David Pain gets his due as creator of Masters sports

David Pain trained for the 40th anniversary of the first U.S. Masters national track championships -- a meet he founded in 1968. But Pain, now 86, didn't compete at the Aug. 7-10 event at Spokane Falls Community College in Washington.

He just needed the strength to push his wheeled walker across the track. "He's been doing some special therapy in the pool, strengthening his legs and working on his balance," said Robin Hochstadt, the first of Pain's four children with the late Helen Pain.

Four years earlier, as a world-class M80 cyclist, Pain suffered severe injuries after flying headfirst over the handlebars on a speedy downhill run. "Basically, he broke everything from his head down to his waist and bruised ever y thing from his waist down to his toes," Hochstadt said, while watching her dad savor Sunday events at the Spokane meet.

Yet here he was, thanks to a grant from the USA Track and Field Masters Track & Field Committee, which brought him and second wife, Linda, from San Diego to witness his first national championships in two decades.

Pain's presence during day 2 at the event was noted bymeet announcer Peter Taylor, and thus began a procession of athletes to meet the Columbus of adult age-group sports. Bill Collins, the world champion M55 sprinter who would win the 100 meters, 200 meters and 400 meters a sixth straight year, stopped to chat. Bob Fine, a co-founder with Pain of the World Association of Veteran Athletes in the mid-1970s, visited. What most impressed me," Hochstadt said, were "people who didn't know him, who came up to thank him for what he had done in starting the movement, so they could enjoy competition today."

David Pain recalled that first nationals and how far the sport had come. Only stopwatches. Few black athletes. No women's events. No hammer throw or pole vault either (because, Pain said, organizers were determined to avoid injuries and seeing their entrants laughed at).

At Saturday night's annual banquet, Pain received a standing ovation as he rose to accept awards. Among those applauding was 1952 Olympian Bud Held, the lone remaining veteran of the 1968 Masters nationals, when he won the javelin. (In Spokane, Held set an M80 pole vault world record and an American record in the hammer throw.)

Pain slowly made his way -- without his walker -- to a set of stairs below the stage. "He was extremely determined," his daughter said. Pain had been given the option of coming to the base of the stage and being handed a microphone. But no. "That wasn't good enough for him. He was determined to go up the stairs."

He accepted two plaques (one saluting him as the sport's "founding father"). But Pain's biggest surprise was being presented with a huge white flag with the old WAVA logo. "I was quite humbled by the whole thing," said Chairman Gary Snyder of Boston, who also sprinted at Spokane. "You think you've accomplished something in your life, and then you see that -- and he's accomplished more in some individual activities than I've accomplished in my whole life."

And Pain? He most appreciated the efforts on the track -- "just the ambience and the same spirit of competitiveness that existed in the first years."

He noted a spectacular wipeout by Amanda Scotti of Folsom, Calif., in the last yards of a women's 200-meter final. "That gal stumbled and fell," Pain said. "She was giving her all."