Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  The German team found Hayward’s organization in Stockholm so impressive they wanted him to coach them in the 1916 Games, planned for Berlin, but of course other, hotter heads in Germany prevailed, starting World War I. The Olympics were canceled. The Great War also wiped out the 1917 and 1918 Oregon seasons.

  In 1920, the Games resumed in Antwerp, Belgium, and Hayward was again US coach. Oregon throwers Ken Bartlett (discus) and Art Tuck (javelin) made the team. Hayward recalled for Bowerman how Paavo Nurmi of Finland carried his own stopwatch in the 10,000 meters, running stoically to the first of what would be nine golds over three Olympics. “The Flying Finn,” as Nurmi was called, struck Hayward as humorless; “The Grim Finn” was more like it.

  The 1924 Olympics in Paris were retold in Chariots of Fire, with Britain’s Harold Abrahams nipping the American Jackson Scholz in the 100 meters and Scottish missionary-to-be Eric Liddell running away with the 400. Hayward’s coaching did help Scholz and Charlie Paddock come back to sweep the 200, and Oregon pole-vaulter Ralph Spearow (who had cleared a collegiate record 13 feet 11⁄2 inches earlier in the year) finished sixth in his event.

  After Paris, Spearow, then known to his Cottage Grove flock as the “pole-vaulting Presbyterian pastor,” was invited on a goodwill tour of Japan. “He saw people using bamboo poles for the first time,” Hayward would tell Bill, “tried one himself, and broke the world record with 13 feet 101⁄2 inches. But it was never accepted because the Amateur Athletic Union hadn’t issued him an official ‘travel permit’ to compete there. They treated him like an outlaw.” Bowerman would recall this as his first exposure to AAU obtuseness.

  Listening to these litanies of the great, it dawned on Bill that Hayward had enabled, witnessed, or photographed about two-thirds of Olympic track and field history. There was no more experienced village elder, if the village was the Olympic one. Hayward urged his men to shoot for the Games as “the ultimate fellowship, the highest target.”

  When Bill appealed to Hayward for help with his football speed, Hayward again chuckled at how oddly he ran. Bowerman leaned forward and had such a hitch in his stride that teammates called him Hopalong. Hayward explained that you don’t change your form by just holding yourself differently, but by strengthening the muscles you need to be more effective. He gave him “high-knee, fast-leg” drills that made him mimic a high-stepping drum major until his groin seized up. Gradually Bill began to sprint with his knees and chest higher, his hips tucked under him.

  “Because of what he taught,” Bowerman would say, “I went from one of the slowest players on the football team to the second fastest, behind only Paul Starr, our great sprinter.”

  For such drills, Hayward simply threw Bill in with his 1931 runners, who happened to be the best Hayward ever had. Besides Starr, they included Ralph Hill, a quietly confident distance runner from potato country near Klamath Falls. Bowerman liked Hill immediately. He’d cheered him on to a near world record 4:12.4 in the mile the year before (Nurmi had run 4:10.4 in 1923). He also observed the long runs that Hill took for stamina and saw how Hayward gave him different track workouts to build two very different things, raw speed and the ability to sustain it.

  Hill was the first world-class miler Bowerman ever met. Recalling that Hayward had said Bowerman himself might be a 440 man one day, Bill ran what he felt was a hard lap. When the nausea and burn ebbed, he was able to lift his watch to his eyes: 63 seconds. “Just so’s you’ll know,” Hayward chortled. “Ralph goes that fast for four laps.”

  “When I coached milers,” Bowerman would later say, “I affected to be nonchalant about what they could do. But that took years. I was staggered by what Ralph could do. It just seemed impossible.”

  The force with which the young Bowerman connected with Hayward certainly had aspects of finding a long-lost father. Bill was grateful to have a guide to good form in his career as well as his stride. But he also came to revere Hayward because he was logical. It is not just the condescension of hindsight to say that sport in the 1930s was a miasma of ignorance. Doc Spears was no exception in putting arbitrary authority ahead of common sense. Hayward, by contrast, looked for the underlying reasons. He’d applied almost all his lessons to himself. He could whisper to a vaulter or jumper or hurdler the tiny changes that made all the difference. This fit with Bill’s growing interest in the sciences and what we now term biomechanics, how the levers are moved by the muscles, how the body, properly aligned, performs at its optimum.

