Seventeen miles into the 1936 Boston Marathon, Tarzan Brown led by a half mile.
Wearing white shorts and a white singlet, his boxer’s biceps and pecs mirrored the aura of a Greek god as he made his way up the first of the four Newton Hills.
His stride was smooth and loping, his concentration total; as he ran, he seemed never to look left or right.
Instead, his dark brown eyes were fixed solely on the horizon.
The crowd favorite was the marathon’s defending champion, Johnny Kelley, a diminutive 28-year-old gardener from nearby West Medford, Massachusetts.
Kelley was an Irish Catholic hero in a city teeming with Irish Americans.
A typical news account of the era described him as a “smiling Irishman.”
When he reached the Newton Hills, Kelley began to close in on the stranger, undertaking what was later called “one of the most furious runs through the hills in history.”
Lining the course were hundreds of thousands of spectators bundled in long coats against the April chill.
Marathoning in those days was nearly as popular as football or boxing.
It wasn’t a mass participation sport, but rather a test of endurance practiced by a handful of brave—and, almost invariably, undertrained—young men.
At Boston’s April classic, the multitudes placed bets on the harriers as though they were racehorses, half-hoping that one of the 200 or so daredevils brave enough to compete might actually die or at least faint from overexertion.
Was this stranger going to fall apart?
To the fans, it seemed almost certain, and not only because he’d gone out like a ball of fire, taking the lead just 300 yards after the start.
In the weeks leading up to the race, Boston’s sportswriters had scarcely mentioned Tarzan Brown, a 22-year-old Narragansett Indian and Rhode Island native.
Though he was no slouch, having won the 25-kilometer national championships eight months earlier, he remained a little-known athlete from a federally unrecognized tribe denied citizenship.
To most scribes, he was an exotic figure; when mentioned in newspapers, they often wove in allusions to “wigwams” and “squaws.”
Just past the 20-mile mark, laboring up the last Newton Hill, Kelley was so close that Tarzan could hear the Irishman’s fans bellowing at him to take over.
“Each of those three hills leading up to Boston College found Kelley getting stronger with each stride,” reported The Boston Post.
In the imagination of many Boston Marathon aficionados, Tarzan Brown is forever remembered at the crest of Heartbreak Hill, finding a bit more gas in the tank to hammer home for the victory.
Unlike the spectators, Kelley knew Tarzan.
New England running was a chummy society in those days, consisting of a few dozen fanatics who met on weekends for small-city races in places like Manchester, New Hampshire, or Beverly, Massachusetts, on crowded streets that weren’t cleared of traffic.
By 1936, Kelley had already been out to Tarzan’s modest home for dinner.
When Kelley caught up to his friend on the crest of that last hill in Newton, he gave him a pat on the back.
Was this an elder’s gesture of support or a vaguely patronizing diss?
Kelley’s biographer Frederick Lewis interpreted it as,
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