Book Report

Book Report

Introduction

The original name of Fred Lebow was Fishl Lebowtiz and he was born in the year 1932, in Transylavania, Romania. He is known as the founder of the largest foot race of the world, The New York City Marathon. Lebow transformed the race with 55 finishers to one of the largest marathons in the world that it is now, with over 30,000 finishers (Rubin, 2002).

The time when Lebow had started running with the NY Road Runners Club, it was more of an elitist group that catered only to top-notch runners. They used to organize a New York City marathon which was also called the Cherry Tree Marathon, and about 200 participants used to take place in it, running on open streets. These tracks were areas that had lesser traffic flow on them. Lebow took part in this marathon in the year 1970, and then suggested organizing a marathon in Central Park, which had even lesser traffic and had a better environment. This happened in 1970 but could not achieve much momentum as Frisbees were being tossed at the runners (Miller, 2006).

However, this marathon continued to spark interest and grew with the help of some dedicated sponsors. In the year 1976, a special course was suggested for the U.S. bicentennial that was going to run through 5 boroughs of New York. Lebow initially did not support the idea, and described his perception about an unbelievable estimate of cost of initiating the race. He was not in favor for persuading people for this idea and at the end had to collect more than the amount in order to make the race happen (Rubin, 2002).

Lebow was only a garment worker, but had the willingness and the convincing abilities to drive sponsors into thinking that their participation would bring benefits. He felt that all ordinary people needed to be given a chance to participate in races, and that such races provide a great experience for the runners regardless of what their goals might be (Lebow & Averbuch, 1999).

It is interesting to know how Lebow got a cautious company to invest by making them realize what potential benefits they could gather. For this reason, he had asked dealers of Buick to give $75,000 for the honour of provision of pace vehicles to the male and female champions. The dealers, however, refused to pay and that is when he himself offered to pay them $10000, with the condition that they would appoint an analyst who will be responsible for calculating the value of the exposure they would get, and Lebow would take 10% of the amount. He did this because he predicted that he would be able to get $100,000. The dealers then gave him $50,000 and a Buick to use, for the period of one year. All of the factors through which Lebow tried to promote the race, eventually caused it to become the famous 40,000 person social gathering of whole day (Rubin, 2002).

How the New York City Marathon was conceived

After migrating to the ...