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lost. >> yeah. >> it's hard to talk about yourself but i can talk about you. you know, 11 championships were precede by two college championships. two of them.team the common denominator in a team sport was you. team sport means that you are a team, everyone having responsibility and you win together.. not michael jordan being acrobatic or lebron james being a freak of nature. but, bill, your contribution --

that i've known 50 years. i got no business being here okay? be :ry![8+oe-6]>l[4

but when he was 75, he says to " me you know, i love you.id and it was the first time he had ever said that. and he says, and i'm proud of j=

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there weren't nearly as many folklore jobs as there are today. and so i ended up going out to seattle. just moved to seatta:íu3+xrlpúg: :ry[8+oe-6]>l[d

folklore degrees and it was very helpful as well in teaching me how to write and research and write clearly and concisely. so i bounced around a bunch of public radio stations. i worked in minnesota. i worked in st. louis. i met my wife there. we were married and worked in maine. and in three i moved to los angeles and worked for a program called "marketplace" and in 2003 it was the year that allison book.

it's in paper back. while i was researching the steagles book i went back and looked at the hisry of spectator sports in the united states. always interested in how we got to this point where sports are really kind of a cultural -- it's like a -- it's like the sports industrial complex today. multi-billion-dollar business. cities build 100, 200, 300 million dollar stadium funded by taxpayers just to keep these teams in town.

i knew it hadn't always been like that. i was curious how it got to be like that. and that's when i learned about this peculiar sport called pedestrianism. it was the most popular spectator sport in the united states for a very brief period of time in the 1870s and 1880s. and it really began in 18 -- 1860. there was a door to door book salesman in boston. and he made a bet with a friend in the autumn of 1860 on the outcome of that year's presidential election. westin bet that lincoln would lose. spoiler alert. lincoln wins. so westin, to fulfill the terms of the bet, it was an unusual bet, the loser had to walk from boston to washington in ten days and arrive in time to see the

inauguration. now this was a really arduous undertaking in 1861, the inauguration was in march of 1861. i'm sure it's no walk in the park today either. i wouldn't recommend taking the interstate. but he walked from. go. set out on february 21st. and of course the roads were terrible and it was the middle of winter. there were no paved roads at all and in some places you had barely more than a dirt path to tell you where to go. there were no reliable maps. when he got to a town he would have to ask how do i get to the next town. but this attempt to walk from boston to washington really captured the public's imagination. it fascinated people. and i think for a couple of reasons. one, winter of 1860-1861, not a lot of good news in the papers.

southern states are seceding. the civil war is imminent. and westin's walk was a feel-good human interest story. as he made his way south, huge crowds would turn out in new york and trenton and philadelphia just to watch him walk through town. people would wait for hours in the cold waiting to see westin on the horizon, slowly making his way to town and bands would come out and play and accompany him. he was a shrewd businessman too. he had made an agreement with a sewing machine company from new york to hand out advertising fliers along the way. he got them basically to sponsor his trip. he would hand out these fliers and make his -- go on his merry way.

nonetheless, he had become very famous. he was also kind of a schemer. he if i neighed an invitation to a lincoln inaugural ball and met lincoln. lincoln offered to pay his train fare back home to boston. but the civil war intervened and it wasn't until 1867 that westin attempted another walk. and this time, it was a walk from portland, maine to chicago. and he made a $10,000 wager he could walk from portland to chicago in less than 30 days. and again, this was considered practically impossible. at the time. he -- he succeed. he won the bet and again along the way, huge crowds in buffalo and erie and cleveland. when he got to chicago an estimated 25% of the population

of the city was waiting to meet him. another huge sensation and this solidified westin's reputation as a celebrity, a celebrity athlete and he was just westin the walker. the name westin was synonymous with walking. he was a clever guy. with his fame at its peak he decided to take his act indoors. in the 1870s, roller skating became a popular sport. it was a fad, really. i think general sherman was a big fan. but anyway, towns and cities began building roller rinks, places where you can go roller skate and westin would stage walking exhibitions in these roller rinks, walk against time. he would attempt to walk 100 miles in 24 hours. and he'd pull into a town and hire a band and he would do

these walks and thousands of people would come and pay 10 cents a piece just to watch westin walk in circles on the floor of these roller rinks. i mean sometimes the laps were so small they were 50 to a mile. he had amazing endurance and also an ability to function with very little sleep. and this proved very lucrative these exhibitions and soon competitors sprang up. the most famous was an irish immigrant from chicago, daniel o'leary. he was a door to door book salesman until the great fire in 1871 in chicago. that really reduced the demand for guiilt-edged version of the bible or dictionaries. so he had to walk out to the suburbs to sell books and developed a reputation for

