Seventy-one years old. Ran his first marathon in 1983 and never really stopped. Skis 41,113 vertical feet in a day, and can show you the screenshot. Carries a 10.3. Still texts people at 1:05 in the morning to ask about whiskey.
This is the scouting report. It is unauthorized, deeply affectionate, and backed by receipts.
Because if it isn't measured, according to Tony, it didn't happen. And if it is measured, he'd like to see your number first.
Every number above is real and sourced from his own records. Tony, if any of them are now higher, we are not surprised, and yes we will update them.
Before the marathons, before Boot Ranch, before the ski app that tracks vertical feet down to the yard, there was a farm in Missouri. Winton and Marcella Allison. Cows, pigs, chickens. Hay bales that were not going to stack themselves. A hoop somewhere. And a younger brother named Marty.
Everything on that farm was a contest. Who could throw more bales. Who could shoot straighter. Who could get the chores done first so they could go play basketball, which was itself a contest, obviously. The prize was never the point. The point was that a winner had to be established, and it had to be established right now.
Seventy years later nothing has changed. The hay bales just turned into vertical feet and the hoop turned into a golf course.
Two boys with guns on a farm can shoot at a great many things. But not Memom's red birds. And not her blue jays. That was the line, it was enforced, and it did not move.
There were also cats. Everywhere. All the time. Nobody has ever produced a final count.
Marty has submitted a formal rebuttal. It appears later in this document.
Everything else in the calendar is scheduling around these two things. Pick a side.
This is not a nice-round-of-golf handicap. This is a get-paired-with-him-and-regret-it handicap. His low index is 7.1. He is retired, he lives on a golf course, and he has solved the logistics.
7.1
79
That is one month. Every one of those is a real posted round. He was not "getting out when he could." He was out.
He walked up to a green with a wedge in his hand and walked off it having made a two.
The putter is on the ground in this photo. It was not needed. He wanted that on the record.
Four or five days of golf. In a row. In Vietnam. Most people call that a vacation and then need a vacation. Tony calls it Tuesday through Saturday.
We know it was Vietnam because the Macallan he texted about at 1:05 AM had a price tag on it in dong. Scroll down. It's evidence now.
Runs logged. Vertical feet accumulated. Top speed recorded. Comparison against everyone else in the group, unprompted, on the lift, before you've even taken your gloves off.
You did not ask for the leaderboard. The leaderboard has arrived.
Duration on snow: 5:55:06. Max altitude 9,107 ft. And yes, that date is Valentine's Day. He skied forty-one thousand feet on Valentine's Day.
26 lifts on the Feb 1 day. Twenty-six. He rode a chairlift twenty-six times and then took a screenshot of it.
Forty-one thousand vertical feet is Everest from sea level, and then most of Denali on top. In one day. On skis. For fun. Before dinner.
Him: "What are you at?"
You: "At? At what?"
Him: "Vertical. I'm at 31."
It is 11:40 in the morning.
They built a house at Boot Ranch. That was not the headline. The headline was the cart.
Black. Lithium. Tan leather. And then he did the thing that makes this whole website worth building.
He put the family motto on his golf cart. Nobody asked him to. Nobody suggested it. He just did it, and now it rolls around Boot Ranch every single day announcing to a Hill Country golf community that the Allisons are here and everything is on.
Six seats. Lithium. Chrome wheels. Not a starter cart.
The kind of detail you only commit to if you mean it.
There is a rag in the seat in this photo. Of course there is.
A 27 on the back nine. They did not squeak this out. They ran away with it.
We played exceptionally well together.
Tony Allison, on winning with his wifeAmy has heard this sentence more than once. Amy also knows exactly which one of them made the putt on the closing hole. Amy is not saying anything. Amy does not have to.
He was overseas. He was on day four of a five-day golf trip. He found a bottle. He had a question. He did not have a clock.
Uncle Tony
overseas · 7,000 miles away · wide awake
The thing about Tony is that the question was sincere. He genuinely wanted to know. He had a bottle in front of him and a nephew who knows whiskey, and the concept of "what time is it where Erik lives" simply did not enter the chat.
He talks fast. He plans everything. He is on the go constantly. Somewhere in that operating system there is one small unpatched bug, and its name is time zones. Vietnam is fourteen hours ahead of Las Vegas. Fourteen.
Not guilty. Sentence suspended. Bottle was, in fact, good.
Aggravating factor: he did it again months later with a bottle of Willett Family Estate rye, cask strength, 109.6 proof. That one came in at 6:30 in the evening, which the court notes was perfectly reasonable and therefore deeply out of character.
For most of his life Tony was a wine man. Then, roughly seven years ago, a nephew put a glass of bourbon in front of him and everything changed.
Now there are opinions. There are preferences. There is a shelf. There is a man in Park City who has strong feelings about High West, buys Eagle Rare by the 1.75, and will text you a photo of a cask-strength Willett rye at any hour to ask whether it's worth it.
Seven years ago he would have handed you a glass of cabernet and left it there. Now he reads the proof off the neck label out loud.
Wine. Civilized. Predictable. Fine.
Reads the mash bill out loud. Unprompted.
High West Distillery sits in Park City, which means his ski hill and his distillery are roughly the same commute. This was not planned. Tony would like you to believe it was planned.
Nose: "Smell that."
Palate: "That's good. That's really good."
Finish: "You want another one?"
Complete and accurate transcript.
