The Making of A Hurdler’s Hurdler
by Steven McGill
Two months ago, in September of 2018, I became a published author for the first time. A few days after my 52nd birthday, A Hurdler’s Hurdler: The Life of Rodney Milburn, Olympic Champion, became available for sale from McFarland Publishing Company, based out of Western North Carolina. Thirteen years earlier I had started work on the biography of Milburn, the 1972 Olympic high hurdle champion in Munich, Germany, who died in 1997 at the age of 47 in a horrific industrial accident at his work place – a paper mill in rural Louisiana.
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When I first heard of the way in which Milburn died (he fell into a vat of scalding chemicals while checking the temperature gauges of the materials that were used to make the paper, and suffered first degree burns over his entire body), I began searching the internet for a biography or movie or documentary about him. I could find nothing. Just a Wikipedia page, photos, and obituary articles.
For an instant, the thought hit me, why don’t I write something? But as a full-time English teacher who also coached track in the afternoons, on the weekends, and throughout the summers, I couldn’t imagine how I’d be able to find the time to write a book.
Still, the thought lingered. I ran my own website, hurdlesfirst.com, where I wrote articles on various hurdling-related topics. Often I wrote profile pieces on collegiate and professional hurdlers, including all-time greats like three-time world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah, 1992 Olympic champion and world record holder Kevin Young, and 1995 World Championship gold medalist Kim Batten. Writing these profile pieces involved conducting a lengthy interview with the subject, gathering background research on his or her career via the internet, and then putting all the information together to compose an article that detailed the athlete’s career and provided insights on his or her unique gifts.
To write a biography, I noted, would be to simply write a longer profile piece. It would entail conducting a whole lot more interviews, doing a whole lot more internet research, doing a whole lot of primary source research, etc. From my undergrad and graduate school days, I knew what the microfiche grind was like. I knew how to turn a pile of information into an essay or story. One day while sitting in my office during one of my planning periods, I felt myself thinking, I can do this.
Part of the appeal of such a project lie in the fact that I had always loved to read biographies – sports biographies in particular. While it’s true that in my teen and collegiate years my love of reading led me to explore the works of authors and poets like J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (my all-time favorite novelist), my love of reading began with sports biographies. Before I reached adolescence, I remember reading biographies or autobiographies of sports stars like Spencer Haywood, Bill Bradley, Wilt Chamberlain, Hank Aaron, Dick Allen, Julius Erving, and many others.
Now before me lie an opportunity to take part in the dance, so to speak. An opportunity to touch the lives of readers in the manner that my writing heroes had moved me. An opportunity to write in the genre that initially sparked a lifelong love of reading. And to write about a hurdler, a legendary figure in the event to which I had come to dedicate my coaching life.
So I decided to give it a shot. The question was, where should I start? For a project of this sort, I would need to get family permission first. On the internet I found out that there was a museum in Milburn’s hometown of Opelousas, LA that had a display dedicated to him. I called the director of the museum, Sue Deville, explained to her what I was planning to do, and asked her if she could provide me with contact information of any of Milburn’s family members. Sue, who has since passed, was very accommodating, and expressed excitement regarding the project herself. She offered to contact family members herself – some of whom still lived in or near Opelousas – and that she’d get back to me with a yea or nay.
Two days later she called back saying Milburn’s brother Jimmy was very eager for a book to be written about Rodney, and that he wanted to meet me and get it started.
You’d think my reaction would’ve been “Let’s go!” But that wasn’t the case at all. I wasn’t expecting such a positive response so quickly. I was now committed to this project. I had people counting on me. A flood of thoughts about disruptions that this project would cause in my life came bubbling to the surface. I had grown accustomed to my routine of teaching during the day, coaching in the afternoons, writing the occasional website article, using Sundays to catch up on my grading, etc. What would happen to my routine? Would I have time to interview all the people I would need to interview? Would I even be able to find them all? If the interviews for the profile pieces lasted in the range of an hour, how many hours would I need to spend just conducting interviews alone, before I even got to the research part?
Suddenly this simple task seemed overwhelming.
But then I remembered a piece of advice that my high school track coach, Mr. Keeley, had told me before my first race. I was standing behind my starting blocks, staring at the lane of ten hurdles that I would have to step over on my way to the finish line. Terrified, I walked over to where he stood and said, “I don’t think I’m ready to run the 110’s today Coach.” The 65-year-old, gray-haired gentleman calmly took a puff on his cigar, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about all ten. clear the hurdle in front of you.”