endurance himself. when he thought about westin he thought i can do that. he rented a rink in chicago and walked 100 miles in 23 hours. and westin walked 100 miles in 22 hours. it became apparent these were the two leading pedestrians in the united states and it was time for a showdown. i call them, really, the ali and velvet shirts and carried a cane. he understood that the event was about more than athletics. it was about entertainment. he was there to entertain the crowd. o'leary would have none of. that he wore a traditional tight cotton pants and a cotton shirt and just looked straight down at

the track, wouldn't even acknowledge the crowd. he was always focused, i guess you would say. he was the joe frazier in the comparison. but in november of 1875 it was finally decided we need to have a competition to determine the world's champion pedestrian. never mind that it was between two americans. but we call it the world series, so, that's never stopped us from deciding that we had the world champion. and it took place in chicago. interesting venue, the chicago exposition building. it was the largest public venue in the united states at the time. the ground covered five football fields. you could fit five football fields in the expo in chicago. it was so big that this was the logical place to hold this great

walking match. and the rules were pretty simple. six days was as long as any athletic contest could take because at the time, there were blue laws that prohibits public amusements on the sabbath. you couldn't walk competitively on sunday. that's the way it was. so the races would begin right after midnight sunday night, monday morning and continue pretty much nonstop until midnight the following saturday night. 144 hours. generally it was six full days. and in this match in 1875 between o'leary and westin, o'leary won and he was declared world's champion pedestrian. westin, who had been the most famous pedestrian up to that point was not gracious in defeat and complained that o'leary had

a home field advantage because the race took place in chicago. he said he had been threatened and somebody had threatened to shoot him, these sort of things. none of these reports panned out but westin was quite chagrinned and decided to take his act to london where he started staging these walks against time again and the british just like the americans were fascinated by westin the walker and would come out to walk him walk for hours or even days at a time. eventually this format of the six-day race kind of was formalized and there would be large competitions that would be staged between all comers. the entry fee would be $10. later it was raised to $100 to discourage speculators, people who thought they could walk 500 miles in six days but really

couldn't. you would have 15, 20 competitors taking part in a six-day race. and dirt track would be late on the floor of the arena about 1/7 or 1/8 mile. a team of judges would keep a:íu3+xrlpúgww$:s. :ry[8+oe-6]>l[d34

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cost about 10 cents. and basically for a dollar, you would have a warm place to stay

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happen, that sort of thing. and pedestrianism really pioneered this. there were brass bands that would be playing songs. there were vendors selling everything from roasted chestnuts to pickled eggs, raw oysters. wouldn't recommend buying those. but you know, there were all kinds of things to do apart from watching the guys walk. it was a spectacle. and for working people especially it was a rare opportunity to take part in something this spectacular and this famous and on the front page of the newspaper the next day. there were other things to do at the walking match. i went to the new stadium in philadelphia and it occurred to me that these new baseball stadiums are designed to give you something to do besides watching a baseball game. you know? they have arcades for the kids and restaurants and bars and it's basically they've admitted

it's a boring sport. but you're paying $28. we'll give you something to do. and that was a little bit the case with pedestrianism. pedestrianism also had a lot of fans from the upper class. and you might see celebrities at a great walking match. james blaine attended walking matches. chester arthur was a huge fan. stop me if you recognize any of these names. tom thumb was a big pedestrianism fan, not literally. but he enjoyed pedestrianism a lot. and i guess was fairly easy to spot in the crowd. i don't know how. but word would get around that tom thumb was in the arena. at one point, there were riots. people rioted to get into pedestrianism matches. there was a riot in new york

where they oversold tickets to the match and people were still gathered outside trying to get in at midnight sunday night and they heard the roar of the crowd inside and began storming madison square garden and there was a very famous, infamous police captain, alexander williams. his nickname was clubber. you can deduce from that what you want. riot in new york since the civil war draft riots ten years before. it inflamed passions deeply. the pedestrians themselves became the first celebrity athletes in the united states. their pictures appeared on the early trading cards. daniel o'leary the irish immigrant from chicago he was the spokesman for a brand of

salt. don't know what the connection was. but apparently he liked that salt. there were corporate sponsorships. i mentioned westin would sell adds as he walked. there were many pedestrians were sponsored by newspapers and would compete with the logo of the newspaper emblazened across the front of their shirt. an early example of advertising on an athletic uniform, a tradition i have to say that major league baseball to its credit has resisted, though for how long i don't know. it also had a -- struck a chord with people not just because there wasn't anything else to do. that was a big part of the appeal. there was so little entertainment but it's the idea of walking to the average american in the 1870s and 1880s is very different than it is today. everybody walked.

