Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  In 1956, Bowerman and friends decided they needed to start a track club to fund sending Oregon grads to big meets or to put on big meets in Eugene. The first president of the Emerald Empire Athletic Association (EEAA) was Dr. Ralph Christensen, then head of Sacred Heart Hospital. (In 1965 the EEAA would change its name to the Oregon Track Club.) “Chris” Christensen, as Bowerman called him, reached out to the professional community. Soon the club was holding its monthly breakfast meetings at a pancake house. Christensen would also be instrumental in hooking Bowerman up with medical experts who would help him improve his own and others’ fitness: orthopedic surgeon Don Slocum, who collaborated with Bowerman on academic papers, used high-speed photography to do early biomechanical studies of running technique; arthroscopy pioneer Stan James; and cardiologist Waldo Harris, who would help Bowerman evaluate the effects of exercise on the heart.

  The EEAA’s first major project was to stage a track meet in October 1956. The US Olympic Committee wanted to give the US team heading for Melbourne in November a competition to sharpen its members in what is ordinarily the off-season for northern hemisphere track athletes. The only catch was that the USOC would not put up any money for the meet and neither would the university.

  “Here’s what we do,” John Jaqua told Bowerman. “You get in writing how much it’s going to cost. I will go up and down Willamette Street and get pledges, backed up by promissory notes. We’ll take those to the bank and get a loan guaranteed by those notes.” Bowerman quickly found that they needed $50,000. Jaqua canvassed Eugene business owners and reported to Bowerman that he had ten $5,000 pledges. “Which was wildly premature of me,” he would later admit. “But I got them eventually.”

  Expenses covered, Olympians flooded the town in October. Jaqua also came up with a way to boost attendance. As he would recall, “Our pledgers, I happened to know, were such cheap bastards that they didn’t want to honor their pledges. So we gave them piles of tickets to sell instead.” The tactic worked like a charm. “We had a massive crowd out at that thing,” Bowerman would remember. “It was a great meet.”

  It was to be the first of many.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Dynasty Begins

  IN THE 1952 FIELD STUDY THAT WOULD BE HIS MASTER’S THESIS, BOWERMAN looked at the scholastic achievement of freshman athletes. He was not greatly surprised to find that trackmen on average earned GPAs a tenth of a point or two above those of football players.

  Pete Mundle, whose senior term paper had sparked Bill’s thinking on training for the middle distances, was a case in point. After graduating, Mundle had lived for a year in England and had trained under Chris Brasher, who had helped pace Bannister to the first sub-4:00 and would win the 1956 Olympic steeplechase. Brasher’s coach was Bill Coyne, and Mundle brought back their steeplechase techniques, including a little pause at the top of the water jump barrier to effect a leap out and not up. Up is bad because it is followed by a plummet straight down, transforming a soaring antelope into a crumpled egret wading out of the water as the rest of the field escapes.

  The steeplechase became Mundle’s best event, although he would try for the 1952 and 1956 Olympics not only in the steeple but also in the 5000, the 10,000, and the marathon. He never made the US team, but drew solace from the fact that his Oregon teammates did: “I know I helped by competing with them.”

  In the winter of 1955–56, the best of those teammates, Bill Dellinger and Jim Bailey, trained with Olympian purpose, aiming for the Games in Melbourne the next November. At the 1956 Northern Division meet in Eugene, Bailey was as lean and impervious as a piece of machinery. Chest and arms held high, his face controlled, almost serene, he powered smoothly past the field on the last backstretch and won at a speed that seemed impossible to wondering sixth graders. Dellinger at least appeared to have feelings. He rolled his head a little, and in the last laps of the two-mile his neck and head turned a disturbing purple crimson, betraying the strain despite his unchanged, supple stride. In later years, when he coached Steve Prefontaine, Dellinger would marvel at how the naked need of Pre’s final drives would bring the Hayward throng to their feet. But Dellinger’s terrifying flush of effort elicited the same roars in 1956.

  In May of that year, mile world record holder John Landy was to race in a special mile, during the USC-UCLA duel meet in the Los Angeles Coliseum. Both Dellinger and Bailey were invited. Bowerman couldn’t accompany them because the team had a dual meet that day, but he held a planning session with the two runners before they left.

