As a father, husband, runner and astronaut, Willie McCool seemed to inspire everyone who knew him. Even at the end. And even now.
May 3, 2006 (Press Release) --
Looking back, the coach wonders whether Willie could have been better had he been tougher, a bit more ruthless. "He was a little bit sheltered," Cantello says. "If someone stepped on his toes during a race, Willie would say,"—here Cantello affects a high-pitched whine—"'That's poor sportsmanship.' Meanwhile, a guy from New Jersey is running next to him, getting ready to throw an elbow, saying, 'I'm gonna put that jerk in lane three.'"
But Willie was other things. He was relentlessly cheerful, given to striding up and down the hallways of his dorm, exclaiming, "Five weeks till the meet. Beat Army!" He was elected captain of the cross-country team as a senior, the guy the team rallied around. "He was energetic, he was enthusiastic, he was smart," says Mark Donahue, the captain when McCool entered the Academy. "When I look back on it, the word that comes to mind is innocent." McCool was the brainy runner that Cantello asked to help his son with algebra one Saturday night. For a midshipman, a Saturday night is a precious thing, one of the only times he is allowed off the Academy grounds. McCool didn't hesitate.
When he graduated from the Academy in 1983, he was ranked second in his class. "He made more of himself in four years than anyone I can remember," Cantello says. Then the coach pauses. "But is he the most inspirational? You gotta remember. I've been here 43 years."
A couple of years later, when he was studying for his masters in computer science at the University of Maryland, Willie made a point of taking care of Cantello's newest group of batons. He drove the plebes to meets. He joined them in practice. He filled up the team cooler with water. Every night before a meet, he invited them to his condominium in Crofton, eight miles west of Annapolis. He cooked them spaghetti. ("Willie knew as much about making spaghetti sauce as..." Cantello says mournfully. "He used carrots! That's a misdemeanor. That's a no-no.") But the batons were grateful.
"He protected all of us," Ron Harris, a plebe in 1983, says. The plebes called McCool's condominium the "Bat Cave" and treasured their time there. They didn't know what lay ahead for him, the greatness in store. They just knew the guy making funny spaghetti sauce. "The amazing thing," Harris remembers, "was that he had so much time for us. He had time for everything."
It was about this time that Willie heard from another Navy man that Lani was separated from her husband. Willie hadn't forgotten her. Sometimes when he ran with his Navy teammates he talked about the girl he had been in love with in the South Pacific, the one with the black hair who got him into running in the first place. He wrote to her and she wrote back. He flew out to see her in Tempe, Arizona, where she was finishing college, and they drove to a nearby football stadium. He handed her his watch, which she had used to time him while he ran quarter miles on Guam. She had always loved watching Willie run. She knew how happy it made him.
After her divorce, Lani and Willie were married in 1986. She knew how much he loved children and that he would be a wonderful father to her two boys; Sean was then 5, Christopher was 3. "I asked him if he wanted kids," Lani says. "And he said, I already have kids. We have kids." But another son, Cameron, was born on September 15, 1987. The next day McCool, by then a Navy pilot, left for a six-month tour of duty aboard an aircraft carrier.
Willie and Lani and the boys spent most of the next decade in Washington State, in the town of Anacortes, just a short drive from the naval base on Whidbey Island, where McCool flew the Prowler, a four-person aircraft used for jamming radar and other electronic warfare tactics. Once, at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, he pulled a Prowler out of a spiral, or a "death spin." No one had ever done it before. Today, every Prowler pilot and would-be pilot studies what McCool did that day; it's the official Navy procedure for pulling a Prowler out of a spiral.
His work meant Willie was gone from home a lot, but Lani had the children to take care of, and her passion for photography, and she played the harp that Willie had bought for her. Lani was a military man's daughter. So she knew the drill. When Willie was home they played chess together, and went on backpacking trips with the kids. He wrote her poetry.
In 1996, NASA selected McCool for its space program. The family moved to Houston, where Willie joined 43 others in a group of future shuttle astronauts—they called themselves "the sardines" because there were so many. It was the largest group of shuttle astronauts since the 1978 class. By then McCool, the Navy pilot, had amassed more than 2,800 hours of flight experience in 24 aircraft and made more than 400 landings on aircraft carriers, which even among pilots is a very big deal.
