Coming up Millroses

New Yorkers who came of age in the 1980s remember the Millrose Games fondly. Its Friday night races, hosted at Madison Square Garden (MSG), were a chance to get rowdy in the cheap seats and watch world-class indoor track in a facility that contemporary racers would deride. This was the era when the Games’ premier event, the Wannamaker Mile, was dominated by Irish middle-distance runners like Eamonn Coghlan, whose prowess on the ramshackle wooden track earned him the nickname “Chairman of the Boards.”

On a sunny afternoon this February, my friends and I—washed-up NCAA distance runners—called an Uber uptown to the Fort Washington Avenue Armory, where the Millrose Games have been held since 2012. The Armory, as it’s known in the track world, boasts an athletic legacy nearly as deep as its military associations. Neighborhood lore evokes the image of Depression-era high school kids running 880-yard races on a strip of gym floor, circling dormant tanks. Later, as the MSG iteration of the Millrose Games was proving there to be a commercial market for niche sports like track…