  Remembering how Bannister had stalked and out-sprinted Landy in Vancouver, Bowerman counted it as a plus that the Australian had not changed his tactics. Landy trained himself to be supreme at breaking away early and hanging on, thus forcing every opponent to make a decision in the first few strides after the gun: Go with him and burn, or wait and be left behind?

  Bowerman didn’t know how Bailey would react to 58 or 59 pace, but he did know that Dellinger couldn’t take it; he just wasn’t that fast. So he instructed Dellinger to finesse it: run 60s or 61s, and in the third lap go around people who’d gone out too hard. And Bailey? “In my whole career at Oregon,” Bailey would say, “I can’t remember Bill saying one word about tactics. I ran on instinct. I couldn’t describe what happened in a race after it was over. It was the same in LA. I ran and reacted.”

  The formidable Ron Delany of Ireland and Villanova University, a future Olympic champion, was in the race too. Bowerman hoped that Delany would chase Landy and keep him from breaking free. If that happened, he told his two Ducks, “Don’t lose hope in the last lap, because with Landy if you can get near, you can get by.”

  The race developed not at all as Bowerman had envisioned. Landy led, but not with any 59. He passed the quarter in a sensible 61. Delany stuck so close that his mincing stride seemed to threaten the Aussie’s heels. Dellinger and Bailey ran a few yards behind, happy the pace was manageable. That didn’t last long. Passing the half-mile in 2:02.3, Landy opened up. Only Delaney tried to stay near him for the next 220. By then, Bailey and Dellinger were fifteen yards back. On the turn Bailey moved ahead of Dellinger into third, but felt a twinge of doubt. He seemed too far behind and too tired.

  With 550 yards to go, Landy broke Delany. The world record holder drove past three-quarters with a growing ten-yard lead in 3:01.5, having run the third lap in 59.2. Bailey was 3:03.1 with a lap to go, having reached the dying Delany’s back. Passing him gave Bailey a great rush and he surged on after Landy. He caught his countryman at the top of the last turn and fought even at the 1500-meter point, where the time for both was 3:43.3. They had 120 yards to go.

  Back in Eugene, schools and department stores had come to a halt listening to the race on KUGN. Seventeen-year-old Jon Bowerman, a senior at Coburg High, was competing in a track meet.

  “They interrupted the meet to put the broadcast on the speakers,” he would remember. “I can still hear us all screaming as they were on the last lap. ‘Bailey pulling up! Bailey pulling up! Bailey passes Delany! Bailey passes Delany! Bailey’s coming on! Bailey’s passing Landy! Bailey wins!’ It made us crazy. We ran our first laps too fast after that. We killed ourselves.”

  Bailey’s 55.5-second last lap carried him across the line a yard ahead in 3:58.6, the first sub-four-minute mile ever run on US cinders. Landy and Delany ran 3:58.7 and 4:05.5. Dellinger finished fourth in 4:08.8. Huge, sequential pictures of Bailey coming off the turn and passing Landy ran in the Register-Guard the next day and were cut out and tacked up on my Dunn School sixth-grade bulletin board by a teacher who knew inspiration when she saw it.

  When Dellinger and Bailey returned to Eugene, fighting through whooping students and athletic department secretaries to take refuge in Bowerman’s office, he sat back and acted as if nothing unusual had transpired. But he couldn’t pull it off for long. Finally, he jumped up and said, “You’re Olympians now.”

  He meant this, of course, simply in the sense that they had acquitted themselves well against the fi
nest on the planet. In fact, while the mile was enough for the Australian selectors to name Landy to their Olympic team, Bailey had to run the 800 and 1500 in later Aussie trials to qualify for both in Melbourne.

  “I always had to prove myself more,” he would recall glumly. “For weeks before the Australian Trials, Melbourne newspapers had been promoting the rematch between Landy and me as the Melbourne gentleman against ‘the Rugby Ruffian’ from Sydney, the bad boy of Australian track.”

  When he stepped onto the field for the finals in Melbourne, 50,000 hostile spectators were chanting, “Beat Bailey! Send him back to America!” Bailey won both the 800- and 1500-meter trials, but in Melbourne he was injured and didn’t make the 1500 final. Ron Delany won it with a late, panicky sprint in 3:41.2, the equal of a 3:58 mile. Six yards behind, Germany’s Klaus Richtzenheim outleaned Landy for second, both timed in 3:42.0.

