Scott Longley (blue face mask) pounding through snow at the 1985 state cross country championship race.
This weekend, high school runners — including several from the Madison area — will converge on the Ridges Golf Course in Wisconsin Rapids for the boys’ and girls’ state cross country meet.
Thirty years ago at the state meet, on Nov. 9, 1985, at Yahara Hills Country Club, a record 6.8 inches of snow fell on Madison. Suzy Favor from Stevens Point Area Senior High won a record fourth straight cross country title and was on her way to becoming one of greatest distance runners in U.S. history.
Another cross country story that year also involved Stevens Point and is gloriously told in a new book, The Animal Keepers: The Story of an Unlikely Hero and an Unforgettable Season (KCI Sports Publishing).
Written by longtime Stevens Point cross country coach Donn Behnke, who was in his ninth year in 1985, this stranger-than-fiction tale focuses on Scott Longley, an unlikely factor in the high school’s state title that season. Longley lived in a group home and suffered physical, cognitive and emotional challenges, but that didn’t stop him from finding his place on the team and earning the playful nickname “The Animal” — inspired by the Muppets character and Longley’s thick, wild hair and frenzied enthusiasm. He also was obsessed with Survivor’s song “Eye of the Tiger.”
“I can still hear Scott’s voice,” Behnke, now 62 and still Stevens Point’s cross country coach, told me last week. “Some of the conversations from that season I remembered almost verbatim.”
Behnke, a former social studies teacher, didn’t consider himself a writer. “I had to become a writer,” he says. “I knew, even at the time it happened, this was a story I had to get out there. The question was: Could I tell it well enough?”
The answer is, most definitely, yes. In fact, someone needs to purchase the film rights to The Animal Keepers. As a movie, this story would leave McFarland USA in the dust.
Today, Longley is 48 years old and lives independently in Texas; Behnke visited him over the summer. “Time has been unkind, and his memories were not as vivid as I hoped,” Behnke says, then foreshadows one of the book’s final and most cinematic scenes, which took place at the awards ceremony at La Follette High School on that snowy day 30 years ago. “The greatest part of his life was as a high school athlete. I take some comfort knowing that in the few months he spent with us he had a great time.”