I understood what he meant: make a huge task small by dividing it into parts. That’s what I did, and I made it through the race. That’s what I would need to do again in regards to this writing this book.
Sue Deville helped in a big way by organizing a day for me to fly down to Opelousas from my home in Raleigh, NC to dig through old newspapers, magazines, and yearbooks. She also invited family members, former teammates, former coaches, and anyone else who might’ve known Milburn to come by the museum while I was there so I could interview them. I conducted more than ten interviews that weekend, and also gathered a good amount of material that would help me piece together Milburn’s childhood and adolescence.
From there, I continued to track down and interview various people who had raced against him, competed during the same era, taught him in college, etc. Also, a biography is often a mini-history book, so I did plenty of research about the late 60’s through the early 80’s, particularly in regard to the track and field landscape, but also in regard to the social and political climates as they related to Milburn’s career. Because I was living in Raleigh, NC, I made several visits to the North Carolina State University library to find microfilmed articles that mentioned Milburn’s name. Finally, a friend came through in the clutch. Ken Stone, founder and webmaster of the masterstrack.com website, still owned back issues of Track & Field News dating back to the 1950s. Ken offered to dig through his back issues, find all the articles that mentioned Milburn, make copies of them, and send them to me. I cannot measure how much time he saved me.
It took me about a year to compile enough research material and interview material to begin writing the book. In organizing the chapters, I decided to go with a hurdle-related theme – 12 chapters, divided into a starting line, ten hurdles, and a finish line. The arch of the story would begin with his childhood, peak with his Olympic gold medal performance, and end with this tragic death. I had read plenty of biographies that got bogged down in the historical and family lineage details to the point where reading the book was a chore. I wanted this story to read more like a novel. I wanted it to have a rhythm that mimicked the quick tempo of a hurdle race.
For the next year, I wrote the first draft of the book during planning periods, faculty meetings, holidays, and summer breaks. I would keep my folders full of research and interview notes with me at all times.
Ken Stone, who in addition to his work on his website also worked for years at the San Diego Tribune as a writer and editor, offered to edit the early chapters for me for free, as he really wanted my project to succeed. Stone informed me that back in his collegiate years he had admired Milburn’s career and even had kept a poster of Milburn on his wall.
After I sent him a draft of the first chapter, he responded with enthusiasm, praising my writing style and stating that I did a great job of making the reader want to read more. But when I sent him a draft of the second chapter – in which I provided details on Milburn’s high school career, culminating with a huge victory against a rival from the big city of New Orleans – he sent it back to me with a truckload of editing suggestions.
My feelings were hurt. I’m not gonna lie. My ego was bruised. Like Ken, I too was webmaster, sole contributor, and sole editor of my own website. In graduate school back in 1994 I had written a novel for my master’s thesis. In 2001 I self-published a collection of stories, personal essays, and poems I had written. Because of all my website articles I was known as a voice, as an authority on the hurdles. And now this guy is sending me back my draft with more editing suggestions than I give my high school students?
But then I sat down and read his suggestions. With each one, I found myself thinking, oh okay, good point. By the time I reached the end, I had made a change based on every suggestions he had made. I realized that Ken was a wizard of an editor, and that I had been writing more like a college student working on a research paper than a biographer telling a story. I had done some serious labor gathering interview material, so I wanted to use all of it. But I realized that using all of it was making the story redundant. For example, I was quoting three people saying basically the exact same thing, when I only needed a quote from one of them. By the time I finished making the revisions, Chapter 2 had shrunk from 11,000 words to 8,000 words.
When I sent it to Ken again, he emailed me back saying, “Now the fun begins.” When I opened the attached document, I saw that he had given me a whole new series of editing suggestions. Trusting his guidance now, I followed his lead without question. He nit-picked every sentence, every phrase, every word. By the time I finished another revision, the chapter was only 6,000 words. When I reread it from beginning to end, I was amazed to find that nothing essential had been lost, and my writing voice had not been compromised in the least. This was a revelation for me. I had had no idea that I was being so wordy. I took the lesson to heart, and really focused on being succinct and to-the-point for the rest of the chapters.
By the summer of 2008 I had completed the book and was ready to begin the arduous task of seeking a publisher. I looked up the website of Nicholas Sparks (whom I knew personally from having coached his son in the hurdles for a few sessions), and followed the step by step process he posted there on how to get published.
To find a commercial publisher, I would first have to find an agent, as commercial publishers don’t deal with authors directly. I sent query letters to about twenty agents and received three responses, which, from what I’d been told, was a very high success rate. But of those three agents, I heard the same basic response: we like your writing style, we like your research, but who’s Rodney Milburn?
