This story was originally published on March 18, 2015.
My notes were added on April 15, 2026.
This story, by Fr,ank Litsky, is about James Dunaway, the editor of American Track & Field and Athletes Only from 2003 to 2014. James also edited Coaching Athletics for my company, Fortius Media Group, LLC.
I first met James Dunaway, over the phone, in 1982, when I had to call James from my job at Runner’s World. James asked me if I knew who he was. I said no; he retorted, “I am the best writer in running.” I chuckle now; I was terrified then. James had this: “Do Not Mess with Me,” tenor to his voice.
James Dunaway was my mentor and friend. started our phone calls while he was my editor, saying, “You will probably fire me after this conversation.” James once lectured me on my conversation with my teenage son, Adam, after Adam and I had an altercation. James was right, and I apologized to James and my son.
James died on March 15,2015. H had not been feeling well for a few weeks. I miss him and the late Bert Rosenthal from AP every day. On my desk, I have several of James’s Christmas cards featuring James and his son, David.
To read stories by James Dunaway, put a search for stories by James Dunaway in our Search bar. His stories are truly prescient, eleven years after his death.
The following piece was sent to us by former New York Times columnist Frank Litsky, a longtime colleague and friend of James Dunaway, who died on Sunday, March 15, 2015, after a long and colorful career in athletics journalism.
In the IAAF obituary, James Dunaway was described as ” a doyen of athletics journalists.” James Dunaway would have enjoyed that description but would also have said it was undeserved.
That would have been one of the many things on which I would have disagreed with him.
The picture below is of James Dunaway from the 1960s. It is one of my favorite pictures of James.
Thanks to Frank Litsky for his story, and the Armory Foundation for the permission to reprint.
James Dunaway, photo courtesy of USA Track & Field
DUNAWAY
By Frank Litsky
James Dunaway’s track and field credentials are overwhelming. He has covered 13 consecutive Olympic Games (1956 to 2008), all but one world outdoor championships from 1983 to 2007 (he missed one because he was buying a home in Texas), at least 53 NCAA outdoor championships, more than 100 AAU-TAC-USATF national championships indoors and outdoors, and more Penn Relays and Drake Relays than he can count. He had never run, jumped, thrown, or officiated in those meets, yet he always had the best seat in the house.
He got there with a press credential and an old Royal portable typewriter (and later a laptop). He was a prolific reporter who covered track and other sports, almost always on a freelance basis, for The New York Times, United Press International, ABC-TV, Track & Field News, and many other outlets.
He was Eastern editor of Track & Field News from 1963 to 2004 and became editor of American Track and Field in 2004. He’s written more than 200 magazine articles on a wide range of subjects, not just track and field. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Reader’s Digest, Esquire, MediaWeek, Advertising Age, BRANDWEEK, Runner’s World, The Runner, American Track and Field, Track & Field News, and many other publications.
One of his books, “The Sports Illustrated Book of Track and Field: Running Events” (Lippincott, 1968), sold more than 100,000 copies and remained in print for 20 years. Several coaches called it the best book of its type ever, and it still sells strongly on the Web.
He also wrote “The Four-Minute Mile, 1954-1967,” a self-published, $1-a-copy book with incredible detail about the first 14 years of the four-minute mile. It’s served as a track statistician’s dream. A review in Sports Illustrated carried this headline: “A Frustrated Five-Minute Miler Gathers the Facts About Sub-Four-Minute Miles.” Actually, the headline was “He was a diligent but ungainly runner, and his fastest mile was 5:48.”
His peers elected him twice as president of the Track and Field Writers of America (TAFWA). He served that organization, the most important in American track, from 1999 to 2002 and again from 2005 to 2007. He was a longtime secretary of the New York Track Writers Association, an organization that helped keep the sport alive in the East at a time when many major indoor and outdoor meets were closing there.
TAFWA honored him in 1996 with its prestigious Jesse Abramson Award for outstanding writing. His exclusive stories in 1980 about how the Soviets won five track-and-field gold medals at the Moscow Olympics by cheating were a journalistic coup.
