Cordner Nelson, 91; cofounded Track & Field News magazine
February 8th, 2010
Originally found at www.boston.com
Written By, Frank Litsky
Cordner Nelson, who drew on his youthful fascination with Olympic athletes to create, with his brother, Track & Field News in 1948 and helped turn it into the sport’s premier monthly magazine, died Monday at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 91.The cause was T-cell lymphoma, his daughter Rebecca said. Mr. Nelson became interested in the sport not as an athlete but as a teenage spectator, when his father took him and his younger brother, Bert, to track and field events at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.Sixteen years later, the brothers began publishing Track & Field News. Mr. Cordner Nelson, the founding editor, gathered track meet results and wrote stories in addition to editing. His brother handled the business side.
Covering the sport for more than a half-century, Mr. Nelson, a tall and dignified presence, attended 15 Olympics and wrote several books, including a biography of the runner Jim Ryun. He originated the magazine’s now-authoritative annual world rankings, as determined by an international panel.Today, Track & Field News bills itself “the Bible of the Sport,’’ but it struggled at first. Two months after it began, the brothers shipped 2,000 copies to the Drake Relays in Des Moines, where they were given away in the hope of landing a bonanza of subscriptions.The effort produced two, at $2 a year. Recalling the magazine’s rocky early days, Mr. Cordner Nelson said in 1998, “Even after deciding to do it, we didn’t know how to do it.’’
They looked to track aficionados for help. A coach told them about Don Potts, at 26 a full professor of mathematics at Northwestern University. Potts told them about a young Italian sports journalist, Roberto Quercetani.The two went on to contribute news, results, and perspective to the magazine for the next 50 years or more. Mr. Nelson became a pioneering writer about weight training and interval training, which involves bursts of high-intensity activity like running or rowing alternating with periods of rest or low activity. He edited the magazine through 1969, remaining as a writer afterward.
His special interest in the mile led him to write “The Jim Ryun Story’’ (1967), “The Milers’’ (1985), and other books.Cordner Bruce Nelson was born in San Diego and grew up in Riverside, Calif. He graduated from the College of the Pacific (now part of the University of the Pacific) in 1940. After college, he managed his family’s farm near Stockton, Calif., and served in the Army from 1941-45.He was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1988.
Mr. Nelson was also a pioneer in fantasy sports, now widely popular among football and baseball fans. Jim Dunaway, a veteran track and field writer, said in an interview that in 1956 Mr. Nelson wrote to eight other track and field fans and suggested a game in which fantasy teams of American athletes would be scored by the results of the annual NCAA and Amateur Athletic Union outdoor championships.“The players drafted their teams until each had a roster of 60 athletes, and the first fantasy competition ended on June 22, 1957, in the AAU championships,’’ Dunaway said. Others followed, and similar fantasy track and field events have since been started.
