Staring Down the Dream
One thing I know for sure: you’re never too old to learn new life lessons. I always tell my athletes prior to big races, don’t back down from the moment. Sometimes when we’re so close to what we’ve always wanted that we can almost taste it, that’s when fear can be at its most intense. We look for reasons to avoid the moment. We create narrative in our minds as to why today is not the day, why now is not the time. And when we fulfill that dream that we have been striving to attain, we walk away in frustration and disappointment. But deep down we feel a sense of relief – it is the relief that comes with maintaining the status quo. It can be very, very difficult to break through that mental barrier, to enter the zone where there is no fear, and you stand naked before the moment, ready to face whatever the moment may bring.
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Recently I re-learned this lesson in my own way, and I want to share this story with you. It has to do with the biography I wrote on 1972 Olympic high hurdle champion Rodney Milburn. Earlier this month, I found a publisher for the book, and it was a long and winding road to get to this point. For those of you who don’t know, I began doing research for the book back in 2006, and finished writing a complete draft of it by the summer of 2010. I spent two years searching for a publisher, and though I had several near-misses, I could not find a publisher to take on the project.
With my duties as a teacher and a coach, I just didn’t have the time or energy to keep chasing down this dream. So I eventually settled for posting the chapters of the book on my hurdlesfirst website. This was in 2014. I figured that was the end of it, and I had no plans of further pursuing publication.
Let me go ahead and provide a little background on Milburn and my motivation for taking on this project to begin with. Raised in the tiny town of Opelousas, LA, Milburn trained as a prep on a grass track that was maintained by his coach. The hurdles he ran over were wooden, made by the teacher and students of the school’s shop class. The house that he grew up in did not have any indoor plumbing or electricity. He and his brother had to chop wood to keep a fire going during the winter months.
From such humble beginnings, Milburn went on to become one of the greatest hurdlers who ever lived. He was truly the first of the “modern” hurdlers – the first to truly sprint between the hurdles. He dominated in 1971, going undefeated for the entire season. In 1972, he won Olympic gold, and also set a world record of 13.24 in the process. After joining an ill-fated professional tour in 1974, he lost his amateur status and was not allowed to defend his Olympic title in 1976. Even four years later, in 1980, he was ruled ineligible to compete at the Olympic Trials, even though it was already known that a team would not be sent to Moscow due to the boycott led by then-President Jimmy Carter.
In the sunset of his career in the early 1980’s, he competed against the likes of Renaldo Nehemiah, Greg Foster, and others. He was no longer at the top of the heap, but he remained competitive, and usually finished among the top ten in the world well into his thirties.
After retiring in the mid-80’s, Milburn went on to coach briefly at his alma mater of Southern University before being fired from that job when a new athletic director was hired a few years into his nascent career. Long story short, Milburn ended up working in a paper mill in Baton Rouge. In 1997, at the age of 47, he died in a horrific accident at the workplace. He fell into a vat of boiling chemicals while checking temperature gauges, and burned to death.
Reports that I read online afterward said that he had been penniless at the time of his death, and that, on the morning of his death, he had donated blood in order to make a little extra money. Upset that such an heroic figure in track history had met such an awful, untimely death, I was expecting to eventually hear that a book was going to be written about him, or a documentary would be filmed, or something. Milburn was too old for me to remember in his heyday, but he had been a hero to my heroes. He was one of the greatest hurdlers in history. Didn’t anybody care that he was dead?
Finally, in 2005, I decided that if no one else was going to write a book on this guy, I would do it my damn self. I began by calling the curator of a cultural museum in his hometown. The museum featured an exhibit on Milburn in which his Olympic uniform, spikes, and other items were stored. The lady who ran the museum promised to help me track down family members, and soon after informed me that the family was okay with me going forward with the project.
Over the next two years or so, I spent my time conducting interviews of people who knew Milburn – family members, former high school teammates and coaches, former opponents, other prominent track athletes from the 1970’s and 80’s who competed against him or during the same era, etc. I also spent plenty of time in the library digging up every article I could find with his name in it. I also got some help from masterstrack.com CEO Ken Stone, who dug up old issues of Track & Field News for me.
After two years of nothing but research, I began writing the book, and it took me another two years to complete the draft of the book. Of course, without my day-job duties, it wouldn’t have taken so long. But the book ended up being another full-time venture, really.
But I’m the kind of person who is repulsed by the business side of everything, admittedly to a fault. And once it became clear to me that finding a publisher would be another whole journey unto itself, I just cut my losses, put the book on my site, and moved on with my life.
Now we’re getting to the part of the story where fear of the moment comes into play – not the fear of the dream falling to pieces, but the fear of the dream coming true. Sounds crazy? Read on.
