The Great American Milers

Millennium Look Back--Kansas Milers

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) _ On a May day in 1965, 18-year-old Jim Ryun of Wichita East High School won the Kansas state mile championship in 3 minutes, 58.3 seconds.

Thirty-four years later, Ryun's mark is still the only sub-4 minute mile ever run in a high school track meet.

Ryun today says that's a disappointment to him.

"It's a great honor," he says, "but it's interesting that what should be a natural progression is a hurdle that shouldn't be so high."

Ryun was the last of three born-and-bred Kansans and Kansas University runners who dominated their eras in track's traditional glamor event, the mile run. Ryun, Glenn Cunningham and Wes Santee all set world records, ran in the Olympic Games and put the state on the running map for more than four decades.

JIM RYUN, Wichita

Ryun, a native of Wichita, in two years went from a 15-year-old just trying to make his high school cross-country team to winning a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in the "metric mile," the 1,500-meter run.

"It has taken me years to appreciate the uniqueness of that," he says. "When you're doing it, when you're in the middle of the battle, your objective is to continue to improve. But I knew it was something special."

Ryun broke the 4-minute barrier five times before he entered college.

Just a month after winning the 1965 Kansas high school championship, Ryun beat Olympic champion and world record holder Peter Snell in 3:55.3 to set a U.S. mile record, a time that's widely accepted as the U.S. high school record.

Ryun later set world records in the half-mile, mile and 1,500 meters.

Ryun 's world and American records have been eclipsed, but he remains one of only three high school runners who broke 4 minutes -- the last one was Marty Liquori in 1967 -- and the only one ever to do so in high school competition.

Ryun won a silver medal at 1,500 meters in the 1968 Mexico City Olympic games and made the U.S team for the Munich games in a comeback in 1972 but was tripped in a qualifying heat.

Ryun, now a U.S. Representative from northeast Kansas, says he learned valuable lessons from the training and competition.

"It's good discipline that helps you, and also good ethics," he says. "There are no short cuts. You have to do things the right way."

WES SANTEE, Ashland

Santee, a native of Ashland in southwest Kansas, was a brash, bold and controversial runner who set U.S. and world records before being banned from amateur competition for allegedly accepting too much expense money from meet promoters.

"Santee was such a great competitor," recalled Bill Mayer, who covered Santee in the 1950s as a young sports writer for the Lawrence Journal-World. "He just flat believed he was better than anybody else. He made a lot of people mad."

Santee dominated the U.S. track scene in the mid-1950s. He set U.S. records in the 1,500 meters and the mile, the world record for 1,500 meters and the world indoor record for the mile.

As a Kansas sophomore, he made the 1952 U.S. Olympic team in the 5,000 meters, though he ran the event only twice. He was denied a chance to make the team in the 1,500 -- his best event -- by officials who claimed he wasn't old enough to run both events in the Olympics.

Santee boldly predicted to a national magazine that he would be the first to break the 4-minute barrier but had few opportunities to run the open mile. He usually ran several events, including relays, in each meet to help the Kansas team.

"Wes gave up a lot of opportunities to run the mile when he was in college," recalls Dick Wilson, a teammate of Santee's from 1950-54. "He believed he was part of the team, and that was coach (Bill) Easton's philosophy."

Perhaps his best effort came at the 1954 Kansas Relays, when 23,000 people turned out to see Santee run 4:03.1 on a cinder track made soft and soggy by heavy rains.

"He was physically and mentally ready," Wilson said. "It was windy and cold, just blowing too hard. They even put tarps up to block the wind."

Just 18 days later, Roger Bannister of England, running in a minor dual meet in which he was paced by two other runners, broke the 4-minute barrier to beat Santee to racing immortality in what Runner's World magazine named the greatest running moment in the past century.

"I absolutely thought I was going to be the first one," Santee said. I don't think there's any question that if we had run a paced race like Bannister, we would have broken it."

GLENN CUNNINGHAM, Elkhart

Cunningham, born in 1909 in Elkhart in southwest Kansas, was severely burned at age 13 when a stove exploded in his school, killing his older brother, Floyd.

"They wanted to amputate his legs and said he'd never walk again," said Ted Hayes, executive director of the State of Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. "And he ended up a world record holder."

Cunningham eventually regained the use of his legs, and as a senior went on to set the U.S. high school mile record at 4:31.4, broke that with a 4:28.4 in the state meet, and then ran 4:24.7 at a national high school meet in Chicago.

Cunningham was the greatest of the Kansas runners, Hayes believes.

"When you talk to people who grew up in the era of the 1930s, Glenn Cunningham is far ahead of anybody else that's even mentioned before 1950," Hayes said. "He's at the top of the list for all sports."

Cunningham broke the world indoor record in the 1,500-meter run three times. His 3:48.4 in 1938 stood for 17 years, until Santee broke it. He also broke the U.S. mile record three times, including a 4:06.7 mile in 1934 that lasted nine years and also set a world record.

He ran in two Olympics, finishing fourth at 1,500 meters in Los Angeles in 1932 and winning the silver medal in the 1936 Berlin games.

In 1978 Cunningham was named the outstanding track performer in the 100-year history of Madison Square Garden -- for many years the site of the biggest indoor meets in the country -- Hayes said.

Cunningham died in 1987 at age 78. Santee worked in the insurance business, served in the U.S. Marine Corps and retired from the Marine Reserves as a colonel. He is now retired in Prescott, Ariz., and Eureka, Kan.