That Park Made Me

As more than 300 schools descend on Van Cortlandt Park on Sunday for the Manhattan College High School Cross Country Championships, there will be thousands of butterflies fluttering in stomachs. It's a feeling the great Marty Liquori remembered well.

"The excitement of going to Van Cortlandt, I don't know if there is anything else to equal that," he told David Gonzalez of the New York Times earlier this year. "Even if you got to the Olympics, you developed the routine for handling stress at Van Cortlandt when you get off the bus and saw 10,000 kids there. You're 15 years old, without a whole lot of belief in yourself thinking you're going to be the 10,000th kid running that day. It was nerve-racking."

Liquori — who ran at Essex Catholic High in New Jersey and Villanova University — made those comments around the time of his induction into the inaugural class of the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame with Matt Centrowitz and Alberto Salazar.

"Van Cortlandt was the ultimate," said Centrowitz, who ran at the old Power Memorial High in the early 1970s. "Kids would come from Massachusetts and Maryland. The point was, if you were a star in any state, you came to Vannie like a gunslinger. Guys came ready for war ... That park made me."

And it helped make so many other legends, including Frank Shorter, Gerry Lindgren and Steve Prefontaine. "It really is the mecca of cross country," said Cross Country Express founder Walt Murphy.

There are those who ran in the past who now sneer at today's manicured paths. They remember a much tougher challenge full of loose rocks, fallen limbs and deep crevices. So if St. Benedict Prep's Edward Cheserek can continue his course-record-breaking ways this weekend at the Manhattans, it will be followed by a lot of discussion. Murphy, who thinks of Cheserek as "fearless," won't get caught up in the debate.

"This is the same argument as cinder tracks versus synthetic ones," he says. "It's progress and you have to live with it. If he breaks 12 minutes, one could argue what Liquori might have done, but it can all be belabored too much. The course is two-and-a-half miles and the record is what it is."

And Vanny remains what it is. When a recent Worlds' finalist — Irishman Ciaran O'Lionaird — ran at the 2008 Iona Meet of Champions, he was asked afterward about the course by Ryan Fenton of Flotrack. "This is a lot closer to cross country in Ireland," he said. "Cemetery Hill was really, really tough. I was walking up that thing and my legs didn't know what to do when I got to the top."

Now Cemetery Hill doesn't come into play for the high schoolers, but the relatively short jaunt to the narrow entrance of the cow path certainly requires a hard charge from the start. To contend for a title, runners have to get out quickly without much time to find a rhythm.

It's not surprising that it remains so beloved after all the years, because Vanny isn't content to just test one's legs. It goes after the brain and the heart as well.