More than 100 people last week gathered at the Los Angeles Coliseum, once track and field’s premier theater, to honor the American sport’s greatest impresario.
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Among the crowd were Olympians, American record-holders and NCAA title winning coaches. World record setting sprinters Steve Williams and Maurice Greene were there, as was Willie Banks, the crowd favorite world record triple jumper, and Ireland’s Eamonn Coghlan, the greatest indoor miler ever.
They were all there to honor the late meet promoter Al Franken, one of the most influential figures in American track and field’s golden era from the 1950s through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
“Al Franken was more important to track and field than all of us present here combined,” Bob Larsen, the longtime UCLA head track and field and cross country coach, told the crowd.
No one disagreed with Larsen.
The purpose of the special ceremony was the unveiling of a Heritage Plaque from World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body, at the Coliseum recognizing Franken’s “special contributions to the development of the sport.”
“Al Franken is one of the most important, innovative, and prolific promoters in the history of American and world track and field,” Banks, a World Athletics council member, said.
Franken put on the Compton Relays and the Coliseum Relays, the meets drawing large crowds to watch the likes of sprinter Tommie Smith, world record setting pole vaulter Bob Seagren or Jim Ryun take on Olympic champions Peter Snell or Kip Keino. He invented indoor track on the West Coast, ending an East Coast monopoly on the sport in the 1960s and eventually equaling and then 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 Coghlan on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
It was not lost on many in the group that Franken, who passed away in December 2021 at the age of 96, spent much of his career at odds with the sport’s powers that be. Until the 1980s, track and field athletes were prohibited from benefiting financially from their talents and labor. Mac Wilkins was living on food stamps when he first broke the world record in the discus in 1976 while the primarily white men from privileged backgrounds who governed the sport flew first class to meets around the world and stayed at five-star hotels.
“The one thing about Al Franken was he really cared about the athletes,” Jim Beatty, the first man to break 4 minutes in the mile indoors, told the Southern California News Group in 2021.
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Steve Scott recalled the first time he broke 4:00 in the mile, running in the 1977 Sunkist indoor meet promoted by Franken.
“Al pretty much did him a favor of letting me in the race,” Scott said in 2021.
Afterward, Franken, Scott said, “gave my coach $100 to go buy me something. I wasn’t sure that was legal or not.”
But it was under-the-table payments with several more zeroes in them that frequently got Franken in trouble with the sport’s governing bodies in the so-called Shamateurism era before the hypocritical prohibition against paying track athletes finally ended in 1981.
Franken was banned for life at least three times by the AAU or The Athletics Congress, track’s national governing bodies, for paying athletes.
“Dad always believed if he benefited then the athletes should share in the profits,” Don Franken said. “He was always at odds with the AAU.”
Each time Franken’s lifetime ban was lifted, and he continued to promote meets that produced more than 100 world and American records. The 1986 Sunkist meet at the Sports Arena saw world records set in four events.
So it is fitting that the plaque honoring Franken will be on permanent display at the south end of the Coliseum, next to a plaque listing the stadium’s track and field records, a record book set in stone next to a remembrance of the man who provided the hammer and chisel.
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