But the other sardines were big deals, too. They had been selected from a pool of 2,400 applicants. McCool was surrounded by people just like him. There was a former circus gymnast, who was also a fighter pilot and doctor. There was a flight surgeon who could name most birds—in Latin. Joining McCool on the shuttle Columbia would be an Israeli Air Force colonel, son of Holocaust survivors, who flew on the mission that had destroyed Iraq's nascent nuclear reactors in 1981. Top guns all, oozing competitive juju.
Steve MacLean was one of the sardines. What struck him most about McCool wasn't his intelligence, or his skills, or his competitive zeal (though MacLean says all were extraordinary, even by NASA standards). What MacLean remembers is watching McCool run. "It was like he was on wheels," MacLean says. "It was a thing of beauty." What he remembers even more is how he treated others, especially children. At weekly soccer games involving astronauts and their families, a goal couldn't be scored until the smallest kid playing had touched the ball at least once—a rule McCool pushed for. As MacLean says, "When he was talking to somebody, no matter who it was, that person was very important."
Almost every day, at twilight, whether in Houston or in Anacortes, Willie would come home and find Lani cooking dinner for the kids. He loved his work, but he hated that he was gone so much. He would offer to help. Lani would decline. He'd insist. She'd tell him to go for a run. Sometimes, she'd watch him take off. "It looked like he ran on air," she says.
Half an hour or an hour later he would come in, dripping with sweat, and he would slam a knight to a new position on their chessboard in the living room, or write a line of poetry. And then he would lie on the living room floor and stretch, and Lani would play her harp as the dinner cooked. And Willie would move closer to Lani. And closer. Until finally, he was stretching his legs while he leaned against Lani.
"Our friends said we were the luckiest people in the world," Lani says. "And they were right."
One day, McCool asked Cameron to join him on a run. But his son, then 13, didn't want to. I have too much homework, he'd say. McCool promised to help him with the homework if he'd run. Well, then, I'm too sore. McCool promised he'd feel better after a run. He'd run, but the teenager would whine about it. For Willie's 41st birthday, a few months before the shuttle launch, Cameron gave his dad a card, promising 15 "complaint-free runs, to be used whenever you want."
Lani told her husband to entertain the boy, to make the running more fun. She told Willie to tell him stories, to take the boy's mind off how much he hurt.
But Willie was a natural listener, not a talker. Still, he tried. He began by retelling novels he thought a teenage boy would like. The first, told over weeks and weeks of running, was The Worthing Saga, by Orson Scott Card. By the end of the book, Cameron could talk and run without gasping. Then there were other novels—Cameron can't remember them all—and now that the boy could talk without gasping, they would discuss the works. They'd talk about "the philosophy behind the stories or just ideas in general," says Cameron.
Willie ran out of new novels. He started telling his own stories.
He talked about throwing berries at cars on Guam, getting in trouble. He talked about building model airplanes with his father. Those were fine, but Cameron wanted stories from the Academy. He wanted to hear about his father's life as a plebe, how he had to tuck his chin into his chest and recite dinner menus and jet parts while upperclassmen screamed at him. He wanted to hear about the ice-cream eating contests his father participated in as a senior, how a plebe stood behind him and massaged his temples to prevent "freeze" headaches. Willie wouldn't just tell the stories, he would act them out—as the frightened plebe, the screaming midshipman, the ice-cream gulping senior. By the time his father flew into space, Cameron had quit counting the poles. They were running three and a half miles from the gates of NASA. Three and a half miles out, three and a half miles back.
Just a few weeks before McCool and the rest of the Columbia crew would head into space, in December 2002, he went for a run with a man named Andy Cline, whom he had met on a backpacking trip a year earlier.
The men ran in Anacortes, where the McCools planned to return full-time after the Columbia mission. McCool wanted to show Cline a spot he had discovered. They ran through the Anacortes Forest Lands to Cranberry Lake. Cline told the astronaut how he wanted to run faster, how he would like, for once in his life, to break the three-hour mark in a marathon.
