Speed Kings (28 page)

In three weeks of practice, Billy and his crew hadn't once broken the two-minute mark on the Mount Van Hoevenberg run. Homburger's course record stood at 1:52. If they couldn't get near that, there was no chance they would win gold. So Billy had an idea, a trick he had used back in St. Moritz. The four of them carried their sled out of the shed and set it up on four big wooden blocks underneath an awning. Billy and Clifford took their seats, and Eddie and Jay stood by the stationary sled. Billy flicked the switch on the stopwatch he was
holding, and shouted, “START!” Eddie and Jay sprinted on the spot, then leaped into their seats. Then Billy cried again: “Eyrie, LEFT!” All four of them leaned over to that side. “Whiteface, HARD RIGHT!” They threw themselves down flat on their backs whenever they entered the straights. “Cliffside, LEFT!” They threw themselves forward again, bobbing back and forth as they came into the corners. “Shady, HARD LEFT!” They rocked from side to side as Billy called the turns. “Zig LEFT! Zag RIGHT! . . . FINISH!” He stopped the clock. Two minutes. Not good enough. So they began again. They practiced. And practiced. Until the clock stopped at 1:51. And then they kept practicing.

The four of them broke up after noon. Jay went into town to take in a hockey game with his wife, Dolly, and Jimmy Walker. He asked Billy if he wanted to come, but Billy still had some work to attend to. He had hired a tractor driver, and the two of them loaded the sled up on a trailer and drove it through the snow to the Ames garage over on Saranac Avenue. He had told Walt Morrison, the garage mechanic, to expect him. The three men unloaded the sled, hauled it into the workshop, and set to it. “All I want is more speed,” Billy told Walt. He had learned from watching the Fram III in action. He decided to insert a series of wedges into the joinery around the runners, to make them curve upward like those on the German sled. Then he and Walt carved a series of notches into the sections of the runners that would be in contact with the track, the better to grip the ice. By the time they were done, it was dark out. Billy, exhausted, went back to his room to think things through.

As for Eddie and Clifford, they had a little business of their own to deal with. Ever since he had been in Lake Placid, Clifford had been going by his nickname, Tippy. But his cover had been blown. Damon Runyon had revealed—in what he described, tongue in cheek, as an “exclusive exposé”—that Tippy Gray, “the solid meat of Jay O'Brien's American bobsled bunch,” had enjoyed “a former career as a movie juvenile” but was “trying to keep his past buried.” So Eddie, who knew Runyon from way back in his days on the Colorado boxing beat, popped round to the journalist's quarters to put him straight.

“Damon,” Eddie said, “I'd like to take you for a ride.”

“A ride?” Runyon replied.

“On a bobsled.”

“Your correspondent scarcely believed his ears,” Runyon wrote the next day. “Now up to this moment, your correspondent had always esteemed Eagan as a kindly, open-faced youth, of many high-attainments. Your correspondent had followed with deep interest Eddie Eagan's career as an Oxford student and an
amateur light heavyweight champion, rejoicing in Eagan's many triumphs, for were we not from the same neck of the woods—fellow Coloradans, no less? Your correspondent had even watched with friendly orb, Eddie Eagan's progress in his new career as a bobber, though feeling somewhat regretful that Eagan had tired of existence at such an early age. Now the fellow stood revealed in his true character. For the first time your correspondent noted the murderous gleam in Eddie Eagan's hitherto innocent eye. Your correspondent observed the blood-thirsty set of Eagan's jaw. Your correspondent turned and took to his rubber heels, issuing such yelps of dismay that the citizens of this Adirondack village thought that one of the pooch teams in the dogsled derby was making a hot finish.”

The three of them made it up in the Cellar later that night. “Unless you are an ale hound there isn't much to do in Lake Placid at night,” Runyon wrote. “Except go to bed. And I must say the sleeping here is first class. I hear the same thing of the ale, which comes down from Canada.”

Runyon wasn't the only one who had been telling stories about the speakeasies. Someone slipped word to the local Prohibition Bureau. Five agents stopped by at the Cellar and took the owner, John Schatz, out for a walk in the night air. As Westbrook Pegler observed, Schatz “undoubtedly had an agreement permitting him to conduct his AC in return for certain considerations, and when these conditions were met he was allowed to continue his business.” Since the price of beer stayed fixed at one dollar a quart all evening, Pegler could only assume that those “considerations” hadn't been “too excessive.” Thirty minutes later, Schatz was back behind his bar and the bobsledders “were beating the tables with their ale glasses again.”

