“Thirty-five of the hardest races I ever ran,” Donnelly said of his own cancer treatment.
The value of competing. Tom Donnelly lived it, coached it, studied it, preached it. Donnelly thought he understood it. Competing was, in a sense, this man’s life’s work. Partnering with his athletes, guiding them until they could see it for themselves.
Some of the great middle-distance runners in the sport’s history have tales of Donnelly, a fierce competitor. Some Haverford College runners who didn’t even know they were competitors turned out to be champions.
Late in his coaching career, Donnelly arrived at another conclusion—competing could save his life.
In 2016, facing down a throat and neck cancer diagnosis, Donnelly was scared of … sneezing to death.
“Terrified,” Donnelly said, sitting in his office last month.
Donnelly, 76, volunteered this information during what in a sense was an exit interview. The last daily check mark has arrived on Donnelly’s desk calendar, his career as Haverford College’s track and cross-country coach ending Saturday at the finish line of the NCAA Championships.
You’re talking about a coaching run that may not be equaled around here, not just for longevity, but for impact, any sport. (You want to go back to Connie Mack, sure, maybe you have a case, but Mack had some down years, too.)
Some Raw Data
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- Since Donnelly took over in 1976, Haverford has won 77 Middle Atlantic and Centennial Conference championships, in fall, winter, and spring. Donnelly’s runners won 29 individual NCAA championships.
- All these years later, can’t forget Donnelly was the personal coach of the top miler in the world at the time Donnelly was working with him — Marcus O’Sullivan, now coaching up the road at Villanova. O’Sullivan and the great Sydney Maree trained with this man at the height of their powers, Donnelly not taking a dime.
- You wouldn’t think Haverford could produce a four-minute miler? The college did, the first in NCAA Division III history.
Even all that … not it. Taking high school runners focused more on a Haverford education than winning races or even joining a team, turning them into competitors.
“Once they acknowledge it’s not a dirty thing to compete,” Donnelly said of where the race starts. “Especially at Haverford, there’s always that overtone, that competitive is a dirty thing. It’s BS. I don’t want to hear that.”
Donnelly might point out to young skeptics that they must have been competitive in their high school classrooms to get into Haverford.
At races, he’s best left to himself, intent on spotting every Haverford runner sometime during the race. He was annoyed during a race this fall. It wasn’t a big meet, his top runners had the week off. But watching, he missed a guy. “I know he’s out there, I saw him on the starting line,” Donnelly told a fellow onlooker, Michael McGrath, a long-ago assistant, now an attorney.
That day, 17 Haverford runners competed. He’d missed the runner because the guy was running faster than expected, and was wearing blue shorts instead of the usual black.
‘She Saved My Life’
Nathan Akerhielm, a team captain in 2021, went on a training run where he was working last year in Charlotte, N.C. He fell to the sidewalk, his heart suddenly gone into an arrhythmia. He lay on the sidewalk for 10 minutes before two other runners saw him and called 911. His heart was shocked in the back of an ambulance, and tests revealed he had a rare genetic condition. He needed a defibrillator procedure.
“Tom called me at the hospital,” Akerhielm said. “He shared with me a story from his cancer treatment in 2016, how the doctor had encouraged Donnelly to use the same mindset and consistent, daily approach he used to coach and run, apply it to the cancer treatment, which would be long and painful.”
Donnelly thinks back to a 2016 conversation with former Haverford athletic director Wendy Smith.
“She saved my life,” Donnelly said.
There had been a biopsy, a cancer diagnosis — “in my throat, then it spread to my neck,” Donnelly said. “I had four tumors. It was pretty advanced.”
The lifesaver to him was Smith’s telling him how former Haverford president Stephen Emerson had previously been chief of hematology/oncology at Penn. He got Donnelly in there.
“I started treatment the end of August,” Donnelly said. “Like 35 straight days of radiation …”
Tom is a detail guy.
“Except for Labor Day,” he said.
The radiation treatment was pretty much “22 to 25 minutes” of terror. A mask over his head with a long mesh front — “they stuck it on where it was so tight you couldn’t even blink your eyelashes. They bolted you in 12 different places on this table. You’re bolted down. It was like slightly downhill, so your head’s down there.”
The terrifying part … “When I sneeze, I never sneeze once. I’ll sneeze like eight, 10, 12 times.”
The fear was that with nobody in the room with him, by the time he signaled distress, it would be too late — “I would choke to death.”
The son of a roofer, who grew up in Logan, he shows a Donnelly roofing hat in his office, “roofing since 1878.”
“Older than the Phillies,” Donnelly noted. “The Phillies are 1883.”
“Tom can tell stories of his dad’s roofers extracting teeth with a shot of Jameson’s on a lunch break on a Philly roof,” said Donnelly’s friend of half a century Paul Keogh.
(Also, Keogh added, “He can explain the meaning and historical significance of a Beethoven symphony.”)
A story from Donnelly’s Villanova roommate, Dave Patrick: “One of the first things I think about with Tom was the NCAA cross-country championships in Laramie, Wyo., in 1967. We were defending national champions, but we didn’t realize all the impediments that were in our way. Laramie was almost 8,000 feet above sea level and the day was cold and windy with gusts up to 25 miles per hour.”