  Hayward was a model healer—half doctor, half inventor. Bowerman began to mold himself into one too, with the same eagerness that he did high-knee drills. “I learned from the master,” he would say. Hayward soon thought of Bowerman as a colleague.

  There was one other parallel. Hayward and Bowerman both felt that high drama was part of a well-imparted lesson. In knocking down Spears, the coach seemed to be striking a blow for a greater good. And in early 1932, it turned out he really had. Others had joined Hayward in complaint and Spears was fired. For the coming football season, Bill’s last, the head coach would be his old high school mentor, Prink Callison, who was fine with Bill’s running track.

  Bill rejoiced, although the college track season was over. Still, there was a big meet coming up. “Not that you’ll probably ever run in one,” Hayward said, “but you should never miss an Olympics. Got somewhere to stay in Los Angeles?”

  Well, yes, as a matter of fact.

  Every Christmas vacation he’d gone down to see Barbara and watch the Rose Bowl and he would also stay with the Youngs for a week each summer. So in the summer of 1932 Bill and Barbara went to the Olympics every day. “I surely didn’t know it would be a foreshadowing of life to come,” Barbara would say.

  The 1932 Games, of course, didn’t sneak up on anyone. Ralph Hill had been working for them for years. He didn’t have a devastating kick in the mile, so Hayward had shaped his training to let him take on Nurmi and the other dour, dominant Finns not in the 1500 meters (the metric mile) but in the more wearing 5000. Hill figured that, coming from Klamath Falls, he’d be able to take the heat in Los Angeles better than Finns from the north woods.

  Hill was right, which made for a historic battle. Nurmi was disqualified before the Games by the International Olympic Committee for taking expense money. But that still left Finns Lauri Lehtinen and Lauri Virtanen, multi-gold medalists whose best times were many seconds faster than Hill’s. In the 5000 final they worked together, set a tough pace, and soon shook off the rest of the world—except Ralph Hill.

  With a kilometer to go, Lehtinen surged, trying to break the American. He broke Virtanen. Into the last lap, Hill was only a meter behind. Bill, Barbara, Hayward, and 90,000 other Americans rose in the stands and called him home. In the last turn, Hill moved to pass, but Lehtinen went wide too, driving him out to the second lane.

  Hill waited there, off his shoulder. Into the stretch, Hill kicked with all he had. As he came even, Lehtinen again veered outward, this time raking the taller Hill with his right elbow, catching his left arm and making him break stride. Lehtinen held the lead.

  But Lehtinen could go no faster. Hill could. He gathered himself and drove on, now in the third lane. Lehtinen saw him, hurled himself out, too, and they collided again. They hit the line a foot apart, both timed at 14:30.0, but Lehtinen reached it first.

  Barbara Young would still feel deaf from the booing two days later. Clearly, Hill would have won if the Finn hadn’t interfered with him. The crowd howled for Lehtinen to be disqualified. He wasn’t. European judges allowed this kind of roughness. The crowd knew what was fair and got uglier. Finally the announcer uttered the desperate cry for which the race would always be known: “Ladies and gentlemen . . . these people are our guests!” But it was only the sight of Hill going to Lehtinen, taking his hand, and the two trotting a victory lap that restored any calm.

  Events could not have been crafted to better enthrall Bill with the Olympic empyrean. Before him was theory made flesh, the Games creating greater bro
therhood among the combatants than the maddened horde. Moreover, he was being steeped in possibility. There was absolutely no reason that a flesh-and-blood friend, a potato-farmer-to-be, could not run with the finest ever. He talked for hours with Hayward and the gracious Hill about racing tactics and the nature of sportsmanship. Both would be needed in that other deadlock down the stretch—the struggle for Barbara’s heart.

  Barbara was a demon socialite. “I accepted everyone who ever asked me for a date, but was serious about only Mike and Bill,” she would say. “Mike was in the news so much it’s no wonder my sorority sisters were jealous.” They pointedly gave her a beautiful, leather-bound copy of Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, “who of course has all these pathetically overblown love affairs and dies a suicide.”

