In the 1950s, he began doing promotion work for Herschel Smith, the Compton Relays meet director.įranken and Smith decided in 1961 to hold the West Coast’s first indoor track meet, the L.A. Later he worked as the prep editor for the Los Angeles Mirror newspaper. He attended UCLA, where he was the sports editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Bruin. “And he fell in love with the sport forever,” Don Franken said. His father took him to the first day of the track and field competition at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. It turns out the AAU’s attorney also represented Franken.įranken was born on April 9, 1925, in Los Angeles. “He was always at odds with the AAU.”Įach time Franken’s lifetime ban was lifted. “Dad always believed if he benefited then the athletes should share in the profits,” Don Franken said. I wasn’t sure that was legal or not.”īut it was under-the-table payments with several more zeroes in them that frequently got Franken in trouble with the sport’s governing bodies in the so-called Shamateurism era before the hypocritical prohibition of paying track athletes finally ended in 1981.įranken was banned for life at least three times by the AAU or TAC for paying athletes. He later held the American outdoor record in the mile for a quarter-century.Īfterward, Franken, Scott said, “gave my coach $100 to go buy me something. Scott returned the favor by breaking four minutes for the first time that night. “Al pretty much did him a favor of letting me in the race,” Scott recalled. Scott, Miller told Franken, “was the next great American miler.” UC Irvine coach Len Miller talked Franken into putting a relatively unknown miler named Steve Scott into a star-studded race at the 1977 Sunkist meet. “I remember thinking ‘Oh, ok, I just got paid to be a high jumper,’” Stones recalled. Stones recalled doing a photo shoot for the Sunkist meet as a barely 19-year-old UCLA freshman and finding a $20 bill in his palm after shaking Franken’s hand afterward. Officials at the Amateur Athletic Union, later The Athletic Congress, the sport’s governing bodies, often felt Franken was too cozy with his stars. Said Beatty, “the one thing about Al Franken was he really cared about the athletes.” “I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Al Franken,” Seagren said. Seagren had regular lunches with Franken until recently. Stones recalled Franken attending his wedding. Oregon distance running icon Steve Prefontaine tended bar at Franken’s New Year’s Eve parties. While he put up Santee at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1953, you were just as likely to find Olympic champions staying at the Franken family home near the UCLA campus, Keino in one bedroom, Finland’s Lasse Viren in another. “Al,” Stones said, “had a way of getting everybody hyped up.”įor Franken, athletes were like family. The 1986 Sunkist meet at the Sports Arena saw world records set in four events. “For track and field on the West Coast,” Seagren said, “Al Franken was the guy.”įranken promoted meets produced more than 100 world and American records. Franken invented indoor track on the West Coast, ending an East Coast monopoly on the sport in the 1960s and eventually equaling or surpassing the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden as the planet’s premier indoor meet with world record-shattering events in Los Angeles and later San Diego that put the sport and its superstars like Irish miler Eamonn Coghlan on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “The end of that era,” said Dwight Stones, who set multiple world high jump records in Franken meets.įranken put on the Compton Relays and the Coliseum Relays, the meets drawing large crowds to watch the likes of sprinter Tommie Smith, Seagren or Jim Ryun take on Olympic champions Peter Snell or Kip Keino.īut it was indoors where Franken was most influential. Franken was recently diagnosed with leukemia, his son Don said. “Al Franken,” Jim Beatty, the first man to run a sub-4-minute mile indoors, said “was the best track and field promoter this country has ever had.”įranken, one of the most influential figures in American track and field’s golden era from the 1950s through the 1970s, died at the age of 96 on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. If track and field, as is often suggested, is a three-ring circus, then Franken was one of its leading ringmasters for parts of four decades. “And it wrapped its paw around me and I almost had to go change my shorts.” “He had this big-ass Bengal tiger in the shot with me,” Seagren said recently, laughing at the memory. Franken was promoting both one of his track meets and a circus at the same time and arranged a photo shoot of Seagren with one of the circus’ biggest stars. Nearly two decades later Olympic pole vault champion Bob Seagren had a somewhat less glamorous Franken-orchestrated brush with show business.