Liquori’s Dream Mile Anniversary Quiet
By Robbie Andreu, The Gainesville Sun
Marty Liquori’s phone has been relatively quiet the past week. That’s not the way it used to be with the approach of a significant anniversary of the Dream Mile.
“When it was 10 years, 20 years, I’d get a lot of phone calls about it,” he said. “But you get to 40 years and you realize there aren’t too many people around anymore who remember that race. The original journalists (who covered it) are all gone.”
The 40th anniversary of the Dream Mile came and went Monday with little or no fanfare — and scant interest from the media. Liquori, the former Olympic runner who lives in Gainesville, said he received only one phone call about it before Monday.
With the passage of time, the Dream Mile has slipped deeper into history — and further from the consciousness of the sports world.
But in 1971, the Dream Mile was one of the most hyped, most talked about events in sports — right up there with the Ali vs. Frazier heavyweight boxing matchup two months earlier that year.
It was Marty Liquori vs. Jim Ryun in a head-to-head battle between the world’s best Milers at Franklin Field in Philadelphia at the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Games.
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