The greatness of track

There are two great stories in here.


The Coach who inspired women to become champions
99-year-old sports great saw potential when society said no
by Jo-Ann Barnas, Detroit Free Press
03/01/2009

He offers his left arm and escorts you down a flight of steps.

"Hold tight," he says. "It's slick out here."

Kenneth (Red) Simmons is 99 years old.

He reaches the passenger side of his gray Impala and opens the door, asking you not to mind the two cushions on the seat that he keeps for his wife, Lois.

He starts the car, turns up the heat and pulls out of the parking lot. He's only a few dozen yards from where -- 74 years ago -- he raked the long-jump pit on the day track-and-field legend Jesse Owens broke the world record at the 1935 Big Ten Championships at the University of Michigan's Ferry Field.

But this isn't a day for that kind of nostalgia.

For the last decade, Simmons has been heralded as U-M's oldest living former head coach. He became the Wolverines' first women's track and field coach in 1976, although his contributions to women's sports began 16 years earlier when he and his first wife, Betty, started a girls track club in Ann Arbor called the Michigammes.

It was a pioneering program that enabled women to dream as big as men and provided the catalyst to careers in such challenging fields as law, engineering and medicine.

"Back then, people said it wasn't ladylike to sweat," Simmons said. "We just said, 'Let's give women an opportunity to compete.'

"We thought, when it comes down to it, life isn't just about what you do. It's about what you become."

There have been many high points in Simmons' life, but one of the most meaningful for women came in 1960, the year he and Betty Simmons went to Italy to attend the Rome Olympics.

By then, Red Simmons -- who had retired in 1959 after 25 years as a detective sergeant with the Detroit Police Department -- was working at U-M as a teaching fellow in the physical education department. Betty Simmons was a gym teacher at Slauson Junior High in Ann Arbor.

Except for sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals, the U.S. women's track and field team was a disappointment.

When they returned from their trip, they were determined to start a track and field team for girls with the idea of eventually creating their own elite athletes -- and Olympians, if they were lucky. They decided to call the club the Michigammes.

They hit a home run on their first try.

The Michigammes

"There she is -- this is the girl that made me a coach."

Red Simmons is beaming. It's a Wednesday morning, and Simmons is in a weight room at Crisler Arena about to begin his workout when Francie Kraker Goodridge walks in. They hug.

Today, Goodridge is recruitment coordinator for U-M's School of Music, Theatre & Dance. But 49 years ago, she was a lighting-fast eighth-grader who could beat all the girls -- and boys -- in running races at Slauson.

"Betty came home and said, 'I think we have our girl,' " Simmons said with a smile.

Goodridge was the Simmons' first Michigamme. And she remains their most famous.

Goodridge became the first native-born Michigan woman to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team (Mexico City in 1968 in the 800 meters; Munich in 1972 in the 1,500).

She remembers the early days well.

Starting a girls' track and field club certainly didn't come without its obstacles. Initially, Simmons said, Don Canham, then the Wolverines men's head track coach, was against the idea.

This was a decade before Congress in 1972 passed Title IX, the Education Amendment Act that banned sexual discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding to provide equal athletic opportunities for men and women.

"He eventually said, 'Just don't get in our way,' " Simmons said.

Goodridge said: "One of Red's major gifts is his personality. He can get a lot done in sensitive areas because he'd do it in a way that didn't ruffle feathers. He never lost his temper."

Red and Betty Simmons collected equipment for their team by retrieving spikes, old shirts and warm-ups that were discarded by the men's team. Goodridge recalled that her first pair of track spikes had been salvaged by Red Simmons from a dusty old box at Yost Field House.

"They were ancient: permanent spikes -- the length of three-quarter-inch nails," Goodridge said. "They were made of kangaroo leather. Light as feather, though; fit me like a glove."

Eventually, the Michigammes grew into one of the top amateur track and field teams in the country, producing seven national champions and 19 state champs.

Suddenly, girls whose junior high and high schools didn't have sports teams had a place to run and jump and throw -- thanks to Red and Betty Simmons, and other programs like theirs that began sprouting up across the metro area.

"It changed my life," said Karen McKeachie, 56, of Ann Arbor, who was a miler and ran cross-country with the Michigammes beginning in the late 1960s. "It got me into a sport that I could keep doing my whole life, and it was even kind of responsible for me to going into engineering. Running made it easier to be the person I wanted to be. It opened doors."

