An important tool in making transition

BY MICHAEL DOBIE | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

EUGENE, Ore.

Long before he descended into an alcoholic haze, long before he landed in an Oregon prison to do time for armed robbery, Jonny Gill was a runner.

When he found himself locked in solitary confinement for the second time in eight months, Gill knew he had hit rock bottom. He had to change his life. He would run again.

Not only did he resume training behind bars, Gill set for himself an audacious goal: He would try to make the 2004 U.S. Olympic team in the 1,500-meter run.

He had talent. He had the backing of a renowned track coach who had produced seven Olympians. When Gill was released last August, he began serious training. However, a leg injury suffered while running in prison flared in April, halting his workouts and eliminating his chances of qualifying for last month's Olympic trials.

But Gill never questioned his decision. Running saved him in prison. Running will sustain him now.

"When you're in the hole you have nothing," said Gill, referring to solitary confinement, "and you will find hope. Hope comes in different ways. Hope might be getting your family back. Hope might be being a productive member of society. Hope might be to get out of prison. Whatever hope is, that's what running gave me. Athletics is all about hope."

Gill, 35, returned to the track in May. He has been competing in local racesand is thinking about the professional track circuit next year. Whatever the result, his quest provides perspective on whether prison sports continues to help inmates when they return to society.

The answer is that no one really knows for sure.

Prison officials believe sports can help ease the transition back to life on the outside and thereby lower the rate of recidivism -- nearly half of the more than 600,000 prison inmates released annually in the United States return to prison within three years -- but there is no definitive proof. There have been no studies of the impact of sports in prison, only anecdotal evidence and that is mixed.

Several former convicts have used sports to become successful. Ron LeFlore, a Michigan prison inmate in the 1970s, was offered a tryout upon his release by the Detroit Tigers and became an All-Star centerfielder who twice led his league in stolen bases. Bernard Hopkins refined his boxing skills while serving 5 years in a Pennsylvania prison and now is the world middleweight champion. Michael Bennett learned to box while doing time for armed robbery in Illinois and went on to win the 1999 amateur heavyweight world championship and captain the U.S. boxing team at the 2000 Olympics.

Less known but greater in number are the jailhouse stars who could not make it on the outside and soon were back in prison, playing in the yard again. Jose Jimenez was a softball star in a New Jersey prison before being paroled in August 2002; six months later, he was back in the same prison playing softball and doing time on a new charge of drug sales, the same crime that sent him to prison in the first place.

In between the extremes are the inmates who do survive outside the walls, some of whom are helped by lessons learned on prison playing fields.

Sports clearly is working for Jonny Gill.

"Running gave me hope not just for the Olympics, but it gave me a bigger hope of being a better person and living life in a different way," Gill said.

Troubled times

Hope was in short supply during a difficult childhood in which Gill said he was shuttled from one family caretaker to the next. His mentally ill and alcoholic mother lost custody of him. A grandmother physically abused him, he said. His father didn't seem to want him. Gill lived with his best friend during his senior year of high school.

Gill discovered track when he was 10 or 11. It was an outlet for his frustrations and the first thing he found that he was good at. He was, by his own admission, difficult to coach. But he won a Michigan state cross country championship as a senior and finished third in a regional behind Bob Kennedy, who would go on to become one of the nation's best distance runners.

Gill earned a track scholarship to a junior college in Texas, but said he was an indifferent student and a hard-headed athlete. He began drinking and drifted to junior colleges in Michigan and Florida, where he finally stopped running altogether as his drinking escalated out of control.

Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, where he robbed a Gap clothing store while drunk on his birthday. Gill says he does not remember anything about the incident. He did six months in the Los Angeles County Jail then moved to Fresno, Calif., where a distant relative who also was a track coach suggested Gill go to Eugene and work with veteran track coach Dick Brown.

Brown, who had trained such stars as Anne Marie Lauck, Vicki Huber and Suzy Favor Hamilton, agreed to tutor Gill.

Gill was "a person with a lot of talent but with a lot of problems," Brown said. "Would those troubles be solvable, specifically alcoholism? I didn't know. That's what we had to address the whole time. He would go in and out of drunken stupors."

During one binge, Gill tried to commit suicide. On New Year's Eve at the end of 1996, Gill swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, drank a bottle of wine and slit his wrists. Then he called Brown.

"I wanted to thank you for your help," Gill said, as he told Brown what he had done.

"If you survive and want to work with me, call me," Brown said. Then Brown called 911.

Gill pulled through and the two men kept training off and on until six months later when Gill, drunk again, robbed a Eugene pizza parlor of $256. He drew a 6-year sentence in the Oregon state prison system. Soon after, Brown paid a visit.

"I'm not giving up on you until you give up on yourself," Brown told Gill.

Gill nearly did that in Snake River, one of Oregon's toughest prisons. He let himself go physically. He courted trouble. When he was put in solitary for the second time in December 1998, on the eve of his 30th birthday, he finally had what he now calls his epiphany.