a good horse might cost 100 or $150. this is one of the things that surprised me. i imagined that everybody had horses. nobody had horses. 1% had horses. the 99% walked. and they walked everywhere. there was some public transportation especially in new york and philadelphia. but by and large people walked. and they had always -- people had had to walk long distances in the middle of the night to fetch a doctor or maybe on a snowy sunday morning to get to church. so people related to the competitors, to the pedestrians. there was an empathy. they were doing this ordinary activity in a very extraordinary way. and also, they were admired for their endurance. in a typical race, a pedestrian might be on the track walking for 21 out of 24 hours. they would sleep about three hours. usually in 15 to 30 minute i

increments. there would be a tent with a cot on the track and that's where they would rest. a lot would have trainers. but the trainers were there to make sure they didn't sleep too much and would throw cold water on them or beat them with sticks to try to get them up and back on the track. a lot of times the trainers were financed by gamblers. it really was an exercise in sleep deprivation as much as athletics. i have a theory i go into in the book in glorious and amusing detail about how sleep patterns affect athletes and affect all of us. most of us are monophasic sleepers. we sleep once a day. some are bi-phasic sleepers who

sleep four or five hours and take a nap. some of you who are sleeping right now are bi-phasic sleepers. but the pedestrians i think were mostly poly-phasic sleepers. this is a real thing. you can train yourself to sleep in 45 minute increments several times throughout day. if you are able to fall into r.e.m. sleep quickly you're as rested as if you slept eight hours a night. it was a physiological quirk that these guys had. if you were sleeping, others were making laps.

you didn't want to sleep very much when you were in a six-day race. there were all kinds of strategies. it was interesting. by the fifth or sixth day that's when the attendants got excited. the guys are sleep deprived, dirty, smelly. they did not have the advantage of modern sports medicine, the diet, you know, generally considered of mutton, which i've had a lot of in mongolia now that i think about it and raw beefsteak. one guy's favorite was greasy eel broth. i asked allison if she would try to make this and she said no. and also they thought champagne was a stimulant. that would help them. so they were drunk and dehydrated. suffering from sleep

deprivation. you get tunnel vision, actually, when you don't have enough sleep. so later in the race they would take chalk dust and mark a line in the middle of the track so they could stay on that line. and often competitors would collapse. they would just -- their bodies just could not endure what they were asking their bodies to do. and at the end of a race, often and dan o'leary was one. he would be so utterly exhausted he was unable to walk they would carry him back to the hotel. westin he was usually in good shape. in fact races would end saturday night and he went to church the next morning. it affected different racers in different ways. the sport also opened doors for

women and african-americans in ways that had never been done before. african-americans could compete with the white competitors on the same field. the rules were simple and if you were able to do it you were given a chance to do it. frank hart won a major race in 1881 and for a time was the most famous black athlete in the united states. women race today. there were six-day women's races. the women, though, they had a -- they had a special problem because the victorian age demanded that they wear full-length skirts or dresses usually of a heavy velvet. god forbid js%j8pd8ol[d34

the races -- the women's races were quite popular as well, they were at a disadvantage. let's just put it that way. in 1880, it looked like the history of pedestrian -- that pedestrianism would last forever. it really was de facto america's national past time. but several things happen that led to its demise. one there were gambling scandals as it game more popular with the public, it became more popular with gamblers. there were all kinds of ways to wager. you could wager on who would be the first to drop out js%j8pd8or

at its height in 1879, 1880, a pedestrian could win and they lpúgww$: +g:ry[8+oe][d34

that any more with professional athletes squandering their wealth. so pedestrianism set a lot of standards good and bad. and really, by 1890, pedestrianism was all but dead. it was also killed by baseball. the national league was founded in 1876 and it was really a rag-tag js%jd8o

fulfill your basic needs, food and water and employment. we're not a walking nation any more. :ry![8+oe-6]>l[d34

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retirement. i imagine -- he performed before a game in chicago between the white sox and the a's in 1927 and i imagine the players in the dugout who were all born well, well after the golden age they had never heard of pedestrianism and they must have been bemused by the sight of this old man walking around the bases as fast as he could. but would have been blown away he had made more in six days than any of them would make in the entire season of 1927. it was a sport that&f[lñ39s js

favorite spectator sport" and it's on sale right over there. what a coincidence. what are the odds. >> two questions did the women walk against other women or against other men? and also did any of the walkers suffer favorly bad health consequences? >> did the women every compete

against men? as far as i know, they did not. women's races were usually held at madison square garden there would be six-day women's races but women did not participate in any of the men's races. but the sport was so popular clubs were organized all over the country. there was a department store league in new york that -- that the department stores competed against each other and this would be a team affair where, there might be four or five people and the accumulative mileage would be the score for the team and i suspect that women participated in those events but not the major races. the other question was about the long-term health effects. westin and o'leary who lived to be 87 and 90 were the exception. you hear many stories of guys

who died very young in their 50s. frank -- there were

several competitions in london and they went to the famous shoemaker in london that actually specialized in making shoes for pedestrians which were a soft leather that was bound very tightly to their feet. but the equipment they worked with was pretty rudimentary. you know, i don't think the clothing was very comfortable. a lot of wo