Hanging Out With Billy Mills

By Bill Schneider, 6-04-07

	Caption: Billy Mills. Photo courtesy of Running Strong.

I’m proud to say that I have three things in common with my hero, Billy Mills. We have the same first name; we both used to run; and we both grew up in little towns in South Dakota nobody ever heard of. But that is as far as it goes. Otherwise, we are worlds apart.

In 1964 when I was a college freshman I watched on a 12-inch black-and-white TV, with awe, as Billy Mills came around favorites Ron Clarke and Mohamed Gammoudi like a bolt of lightning to win the Olympic Gold Medal in the 10,000 meters.

Twenty years later, I watched Billy do it again, in color, still in awe, at a movie theater in Missoula in Running Brave, one of the most inspirational movies ever made.

Now, another twenty-three years later, last weekend, I watched Billy once again, in real life, in Helena, and yes, still in awe, giving an incredibly inspirational talk to Indian kids at the Helena Indian Alliance.

In addition to telling you how old I am, all this tells you that I am among the most fortunate to have spent nearly a whole day hanging out with Billy Mills.

Here’s how it happened. A while back at a meeting of the Governor’s Cup Committee, where I’ve volunteered since the early-1970s, we were discussing what celebrity we could bring in to help promote Montana’s largest running event. On an impulse, I suggested Billy Mills, partly because the Governor’s Cup is sponsored by the Caring Foundation to raise funds for to help uninsured children, a goal in line with Billy’s mission in life, and partly because I wanted to meet him. The committee liked the idea, and much to our pleasant surprise, he agreed to come to Helena. And I was assigned to be one of his escorts. Assignment is sort of a push, I guess, since I begged to do it.

For those of you who don’t know the story of Billy Mills, click here. But briefly, at the Tokyo Olympics, nobody had even heard of Billy Mills. He was only a “pace setter,” who had never won any major race. He didn’t even win the USA Olympic Trials, and his best time was a minute slower than favorite Ron Clarke from Australia.

But the unknown Billy Mills did indeed win, in the most dramatic fashion, beating the Olympic record by 50 seconds with his 28:24 time. Running Brave concludes with a dramatic and amazingly accurate reenactment of The Great Race.  Click here to see it on YouTube.com. 

Before Tokyo, his entire life was about overcoming adversity, and I’m not talking about the aches and pains of rigorous training. That was probably the easiest part. Billy had a lot more than overcome than Clarke and Gammoudi. He had to overcome such poverty, prejudice and despair that it would sink most mortals. Not just the stress of growing up Indian on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where we still have 85 percent unemployment, but also in college, where they didn’t let Indians in fraternities, and then later as a U.S. Marine to not only become the only Native American to win a Gold Medal in the Olympic 10,000-meter race, but the only American to ever do it.

He did it, in part, through the power of visualization. “I visualized myself doing it thousands of times before the race.”

At the Helena Indian Alliance, talking to a crowd heavy with wide-eyed Indian high school students, he recalled living in the back seat of a car during high school...and dragging home a bed-bug-ridden mattress from the dump to sleep on...and of being beaten up by his best friends because he refused to get drunk with them....and more challenges than any of us have ever faced.

He talked sincerely, of his struggles, of how his brother had committed suicide and he almost repeated the mistake. In 1963, on the eve of the Olympics, he again contemplated suicide, twice, with one incident of particular note for all of us who have had it so easy.

Billy was named All American in cross country three times. Each time, the photographer would ask him to step out of the victory photo, so he could get a shot of only the four white All Americans. Billy emotionally re-calls the night after the third time this happened. He stood on a chair on the sixth floor of a hotel ready to jump, but at the last moment, his defining moment, he remembered what his father had told him when he was eight. Follow your dream, he father had said, so Billy decided to must do it, and if he killed himself, he couldn’t. So he got off the chair and he wrote it down, “Olympic 10K Gold.”

That’s the same thing he wrote on my Governor’s Cup hat, incidentally, something I will treasure forever.

At this point, he polled the highschoolers on their dreams and encouraged them to follow them and share them with others. He returned again and again to the far-too-common problems of domestic abuse, drugs, alcohol and suicide plaguing our reservations and Native American populations and told them how to beat it all by “pursuing your dreams” and “never letting hate and anger destroy you.”

“The world forgets,” he admitted to them, referencing Hiroshima and 9-11, “but we must not forget the world.”

Here is where it all started for Billy Mills. When he was eight, after his mother died, his father took him fishing and told him, “son, now you have broken wings, but if you follow your dream, you can have the wings of an eagle.”

Then, later when telling about the last lap of his championship run, he said he had thought of quitting, giving the race to Clarke or Gammoudi. But then, coming out of the final turn in third place, he saw an eagle on the uniform of one of the other runners and he knew he could win. And he did win, flying forward like he had the wings of an eagle. “It was the most inspirational moment of my life,” he recalls. “It was a gift from the Creator.”

Then, he told the youngsters in the crowd that they all had such a gift. They just had to find it.

I’m glad I was able to write that story down because after hearing Billy tell it, I have tried to repeat it to others, but I have not been able to do so without getting chocked up.

When you listen to Billy Mills, you cannot fight back inspiration, nor can you help adoring the guy. Since 1964, he has been my hero, but now it seems he’s moved up a notch.

A hero, they say, is a person who makes a difference, and here is a guy who has spent the past 43 years, traveling 300 days per year to 91 countries so far, trying to inspire our youth, particularly our young Native Americans, to “empower yourself” and pursue dream and “don’t be a quitter.”

He has helped raise, partly through Running Strong for American Indian Youth, around $500 million to help the impoverished and disadvantaged, and not only Indians, but many others who need our help.

But I can see that helping Indian youth get and stay on track is Bily’s passion. “Nobody has broken wings more than Native Americans in this country,” he said. “We live in a form of quasi-apartheid.”

Even Billy breaks up when he talks of people far-to-often believing all young Indian people are drug-addicted, alcoholic quitters.

He told a lot of stories at that two-hour luncheon, and I’d like to repeat all of them, but I’ll control myself and tell only one more.

After Running Brave came out Billy had a call from a young Indian athlete in British Columbia who was in contention for Athlete of the Year in his small town and had seen the movie and wanted “to be like Billy Mills.” The young Indian’s best friend, also a good athlete, was white, and they had become best of friends and training partners, and was also in contention for Athlete of the Year.

One day Billy comes home to find his wife in tears. She had gotten a call from the young Indian athlete, who had been named Athlete of the Year.

At the victory party, the winner saw his best friend, his best white friend, come in with a paper sack and ask him to talk to him outside. “I can’t go home,” his young white friend said tearfully, “because my parents told me I could never come home again if I lost to an Indian.”

At that moment he reached in the bag, pulled out a pistol, held it to his temple and pulled the trigger. Then, the young Indian athlete picked up the bloody gun, held it to his own temple, but did not pull the trigger. Instead, he said, “Billy Mills didn’t do it.”

That is a shortened and perhaps woeful recollection of the inspirational story, one of many I heard Billy tell, but at least now, you know why I think Billy Mills should always be one of our heroes.