"And Willie said that was no problem, that he'd pace me and that he would help me get to that. And I believed him. When you were with him, you felt like you had his undivided attention. That life seemed pretty clear."
Provided by Runner's World
But Willie was other things. He was relentlessly cheerful, given to striding up and down the hallways of his dorm, exclaiming, "Five weeks till the meet. Beat Army!" He was elected captain of the cross-country team as a senior, the guy the team rallied around. "He was energetic, he was enthusiastic, he was smart," says Mark Donahue, the captain when McCool entered the Academy. "When I look back on it, the word that comes to mind is innocent." McCool was the brainy runner that Cantello asked to help his son with algebra one Saturday night. For a midshipman, a Saturday night is a precious thing, one of the only times he is allowed off the Academy grounds. McCool didn't hesitate.
When he graduated from the Academy in 1983, he was ranked second in his class. "He made more of himself in four years than anyone I can remember," Cantello says. Then the coach pauses. "But is he the most inspirational? You gotta remember. I've been here 43 years."
A couple of years later, when he was studying for his masters in computer science at the University of Maryland, Willie made a point of taking care of Cantello's newest group of batons. He drove the plebes to meets. He joined them in practice. He filled up the team cooler with water. Every night before a meet, he invited them to his condominium in Crofton, eight miles west of Annapolis. He cooked them spaghetti. ("Willie knew as much about making spaghetti sauce as..." Cantello says mournfully. "He used carrots! That's a misdemeanor. That's a no-no.") But the batons were grateful.
"He protected all of us," Ron Harris, a plebe in 1983, says. The plebes called McCool's condominium the "Bat Cave" and treasured their time there. They didn't know what lay ahead for him, the greatness in store. They just knew the guy making funny spaghetti sauce. "The amazing thing," Harris remembers, "was that he had so much time for us. He had time for everything."
It was about this time that Willie heard from another Navy man that Lani was separated from her husband. Willie hadn't forgotten her. Sometimes when he ran with his Navy teammates he talked about the girl he had been in love with in the South Pacific, the one with the black hair who got him into running in the first place. He wrote to her and she wrote back. He flew out to see her in Tempe, Arizona, where she was finishing college, and they drove to a nearby football stadium. He handed her his watch, which she had used to time him while he ran quarter miles on Guam. She had always loved watching Willie run. She knew how happy it made him.
After her divorce, Lani and Willie were married in 1986. She knew how much he loved children and that he would be a wonderful father to her two boys; Sean was then 5, Christopher was 3. "I asked him if he wanted kids," Lani says. "And he said, I already have kids. We have kids." But another son, Cameron, was born on September 15, 1987. The next day McCool, by then a Navy pilot, left for a six-month tour of duty aboard an aircraft carrier.
Willie and Lani and the boys spent most of the next decade in Washington State, in the town of Anacortes, just a short drive from the naval base on Whidbey Island, where McCool flew the Prowler, a four-person aircraft used for jamming radar and other electronic warfare tactics. Once, at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, he pulled a Prowler out of a spiral, or a "death spin." No one had ever done it before. Today, every Prowler pilot and would-be pilot studies what McCool did that day; it's the official Navy procedure for pulling a Prowler out of a spiral.
His work meant Willie was gone from home a lot, but Lani had the children to take care of, and her passion for photography, and she played the harp that Willie had bought for her. Lani was a military man's daughter. So she knew the drill. When Willie was home they played chess together, and went on backpacking trips with the kids. He wrote her poetry.
In 1996, NASA selected McCool for its space program. The family moved to Houston, where Willie joined 43 others in a group of future shuttle astronauts—they called themselves "the sardines" because there were so many. It was the largest group of shuttle astronauts since the 1978 class. By then McCool, the Navy pilot, had amassed more than 2,800 hours of flight experience in 24 aircraft and made more than 400 landings on aircraft carriers, which even among pilots is a very big deal.
