start at the Olympic Games. That's an amazing accomplishment when everybody loves you. It's staggering to contemplate when most of the world hates you.

Les will be in heaven. And on the assumption that I get up there, I'm going to give him a slap on the back (whether he likes it or not). As I recently stated somewhere, I liken Les to Winston Churchill. The English unceremoniously tossed him on his can as prime minister about thirty minutes after VE Day. Doesn't seem cricket to me. But perhaps in their wisdom the English realized that different men are needed for different times. Perhaps Churchill felt betrayed and unappreciated after his defeat. But history has been more than kind to him.

And whatever happens to Les in this election, history will be kind to him as well. (And although I truly believe all these nice things I'm saying, I still hope he loses).


Murphy Reinschreiber (PUBLIC APOLOGY #6: PUBLISHED 5.10.00)

Here's a guy that was Hatfield to my McCoy for almost twenty years. Then I woke up one day and realized that we both'd been through three generations of tri-hacks, all of them come and gone, and we were two of the original few left standing. Like if Dewey and Truman were both a hundred-and-thirty years and still alive, you'd figure they'd be getting along right now. Who else would there be to talk to about the old days?

So we're sort of friends now. By default. Everybody else from the old days is dead, for all we know.

And what was it he did that pissed me off originally? I can't exactly put my finger on it. And vice-versa, I expect. So we both shrugged one day and that was it.

Murphy is the agent to the stars. There are three categories, those who have Murphy as an agent, those who are going to have Murphy as their agent, and the rest, who Murphy would, in all likelihood, not want to represent anyway. He's tough, ornery, cantankerous, maddening, sometimes downright unfair, tenacious, and a poor loser. Maybe that's why we get along now-- we're so much alike.


David Yates (PUBLIC APOLOGY #7: PUBLISHED 5.10.00)

David used to run World Triathlon Corporation (owners of the Ironman), and did so for pretty much the entire decade of the '90s.

I never realized how good I had it. I used to give this guy fits. Shouting matches right out there in the transition area, the night before the Ironman. In the rain.

One thing about a guy with principles, he's the most dangerous kind, because he truly believes he's doing the RIGHT thing, not just the profitable thing. I know this because I might have been known, once or twice, to wax virtuous. People like that are unpredictable. It always seemed to worry people when I was in that mode.

Anyway, David sometimes used to be like that. It made him do things like demand a $50,000 minimum pro prize purse for Ironman-licensed races, and to fight for the right of athletes who were being pushed around by their federations.

Imagine that.


Mark Sisson (PUBLIC APOLOGY #8: PUBLISHED 5.10.00)

I've actually never done anything to Mark Sisson. But others have. Some of it he has deserved, I think, because he has not, perhaps, more forcefully stood for the cause of "right" when the ITU has behaved the way only sport governing bodies and other small-time puppet dictatorships seem capable of behaving. (Mark is the ITU's Secretary General, and has been Les McDonald's right-hand-man from the beginning.)

But Mark is a Big Picture guy. He doesn't sweat the details. He sees the world the way it could be in ten or twenty years and he works toward that end. If a few untidy or distasteful things happen along the way, that's business.

We usually don't like that style of governance. But nobody complains when, in ten or twenty years, the future unfolds the way such men of vision have predicted -- even if some of the execution of the vision sometimes leaves something to be desired.


Gerard Vroomen (PUBLIC APOLOGY #8: PUBLISHED 5.10.00)

If Gerard ever had a public relations problem, it was probably because I did my best to make it happen. Gerard is part-owner and front-man for Cervelo. This is a scary company if you're in the tri-bike business, because these guys know what they're doing, and they don't make many mistakes.

Their bikes are very, very good. And if I ever gave them a hard time, it only mostly because it made proprietary sense for me to do so (we've all got to feed our families, and if somebody's family has to starve, it sure isn't going to be mine).

Now, of course, I can say with comfort that Gerard has always made fine bikes, and if I could have any bike I wanted for triathlon I'd as likely buy one of his as one of anybody else's. But more than that, Cervelo's principals have kept alive the notion that triathlon ought to be a high-tech sport with high-tech equipment. Some of that envelope-pushing has fallen by the wayside in the last decade. But Gerard is out there pushing it anyway, and I honor him for that.


Steve Locke (PUBLIC APOLOGY #9: PUBLISHED 6.7.00)

This is another one of my fake apologies, which is to say I never really did anything to this fellow I feel I need to apologize about, but there is an element of credit and honor I feel compelled to bestow upon him nonetheless, which I will do forthwith.

I would not want Steve Locke's job. You are not going to be given very much credit regardless of what you accomplish in the position of executive director of USA Triathlon. Plus, hey, it's government, so what do you expect? Worse yet, here we are (Americans, I'm talking about), a people who do not exactly like a lot others standing over us watching our every move and saying "No," when we fail to color between the lines. Double-worse yet, USAT's sole purpose is to govern an entirely ungovernable group of people. Triathletes are the activist right-wing of libertarianism. If we wanted to be told what to do we'd have joined some sport where refs get on your case when you're playing, and your coach is on your case when you're sitting.

Through it all, though, I have never seen Steve Locke lose his temper, never heard him raise his voice. He is absolutely unflappable. And I ought to know. I've tried to flap him many times.


Jim Curl and Mike Plant (PUBLIC APOLOGY #10: PUBLISHED 6.7.00)

This is a genuine apology. These two guys are—might I say in the way of introduction—very picky about how they go about their business. This gets on people's nerves. They are not universally liked. But that is the sort of mindset required to do well what they do so very well.

Most of you don't know this because you haven't been in the sport long enough, but Jim Curl co-founded the United States Triathlon Series in 1981. This series was every bit as big, important and visible as the Hawaiian Ironman during the decade of the '80s. Mike Plant was closely involved in the Series back then as well, and on top of all that was probably the best journalist triathlon has ever had. I re-read race coverage articles he wrote in 1982 and must admit we have not seen their equal since, in pure journalistic talent.

Long story short: things happened; the Series folded after a decade.

In 1997, I asked Jim to come back and help me resuscitate it, which he did after much cajoling and arm-twisting. We put on our first "new" USTS race back then, and Mike Plant announced it. (Mike is also the best announcer triathlon has ever had.)

We had an eight-race series in 1998 and a 12-race circuit in 1999. We gave away something close to $200,000 in prize money in our last year and served age-group triathletes in 12 cities. We also breathed new life into a dying national race director conference, and that was ALL Jim and Mike. But things happened; the Series folded.

These two tried to buy the Series themselves, to keep it going. That sale was never consummated. I don't know if I would have been able to help, and what I could have done. But it took some distance for me to appreciate exactly how much value and talent these guys add to triathlon race production, and I will always, with great fondness, recall the work I did with them. There is absolutely nobody in the world who puts on a show like these two. I did not appreciate it at the time, but I do now, and I apologize to both of them that I did not recognize it sooner.