  Years later, Barbara said of Bill, “I really doubt our relationship would have survived if we’d gone to the same college. The interests I had were so disparate. But also, would Bill have endured what I put him through if we’d been at school together?”

  In his letters and calls to her, Bill began sketching plans for after he graduated, and they always included Barbara. But in early 1933, something happened that would delay everything. Bill had joined ROTC as a senior because he needed the money, without realizing that in return for tuition help he was committing himself to a two-year obligation. He’d have to spend a fifth year at Oregon when he’d hoped to graduate in four.

  Bill’s reaction to this belated realization was apparently to reason that if he was going to be controlled by the military, he might as well really be military. Half a century later, Barbara unearthed a stack of 1933 letters from Oregon Governor Julius L. Meier to Senator Fred L. Steiwer and other politicians in support of Bill’s appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point. All mentioned that Bill was the son of former governor Jay Bowerman. Yet although he took an exam and qualified, Bill never transferred to the Point. “It’s another mystery,” Barbara would say. In any event, nothing came of it. Bill stayed at Oregon. Although he had exhausted his football eligibility in the fall of 1932, he would have another season to run for Bill Hayward.

  The next spring, free at last, he took full advantage. His stride was smoother and he learned that for a quarter-miler, how fast you run is almost unrelated to how you feel. “You’re near death’s door anyway afterward, paying off your oxygen debt,” said Hayward. “You may as well make it worthwhile.” Bill was soon knocking at the door of a 50-second 440.

  He broke through when Hayward taught him finesse. “Sprint the first 110 yards,” was his advice. “Then float the second 150, then sprint again in the last turn. After that, it’s who slows down the least.” Bill obeyed and eventually ran times in the high 48s for the 440. He was an emotional relay-team member. “He was almost always better in our mile relay than he was in his individual races,” said George Scharf, a teammate who would become a lifelong friend.

  Bill was also trying to uphold the Bowerman family honor by graduating Phi Beta Kappa, as his sister Beth had done. He would have made it, save for one class. “His French teacher gave him a D,” Barbara would lament. “Why? To demonstrate not caring about football players.” Bill took extra business courses he knew he could ace to bring up his GPA, but missed the cutoff by a hair. Given the hours he’d spent at part-time jobs, it was a considerable achievement.

  About this time, Jay Bowerman summoned Bill to his law offices in Portland. When his solemn, curious son was standing silently before him, the former governor stood, shook his hand, and said, “Son, you have the grades. I’ve seen you with people. You have the talent to be a fine attorney. And I’d like to help you become one.” There was surely a Bowerman-length pause as Bill considered. Jay was only fifty-seven, but Bill could see that he was aging rapidly. “The biggest help you can be to me, sir,” Bill said softly and evenly, “is to go straight to hell.”

  He turned, walked out, and began a life in which he would have little further contact with his father.

  Bill graduated in June 1934 in business, but with enough science and math credits that Oregon’s School of Medicine, in Portland, admitted him. No scholarship came with it, however, and he didn’t have the tuition, nor would he accept anything from his father.

  “The Depression was deep,” Bowerman said later. “I didn’t have a plateful of choices.” After much canvassing, he was offered a position teaching and coaching for eighty dollars a month at Portland’s Franklin High School. He elected to take it for a year and salt away the money. The medical school saved him a place in the next year’s class.

  At Franklin, he taught science, coached football, assisted in track—and chafed. “Everything you did, you did by the numbers,” he would remember. He had a number of run-ins with the principal over his disciplinary methods. “Marijuana is not new, you know,” Bowerman would say, looking back. “Kids would go out to these shacks and I’d chase them out of there, then their mothers would call the principal. I don’t know if they were selling or what. But kids wouldn’t show up in my classes, and I’d go look. I’d find one out there and I’d drag his ass out and say, ‘Get back in school.’” This was not allowed, said the principal, because the handbook specified that teachers had to confine their discipline to the campus. “That wasn’t the kind of school I went to,” Bowerman told him.

