Author Description

"What magnificent, important work... I can clearly imagine you and me continuing our talk about the meanings and paradoxes of sporting effort, community and service, and me inviting you to train in Eugene after the '72 trials. Where I would have tried to shake you out of the provably erroneous assumption that four college years were all you were allowed for a career..." *Kenny Moore, two-time Olympic Marathoner, thirty-year veteran journalist with Sports Illustrated, screenwriter of "Without Limits," and author of "Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder" (2007). "JOCK: a memoir of the counterculture" is a coming-of-age story of a college athlete and an unexpurgated account of how the counterculture, war, politics, anti-authoritarianism, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll impacted the world of big-time college athletics in the late Sixties and early Seventies. A walk-on from faraway Seabrook, Texas arrives at Stanford University in the fall of '68 and unexpectedly blossoms into a distance running star. He encounters hippiedom in his freshman dorm and race and anti-war politics on campus; a right-wing Head Coach and U.S. Olympic team leader with a Paleolithic worldview; a Head Trainer who slaps his face because he objected to the freshman's anti-racist activism; and an Athletic Department P.R. Director who mocks him at a "booster" breakfast supposedly held in his honor. But the runner perseveres because of his passionate commitment to his sport, his school, some great teammates (including two future Olympians), an unassuming Assistant Coach, and a wild & crazy fraternity house full of recreational drug-using countercultural football heroes and Olympic swim stars. (The book names names and takes no prisoners.) He competes in cross-country and track against some of the greatest runners of the age, including Steve Prefontaine (the subject of two feature films in 1997 and 1998.) His Zelig-like encounters eventually take him ov