It started because a friend crashed at his place for the 1982 Houston Marathon and told him if he could run ten miles he could run a marathon. That friend has no idea what he did.
Sealed at the Philadelphia Marathon, alongside his friend and Woodlands running partner Geri Henry. Both joined the 50 States Marathon Club that day.
Australia went last on purpose. That is where he and Amy honeymooned. He saved it. Of course he did.
"I was so elated. I felt like I had accomplished something," Henry said.
Allison met Henry in 1998. He had already run 35 marathons and had started questioning why he was running them at all. At an expo he found Team in Training, which sends three quarters of everything it raises to the Leukemia Society.
He ran with the Houston branch in San Diego that year, then started a chapter in The Woodlands with eight members. Henry was one of them.
He ran his first Houston Marathon in 1983, after two years of college basketball at Central Junior College in Kansas and a stretch of gaining weight afterward.
He calls Boston "the Super Bowl of all marathons." He thinks Lake Tahoe is the prettiest. His fastest was Houston, 1987: 2:58:32.
"It was nice to finish the fiftieth state with somebody that I know and that had the same goal," Allison said.
A hundred marathons is roughly 2,620 miles of racing alone. That is Fredericksburg to Park City and back, with enough left over to get most of the way to Houston.
Done 26.2 at a time, over forty-three years, with a number pinned to his shirt and a watch he checked constantly.
Somewhere in there he stopped running for himself and started a Team in Training chapter in The Woodlands. Eight people. Money to the Leukemia Society.
That is the same guy who mails Hofbräuhaus gift cards every year without being asked. It tracks.
Amy has run sixteen marathons. She has also been known to run with Geri. This family does not have a couch.
Every January, Park City fills with film people, and Tony and Amy are right there in the middle of it, going to screenings, seeing friends, being part of the whole thing.
And then, if we're being honest about the ratio, they go skiing. And the next day they go skiing. And somewhere in there a film gets watched, usually by people still wearing ski pants.
And when you land at the airport, he is standing there holding a sign he made by hand with your name on it. Because of course he is.
Loyal through everything. Every rebuild, every quarterback, every season that started with hope and ended with a spreadsheet about draft position.
"I hope we kick the Raiders' butt."
Direct quote. Lightly cleaned up for a family website.
Same city, same commitment, considerably more championships to point at during arguments. He will point at them.
The Woodlands built the man. Fredericksburg keeps him. Houston still owns his Sundays.
Every year. To Erik, to Blake, to Tamara. Without fail. Because at some point he clocked that we love that beer, filed it away, and has never once forgotten.
That's the thing people miss about the competitive fast-talking planner. The man pays attention. He notices what you like and then he just keeps doing it, quietly, for years.
Genuinely. Every time.
RECIPIENTS: 3 · LAPSES: 0
The same man who tracks his vertical feet also sits on a community theater board. Shows up. Does the work. Cares about a small town having a stage.
Board Member
Fredericksburg, TX
Standing ovation
Peer reviewed by everyone who has ever tried to keep up with him.
Here is a man who has run over a hundred marathons, wearing bib number 5, in a giant felt Hofbräuhaus hat, holding a beer, flexing at a camera, in front of his house.
There is no version of this photo where he is embarrassed. That is the entire point of him.
Conclusion: exhausting, in the best possible way.
In the interest of fairness, the younger brother has been given space. He used all of it.
Point one. The farm-era record is not settled and has never been settled. There were no officials. There was no clock. There was one brother who declared himself the winner loudly and immediately, which is not the same thing as winning.
Point two. Regarding hay bales: the counting method was invented by the person doing the counting.
Point three. Nobody disputes the marathons. The marathons are real. Marty would simply like it noted that running is not a sport you can lose, which may be the entire appeal.
Point four. The vertical feet number is self-reported, from an app, by a man with an interest in the outcome.
Point five. The handicap is legitimate. Marty concedes the handicap. Marty would like this concession to be noted as evidence of his own fairness and objectivity, which contrasts with certain other parties.
In closing. Happy birthday. He's still older.
SUBMITTED BY M. ALLISON · CONCURRING: D. ALLISON
The above is unverified and was not fact checked, in keeping with the standards of this website.
Stop the power bar. Stop the accuracy bar. Then watch him do it better anyway.
Rigged? Slightly. Realistic? Completely.
Twelve questions. No partial credit. Amy is exempt, she'd run the table.
Wife. Co-champion. The only person who can say "Tony" in a certain tone and end a discussion.
Brother and sister-in-law. The original rivalry, now mostly retired. Mostly.
Amy's daughters, their husbands, and the grandkids. Fully absorbed into the operation and now also being told about vertical feet.
Nephews, wife, permanent Hofbräuhaus beneficiaries, occasional 1:05 AM support line.
Mom and Dad. Started it all on a farm in Missouri with cows, pigs and chickens. Memom is still in every photo on the wall and every stubborn thing her sons do.
When we're all in one place, there's only one thing to say. Keep scrolling.
Because that's the last name. And because when the Allisons get together, everything is on. Every game, every bet, every round, every bottle, every argument about who was actually faster.
Happy 71st, Tony. You were 70 for an entire year and never once mentioned it, which for you is remarkable restraint.
Now go post 20 more scores this month, ski 41,000 feet in a day, and text somebody about it at an unreasonable hour.
You put it on the cart. That's the part we're not going to get over.
