June 2026 Alumni Update

Bison,

It was a winter night in January of 1973. I'd made my way from my home on Long Island to Madison Square Garden in New York, where I was to meet Art Gulden and his team competing at the Millrose Games. I was a high school senior, a distance runner, being recruited by Bucknell. Gulden had asked me to come to the Garden so he could take me to campus with the team for the weekend.

When I arrived at the Garden and walked up into the stands, I began searching the track for Bucknell runners. I'd not yet met Gulden, and so I had no way of recognizing him. I went down to the rail overlooking the track and saw a Bucknell runner approaching. He was in our original sweats, first worn that year by the team, blue pants with white stripes down the legs, white top with blue stripes around the arms, "Bucknell" emblazoned in orange across the back. He appeared to be warming up, holding his Adidas spikes in his hands as he ran. "Hey Bucknell, where's your coach?" I yelled, in retrospect probably sounding like a classic New York heckler, as if I was asking him not for the location of his coach, but why he was at this meet without one. He stopped and looked up at me, seemingly mystified, as I would have been. Then he raised an arm, and without saying a word, pointed toward the stands on the far side of the track, where I saw several Bucknell runners speaking with someone I'd soon learn was Gulden.

That runner on the track was Ted Dzurinko '76, the first Bucknell cross country and track & field team member I ever met.

Ted was a sophomore that year, enrolled in a five-year engineering program, and one of our top middle distance runners. When I came to Bucknell that fall, I saw him again at practice, where I heard our teammates call him Oz. That would be Oz with a long O, as in Ohs, and not Oz with a short O, as in The Wizard of Oz. A teammate explained to me that Oz got the nickname at an earlier meet. The meet announcer was calling out the names of runners in the next race, and he paused when he saw Dzurinko on the list, apparently unsure of how to pronounce the name, or perhaps not clearly seeing the name. In an etymological twist of fate that has endured for more than half a century, the announcer swapped an O for the D, resulting in Ozurinko. Thus, the nickname Oz was born. Or O'z, for O'Zurinko, as our teammate Glenn McLaughlin '74 writes in Quiet Decency Changes the World, his eloquent remembrance of Ted, which follows this essay.

I was fortunate to have Ted as a teammate for the ensuing three years, as we all were throughout his five years at Bucknell. He brought to the team his many gifts as a runner, as a student, and as a friend. But what I remember most was his stillness, especially the layered nature of that stillness. At first glance, his quiet presence seemed like understatement and nothing more, humility so deep it made silence his language, deference his preference, kindness his manner. Those attributes were true of him. But there was more to him. There was another stillness beneath that first glance. It was a stillness reflective of virtues so steadfast they didn't require expression in words, virtues such as civility, devotion, empathy, graciousness, honesty, principle, generosity, and so many others, virtues present enough within him to wordlessly radiate through his understatement and humility, his silence and deference, his kindness.

Ted reminded us of what a teammate should be, borne of those virtues, when at times we'd forgotten. He showed us in many moments, on and off the track. But he did so especially one April day in 1976, when he stepped up to the line against the boundlessly gifted Tom McLean '78, in Tom's signature event of the 880, on the ravaged cinders of Christy Mathewson Memorial Stadium in a meet against Lafayette. Tom was just two months away from winning the NCAA 800 title, becoming Bucknell's only NCAA champion in track & field. Ted won that race in April, not out of rivalry, but out of respect, the virtue of honoring our bond as teammates by bringing our best to competition, eliciting the best in each other.

Tom won his NCAA title convincingly that June, surging off the final turn and electrifying the crowd at Penn's Franklin Field in Philadelphia, where the meet was held that year half a century ago. He needed no one's help to carry him to victory. His win was his alone. But I'd like to believe he ran a step faster in winning that day than he would have run otherwise in winning, because Ted had beaten him by a step two months earlier in winning.

None of us would have been any of us without all of us.

Thank you for your stillness, Ted. Thank you, especially, for the kindness harbored by your stillness, kindness so rare a virtue these days.

--Robert Braile '77