Officials at the Amateur Athletic Union, later The Athletic Congress, the sport’s governing bodies, often felt Franken was too cozy with his stars. Said Beatty, “the one thing about Al Franken was he really cared about the athletes.” “I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Al Franken,” Seagren said.
Seagren had regular lunches with Franken until recently. Stones recalled Franken attending his wedding. Oregon distance running icon Steve Prefontaine tended bar at Franken’s New Year’s Eve parties. While he put up Santee at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1953, you were just as likely to find Olympic champions staying at the Franken family home near the UCLA campus, Keino in one bedroom, Finland’s Lasse Viren in another. “Al,” Stones said, “had a way of getting everybody hyped up.”įor Franken, athletes were like family. The 1986 Sunkist meet at the Sports Arena saw world records set in four events. “For track and field on the West Coast,” Seagren said, “Al Franken was the guy.”įranken promoted meets produced more than 100 world and American records. Franken invented indoor track on the West Coast, ending an East Coast monopoly on the sport in the 1960s and eventually equaling or surpassing the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden as the planet’s premier indoor meet with world record-shattering events in Los Angeles and later San Diego that put the sport and its superstars like Irish miler Eamonn Coghlan on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
“The end of that era,” said Dwight Stones, who set multiple world high jump records in Franken meets.įranken put on the Compton Relays and the Coliseum Relays, the meets drawing large crowds to watch the likes of sprinter Tommie Smith, Seagren or Jim Ryun take on Olympic champions Peter Snell or Kip Keino.īut it was indoors where Franken was most influential. Franken was recently diagnosed with leukemia, his son Don said. “Al Franken,” Jim Beatty, the first man to run a sub-4-minute mile indoors, said “was the best track and field promoter this country has ever had.”įranken, one of the most influential figures in American track and field’s golden era from the 1950s through the 1970s, died at the age of 96 on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. If track and field, as is often suggested, is a three-ring circus, then Franken was one of its leading ringmasters for parts of four decades. “And it wrapped its paw around me and I almost had to go change my shorts.” “He had this big-ass Bengal tiger in the shot with me,” Seagren said recently, laughing at the memory. Franken was promoting both one of his track meets and a circus at the same time and arranged a photo shoot of Seagren with one of the circus’ biggest stars. Nearly two decades later Olympic pole vault champion Bob Seagren had a somewhat less glamorous Franken-orchestrated brush with show business.
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