Some of you have wondered if I ever had any association with the now infamous “Alexi Indris Santana,” also known by his given name of James Hogue. “Alexi,” as I’ll call him since that’s the name I knew him by, was recently portrayed in a documentary now showing on some premium cable channels called “Con Man.” Alexi entered Princeton in the fall of 1989 posing as a 19-year-old self-educated freshman, when, as it would later be revealed, his real name was James Hogue, he was 30 years old, he had a criminal record, and he had drifted about The West most of his adult life continually trying to reinvent himself. I sometimes refer to him as the man who became a lot more famous for pretending to be me than I ever was for actually being me.
I first heard of Alexi I think some time during my junior year at Princeton. There were stories that we were recruiting some sort if one-in-a-million self-educated athlete with a cardiovascular system to rival Bill Reifsnyder’s (Bill, trained at sea level his whole life, had an 88 VO2). They said he ran a 9:00 two mile at first, then it turned into a 9:00 two mile at altitude, then it was a 9:00 two mile at altitude in training shoes, then it was a 9:00 two mile at altitude with no shoes on a cinder track, then it was… You get the idea. I don’t hold Alexi responsible for the stories about his running, but I do know he visited that year and went for a run with the mega-talented Jon Luff. Jon, who hates it when people spell his name “John,” thought he was pretty good. I was skeptical. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” I thought. I suppose that, as an up and coming distance runner, I didn’t want to be made obsolete by some freshman wunderkind. Then the news came that Alexi would not be starting Princeton in the fall of 1988 as planned because his mother had taken ill, and he had to delay starting school a year to take care of her. As it would turn out, he was in prison in Utah.
I met Alexi for the first time (we didn’t formally meet when he came out the year before) in Provo, Utah in 1989 at the NCAA Track Championships. I was running the 10,000. To this day, it is my only experience racing at altitude, and I finished 8th in 30:05. Coach Samara introduced him to me, and we hung out for a while. My major was aerospace engineering, and he showed me a book he was reading on nonlinear partial differential equations. “PDQs,” as we call them in geek school, are rarely, if ever, studied at the undergraduate level. People who study acoustics, fluid flows, and combustion use them, usually taking the course in graduate school. I managed to get through the PDQ course with a “B” by brute memorization of various problem types – my actual understanding of PDQs was limited. Alexi said he thought the PDQ book was fairly straightforward. I was incredulous, but I said “well, you’re not likely to see that material as an undergraduate, but if that’s easy for you, then more power to ya.” He probably wasn’t lying to me about his aptitude for math since it later turned out he was an excellent student at Princeton. As one might imagine, there are such students at Princeton: students that come in knowing more math than I’ll ever get near. Later, Alexi joined Laura Cattivera, a teammate of mine, for a run. He wore Teva sandals.
Later that summer after I had graduated Princeton I was still hanging around campus for some stupid reason. Alexi drove out from Utah in his truck and crashed on my couch for a night until he could get into official campus housing. The track coaches had gotten him some job. At this point, I know we did a workout on the track at one point when I was still hanging around and he was settling in, but I can’t remember if he did the same workout I did. When I was 22, I could really do some impressive stuff on the track. In fact, the best workout of my life, even as I got older and became one of the best distance runners in the country, was in college. 3 x 1200 in 311, 314, 314, 2 x 800 in 206, 208 and I was holding back. When I was older, I think my fitness came more from consistently good training and high mileage. I never really did any freakishly great workouts. I think Alexi might have joined me for a quarter or two, but it was clear he had some work to do before he would get to my level. Still, my recollection is fuzzy. I know he was like a 1440 type his freshman year, and, when I was 22, I was running 1403 and 2859. Little did I know he was 30 years old and not likely to improve at all.
And that was it. I left town to get on with my life. I saw him once more at the Penn Relays, but didn’t get a chance to speak to him. I kept hearing from people at Princeton how he was such a great guy and the women loved him and he was going to be a great runner, but he had injury problems (gee, I wonder why? he was old – I never got injured very long when I was a college-age kid). I was sitting at breakfast in a Penn State dining hall in February of 1991 when I saw a headline about a fraudulent Princeton Student in a local paper. I couldn’t stop laughing when I caught the name in the first paragraph.
Update – Here are my reflections after watching the Con Man documentary.
I thought they left his Princeton visit a little short. Surely, he must have had more to say about his experiences there. In keeping with his character, as described in the documentary by those who knew him, he answered questions with as few words as possible, leaving others to draw conclusions and fill in the blanks. I would say, on the whole, when James Hogue was interviewed he didn’t conduct himself as I might expect a would-be Rhodes scholar to. He wasn’t animated, glib, or articulate in the least. He was almost mute, unable to finish his own sentences or flesh out his own thoughts. It made me think that the producers took the worst footage they had, and intentionally put it in the documentary, but I actually believe that this footage was the best they could get out of him.
Many people, including his teammate Brian Sax, who was in the documentary, and my wife (who wasn’t) are sympathetic to his plight. I disagree with any such sentiment. I remember having my bicycle stolen from Princeton’s campus when I was a freshman. I remember how I felt. I didn’t like being ripped off. Alexi stole bicycles repeatedly, with no regard for his victims. I admire honesty in a person much more than I admire intellectual firepower. If he hadn’t learned to conduct his life with more integrity, then Princeton University may as well not have taught him anything.
In his defense, I have to agree that, although he proved to be a capable student, Princeton never would have admitted him if they had known the truth. He had to make up this story to get the life he wanted, and he never cheated academically. Being in the job market, I know (a little) how he must have felt. I haven’t lied yet, but with the old no experience no job catch-22 everywhere you turn, it seems I’m supposed to. Much less qualified people are out there getting great jobs, and I have to assume that at least some of them are not being truthful in representing themselves. I also recall him saying that he regards what he does as a sort-of psychological condition, and that if he were, say, an alcoholic, there would be lots of treatment options for him. But he isn’t, and there aren’t, so that’s why he ended up the way he is.