These were strange days for the Suicide Club. Their competition had been postponed for two days in a row now, while the storm swept through and the officials worried over the state of the track. The competitors were starting to suffer from both boredom and nerves. So they blew it out in the bar. They seemed to “train on ale,” wrote Pegler. Every night in the barroom of the Cellar Athletic Club “the bobbers of many nations would sit at adjoining tables,” drinking, bragging, singing. Werner Zahn was there, “hoisting strong Canadian beers and beating the time of robust German stein songs on the table top with his one good hand.” Zahn told anyone who would listen that it had been “a puff of snow” that caused him to crash. It hit him in the face and blinded him for an instant, “so I was a tenth of a second late when I started to come down.” A tenth of a second too late. That was all the margin of error the Mount Van
Hoevenberg run allowed. The other riders didn't buy it. Zahn, one told Pegler, “was game, but a bad driver, because he crashed too often.”

That was typical. The bobsledders were a band of brothers, bound tight by the risks they shared, and the sport they loved. But for all the camaraderie, there was also real rivalry between them. “The bobsledders,” remembered another local rider, Paul Dupree, “were a breed of cat that didn't usually have too much good to say about each other. They were always in combat over something.” They loved to bet. When Sonja Henie came in one night, just after she had won her second gold medal on the figure skating rink, they ran a contest to see who could sweet-talk her into accepting a drink. Not one of them managed to get by her parents, who had wisely decided to come along to act as chaperones.

That was nothing next to the screwball wager between the columnist Henry McLemore and Paul Stevens, the brother riding with Homburger and the Red Devils. Stevens, McLemore said, was “the maddest of the mad, mad Stevens boys.” He kept, no joke, a black bear as a pet. He had domesticated it when it was still a cub. He called it Tobias. Now, Paul's two brothers, Hubert and Curtis, were due to compete in the two-man bob competition for the United States. McLemore made the mistake of asking which of the brothers was the best bobber in the family. “I am,” Paul Stevens replied. In fact, he explained, he was planning to enter a team in the National Championship, which had, of course, been postponed until the Olympics were over. At which point . . . well, while offering no guarantees as to the veracity of his story, it's best, perhaps, simply to hand it over to McLemore himself. Bear in mind that the two men had been, as McLemore put it, “quaffing great beakers of orange juice in the club all evening.” This is how he told it:

“Well, who are you going to get to ride with you?” McLemore asked.

“My bear,” Stevens replied. “My great black bear, Tobias. I'll drive, and Tobias will ride along as brake ballast. I figure we'd win without any trouble. You know weight is what counts in a bobsled race, and me and Tobias will pack plenty. I weigh 250, I guess, and Tobias, despite his refusal to eat since he went into hibernation last December, figures to weigh in the neighborhood of 500.”

“Has Tobias got enough sense to work the brake?”

“Has Tobias got enough sense to brake? Listen, that bear is nine years old. He is simply overloaded with brains. He's been doing the heavy work around the house for four years now. And the only thing
he has broken is a piano he was moving. But even if he wasn't smart, he'd be quite all right as a brakeman. For, after all, who wants the brakes on when you're trying to get somewhere in a hurry? Besides, braking isn't safe; when you are traveling 75 or 80 miles an hour it's bad business to have somebody monkeying with the brakes.”

The tale grew in the telling. In later years, McLemore insisted that at dawn the next morning the two of them drove by Paul's house, picked up Tobias, and headed on out to Mount Van Hoevenberg.

“I stood at the finish line with a stop-watch. Paul shouted from the top and he and the bear took off. On the first turn, the bear fell off the back. And Paul kept zipping down the course in the bobsled, now without a brakeman. And the bear kept zipping along the course in quick pursuit, not in the bobsled, and howling all the way. At the finish I clocked Stevens at two tenths of a second under the world record. And the bear, missing a big patch of fur on his backside, tied the world record.”

