Running toward salvation

By DARRELL FRY

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 24, 2001

TAMPA -- Cookie didn't mean to pull the trigger. It was, Bobby Clemons guesses, a reflex. An involuntary reaction to the sound of another gun firing as Clemons, Cookie and an accomplice robbed a concessionaire in Texas in 1976.

Instinctively, Clemons ran, leaving the wounded victim sprawled on the cold basement floor. Clemons ran from Texas police nine years later to escape a parole violation. He ran again about four years after that, this time to Tampa, to dodge a burglary warrant.

Robert Lee Clemons is back in Tampa today, and again he is on the run, only now he is running toward something, not away from it. You might spot him along Bayshore Boulevard, a speck among the throng of runners in today's Gasparilla Distance Classic 15K race. He'll be the one outrunning his past and chasing his redemption.

"It's good to be back running the streets here," Clemons, 52, said, "but running the streets in a different spirit."

Two days before the race, Clemons was 12 years in the past, standing in the middle of Perry Harvey Park near downtown just like he did all those years ago when it was called Central Park. He pointed at the housing project where he peddled the stolen merchandise he and his girlfriend regularly "boosted" from area malls.

He wheeled around and stared at the corner where he used the money from the stolen merchandise sales to buy cocaine and methadone that kept him high until it was time to hit the next mall.

He passed by the Jayhawk Motel on Nebraska Avenue, where he'd shack up for a week when his dirty deeds were profitable. Otherwise he'd sleep on benches at bus stops near the park while his girlfriend sold her body to anyone and everyone during the night.

He turned a corner and stopped at a red brick house he remembered living in. Or rather, living under. "There was a place where you could crawl underneath the house, and these guys had it fixed up nice with lights and a mattress," he said. "We paid them $50 a week to let us stay there.

"We'd live from pillar (a motel) to post (the street). Every day we'd get up and go around boosting stuff so we could make some money to get more dope."

They didn't have a car, so, Clemons said, he paid a guy $250 a day to drive him and his girlfriend to malls and stores where they could shoplift. They would walk in with concealed shopping bags, fill them with merchandise, then walk out as if they had purchased the items.

They would sell the stuff for whatever they could get, sometimes accepting as little $75 for a $300 dress. Just as long as they made enough to keep them high the rest of the day.

"Man, that wasn't much of a life," Clemons said. "Always on the run. Everywhere you go you're looking over your shoulder, scared someone's going to get you before you can get them."

After getting caught in 1990 and going back to a Texas prison for a fourth time, Clemons was tired of running. At least from the police. Instead, he started running to cope with his incarceration.

"To vent things out, I would run when they would let us out in the yard," he said. "I'd run as long as I could. It was a form of venting."

As it turned out, he wasn't half bad. One of the prison guards told him so. He said Clemons could run marathons.

Since getting paroled a year later, Clemons said, he has run four Boston Marathons, a New York Marathon and other distance races from San Antonio to San Diego. His personal best is 3 hours, 6 minutes, about a hour off a typical winning time for the Boston Marathon.

This is Clemons' first Gasparilla Distance Classic and one of his rare trips back to the side of town where he spent so much time doing that other type of running. He doesn't fashion himself as an elite distance runner but hopes to finish somewhere high in his age group.

Finishing in under an hour would be ideal but not crucial (last year's winning time was 46 minutes, 37 seconds). Clemons learned long ago that some people you just can't beat and some things you just can't outrun.

Like your past.

Not that he is trying to forget what happened or what he was. He wears it like a badge, talking about it often in his work as an associate pastor in Austin, Texas, particularly in his prison ministries.

It's a tough reputation to shake anyway. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a scarlet letter, either.

Life, like distance running, is a long journey. And, as Clemons can attest, no matter how far you fall behind at the start, the only way you'll lose is if you stop running.

Gasparilla Distance Classic

Today's races begin and end in downtown Tampa.

MEN'S 15K: 8:15 a.m.; begins at Brorein and Franklin.

WOMEN'S 15K: 8:15 a.m.; begins at Morgan and Cumberland.

5K: 10:30 a.m.; begins at Brorein and Tampa.

FINISH LINE: Marina at Platt Street Bridge.

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