I have been reminded several times over the last couple of weeks that 1979 was a long time ago. The first reminder is a reunion event that I plan on attending in Syracuse, NY – my hometown. The cross-country running teams of two of the Syracuse high schools – Nottingham and Corcoran – are getting together for some weekend events at the end of July.
I was 15 years old when I started my varsity cross-country running “career”. I’m 60 now – you do the math.
“This is it?”
“Well, you know what the doctor said. At your age.”
“At my age. What the hell do you mean at my age… god damn see through coffee.”
The story of how I became a runner in the first place is not the point of this post, but the brief history is…
I moved (back) to Syracuse in 1977, after living in Seneca Falls, NY for three years. I was born in Syracuse and raised in the suburban village of Jamesville, NY, and lived there until 1974. My dad was a Methodist minister, so it wasn’t uncommon to move around a bit.
As a kid I loved baseball (and hockey, and football, and basketball…). Baseball was a sport I could play. Being smallish, baseball was the sport I could excel at as a kid. I played little league in Jamesville and Seneca Falls, and when I moved back to Syracuse the plan was to play baseball in high school. My algebra teacher suggested I run cross-country in the fall to “get in shape” for baseball in the spring. That was the beginning. You can probably guess that I never had that baseball career in high school (I was also intimidated by the size of inner-city gentleman playing the game). Running could be done by athletes of any size.
So from cross-country in the fall to track & field (not baseball) in the spring, and after a year in Syracuse, I was REALLY into running. Runner’s World was my go to magazine. I had a pretty good freshman year on the Nottingham track team, setting the freshman record for the mile (4:46). My sophomore year of high school, 1979, I made the varsity cross-country team, and that is the basis for participating in the upcoming reunion. I’ll talk more about the reunion I’m sure, but for now let in be known that 1979 serves as the pinnacle of my running career, and after that season, things changed.
“I’m gonna have this out with him now…”
“…What’s the matter?”
“He’s shaving…”
“…Well? So what?”
“…His legs. He’s shaving his legs.”
I had always loved riding my bike. When I lived in Seneca Falls, I had friend who enjoyed riding, like me. We even planned (or more like fantasized) taking a bike trip around Cayuga Lake, an 80+ mile odyssey. Seneca Falls was also the place where I had a bike accident, fell literally on my face, and luckily because of the braces on my teeth, only wound up chipping a tooth. It was a nasty, stupid, crash, but it did not deter me from riding obviously.
So why did I lose interest in running and begin my passion for cycling? Well, it wasn’t any one reason.
In 1978, Syracuse was the center of amateur sports in New York State for one big reason – the newly established Empire State Games. It was an “Olympics style” event consisting of regions of the state competing over 4 days, complete with opening and closing ceremonies. Up to the 1979 version I was following the running events, but I was also interested in the cycling competition. I had designs of possibly being a triathlete as I was that into the “endurance sports”. It was 1980 when I started to lose interest in running track and enjoyed riding my bike in the spring more. And that was when, while riding my bike, I saw some gentleman with tight wool shorts riding really fast. I lived in the Syracuse University area and that seemed to be the Mecca of competitive riders. They were training for the ESG, something that I hoped to maybe do one day.
I was reading Bicycling Magazine. I had just begun reading books about bicycle maintenance, something that I used to love to do. I was hearing more about this huge 3-week race in France. But it was probably this cover on the August (my birth month) 1979 issue of Bicycling that set me off.
“New Bike Racing Movie”
Breaking Away! A movie combining my love of cycling with a love of film. I didn’t completely get the reference at first, but as I came to experience first-hand bike racing in the late 70’s and early 80’s, a “breakaway” was a significantly important part of racing tactics. It serves as a metaphor (for me at least) for so much of life.
The day I went riding with those SU cyclists for the first time, it was like that scene in the movie where Dave races with his heroes from the Italian Cinzano team, who turn out to be the opposite. In my case the cyclists were mentors. Good people. Smoked a little weed. Friendly. Funny. I wanted to learn everything about the sport and they were my local heroes.
A funny story is that after the Empire State Games in 1980 (which I still wasn’t able to participate in because there was no “scholastic” division like in other ESG events), I went to a party at their campus house, just two blocks from where the brand new Carrier Dome was built. I proceeded to have my first beers (yes, multiple) and well…
I had to tell my parents that I went to a party and “fell asleep”. Plausible because to my Mom and Dad I was always a good napper (haha). I was a good kid, but I didn’t avoid the effects of a few Budweisers. My new cycling friends didn’t give me any abuse. They let me sleep, and gave me a ride home (after getting sick of course). They were people I could trust.
Yes, I did start to shave my legs as well. I can tell you why if you’re interested, but I will say once and for all, it wasn’t because of aerodynamics.
If you ask me at any given time what my favorite movies are, #1 and #2 are Breaking Away and The Shining, which came out a less than a year apart. Thanks to Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith and their Family Pictures Podcast (a brilliant idea BTW), Breaking Away was thrust back into the spotlight for me to revel in once again.