  Although he would come back to race in the 1957 season, James Bailey’s finest sporting moment would remain his great mile in Los Angeles. But thousands of his countrymen never forgave him for beating Landy, their idol. After graduating from Oregon, Bailey would take a job representing Jantzen knitwear, an Oregon firm Bowerman had put him in touch with, and make his life in the United States.

  Dellinger, for his part, had no trouble winning the 1956 US Olympic Trials 5000 in an American record 14:26.0. But Melbourne would be a miserable epiphany. Overcome by heat, he did not finish the race, which was won by twenty-seven-year-old Vladimir Kuts of the Soviet Union. Dellinger—twenty-one and the youngest in the field—was shocked at the huge gap between his training and that of runners from the rest of the world, who trained not only year-round but twice a day. “No wonder my 14:26.0 was almost a full minute behind the world record of 13:35—a time I felt was absolutely impossible for me to run.”

  He and Bowerman returned sobered. They had more to learn. A couple of years later, Bill would hear about a New Zealand coach named Arthur Lydiard, whose runners could carry a five-minute pace or better for ten miles. Intrigued, Bowerman began writing to Lydiard to find out about building that kind of strength.

  Bowerman already had more raw material at home to work on. In 1955, high school talents Dick Miller, George Larson, Phil Knight, and Jim Grelle had entrusted their fates to him. Knight and Grelle were the two best half-milers in Portland their senior year. Known to his family and friends as “Buck,” the towheaded Knight would endure other nicknames at Oregon. Jim Bailey, for one, used to call him “Albeeeno” because he was so fair. But then came a time when Phil took a carload of teammates to the Glenwood Drive-in on an evening when entry was a dollar a car. Grelle saw the marquee and said, “Look, we’re being taken on ‘Buck Night’ by Buck Knight!” Phil was “Buck” from then on.

  Quick of wit and a devilish mimic of other runners’ strides, Grelle in 1956 had not been beaten in the 880 for three years, but Bowerman was leaning on him to move up. “Why suffer twice as far?” Grelle would say. But Bowerman nagged, telling him he wasn’t fast enough to be a great half-miler, that even he, Bowerman, could beat him in a 220. When Grelle called him on it, Bill said, “Okay, I’m going to race you. We’re going to line up here in staggered lanes and you can’t look back. Look back and you’re disqualified and I’m the winner.”

  “You’re going to cheat. You’re going to cut across the infield.”

  “But you won’t know unless you look back, and then you’re eliminated and I win anyway.”

  This went on for years. “Anybody who thought he was fast was supposed to race Bowerman and he made the rules,” Grelle would say. “So we never did have a race.”

  Finally, after losing an 880 as a sophomore in 1957, Grelle bowed to the inevitable. Bill took him to the NCAA meet in Austin, Texas, and put him in the mile. Grelle didn’t know mile tactics, but Bowerman told him it was simple: “See that Villanova guy? That’s Ron Delany, the Olympic 1500-meter champion. I want you to follow that guy. Do what he does.” Grelle found the pace not too bad and got on Delany’s shoulder. “We work through the field and with 200 left Delany goes to the front and I get into second and we finish that way. And I go over to Bill and say, ‘Wasn’t that great? I got second! I ran 4:07!’” The following week, Bowerman took Grelle to the Oregon Club—where he stood him up and apologized for making such a tragic mistake. Everyone wondered, What mistake? And Bill said, “I forgot to tell him to win.”

  In 1958, Grelle ran 4:01.7 for fourth in the AAU Nationals (behind new Aussie sensation Herb Elliott’s 3:58.0) and qualified for one of the Cold War’s great events, the United States vs. USSR dual meet in Moscow.

  There, beneath the glare of Nikolai Khruschev and 80,000 others in the Moscow stadium, all emanating grim negativity, Bill Dellinger made the 5000 meters “the event of the meet,” as Track and Field News would deem it. Dellinger and teammate Max Truex of the University of Southern California and the LA Striders were up against Pyotr Bolotnikov and Hubert Parnakivi. Bolotnikov, who would be the 1960 Olympic 10,000-meter champion, would rank number one or two in the world for the 10,000 in every year from 1957 to 1962 except for 1961 when he fell to fifth; he would also rank in the top ten in the world for the 5000 during the same period. Parnakivi, a newcomer, had beaten Bolotnikov that year in the USSR Championships.