If all these jobs seem like overkill, Mr. Dunaway keeps working and keeps writing, and the track world is the better for it.
In 2010, he was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, only the second non-magazine journalist so honored. (The first was the same Jesse Abramson, of the New York Herald Tribune).
Dunaway was stunned by his Hall of Fame selection.
“I called myself an amateur,” he said. “My day job was something else. You’ve got to understand that this was my hobby, so when track people said I should be in the Hall of Fame, I said, ‘Please don’t nominate me.’”
He was nominated and elected, a fitting tribute to a man who should logically have been doing something else. In 1949, he earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from Penn State. He became an advertising copywriter and served such corporate giants as General Electric, DuPont, Kellogg cereals, Procter & Gamble, and Palmolive soap. Late, he spent 19 years with the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the last 10 as its vice president for information, and served as a spokesman for the newspaper industry.
As a young man in the 1950s, his first residence in New York was a rent-controlled apartment on East 93rd Street for $3 a month. In the early ’60s, he lived just off Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. “5 E st 51st Street,” he said, “directly across from the transept of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.” A devoted jazz fan, Dunaway spent many a night in those years in the beloved clubs of 52nd Street, frequenting such legendary jazz haunts as the Three Deuces, The Famous Door, and the Downbeat.
James O’Dwyer Dunaway was born August 17, 1927, in Houston. His love affair with track and field began as a college student, and he was friendly with such celebrated runners as Horace Ashenfelter, later an Olympic steeplechase champion; Curt Stone, later a Pan American Games champion; and Jim Gehrdes, a hurdler and later the Naval Academy and Penn State coach. After college, he worked a year and a half, saved $1,000, quit his job, went to Europe, had a good time, and returned six months later with $5.50 in his pocket.
He got another job, but in 1956, he took a year’s leave of absence to see the Melbourne Olympics. He had little money, but through his father, who worked for Texaco, he got free rides on slow trucks. Journalism credentials for the Olympics were easy to get. Still, he had hardly any journalistic background, although writing advertising copy had given him a head start.
To make money, Dunaway invented Hometown Features, a news agency that would provide American newspapers with Olympic stories about hometown heroes, and solicited 34 newspapers. As he recalled it:
“There was one problem: I had never written a news story in my life! On the other hand, those sports editors didn’t know that. I didn’t have any doubts about my ability to do the job, but I didn’t want to lie about my qualifications. So I got a letterhead printed up that looked like I was a freelance journalist, and I wrote a letter which made it sound like I had been writing about sports for years.”
Five of those newspapers hired him to be their man in Melbourne and write about the local athlete who made g. An Oklahoma City newspaper was so impressed with his presentation that it agreed to use him only if he, and not any of his employees, wrote the stories.
He assured the paper that he would do the job himself. That was easy because he had no employers. He was a one-man show, and he did so well that he kept writing at future Olympics for newspapers and wire services in the United States, Italy, and Australia; Esquire and other magazines; television, the Web, and the IAAF.
In later Olympics and elsewhere, deep into his 80’s, he wrote for just about everyone, always with authority.
He would drive from his home in Homestead, N.J., and Austin, Texas, late in the year to write about meets in Eugene, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and almost everywhere. He would cover half the country with one night stop. Although he paid his own travel expenses and room and board, his greatest motivation was not to make money but to be brief. In the process, he brought his track love and wisdom to newspapers in New York, Chicago, Eugene, Des Moines, Houston, Fort Worth, Austin, Baltimore, and points in between.
In addition, he has served as a sports historian and consultant to ABC Sports, Sports Illustrated, Runner’s World, The Runner, and The New York Times.
He has been doing it mainly for the love of a sport to which he gave so much, and which gave him so much. The task was not easy.
“Track and field is a very tough sport,” he said. “It’s like 14 different sports, and you have to know a lot of things. But it still has ot of vitality. I love it. I just spent too much money on travel most of the time, but I did some good things.”