McKeachie later became a five-time national and four-time women's age-group world triathlon champion. She helped coach the Michigammes in 1974, when Simmons took a leave of absence to be with Betty Simmons, who was dying of cancer.

In 1976, at age 66, Red Simmons was hired as U-M's first women's track coach. Shortly thereafter, the Michigammes ceased as a club.

A campus fixture

How do you want to be remembered?

Simmons, who considers himself a centenarian in training, will turn 100 on Jan. 5, 2010.

He's sitting in a corner booth at Benny's Family Dining on South Industrial near the U-M campus in Ann Arbor.

It's just after 9:30 on a weekday morning, and Simmons is looking dapper, as usual. He's wearing a white turtleneck under a blue U-M track sweater, khakis and brown shoes. The buckle on his belt was made from a medal he won running track at the 1930 Drake Relays.

He mentions that he owns a 1932 Penn Relays watch. It's still running.

"Wore it at Eastern yesterday," Simmons said, referring to Eastern Michigan University, his alma mater. He graduated from EMU -- then called Michigan State Normal College -- in 1933.

Simmons is a fixture at both campuses, attending athletic events with Lois, whom he married in 1975, the year after Betty Simmons died of cancer. They were married 42 years and had two children -- Marge, 71, and Larry, 70.

"It's been a continuous adventure being his son," Larry Simmons said. "It's a joy to go with him anywhere. Very seldom do I get to introduce him as my dad. Everybody always says, 'Oh, and that's Red's son.'

"His circle is much bigger than mine."

His early years

Known by his nickname, Red Simmons was one of the state's top hurdlers and sprinters at Redford High. Newspaper headlines in the 1920s dubbed him the Crimson Flash. Simmons also was an all-city halfback and captain of the football team.

"Life was a little different in those days," said Simmons, whose sunset-colored hair of his youth now is thinned and faded to a strawberry blond. "I started at Beech Road School -- first through eighth grade in one room. A wood furnace, two outhouses -- one for the boys, one for girls -- and kerosene lamps on the walls."

Simmons, who was born in Cleveland, was a track star, wrestler and boxer at EMU.

He once was asked to be a running partner for an amateur boxer, a teenager he came to know as Joe Barrow. For seven weeks -- Simmons believes it was around 1930 -- the two ran side-by-side in the mornings on the streets of Detroit.

Barrow was Joe Louis.

In 1932, Simmons competed in the U.S. Olympic trials in track. He also ran in track meets in summer AAU meets. Often the field included Owens. Simmons said he never beat him.

The two weren't strangers that historic day in 1935 at Ferry Field. Owens, then a star at Ohio State University, broke three world records and tied another in a two-hour span -- considered one of the greatest one-day sports achievements in history.

Simmons was asked to work the event. At the time, he was a Detroit police officer -- and the department's star athlete in field-day competitions held across the Midwest and Canada.

A year later, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Owens would destroy German Chancellor Adolf Hitler's idea of Aryan superiority by winning four gold medals.

In 1972, Owens gave Simmons a plaque. Owens wrote: "Hi Red. My best to an old friend and foe."

Simmons won the AAU high-hurdle championship at age 36 in 1946 and competed for the police department until 1951. He still works out five days a week and said he thinks his athleticism came from his parents, particularly his mother.

His father, Herbert Simmons, was a lumberjack-turned-barber who liked to work up a sweat as a sparring partner at local boxing gyms. Red Simmons' mother, Margaret, was never shy showing off her sporting ability around her children.

Simmons recalled how she'd hike up her skirt and challenge him to footraces in the field near their home.

"Boy, she could run," Simmons said. "My first wife, Betty, she was a fine athlete, too. But like my mother, she never really got to compete. It wasn't accepted for girls to be athletic back then. They were born in a time when women just didn't do those things."

'Live your life'

All these years later, his legacy endures.

"Red Simmons was a multiculturalist even before it was a word," said Marcia Karwas, 54, who competed for the Michigammes in the mid-1970s. "He understood the value of being a human being."

Simmons said: "I had athletes then -- and many of them still are. But now they're also lawyers, doctors, professors -- anything they want to be."

Another Michigamme reunion is in the works; the team last came together four years ago. But this one will be to celebrate another milestone: Simmons' 100th birthday.

"No one knows how long you're going to live," Simmons said. "So live your life."