  The Soviets led through sheets of rain on a heavy track, but the Yanks hung tough. Bolotnikov tried to run away with two laps to go, but escaped no one. Parnakivi then shot ahead at the bell, but couldn’t shake Dellinger. Bill went for the lead on the backstretch, failed, went for it on the last turn, failed, and went for it all down the home stretch. He couldn’t get the last six inches. Both were timed in 14:28.4.

  In the 1500, with 400 to go, Grelle would remember, “there was no cheering.” The disgusted silence was because he was winning. Grelle could hear his own footsteps as he outkicked Jonas Pipyne, 3:46.7 to 3:47.3. Despite the lack of encouragement from the crowd, Grelle took a victory lap and then headed for the showers. There he came upon Dellinger having a well-earned soak in a tub that looked big enough to dive into. “How’s the water, Bill?” Grelle asked. “Just fine,” Dellinger answered. So Grelle stripped, jumped right in, screamed, and popped straight back out, almost hovering in the air. The water was about 150 degrees. Dellinger, who had eased in a bit at a time over half an hour, “laughed so hard he about croaked,” Grelle would recall, adding, “He’s told that one a few times.”

  Dellinger’s pranks were solidly within the Bowerman tradition, but Bill Bowerman’s were even more devious. One of Grelle’s favorite Bowerman stories involved a pair of twin quarter-milers, Dave and Don Christian, who were heaven-sent for a Bowerman scheme that had been germinating since the days of Jack Hutchins.

  In 1958, Bowerman concocted a plan to enter one of the twins in the half-mile and hide the other one behind the end zone seats that briefly blocked spectators’ view of the race. One twin would float along at the back of the pack for a lap. He’d step off in the turn and his twin would get on and smoke around the field, winning by fifty or sixty yards and breaking the world record.

  The twins ordinarily would have done anything for Bowerman, but they worried about whether they could get away with it. What about the turn judge back there? Bowerman said he’d distract the judge during the switch, or if the judge caught on, he’d just persuade him to shut up for a while. Then, after the crowd was floored by the new world record, Bowerman figured he’d say, “Wait, we had a little mix-up. It’s all a mistake. Dave got confused by what Don was doing. They thought they were in the relay.”

  In the end, the brothers couldn’t bring themselves to do it. “But they practiced it in workouts a couple times,” Grelle would remember, “and it looked great. From the stands it just looked great.”

  Something else that looked great from the stands in 1958 was sprinter Otis Crandall Davis. Born in Tuskaloosa, Alabama, Davis had had a stint in the service before being lured to Eugene in 1957, at the age of twenty-five, by a basketball scholarship. As it turned out, howe
ver, Davis rarely got into a game. Basketball coach Steve Belko asked Bowerman to take Davis off his hands, saying that yes, he had springs, but also an uncanny way of “going up when the ball is coming down and coming down when the ball is going up.” Bill got Davis out to Hayward Field and tried him in the high jump and then, eventually, the sprints, once Davis mastered the starting blocks.

  In the summer of 1958, we kids fought to carry those battered steel blocks for Davis during the all-comers meets. We instantly adored this gentle, bemused black man, the first most of us had been anywhere near, save for some gospel singers who came through at church. He let us cluster around as he measured how far back from the line Bowerman said each foot should be. He let us hammer in those blocks. When he crouched into them, he seemed heronlike, a folded-up Erector set. Thus were coach, runners, and admirers agape when Davis leapt up and sprinted 9.6 for the 100-yard dash and 21.5 for the 220. He ran high and proud, almost too much so, his back arching as he came down the stretch, his head tipping back, as if his joy made him look to heaven.

  Since Bowerman wasn’t content to merely find a sprinter, he thought of the 440. The following spring, he took Davis to Fresno State to run his first quarter-mile. On that track, the 440 was run around only one turn (there was a 220 straightaway before hitting the curve), so Davis took a little walk just to see how far this was. As Davis would tell the story many years later, “By the time I got back to Coach I was nervous as a cat. So Coach—I always called him Coach, and for some reason he never minded it from me—Coach Bowerman volunteered to massage me before the race, to calm me down. He got that balm all over my legs and was massaging closer and closer to the parts of which I was very proud, and I realized why, why . . . this man truly IS a great track coach! Then I felt the full heat of that salve, that Atomic Balm, and I think I ran so fast because I wanted to get back to the locker room and get it off.”