Even Paul Stevens and his bear might have had a shot in the two-man competition, which finally started on Tuesday, February 9, five days after the opening ceremony. The snow was so thick that the run was slower than ever. The two-man course record stood at 2:03. Most teams clocked something in the range of two minutes and the high teens. Even the Stevens brothers were ten seconds back from their best time. The only man who got anywhere near the record was Reto Capadrutt, whom the
New York Times
reckoned to be the “most daring driver in the Olympics.” He took risks that caused “several uneasy moments,” but then, the
Times
added, he could afford to, since “the two-man bobs are much safer than the bobsleds, and recklessness is not penalized as greatly as in the four-man event, where even the slightest slip may mean serious injury and possible death.” Which was true. The boblets, as they were known, were smaller, slower, and safer. After the first two heats, Capadrutt had a combined time of 4:13.09, good enough for a four-second lead over the Stevens brothers. Billy Fiske's old pal Jack Heaton was way back in third.

The two-man teams returned to the mountain the next day. They each had two runs left. The four times would be combined, and whoever had the lowest would win gold. The Stevens brothers, Hubert and Curtis, had come up with a cunning plan. In the minutes before the race, they took a blowtorch to their runners, heated them till they were white-hot. Swept of snow, the course was already running fast. Capadrutt clocked his best time yet. But the Stevens
brothers, on their burning blades, were quicker still. They cut across the ice in 1:59.69, and on their last run in 1:57.68. This was a new course record, a new world speed record, and easily good enough for the gold. Capadrutt, two seconds back, took silver, and Heaton the bronze.

Godfrey Dewey was delighted. He had been proved right; the local riders were quicker than the crews from 1928. Heaton was almost fifteen seconds shy of the Stevenses' winning time. And it looked like it was going to work out that way in the four-man competition too. The track had been opened for practice again on the Wednesday, right after the boblet contest was over. The conditions were as good as they had been at any point in the last six weeks, and the riders, accustomed to the conditions, were quicker than ever. Hans Kilian, Germany's lead driver now that Zahn and Grau were out, had gotten his team down in 1:51.3. That was seven-tenths inside the Red Devils' track record. That time was then beaten by Billy Fiske and his crew, finely honed and freshly drilled. They finished in 1:48, four seconds inside the Red Devils' time—their best run yet. Records set in practice didn't go down in the books, only those made in competitions. But the bragging rights were worth plenty. Not that Billy got to keep them for long: the Red Devils set another unofficial course record, lowering it to 1:47.2. Billy had closed the gap, but not by enough. And he was fast running out of time. The final was just eighteen hours away, due to start at dawn the next day.

Every hotel in town was already full, but another 1,200 spectators had arrived that morning on a special express from Manhattan just to watch the finals of the four-man bobsledding. “For days now,” Neil wrote, “the bobsleds have been the lure that brought the incoming throngs into town.” And then the rains came. On the morning of the 11th, the streets of Lake Placid were awash. The ice columns on Main Street, festooned with evergreen sprigs and sparkling lights, dwindled and sagged, the ski jump turned into a water shoot, the skating oval a shallow pond, and the bob run was a river of meltwater. It rained right through Thursday, and all the while the bobsledders grew more anxious, and more impatient. They were almost out of time. Saturday the 13th was the ninth and final day of the Olympics. The closing ceremony was scheduled to start that evening. All that money, all that time, all that effort—it was starting to look as though it would all be for nothing. It was all the more frustrating because the bobsledders were convinced that if the temperature would only drop to the freezing point again, the course would be faster than ever. All that water would turn to ice, and there wouldn't be a lick of snow to slow it. Homburger told the
New York Times
that if the track froze again, he expected the sleds to cover the
run in 1:40—a full seven seconds up on the record he had set only a couple of days earlier. But the freeze didn't come. On Saturday morning, the run was just so much slush. The rain had stopped the night before but the weather remained mild. The Winter Olympics ended later that afternoon.

The ceremony was a simple affair. It took place right after the ice hockey final, a 2–2 tie between Canada and the United States settled, in the end, on the results the teams had achieved earlier in the tournament. The Canadians won. When they were done, they joined the other athletes in the outdoor arena, where the opening ceremony had been held. It was only then, at the very end, that the medals were given out. A podium had been erected in front of the main grandstand, and the winning athletes from each event were called forward, one by one, and presented with their medals while the flags were run up the poles and the band played the national anthems. Sonja Henie got a gold. So did Hubert and Curtis Stevens. Jack Heaton got his bronze. But there was no four-man bob champion.