There was blowing snow and some ice on the course. The night before the race, Patrick said, “Tom somehow got food poisoning and it was a night of trying to get to the bathroom as soon as possible.”
Villanova coach Jumbo Elliott heard of this the next morning.
“He wanted to scratch Tom,” Patrick said. “But Tom spoke out and said to Jumbo, he didn’t come all this way not to run.”
Donnelly, a two-time cross-country all-American, was Villanova’s second finisher. The Wildcats held off Air Force by a few points to repeat. His points, all needed.
Mention Patrick to Donnelly, he’ll get up and walk to a shelf and pull out a copy of a Sports Illustrated cover from 55 years ago, Patrick on the cover, as a Villanova undergrad, the headline noting “on the heels of Jim Ryun.” (In fact, Patrick won the mile at the 1968 U.S. Olympic trials, but that’s a whole different saga.)
In his own opinion, Patrick said, his old roommate might be the best coach in the world.
‘I Was Ready’
Donnelly never sneezed.
He’d prepare each day, he said, like it was a race — “35 of the hardest races I ever ran.” He’d psych himself up each morning driving down to Penn.
“When I went in there, I was ready,” Donnelly said. “My mind was so set.”
He knew firsthand the importance of that mental prep. There had been a trial run, Donnelly told to just put his hand up if he had any problem. ”They weren’t out of the room five seconds, my hand was up,” he said. “I hadn’t prepared myself. I thought I had.”
Starting the whole ordeal, “I didn’t know if they were going to have to remove my tongue. I’m the worst guy on a computer. How am I going to communicate with my team? I’m just envisioning walking out there, writing stuff down.”
This was during the fall. How quickly did he get back to his team?
“I never missed a day,” Donnelly said. “It’s the most proud thing for me coaching, ever. Because I was down at Penn half a day. And the two days I was down there for chemo, I was there all day.”
He was late for practice once.
“Five or 10 minutes,” Donnelly said. “That was just traffic driving back from West Philly.”
One more bit of torture.
“I had no pain through the whole thing,” Donnelly said. “The very last treatment, my body broke out into a rash.”
A parting gift of sorts.
“Like that for the next five weeks,” he said. “Nonstop itching. Everywhere except my face and my hands. The whole rest of my body.”
Never mind coaching, “I slept between 15 minutes and 60 minutes usually, every night, for five weeks.”
He worried about screwing up race entries.
“I remember coming over to the office, I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I finally went out to an all-night diner. Got a traffic ticket, right on red.”
Small potatoes.
“It was a tough fall,” Donnelly said. “But a lot of people don’t make it.”
Tough fall for his squad? Their coach was so weak he could barely stand up.
“The guys were great,” Donnelly said. ”We had a good team. We won the conference.”
‘Is That The Way You Would Want to Win?’
There had been a race in 1980 when it looked like Haverford was going to miss the league indoor title by one point. (It turned out, Donnelly had counted wrong; his team actually won.) A team member, trying to be helpful — and hypercompetitive already — suggested a way to get that point, protesting that Widener did not have matching uniforms, a violation of league rules.
“Tom looked at me with such disappointment, and maybe sympathy in his face,” said Gerry Lederer, an attorney. “He asked, ‘Is that the way you would want to win?’ It’s 43 years later and I have never looked to win on a technicality since.”
A former runner, Chris Hood, said two decades back that Donnelly “understands that winning and running is as foolish and meaningless as anything else in life. Of course, if it’s as meaningless as all those things, it’s as meaningful. He wants his runners to commit with their whole mind and spirit, and that commitment is what they’re going to learn from. He really lives by that.”
“A human, not a god,” said the long-ago assistant, McGrath. “But he’s a really good human.”
Some years back, Donnelly had promised Haverford’s incoming freshmen that he’d stay through their four years. He just couldn’t foresee the COVID-19 pandemic, a year without Centennial sports competition — a couple of those freshmen still here for a last cross-country season before graduating in December.
“I just felt obligated to be here during their time,” Donnelly said.
Donnelly has always told his runners that they’re doing this for fun, that it’s a game. Pressure, he’d tell them, is a job interview with four hungry kids at home. But he’d tell them all, if you’re going to do this, whatever this is, be great at it. “If you’re going to be a small-time Philadelphia crook,” he’d say, “be a big-time Philadelphia crook.”
Assistant coach Matt Cohen, a former Haverford runner, mentioning all this, said Donnelly would tell their guys, “This team could be great, just by each runner being committed and being themselves.”
Which year? Every year.
Could this man offer important lessons on finishing the race? Sure, except that’s not the trick. Nearly everyone finishes. Make one big move, not a bunch of halfhearted ones, he’s always told his guys.
“That was always a Jumbo thing,” Donnelly said, referring to the legendary Villanova coach. “Just make one big move, one decisive move.”
Here’s the trick, Donnelly said. “You just have to figure out the right time.” ♦
This article by Mike Jensen originally appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 17, 2023.
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