On a warm afternoon eight days ago, on the golf course of Bowling Green University, the lives of a 21-year-old female cross-country runner and a 36-year-old coach from a rival school intersected.
The result was one saved life, two changed people and a week overflowing with hugs and tears, disbelief and relief. Here is their story:
The Runner
Jamie Luketic is a small-town person with a little girl’s voice, high-pitched and sweet. She talks how she is.
“She’s definitely one of the happiest, kindest people I’ve ever met,” says Abby Cominsky, Luketic’s teammate on the Baldwin-Wallace College women’s cross country team.
Last year Luketic (loo-KET-ick) wrote a tender card of encouragement to each of her 18 teammates, tucking a piece of candy or hair clip in each.
One reason she chose Baldwin-Wallace in Berea, Ohio, was that it’s only an hour from Rootstown, where she lives with her parents, three younger brothers and a dog and cat in a house with 30 acres and a lake.
“I am not a big risk taker at all,” Luketic says.
“That’s one of the first things I thought of after everything happened. I run because it’s a safe sport.”
Her dorm room is her sanctuary. It’s where she has her purple Beanie Baby, and a desk full of photos of family and friends, and a verse given to her by her coach at Rootstown High, Larry Bailey. It reads:
There’s no thrill in easy sailing
When the skies are clear and blue;
There’s no joy in merely doing things
Which anyone can do.
But there is some satisfaction
That is mighty sweet to take,
When you reach a destination
You thought you’d never make.
Luketic first went out for track as a high-school freshman, at Bailey’s urging. She quit after two weeks. She hasn’t quit at anything since.
She was high school valedictorian. She has a 3.9 GPA as a B-W junior, majoring in speech pathology.
In cross-country, she has improved her 5K time almost three minutes from her freshman year. She has not done it with Olympic-caliber talent.
“She’s the kind of athlete who keeps you in coaching,” says Bill Taraschke, in his fifth decade at B-W, which he has built into one of the elite Division III cross-country programs in the country.
“She’s an overachiever,” says Bailey.
“I’ve been in this 21 years, and she’s the best girls’ captain I’ve ever had. She has a tremendous work ethic.” Luketic missed the first meet of the year to attend a funeral for her uncle. She was eager to run last Saturday. “Running is such a huge part of my life,” she says.
Up early, Luketic got into her black-and-gold Baldwin-Wallace speedsuit, and was on the charter bus at 7:45 a.m. The team stopped for breakfast. Luketic had a bacon-and-cheese omelette. She slept for most of the three-hour ride to Bowling Green.
It was a warm day. Luketic and her teammates went over the course and talked positively about the race, the Mel Brodt Invitational.
The field was almost 150 runners deep. One of the teams B-W was competing against was John Carroll University, its Cleveland-area (and Ohio Athletic Conference) rival. John Carroll’s new coach is Mark McClure. The person who recommended him for the job was Taraschke.
Arm in arm in a circle, the B-W runners recited the Lord’s Prayer, then put in their hands and shouted, “Determination!”
In Rootstown, Jamie’s mother, Jill Luketic, lit a candle, the way she always does when she and her husband, Tony, aren’t at one of her races. The horn sounded. The runners were off.
The Coach
Life has been full for Mark McClure the last six weeks. He started his new job at John Carroll Aug. 1. He’s renovating the house he and his wife, Bonnie, just moved into with their two young boys, in his hometown of Green Township.
With a 100-mile round trip to school every day, McClure’s burning so much gas in his Yukon he sometimes wonders if he’s breaking even.
Still, McClure loves coaching. He tries to make everyone on his team feel wanted. He still remembers how, as a ninth-grader, he let himself get talked into playing basketball instead of football, his best sport.
He felt strong-armed. He wants his kids to have passion for what they do.
At 6-5 and 200 pounds, McClure has an athlete’s physique and the resume to match. He high-jumped 6-8 in high school, finishing No. 2 in the state. At Malone College in nearby Canton, he set a school decathlon record and was unbeaten at 100 meters. McClure offers up none of this.
The Bible preaches humility; McClure, grandson of a minister, takes his Bible seriously enough that he uses a scriptural reference for his bank-card PIN.
McClure moved to John Carroll after nine years under Warren Mandrell, track coach at Miami of Ohio.
Before leaving, McClure took a refresher course in CPR and emergency medical training. He figured it was a good idea, with his two little boys.
