Hardly a man is still alive who remembers when Lawrence’s mid-April lifestyle did not include the Kansas Relays.
In a couple of days, the Kansas Relays will be 65 years old and the giant-size track meet is now an institution, if an old gray mare of one.
“It is remarkable,” Kansas athletic director Bob Frederick says of the meet’s longevity. “But in another sense, a big event, like it used to be, gathers momentum and just continues to exist.”
They can’t kill Freddie Krueger and they can’t kill the Kansas Relays.
They can sure as heck water it down, though, which they’ve done because they have no money. The reason they have no money is because no track superstars means no fans, and no fans means no money to bring in track superstars. Yep, it’s a classic vicious circle.
“I’d love to get Carl Lewis,” KU track coach and meet director Gary Schwartz said, “but we flat out don’t have the money. We’d need a half-million dollar budget. I’m not exaggerating. We spend $55,000.”
Schwartz;s lament has been a fact of Kansas Relays life for the past 10 or 15 years, and a renaissance isn’t imminent. The venerable old Texas-Kansas-Drake midlands relays circuit is a relic today, a Packard Phaeton putting putting along on bottom-line maintenance.
“Things have really changed in intercollegiate track and field,” Frederick says. “Everybody wants it back the way it was, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards.”
You’d think people around here would enjoy a track meet once a year. Some do, of course, but track suffers from comparison to baseball, basketball and football.
Track meets last too long.
“It’s pretty tough for a fan to sit there from 8 in the morning until 5 o’clock at night,” Schwartz conceded. “But it’s pretty frustrating for coaches, too, because in terms of quality athletes we have a lot of ’em, and people don’t want to see ’em compete.”
The Kansas Relays is a cattle call, pure and simple a mind-boggling two days of dawn-to-dusk starting pistols, lap bells, accutrak pictures and baton passes. In that sense, it’s self-diluting, slowly jading by its sheer repetition.
Still, the Kansas Relays is a terrific high school meet. By lumping every athlete into one class and luring preps from surrounding states, the Relays is an intense crucible, more competitive and demanding than the state championships.
My only complaint is that they mix the high school competition with the college and open events on Friday and Saturday. Why don’t they split ’em up? Why don’t they run all the high school races on Friday and all the college and open events on Saturday?
Perhaps it’s because they’re worried nobody would show up on Saturday, that the college-open division wouldn’t stand on its own two feet. Whatever, it’s no secret the Kansas Relays exists today primarily as a recruiting tool.
“That’s accurate,” Frederick admitted. “It certainly showcases our university under pretty impressive circumstances.”
Unless it rains, of course. The threat of rain has always been a Kansas Relays albatross.
Nevertheless, it seems to me the Relays needs to re-direct its marketing strategy from a mass quantities approach to a gemstone mentality. An all-day prep format on Friday is OK, but the Saturday program needs to be shortened.
Fewer events on Saturday afternoon would create more suspense by enabling the average fan, accustomed to spending two or three hours at football, basketball and baseball games, to focus.
More in the case of the Kansas Relays isn’t better, even if the Relays does seem destined to live forever.