"Something's got to change or you're just going to be in the hole the whole time," Gill said to himself. "You're never going to pan out to what you believe you can be in life and you keep saying this to yourself, that you can be this runner and you can do this and this, but something's obviously wrong because you're not doing it and now you're in the hole and you're not going nowhere."

It was in the hole, Gill said, that he finally made a commitment to running. He started doing push-ups, squats and other calisthenics. And he began running in the yard. In solitary, that was a small rectangular space surrounded by four cinder block walls with wire mesh on top. Gill measured it in runner's terms -- eight strides by three strides. Inmates in solitary confinement were let out three days a week, Gill said, and "we were lucky if we got that."

Gill ran every minute, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, running so furiously he wore a groove in the snow and ice. Sometimes, his feet bled.

He kept running when he got out of solitary, and when he was transferred from one prison to the next. Some prisons had outdoor tracks. Two were work camps where Gill toiled as a forest firefighter and ran on trails through the woods during lunch or in the evenings.

Gill served the last part of his sentence in Santiam. The prison's short macadam track was flecked with little potholes and had turns that were angled more like corners. He tore ligaments in his left ankle when he didn't slow down enough on one of those corners and stepped into a ditch on the side.

Gill said the obstacles to being a serious runner in prison taught him focus and discipline. He was a different athlete when he was released last August.

Reality check

Back in Eugene, Gill resumed training with Brown on the famed Hayward Field track at the University of Oregon. Gill did everything Brown asked. He logged 100 miles a week to build his aerobic base. He did speed work on the track. He ate right, slept well and took a dizzying combination of supplements ranging from creatine to salmon oil, buffalo liver and vitamins.

He made progress. His technique, which had deteriorated in prison, improved. He was regaining his speed. At times, Brown thought Gill might be able to defy the odds and challenge for one of those Olympics berths.

"Jon has the genetic gifts," Brown said last fall. "If he can keep his focus and if he can train consistently and intelligently, he has a shot."

Gill's effort attracted attention. Even before he was released, he was profiled by television, newspapers and magazines. He was approached by an agent. There was talk of a movie deal.

Injuries were his reality check. His ankle bothered him and that affected his Achilles tendon. He had soreness in his lower stomach that doctors traced to scar tissue in the muscles from over-exercising in prison. He had to take frequent breaks, some lasting as long as two weeks.

Gill said the on-again, off-again nature of his training, combined with some personal issues he declined to disclose, led to a relapse of his drinking during the Christmas season. He had been tempted on other occasions, but abstained. This episode lasted two days.

"You feel horrible about yourself, and then you look back and you realize it wasn't even fun," Gill said. "You know you shouldn't be doing it . . . Are you going to do this every time something goes wrong?"

With his post-prison life framed as a pursuit of Olympic glory, the ultimate frustration came in April when the ankle he had damaged in prison began to hurt during a series of seven 500-meter dashes.

"I probably should have stopped after three of them," Gill said. "It was this old prison thing: I'm just going to run until the wheels come off. Either it's going to pull or I'm going to run through it. And I'm at the cusp, I have to stay healthy or capitulate my goal. I got frustrated and I didn't tell Dick."

Gill kept running, re-injured the ankle and was sidelined for a month, which eliminated his chances of posting a qualifying time good enough to get to the Olympic trials in early July. For the brash Gill, that was disappointment on a grand scale. To deal with it, he once again tapped his prison experience.

"I was pretty broken up but I wasn't shattered. I think it was because prison teaches you the toughness," Gill said. "I don't mean walking around and being a bully. I mean when your wife breaks up with you, although that didn't happen to me. Or when a guard talks down to you, or you don't get a visit for four years, or you don't see anyone in your family for 12 years. You're hurt but you realize you have to go on. That's what I learned: You go on. You start over."

Gill, who lived with Brown for nearly a year before moving into his own apartment in June, wants to compete professionally next season and is thinking about next year's world championship trials. He is working as a cook at a restaurant in Eugene and also does motivational speaking and works with at-risk teens in Eugene in a running-mentoring program sponsored by a shoe company.

Different hopes

Thirty years before Gill walked out of prison, another convict was released with similar dreams of making it big in sports. Improbably, it all worked out for Ron LeFlore.

LeFlore was serving a 5- to 15-year sentence for armed robbery in Michigan's Jackson State Prison when manager Billy Martin and several of his Detroit Tigers visited the prison in 1972. LeFlore played football and basketball at his Detroit high school but never baseball until he was incarcerated. He learned quickly and excelled, so much so that a friend of a friend told Martin about the speedy convict who could flat-out hit.

"He guaranteed me a tryout at Tiger Stadium if I could get a furlough," LeFlore, now 56, said from his home in Pinellas Park, Fla.

Prison officials gave LeFlore a 24-hour pass and he did well enough to earn another furlough to play in an exhibition game with college players and other prospects. LeFlore said he got a couple hits and was timed at 6.2 seconds in the 60-yard dash. That was good enough.

After serving 51/2 years, LeFlore was paroled at age 25 on July 2, 1973. He signed a contract with the Tigers the same day. By 1974, he was in the major leagues.