But the other sardines were big deals, too. They had been selected from a pool of 2,400 applicants. McCool was surrounded by people just like him. There was a former circus gymnast, who was also a fighter pilot and doctor. There was a flight surgeon who could name most birds—in Latin. Joining McCool on the shuttle Columbia would be an Israeli Air Force colonel, son of Holocaust survivors, who flew on the mission that had destroyed Iraq's nascent nuclear reactors in 1981. Top guns all, oozing competitive juju.
Steve MacLean was one of the sardines. What struck him most about McCool wasn't his intelligence, or his skills, or his competitive zeal (though MacLean says all were extraordinary, even by NASA standards). What MacLean remembers is watching McCool run. "It was like he was on wheels," MacLean says. "It was a thing of beauty." What he remembers even more is how he treated others, especially children. At weekly soccer games involving astronauts and their families, a goal couldn't be scored until the smallest kid playing had touched the ball at least once—a rule McCool pushed for. As MacLean says, "When he was talking to somebody, no matter who it was, that person was very important."
Almost every day, at twilight, whether in Houston or in Anacortes, Willie would come home and find Lani cooking dinner for the kids. He loved his work, but he hated that he was gone so much. He would offer to help. Lani would decline. He'd insist. She'd tell him to go for a run. Sometimes, she'd watch him take off. "It looked like he ran on air," she says.
Half an hour or an hour later he would come in, dripping with sweat, and he would slam a knight to a new position on their chessboard in the living room, or write a line of poetry. And then he would lie on the living room floor and stretch, and Lani would play her harp as the dinner cooked. And Willie would move closer to Lani. And closer. Until finally, he was stretching his legs while he leaned against Lani.
"Our friends said we were the luckiest people in the world," Lani says. "And they were right."
One day, McCool asked Cameron to join him on a run. But his son, then 13, didn't want to. I have too much homework, he'd say. McCool promised to help him with the homework if he'd run. Well, then, I'm too sore. McCool promised he'd feel better after a run. He'd run, but the teenager would whine about it. For Willie's 41st birthday, a few months before the shuttle launch, Cameron gave his dad a card, promising 15 "complaint-free runs, to be used whenever you want."
Lani told her husband to entertain the boy, to make the running more fun. She told Willie to tell him stories, to take the boy's mind off how much he hurt.
But Willie was a natural listener, not a talker. Still, he tried. He began by retelling novels he thought a teenage boy would like. The first, told over weeks and weeks of running, was The Worthing Saga, by Orson Scott Card. By the end of the book, Cameron could talk and run without gasping. Then there were other novels—Cameron can't remember them all—and now that the boy could talk without gasping, they would discuss the works. They'd talk about "the philosophy behind the stories or just ideas in general," says Cameron.
Willie ran out of new novels. He started telling his own stories.
He talked about throwing berries at cars on Guam, getting in trouble. He talked about building model airplanes with his father. Those were fine, but Cameron wanted stories from the Academy. He wanted to hear about his father's life as a plebe, how he had to tuck his chin into his chest and recite dinner menus and jet parts while upperclassmen screamed at him. He wanted to hear about the ice-cream eating contests his father participated in as a senior, how a plebe stood behind him and massaged his temples to prevent "freeze" headaches. Willie wouldn't just tell the stories, he would act them out—as the frightened plebe, the screaming midshipman, the ice-cream gulping senior. By the time his father flew into space, Cameron had quit counting the poles. They were running three and a half miles from the gates of NASA. Three and a half miles out, three and a half miles back.
Just a few weeks before McCool and the rest of the Columbia crew would head into space, in December 2002, he went for a run with a man named Andy Cline, whom he had met on a backpacking trip a year earlier.
The men ran in Anacortes, where the McCools planned to return full-time after the Columbia mission. McCool wanted to show Cline a spot he had discovered. They ran through the Anacortes Forest Lands to Cranberry Lake. Cline told the astronaut how he wanted to run faster, how he would like, for once in his life, to break the three-hour mark in a marathon.
"And Willie said that was no problem, that he'd pace me and that he would help me get to that. And I believed him. When you were with him, you felt like you had his undivided attention. That life seemed pretty clear."
Provided by Runner's World
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