Silly me, I thought everybody knew Rodney Milburn. But I soon realized that not everybody’s life revolved around the hurdles like mine did.
These pleasant, thoughtful rejection letters left me feeling exasperated. If the one obstacle preventing me from getting published was the fact that my subject wasn’t “sexy” enough (to repeat the word one of the agents used), then I had run into a dead end. If the agents had dissed my writing style or my research then I could make the necessary changes and try again. But there was nothing I could do about Milburn not being more well-known to the general public. Why continue to contact more agents just to pile up more rejection letters. Such persistence has led to success among many professional writers, I know, but Steve didn’t have time for all that.
I looked into a few university presses, including that of LSU, but couldn’t generate any interest. So I just said the hell with it. I would continue my life as a teacher and coach and move on from the book. In 2012, because I didn’t want the book and all my work to disappear completely, I uploaded all the chapters to my website so that visitors to the site could read it for free.
Occasionally, I received emails from people who had known Milburn personally, or who had met him at some point, or who had competed during his era. In these correspondences they thanked me for writing the book and uploading the chapters; some told me stories explaining the context in which they had known him. A few asked if I was still seeking a publisher, or if I might seek to self-publish it as an e-book or audio book. Each time, I politely responded that I’d look into following up on their suggestions, but I never did.
Then, in the summer of 2016, I received an email asking me if I’d ever heard of McFarland Publishing Company. No I hadn’t, but I decided to go ahead and look into it, because what did I have to lose? In visiting their website, I saw that McFarland was an academic publisher based in the mountains of Western North Carolina. In looking through their catalogue, I saw that they published books on African American history in culture, they published biographies, and they published books on various sports-related topic. Seemed like a good fit.
I sent an email to the person listed as a chief editor, briefly explaining my project and attaching the first chapter. I knew that sending a portion of the book went against the rules that say you must write the query letter first. But I had nothing to lose. If they said no or ignored me altogether my life would roll on as it was.
To my surprise, the editor emailed me back the next day saying that she liked what she read and that she wanted to read more. Wanted to read more? That was the moment when I realized how negative my attitude had been. I had given up too soon on getting this book published. I had given up too soon on seeing my own project through to its completion.
I sent the second and third chapters. About a week or two later, after a group of editors had met to review my chapters, I received an email saying that they wanted to publish the book. They would just need me to add the endnotes and bibliography, and then they’d mail me a contract.
You’d think I’d’ve been ecstatic. And I guess I was. But even more so, I felt terrified, even though I wasn’t admitting so at the time. My dream of being a published author was staring me in the face, and I wasn’t ready for that.
So there I was, in the middle of the summer, with lots of time on my hands, dreading the thought of going to the downstairs closet, digging through storage boxes, and pulling out all my old Milburn files that I hadn’t accessed in over eight years. Dreading the thought of going back and adding in all the documentation that I hadn’t added in eight years ago.
I spent about three weeks doing nothing, telling myself that I didn’t care about the book anymore, that that ship had sailed. I resented the fact that the book was intruding upon my life, threatening the peaceful slow place of my summer months.
But finally I acknowledged that I was just scared. Scared that something I’d wanted to happen all my life was actually going to happen. To be a writer was one thing. Writers write, and I wrote all the time. But being an author was something altogether different. I think it’s true that when dreams are about to come true, we often hesitate before going forward. Marie Curie spent five years working as a governess before her sister said, Hey, come to Paris and begin your education. Instead of being joyous, Marie, who was still known as Manya at the time, found a laundry list of reasons not to move to Paris. Richard Wright, in his autobiography Black Boy, talks about how he hesitated a long time before finally taking the leap to move from the racially hostile environment of Mississippi to the potentially better life in the city of Chicago. Everybody hesitates, but those whose names we remember eventually take the leap. It was time for me to take the leap.
I dug out my old files and started adding the endnotes and bibliography. It was very tedious work that dominated most of the rest of my summer and leaked into the beginning of the new school year. But I got it done. After submitting these materials, I received a contract in the mail for me to sign. I was going to be a published author.
***
One day after finishing the endnotes, I was sitting in my bedroom thinking about my writing journey, trying to take in how far I had come. As a kindergartener my teacher had wanted to hold me back and have me repeat kindergarten because, she claimed, my reading levels were weak. My mom met with the teacher and asserted with gritted teeth, “You are not going to hold my son back.” She transferred me out of that school, and I began first grade at a private school a little further down the road. There, I had the best reading grade in the class. I did so well that my kindergarten teacher came to visit one day to see what my new teachers were doing differently.