The coach was up early last Saturday and in his Yukon by 6:20. He bought bagels, water and sports drinks for his runners, and got on the charter bus for the trip to Bowling Green. The men raced first, the women at 2 p.m. The John Carroll women huddled up, the start area jammed with runners. The horn sounded. The runners were off.
The Rescue
The finish line was too crowded. Mark McClure wanted to see his runners and have them hear him. Toward the end of the race, he walked 600 meters up the course. There was one other person there. It was a perfect spot.
McClure watched runners stream by, beginning the push toward the finish. In front of him, a woman in black-and-gold went by.
She looked as if she were trying to get rid of something in her mouth. She kept running, but was clearly uncomfortable. McClure didn’t think much of it.
Cross-country is the ultimate gut-check sport, a race not so much against others as your own pain threshold.
McClure has seen runners seized by oxygen debt, runners vomiting.
He had never seen this, though. Jamie Luketic was choking. She was choking on a rock that had been kicked up by one of the runners in front of her, and that had gotten stuck in her throat.
At first she thought it was a bug. She was annoyed. She had never dropped out of a race before. “C’mon, Jamie, you can get through this,” she told herself. Finally she had to pull off to the side. She went down on all fours.
McClure now knew this was no routine runner distress. He rushed over. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Luketic grabbed her throat, motioned to it. She sputtered out the word “rock.” She was turning pale, fast. McClure helped her to her feet. Standing beside her, he put one hand on her back and pressed in her abdomen.
A penny-sized stone with a bend in the middle, shot out of Luketic’s mouth. It landed eight feet away.
The runner and the coach walked together toward the finish, McClure towering over the 5-foot-4 Luketic. He looked back at the stone and thought of getting it, but didn’t want to leave Luketic’s side.
It took Luketic a little time to grasp fully what had happened. At the finish, not knowing what had happened, Abby Cominsky said to Luketic, “Good job, Jamie.”
“No,” Luketic answered. Now the emotions started to spill from her. She began to cry and hug her teammates and Taraschke.
“That was really scary,” she said. She went on the bus by herself and called her mother on a cell phone, and then she was overcome, tears and gasps surging like surf in a hurricane.
“Mom, I could’ve choked. I could’ve died. What if he wasn’t there?”
Jill Luketic was crying, too. “Oh, Jamie,” she said. “You’ve got a really good guardian angel.”
Luketic kept trying to find the right way to express her gratitude to McClure, but couldn’t.
At the awards ceremony, she hugged him and said, “Thank you for being there.”
McClure wasn’t sure what to say, either. He was very uncomfortable being cast as the hero.
“I know God put me there,” McClure says. “He did the work. I didn’t do anything. He led me.”
The Changes
Bill Taraschke has been coaching track and cross-country for 37 years. He had never heard of a stone flying into someone’s mouth.
“One minute, you are a healthy, happy college student running along on a beautiful day, and the next minute, some quirky little thing can take you out,” he says. “This is not like a 12-car pileup on the interstate. I’d be surprised if there were five stones on that whole course. It’s one of those things that reminds you how fragile life is.”
After arriving back at B-W that night, Jamie spent a long time writing in her journal, putting down her feelings, trying to make sense of all the what-ifs.
What if Mark McClure, a man she had never seen before, hadn’t walked up the course? What if he hadn’t been paying attention to other runners? What if he’d been too scared to act, if he hadn’t had his refresher course?
“I just know God was looking out for me,” she says. She turned out the light. She slept soundly.
The next morning, Luketic went for a one-hour run with her teammates. A teammate suggested she run in front. They all laughed. It felt good. Jamie Luketic ran in front.
“I saw every single rock on that course,” she says. A day later, The Associated Press moved a wire story about what happened.
Luketic and McClure and their schools began getting inundated with calls. Neither of them really wanted it, but they understood.
Jill Luketic called Mark McClure and expressed her feelings.
“How do you thank someone for saving your daughter’s life?” she says.
Jamie Luketic wrote a note to Mark McClure, a man she had never met before eight days ago.
She thanked him again and said she would never forget him and what he did for her, not for the rest of her life.
She cried when she wrote it. He cried when he read it. Even by her standards, Jamie Luketic has had a very happy week.
“I don’t know why this happened, but I guess somebody is telling me I need to put my life in perspective,” she says.
“So I’m giving everyone hugs and telling them how much I love them.”
(c)2003, New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/ Tribune Information Services.

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