Pat J Daly

A native of Wantagh, a hamlet on the south shore of Long Island, I was diagnosed at the age of four with a degenerative hip condition called Perthes Disease. In order to allow the hip to heal, over the next five years I was forced to wear a harnessed leg brace that ran along the entirety of my left leg. It was indeed a rough period for me. Not only the paralyzing effects of ridicule (the nickname, Cornball Harry, came to stick to me like a burr in my Catholic grammar school). But also that Dr. Jackson insisted that after dinner each night I take off my brace and rest in bed. Especially during the summer months, I experienced a festering jealousy: from my bedroom window I watched neighborhood kids racing about our cul de sac in reckless abandonment. And they did so on a daily basis. If not for my saint-like father, I would have gimped my way to the Brooklyn Bridge and jumped. 

For one thing, my father as a public-school English teacher regularly brought home all kinds of library reading material. Given that I was a hostage to bedrest, I devoured a good deal of it. My father also encouraged me to sketch photos from publications such as National Geographic. After I got good at that, he’d slip me a quarter for every one-page story that I wrote which was based on one of my magazine sketches. With a clear view from my bedroom desk of neighborhood kids zigzagging about, I wrote one story after another. Many involved a running scene.

My father also took me on road trips into the city. Sometimes to my grandfather’s tavern in Manhattan. At other times to the bleachers of Yankee Stadium. Every so often we drove to his boyhood home in Queens where his mother, an immigrant from Ireland, heated up leftover leg of lamb and spuds for us. My favorite excursion, though, was the nocturnal trips to Jones Beach’s Field Nine. After discarding the brace, he’d carry me over sand and down to the water for a swim. (Dr. Jackson urged swimming since it would exercise the left leg without putting any pressure on it.) With the moon bright, the water black and salty, we’d swim out past the breakers. I got good at it. But I was always sure to keep the dunes’ feathery caps in sight.

Once the hip had healed, and the brace came off for good, those five years from hell quickly became ancient history. In no time at all, I often found myself running in open stretches. A path in the woods. The shoreline. The cinder track at the local high school. The buoyancy of it all, running seemed more natural than walking. And after the brace was tossed in the dumpster, I continued putting pen to paper to compose what I thought were ambitious stories, a few of which were based on real life incidents that I had witnessed firsthand. A fisherman on a jetty reeling in a monstrous bluefish on a stormy night. A deranged nun beating senseless a classmate of mine, right there in the church foyer. A great uncle, a New York city cop, handcuffing a drunken man to a funeral home’s bathroom cast-iron radiator.

In seventh grade I joined my grammar school’s CYO track team, where my utter lack of foot speed landed me in the distance events. Still, a shiny trophy followed me home after winning an age-group road race at Alley Pond Park in Queens. During this time I wrote a story that I called, “The Race.” It featured a boy who with a cast on his arm wins a half-mile race in front of a sold-out crowd. The dangling modifiers and comma splices aside, I remain convinced to this day that the story has Pulitzer potential. 

Of course, I am no Oates or Murakami. Nor am I a Prefontaine. In fact, my record on both fronts is meager at best. Still, my twenty-six years of teaching and researching British literature at Indiana University Southeast has resulted in ambitious literary undertakings: a full-length biography; a number of short stories and screenplays; and a series of articles on the intersection of Shakespearian literature and the politics of the Stuart Monarchy. Equally relevant, over the last five decades I have amassed some 60,000 miles of running. Many of those miles came during my competitive years on the cross-country and track teams of Holy Trinity High School and Bradley University, where I studied literature and political science.  

I believe that it was the cumulative effect of lessons learned from my brace years as well as the afterglow of my college immersion in literature and eight years of competitive running that led me, soon after graduation in 1979, to compose a dark tale about a high school cross-country team. But given that the draft was clunky at best, filled as it was with embarrassing scenes of adolescent exuberance, it was banished to a footlocker. That’s not to say that over the years my mind didn’t drift off to the story. It wasn’t until some three decades later, when I became a roadie to state-ranked high school cross-country teams that my son and daughter ran on, that I got the itch to return to the draft. A few years later, in 2014, I self-published the first edition, whose front cover looked like this:

Some former harriers who read the book emailed me with favorable comments. They also expressed some disappointment that the novel didn’t have more running scenes. Other readers counseled that the story would have been more dramatic had I developed the cast of townspeople. While it wasn’t lost on me that both critiques had merit, I dreaded the labor that would go into a major revision. Over time, however, I came to appreciate that the original edition, despite all its flaws, possessed a compelling storyline. So I went to work, and gradually over the course of several revisions a more robust community surfaced. With the team now embedded in the social structures of family, church, and town, the novel now had a far greater thematic complexity, which reached well beyond the cross-country course. So, too, did I grow the story’s running side. A slew of daunting practices as well as rousing competitions were added to the 2025 revision, whose front cover has been redesigned to now look like this:

Indeed, if early positive reviews of the 2025 edition are accurate, readers now hear with clarity the voices of doting mothers and gruff blue-collar fathers; the pristine solemnity of nuns and the dignified hubris of clergy and their love of lace; the calculating bravado of small-town elite. Moreover, the team’s passionate coach, Jack Hogan, having found himself in a much larger role, never fails to jumpstart floundering workouts with his indelicate tongue and withering stare. 

Finally, given that novels live or die by their characters, I grabbed a needle and injected adrenaline into the arms of the varsity seven so that each has a unique personality and voice. By novel’s end, each runner – Dennis, William, Peter, Legs, Adam, Mumbles, and Fenny – has a meaningful impact on the story. About the novel’s representation of the team, one reviewer has recently written, 

Daly doesn’t dress things up. He lets the story breathe in its own rawness, its own weird charm. The characters aren’t perfect, and they don’t try to be. They screw up. They say the wrong things. They carry guilt like a second backpack. But they feel real. Dennis, especially, is a character I felt for deeply—a quiet resilience runs through him. And Coach Jack? A wild, profane, occasionally brilliant force of nature. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug him or slap him.

So that’s my story as a runner-writer, and that’s how Sitting Bull Run evolved from draft to publication. And as today I work on the sequel, I try like hell to continue to hitch my wagon to community at large. 

Other Selected Publications by Pat J Daly 

A Campus Ministry: Monsignor Edward J. Duncan and the Newman Foundation at the University of Illinois in the Twentieth Century,” 25 (1) 2001. 

“Monarchy, the Disbanding Crisis, and the Dispensary,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 25 (1) 2001: 35-52. 

“Court Politics and the Original Two-Canto Rape of the Locke”  Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 42 (3) 2010: 331-358. 

“’Rome’s Other Hope’”: Charles, Monmouth, and James in the Summer of 1676,” English Literary History,  66 (3) 1999: 41-58.  

“Patrick Hume and the making of the Addison’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Papers,  Milton Studies 31 (1) 1994: 179–195.