Shortly after – by third grade – was when I began reading sports biographies. By ninth grade I read all of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. By the end of high school I had read all five of Dostoyevsky’s major novels – Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. I loved his books because they confronted life’s inherently tragic nature. Dostoyevsky’s characters were often ugly people and his books are filled with portrayals of the dark side of humanity. But always, always, a light appears. Always, we discover beauty and depth in these ugly, shallow characters. Always, we find glimmers of hope and glimpses of Truth amidst a mountain of lies and corruptions. Dostoyevsky struck me as a writer who wasn’t afraid, and I wanted to be like him. I wanted to write books that transformed lives the way his books had transformed mine.
In my senior year of high school I was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia – a rare, potentially fatal blood disease. I spent three weeks in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia receiving treatment. I had no reason to believe that I would survive, but, long story short, I did. I made a miraculously quick recovery. My experience in the hospital, where I was surrounded by kind, loving nurses and compassionate, caring doctors, had a hugely profound effect upon me. Among the many consequences, one was that it made me into a writer. About a week after returning home from the hospital, I began writing verses. I wouldn’t call them poems, but just verses, kind of like brief, four-line journal entries.
Fast forward three years later, when it was clear to me that any dreams I had of being a great hurdler were never going to come true, and was still feeling like a stranger in the world after having experienced the awakening brought on by the battle with my illness. I found myself giving up on college and the importance of formal education. I was attending an academically rigorous small school in Pennsylvania, and I no longer saw the point of trying. All of my peers seemed focused on studying hard and drinking hard. They all wanted to be big-time professionals but they were all very shallow when I tried to engage them in meaningful conversation. I wanted to talk about my hospital experience. I wanted to talk about life and death, why we’re all here, what our existence means. My friends wanted to drink beer and get laid. I didn’t fit in and I hated it.
So, in the second semester of my third year, I started missing classes pretty regularly. I would stay up late into the night meditating while listening to music. During the days I either stayed in my room or went to a quiet part of the library and I’d write poetry. Poems came pouring out of me. I don’t know how good they were, but it sure felt good to write them. These poems gave me a voice; they gave me an opportunity to let out the poisons that were killing me, and to let out my inner beauty that I had been keeping suppressed. I found that writing poetry made me feel that the world did not have so much control over my life, over my emotional world. My poems gave me validation from within that I couldn’t find from the world around me.
I dropped out after that semester, with zero intention of ever returning to any college to finish my degree work. I was done with school, done with this system that sucks the poetry out of life. But after two years of working an office job that provided no intellectual stimulation, I transferred my credits to another college and was able to earn a B.A. in English. Two years later I earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. For my Master’s Thesis, I wrote an autobiographical novel based on my illness and recovery from it. From there, having no desire to continue on as a student, I took a job teaching English and coaching track at a private school in North Carolina.
While I continued to write all the time, and did self-publish a book in 2001, I settled into the life of a teacher/coach. Despite some early struggles, I became very successful in both roles and developed very meaningful relationships with my students and athletes. I had no real intention of writing a book anymore, and I had no desire of chasing after a dream of being the next Dostoyevsky or Richard Wright. If Rodney Milburn hadn’t died in the horrific manner that he did, I probably wouldn’t have felt compelled to write a book at all.
***
This past summer I completed a final review of the manuscript, then added the index, and submitted both to be included in the final draft. This past September, as I said at the beginning of this essay, the biography of Rodney Milburn, by Steven McGill, was released by McFarland Publishing Company. A dream had come true, somewhat in spite of myself. But it seems to me that that’s true for all dreams. It seems to me that destiny find us, not vice versa. Dreams come true when we’re ready for them to.
Last month I visited Opelousas, LA for the third time. This time I wasn’t visiting to conduct research or to conduct interviews. This time, I returned to the Opelousas Museum and Interpretive Center to conduct a book reading and to sign books.
I did two readings that Saturday morning, to two separate groups of people, one at 10 am, one at 12pm. Both times, I read from the part in which I wrote about Milburn winning the Olympic gold medal, describing the race in detail. Afterwards, one of the assistants at the museum told me that she felt chills running down her spine as I read. Another person – a cousin of Rodney whose last name was also Milburn – walked up to me afterwards, looked me in the eyes, held my hands, and tearfully thanked me for writing the story of her cousin, for not letting him be forgotten.
***
Link to the book’s Amazon page:
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