"I knew I had to give every bit of energy and desire I had within me to make it," LeFlore said. "I couldn't see myself going back and forth to prison."

LeFlore led the American League in runs and stolen bases in 1978 and the National League in stolen bases as a member of the Montreal Expos in 1980 and finished with a career batting average of .288. He also endured countless taunts during his nine years with the Tigers, Expos and Chicago White Sox.

"We were always looked at like the pit of the world," LeFlore said. "Being an ex-offender, nobody thinks you're ever going to be able to turn your life around after you committed a crime, but it's not always like that. You do deserve second chances."

Asked whether he would have made it without baseball as his second chance, LeFlore told a story about the day he left prison. One of his accomplices in the robbery knew LeFlore had received a $10,000 signing bonus from the Tigers and asked LeFlore for money to buy drugs. LeFlore turned him down. Later that day, the man tried to rob a jewelry store and was killed.

"He was a great basketball player," LeFlore said. "He could have been a professional basketball player."

Having baseball was "really fortunate," LeFlore said, but sports alone was not enough.

"You've got to have a certain heart and a certain will power," said LeFlore, who managed an independent minor league team last year and hopes to land a major league coaching job. "I was one of the few people who turned it around."

Working it out

The dreams of most ex-convicts are not nearly as grand. Mark Freitas, for example, simply would like to find time to run.

Freitas, 27, served two years in Connecticut prisons for drug dealing. While imprisoned, he took up lifting and running, got in shape and felt better about himself. Before his release last summer, Freitas vowed that running would be one of his hobbies when he returned to his hometown of Naugatuck, Conn. But when he found work as a carpenter, 12-hour days made it difficult to run or get to the gym.

"I haven't been working out that much only because I don't have that much time," Freitas said last fall. "I try to get to the gym three, four times a week. I'd love to go every day like I used to [in prison]."

He laughed at the idea that as a free man he was working out as much in one week as he did in one day in prison. But his relative inactivity gnawed at him. He wasn't feeling right. He finally decided to fit in workouts around his schedule. Now he goes to the gym every day, for a half-hour of cardio work at 6 a.m. and 90 minutes of weightlifting at 7:30 p.m.

"It just makes me feel better about myself, I feel like I'm more productive," Freitas said. "I feel better when I work out, feel better about my person as a whole."

His day is longer, but that has its own benefits.

"I'm not hanging around with friends that were leading me into the lifestyle of a criminal," he said.

Freitas' attempt to keep sports in his life was complicated by the fact he had to support himself. Gill, on the other hand, lived initially with Brown, who has a doctorate in exercise and movement science and teaches a class at the University of Oregon. Gill also got spending money by working two hours a week for Brown's foundation. Most ex-cons don't have that kind of support system.

More common are former inmates such as Ed Parker, who did more than 18 years in the New York prison system on a drug possession charge before his release in 2003. Parker works 16 hours a day as a data analyst for a company that evaluates non-profit service programs and as owner of a budding business that fabricates and installs granite countertops.

Parker was a zealous runner in prison. He began every day with a five-mile run and formed a runners' club that had as many as 130 members during his 14 years at Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate Napanoch. At Eastern, Parker organized an event in which inmates would run a marathon and collect donations for the Tomorrows Children's Fund. Some years, Parker and his peers raised more than $3,000.

Parker, 54, has continued doing much of what he did inside, but on a smaller scale. He still finds value in working out, still is involved in charity work, and even competes occasionally in community races in and around Kingston, where he lives. It's just that sports is not as important anymore. He found it essential to surviving inside prison. But Parker questions what it really was worth as he tries to re-establish relationships with the family he was separated from for nearly 20 years.

"I look back and I go, wow. You don't realize, nobody realizes, what you lose," Parker said. "What is really important in life is family and friends and just living and that's taken away from you. And while you're on the inside you might trick yourself into surviving, running around the yard thinking you're doing something. But when you come out and see the enormity and the reality of what you've missed, it's amazing, it's mind-boggling, and you feel it every day, and it will be with me the rest of my life."

For Parker -- indeed, for many inmates -- sports in prison is a narcotic that masks an unspeakable pain. When they get out, things change.

To Parker, sports is of little help in reconciling with his daughters. To Freitas, sports is worth pursuing but ultimately a secondary priority in the struggle of day-to-day living. To LeFlore, sports is an ongoing ticket to real-life success. To Gill, sports is survival.

And, Gill said, he's not the only one.

He has several friends in the Eugene area, guys who ran with him in prison, guys who are doing well and still are active. There's Tyrone, who joined a bike club and does 50-mile races on weekends. There's Mark, who works out regularly in the gym and is trying to become a physical trainer. There's Dennis, who is in his 50s and runs and hikes all the time. None of them, Gill said, did anything athletic before prison.

Gill did. He had a passion and lost it. And then found it again in the loneliness of an Oregon prison cell.

"Running gave me hope," Gill said, "and once you get hope instilled, I don't think it goes away anytime soon."