Macombs Dam Park, Legendary For Generations of Bronx Runners, Including UAlbany's Coach Vives

Under clouds of rain and dust, bulldozers picked through the shrinking ruins of the old Yankee Stadium on Friday. Across the street, at the gleaming new stadium festooned with huge banners, preparations continued for Opening Day next week.

Not that anybody noticed. A few hundred people had gathered in the shadow of Yankee parks old and new to celebrate Joseph Yancey, a legend who coached track and field because he loved it. His name — on a regulation issue Parks Department sign — graces the track at the new Macombs Dam Park, which itself was legendary for generations of Bronx runners.

The old track and park are gone, buried under the new stadium, where signs declare that NYY Steak and the Hard Rock Cafe are open “Year Round.” If the demise of the old Macombs Dam Park was full of sadness — if not outright bitterness — its rebirth atop a garage across the street gave cause to smile and remember and look to the future.

“I know they took our park,” said Lon Wilson, a coach who started running in the 1960s. “But this is the better deal. Before, we had no bathrooms, the stands were a mess and there were rats below. We had a whole bunch of nothing.”

Granted, runners know how to make something from nothing. It seems almost Sisyphean, running in circles. But it can be a road to self-discovery and discipline, if not riches. Those lucky enough to have found the inner path that unfolds in 400-meter increments did so because a coach cared.

Joseph Yancey, who died in 1991, was such a man. A native New Yorker, he was a founder of the New York Pioneer Club in the 1930s, serving as volunteer coach for an integrated club at a time when institutions like the New York Athletic Club did not have black members. From that base, he went on to coach thousands of people, helping them win scholarships and Olympic medals.

Some of those runners, older but just as lithe of mind and body, spoke with grace and gratitude of what they had learned from the man. Harry Bright — a former half-miler whose attitude suits his surname — sprang up to praise his coach’s leadership in forging a team that knew no boundaries of race.

“He taught us to walk up to someone and shake their hand,” Mr. Bright said. “Everything we have done since, he laid the background to prepare for the future.”

In the audience, men of a certain age nodded knowingly. Among them was Ed Robinson, who earned the nickname Swifty and who went from running at nearby Cardinal Hayes High School to coaching there for many years. Now in his 60s and retired, he still officiates at meets.

Mr. Robinson’s temper at times was Wagnerian, but the results bore him out. Some of his young charges went on to become college stars. Many more went on to be lawyers, doctors, teachers. Face it, in the 1970s, nobody was making any money running in the Bronx, except maybe the guy sprinting down the Concourse with a snatched purse.

Coach Robinson smiled approvingly at the new park, which cost $35 million and looks it. Too bad the world of schoolboy track is no longer what it was, even if the facilities here, and at the Fort Washington Armory and Randalls Island, are better than ever. The squads are smaller, he said, and while they have a few good runners, they lack a deep bench of talent. Teenagers seem unwilling to push themselves, while meet organizers are reluctant to upset parents and children.

“Everybody gets a medal,” he said. “Some Jersey meets just throw medals at the kids. They walk around with these ribbons hanging on their necks with medals on their chests just clacking around.”

Roberto Vives knows the satisfaction of a medal won through sacrifice. As a teenager, he was among Coach Robinson’s runners, a wiry sprinter with big glasses and an even bigger Afro. As he worked his way through college with a job at Alexander’s, his dedication was tested every evening when he got home to the Patterson Projects and had to decide between rice or running.

“I’d get changed, then go out, smelling the steak and rice and beans, oh man,” he said. “I’d run over to the track and leave my sweats in the middle of the track. That way, if someone tried to grab them, you had a chance of catching them. If you left it on the side on the back straightaway, forget it, they’d be gone.”

Macombs remains Mr. Vives’s touchstone.

“I have pride in my roots, in what track and field means to me,” he said. “I do what I do because of Macombs.”

And he does it well. Now the head track coach at the State University at Albany, he has coached scores of All American runners, seen his team win — among others — two consecutive IC4A titles and been named this year’s Northeast region Coach of the Year.

“I tell my runners where that stadium is now, that’s where I got my start in track and field,” Mr. Vives said. “That is hallowed ground.”

By DAVID GONZALEZ