Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics of the East, and several of them still have a potency, for their own neighborhoods, social as well as athletic. At the same time that the Pacific Slope was thus getting into the game, the Middle West, led by Detroit, began to enter the running. The Detroit Athletic Club, which was the centre of Middle Western athletic activity for a number of years, was organized in 1886. It was a success from the start. "Jack" McMasters, the club's trainer, laid out its cinder path and also the foun– dations of that knowledge and skill which years afterwards were to decorate his watch-chain with little gold footballs. Many capable performers were developed by the Detroit Club, but the most famous of them was John Owen, Jr., and although the prestige of the organization has long since waned, the initials " D. A. C." are fixed in the record books after the name of John Owen, Jr., the first amateur in the country to win the hundred in better than even time. It was at Detroit that the first national meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States was held, in r 888. There were one hundred and twenty athletes entered for this event from all parts of the country. The East sent its best men. Condon, of the New York Athletic Club, threw the fifty-six-pound weight farther than it had ever been thrown before, and all in all the meet was a