  Bill’s sense of being in limbo could only have been intensified by the death of his grandmother, Mary Jane Chambers Hoover, in Fossil, on September 29, 1934. He couldn’t get away for the funeral, but Lizzie, Dan, and Beth filled him in. The stories flowed for days. Mary Jane had raised the town just the way she had raised him. Whether she had to hog-tie, cauterize, or serenade, she was the tough, hard, proper, educated, musical soul of Fossil in its youth. Dozens walked away from the service sure that Mary Jane was pressing some lesson on him or her still, to be more civil, to watch your language, to study harder, but also to always have a little wild yearning in you, a shot of pioneer spirit, for those of pioneer stock.

  It made Bill miserable to compare his heritage with his dreary, nowhere job that was so resistant to any pioneering. Besides, things in LA were not good.

  Mike Frankovich had graduated from UCLA two years before Bill did from Oregon and went off to do sports radio in Canada. As Barbara discovered “how nice it was to have two people who were both away,” she also realized that she preferred “the quietness of Bill rather than the . . . un-quietness of Mike, at least to live with.”

  But each time Frankovich returned to LA he applied gentle pressure, and Barbara began to yield. “I graduated in 1935 and Mike and I decided we were engaged,” she would recall. “We had a ring made.” Meanwhile, she was living at home while going to business college and resenting the change after four years of being free to come and go at UCLA. “So one night when Mike was back from Canada, I called him and said, ‘Come get me!’ I told my folks I was going to spend the night in the Tri-Delt house.” When Frankovich hopped out of the car, he took one look at her and said, “Let’s go to Reno and get married.”

  “I threw a bag in the car and we took off,” Barbara would remember. “But he stopped to run in and tell the Browns, and while I sat there, I thought, ‘I’m not doing this, not this way,’ and turned us around.”

  Frankovich, so near to victory, pressed on, and eventually Barbara wrote a letter to Bill saying she wasn’t going to marry him. “Mike took me to the post office and made sure I mailed it,” she would remember. Having made the decision, Barbara’s reaction was not one of peaceful relief. “I went home and cried for two weeks,” she would say. “I didn’t want to marry either of them. I loved them both too much to give them up!” But Frankovich had called the newspapers, so when Barbara changed her mind again, “we had to call them back, call it all off.”

  But Bill had received that letter and had begun to accept the reality of losing Barbara. In so doing, he may have stumbled upon the way to keep her. A few weeks later, when she got word to him that she’d broken it off with Frankovich, he didn’t react qui
te as he had so many times before. “Bill and I started writing again, kind of coolish letters,” Barbara would say. “In one of them he mentioned that he was taking another woman skiing at Crater Lake!”—their sacred place.

  “The reason Bill Bowerman married me,” Barbara has maintained, “was his sense of competitiveness.” Of course, that’s true. But in the end it was Barbara who most couldn’t bear to lose him. She and a girlfriend whipped up to Medford. In a week, she had him back.

  But times were hard, and the rule in those days was that the groom had to have $1,000 in the bank and a job that paid $100 a month. “Bill was making $80 a month teaching at Franklin,” Barbara would say, “but he hated that job so he wasn’t ready to marry then, and I had to go back down to LA. A lot of this was decided without words. A lot of life with Bill was like that.”

  A voice from the past, a profane, commanding voice from the inner sanctum, came to the rescue. Medford school superintendent Ercel Hedrick heard that goddamn Bill Bowerman was out of Oregon and coaching. Hedrick called Bill to say he’d been recommended to coach the Medford football team. “I’m very flattered,” Bill said, “but I have one more year teaching and then I’m entered in medical school.” Hedrick persuaded him to come to Medford to talk it over.

  “So I drove down,” Bowerman would recall, “and he said, with a lot of profanity thrown in, ‘You’re a Medford product. You know how I like to run my schools.’ My schools. I reminded him about med school. He said, ‘Here’s a point you may be interested in. I know in Portland you get paid $1,000 for the year. We pay $1,500. We hire people one year at a time. Hell, you may change your mind and stay after a year. Think that over and let me know tomorrow.’”

  Bill called Barbara and asked if she thought she could live in Medford, Oregon. She screamed and said yes. “And since that moment,” she would moan down the years, “Bill has always blamed me for his not being a doctor.”