Reprint of a Frederick Graham column following Regional Olympic Try-outs

DIG INTO YOUR POCKETS!!!

FREDERICK GRAHAM

News-Press Sports Editor

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AMONG the more distasteful misdemeanors of social relations is misrepresentation.  Many who purchased tickets to the Far Western Olympic tryouts in the Coliseum Friday night and Saturday afternoon were of the impression they were contributing to a fund to send western qualifiers to the final tryouts in New York next month.

Not a few of the athletes, including our own Frank Wykoff, entertained this delusion.  That is why Frank, at his own expense, came down from Carpinteria to participate in the Long Beach, Whittier, Compton and coliseum track fests.

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WHEN he qualified Saturday he thought, quite naturally, that he had assured himself a trip east to the finals.  Frank qualified all right.  No doubt about that.  He breezed to victory in faster time than that which made him the national sensation in 1928.  Furthermore, he looked the money doing it.

It was a disappointing discover, after the meet, when he learned that there was no provision for his trip east.  The money collected in these Southland meets will not apply to sending coast Olympic timber east.  Those funds, we are now told, go directly to the National Olympic committee in New York where they will be applied to a fund to send the entire American Olympic team from New York to Berlin.

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ALL OF WHICH leaves Glendale's Frank Wykoff high and dry.  The University of Southern California, which Frank helped put on the map, has barely enough money to send its own undergraduates to the eastern finals.

It was not until I came to Glendale four years ago that I really knew Frank Wykoff.  I had respected his talents as an athlete but it wasn't until the last few years that I learned to regard him as one of the finest and cleanest young men in sports.  He has done more than given the city world wide publicity.  He has enhanced its civic character.  Youngsters who have worshipped him as a hero have sought to weave his qualities into their own lives.  By the same token that his track prowess has inspired prep talent in our schools to be the most consistently outstanding in the United States, so has the friendly worthy character of Wykoff also become a part of their makeup.

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I'M NOT POURING BANANA OIL when I say that this city has a quality of kindliness that has touched me as being one of its outstanding characteristics.  True, I've made enemies here.  I have a faculty for that.  But they've been good-natured antagonists.

The friends have accorded me more kindness than I deserve. Especially in view of some of the predictions we have foisted on them.  In return for this tolerance our humble little staff has endeavored to play the game, if not as famously, at least as fairly as the young hero who has done so much for this city and who is now left to contemplate his misfortune 3000 miles from his goal.

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I DON'T KNOW what Frank Wykoff means to the readers of this column, but I do know what he means to me as a sports writer.  I have never asked anything of you readers and I'm not asking now, but if you feel like doing it, send in a contribution.  Three hundred bucks will send Frank east and, if he flops, will bring him back home.

I will make this prediction:  Frank will race in the final tryouts at New York.  And he'll have money to get there and enough left to come home.  Because if, after writing here for four years I can't raise $300 in six days, I'm going to dish it out myself and scram out of town.

If you want to bet against that prediction, you will do so at your own risk

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Read Also:

"The Big Gyp" -

by Frederick Graham