Breaking Away is one of those movies that has the quotable lines, like a Caddyshack, or an Animal House, or especially The Shining. It is also a sweet movie that will still bring a tear to my eye (though I am more emotional – at MY age). However, its title is what resonates and makes the film great. It’s literal in the sense of the scene, again, where Dave breaks away from the pack with the Italians. Sure there is a general Rocky-esque plot that is the simple description of the movie (and one that many critics pointed out). Like a bike race, however, there is the constant dilemma of whether to, or when to, break away from the pack. There’s the relative safety of the “peloton” (the main group of a bike race), but also the chance to win solo in a break away, without the benefit of drafting other riders.
The four high school friends have been together for years. Their fathers worked in the local limestone quarries together, but that time has passed, with little employment available as a “cutter”. The friends are thinking about their next steps in life, and there’s that tension of breaking from the bonds of friendship. The four friends have their own versions of breakaways in the making and with that the fear of life changing in profound ways.
Dave’s mother and father are in a tension of their own with their son who has found a passion so great that he almost becomes another person.
“It’s that cologne he wears.”
“It’s called Neapolitan Sunset.”
“Well, the flies seem to like it.”
…
“Look what’s happened to him. He’s turned into an EYE-talian. ‘Ciao Mama’, ‘Ciao Papa’. That’s EYE-tee talk.”
The father is also simultaneously worried about whether his son will ever go out and find a job, but also struggling with his son’s possible future college plans.
There are an incredible number of layers to this film that deal with family and friendships as they relate to small-town life and economic downturns. The bikes, and the cars, and the jobs compared to 1979 may have become more modern, but the issues of the everyday are all too familiar in Breaking Away.
“How ya doin’ guys?”
“Well, we’re a little disturbed by the developments in the Middle East, but other than that…”
It isn’t until late in the film that a series of events pushes Dave to confront who he really is. At least he is no longer “sickly”, as his mother described him “before riding that bike.” He does show signs of the real Dave after his encounter with the Italian racers. However, it becomes apparent that cycling has provided him with a way to avoid what needs to be confronted. Subsequent events dramatically show him that “everybody cheats”. Not only the Italian team, but his father, and even Dave himself (he is pretending to be an Italian exchange student with a college-girl love interest).
“How do you feel, Dad?”
“Dad? Well I’ll tell you how I’m feeling son. I had nightmares all night that everybody who I ever sold a car to came in to ask for a refund. And you were there handin’ out the checks. One for you and one for you and…”
“I’m sorry I gave him back his money. I really am. Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know.”
“Well now you know.”
If ever there was a middle-age father character with more great lines than Paul Dooley as Ray Stohler, I don’t know of one. The scene of him comforting his son while tears well up in his wife’s (Barbara Barrie) eyes is so pitch perfect and so laugh out loud funny. However, the scene is an important one as it is the beginning of the coming together of this particular family, and NOT the breaking away, and the strategy of the mother all along is to bring the small (but growing!) family together. “Like the Italians.”
I fear I’m getting close to summarizing the whole movie, which isn’t necessarily a good way to review a film. Something my Film Criticism professor taught me while I was at SU. The film culminates in the final race at the Little 500, a bike race in the vein of the Indianapolis 500 on the Bloomington Indiana campus (back when they had a cinder track – again something that I can relate to from my running track days).
The only thing I’ll say about the race is the technical challenges of filming the race were enormous back in that era. Trying to get a camera placed on a bicycle back in the days before GoPros was not easy. And that brings me to the final thing to say about the filmmakers. Peter Yates directed it, he of the infamous car chase scene in the movie “Bullit”. Hence, why not go for directing a film involving an unconventional bike race scene. And then there’s Steve Tesich, the writer who based the film’s main character on a fellow Little 500 teammate from 1962. The legend of Dave Blase has earned a Wikipedia page.
“You said you were going to give them a pep talk.”
“They don’t need pep. I need pep.”
In 1979, Breaking Away was current events for me. I knew about the film BEFORE it was released and everything I heard about it sounded like it could be great, and it was. Unlike American Flyers in 1985, which seemed to have similar aspects going for it including Tesich writing the screenplay, but it was a bit of a dud. American Flyers was featured in a Siskel & Ebert special called “They’ll Do It Every Time” in the category of “The Hero Stumbles”: And no, he can’t do that.
The scene in Breaking Away with the drafting of the semi does have a continuity error. Well actually several that can’t really be helped because Dennis Christopher isn’t actually doing the fast riding in the race scenes. One in particular is the “small chain ring error” – there’s no way any rider could spin at the RPMs needed to go close to 60mph in the smaller of the two chain rings on the crank arm where the pedals are attached. Another thing I’ll mention about the popularity of the film is that It did spawn a brief run of a TV series starring Shaun Cassidy, and it included Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and John Ashton (who played Dennis Quaid’s cop brother).
The last thing I’ll say in this post is that I had a blast being reminded not only of this film, but the story behind it. Some of my memories were vague on a few points, but then I found this Bike Forums article. Wow! Not only that magazine cover that I remember so vividly, but also where I heard the word “stronzo” for the first time (Italian for “turd”). I had no idea, and certainly no expectation, that this article was somewhere on the Internet. But it’s THE INTERNET, and it’s still wondrous!
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