After posting the chapters on my website, I would occasionally receive emails from people who had known Milburn back in the day. Most of them just wanted to thank me for writing the story, but every now and then I’d receive a suggestion for ways to get the book published. I didn’t want to self-publish, because I’d been down that road before with other writings, and it’s a very costly one. Other ideas – like creating an audio book, or an electronic book, would be similarly time-consuming and potentially costly.
Honestly, emails with such suggestions were getting annoying. In my mind, I was done with the book. I had researched it, written it, posted it, and those who wanted to read it could read it. For free.
This past June I received an email from someone if I had tried contacting McFarland Publishing Company, which is located not too far from where I live in North Carolina. Ironically, however, I had never heard of them. I looked up their website, and saw that while they were mainly an academic publisher, they did publish books on African American topics, including biographies of athletes, particularly negro league baseball players.
I figured it was worth a shot. So I emailed them. Worst that could happen was what had always happened. A “Sorry, but we’re not taking on new authors” or something to that effect. By emailing them, even half-heartedly, I could say that I had given it a shot, and the sure-to-come rejection email would save me from needing to follow through.
But I didn’t receive a rejection letter. Instead, one of their editors emailed me back expressing interest. Holy sugarloaf, I thought to myself, could this really happen? I sent her the first two chapters. She responded by asking where my endnotes were. I explained that I hadn’t done them yet. For those of you who don’t know, documenting all the source material for a lengthy project like a biography is a pain in the ass, and I wasn’t going to do it until I had to. She told me to document the first chapter so that she could see my documentation style. She added that if it looked well done, they would be interested in being my publisher and offering me a contract.
This was in July of this year. I dug up all my old Milburn file folders and found all of my source material. Though it would be very time-consuming, very tedious, it was do-able. I was one step away from my dream of becoming a published author finally coming true. I grabbed all the folders, spread them out on the bed, and began to get my documentation on.
When I asked the editor by when she wanted me to send her a documented chapter, she told me to take my time, that she wasn’t on any strict time schedule. “Take your time and be thorough,” she said.
Why did she tell me that? I don’t work well without deadlines. Tell me to take my time and I’ll take all the time in the world. After adding in the documentation for the first few pages one weekend, I decided to take a break.
That break ended up lasting two months. A new school year started up again, and the urgency of the writing project faded from my mind. The editor emailed me again in September, asking me if I was still working on the documentation, and I dishonestly assured her that I was. My files were collecting dust on my desk. But the email from her let me know that they hadn’t moved on from me. “I’ll get something to you real soon,” I emailed her.
Two months later, when Thanksgiving break came around, I still hadn’t sent her anything. As I sat in my room the Friday after Thanksgiving, I had an epiphany: I’m scared. That’s what I realized. That’s what I admitted. I’m scared. I’m scared that if I document the first chapter, send it to her, and she likes it, she’ll offer me a contract. Then I’ll have to document the entire book. Then my entire identity will shift. Being an English teacher and track coach is all I’ve ever known my entire adult life. To be an author – the thought terrified me. Even though it was what I had always wanted, it terrified me. When I was seven years old I began reading sports biographies for pleasure – Bill Bradley of the New York Knicks, Spencer Haywood of the Seattle Supersonics, O.J. Simpson of the Buffalo Bills, and of course The Doctor, Julius Erving, of the New York Nets and then the Philadelphia 76ers. And now here I was with a chance to come full circle – from being a reader of biographies to being the author of a biography. And the fear immobilized me.
Sitting in my room that day, I decided I wouldn’t be ruled by fear. I grabbed my Milburn files, opened the document with the first chapter in it, and went to work. When I finished the next morning, I sent the completed version to the editor. I was hoping I wasn’t too late; I was hoping she hadn’t given up on me, moved on from me. But if she had, I could perfectly understand. But at least I would be able to say that I followed through, no matter what happened.
She emailed me back a few days later saying that they were ready to offer me a contract. “We’ll just need your address and your full name as it appears on your tax forms,” she wrote. Well I about broke down and cried.
I just turned fifty years old this past September. You wouldn’t think that a fifty-year-old is still in the process of finding himself, of realizing his dreams. You would think that he’d already be settled into a life that he is comfortable with. And you’d be right. And that was the problem. I was comfortable with my life as an English teacher. Sure, I’d grown sick of grading papers, of dealing with teens’ emotional dramas, but it was a life that I was familiar with, and it was a setting in which I thrived, and was loved. I don’t know the life of an author. I don’t know the life of working with editors, of marketing a book. I know nothing of the business side of being a writer.
But I’m about to find out. My teacher life won’t end any time soon, if ever. Being published doesn’t equal being rich. Far from it. But that’s not even the point. The point is that dreams are meant to be realized. The point is that I didn’t back down from the moment.
The book will most likely be published sometime in the fall of 2018. I’ll keep you posted.
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