by Kenny Moore
Davis ran 48.6 for his first 440, a few tenths of a second from the school record. “So then I had an event to learn, and Coach said, ‘Oat’—he always called me Oat—‘Oat, that was my race too.’ So I trusted him about how to run it.”
A quarter-mile is 440 yards, about two-and-a-half yards longer than the 400 meters raced internationally. It is also about 100 yards farther than a man or woman can truly, physiologically, sprint. Thus it is won by the athlete who slows down least. Bowerman taught Davis to go hard from the start, reach virtually top speed, then “float” down the backstretch, maintaining his form and cadence without straining until, somewhere in the turn, he should “light out for home.”
Davis soon got a feel for the crucial float. And there was a handy standard of greatness to measure him against. The University of Washington’s Terry Tobacco was a Canadian Olympian and a sub-47-second man. Before their 1959 dual-meet race in Eugene, Bowerman walked Davis around the track himself, observing that if both men ran their best times, Tobacco would beat Davis by fifteen yards. He noted that Tobacco would be two lanes inside him and that, because of the stagger, Davis wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him in the first turn. “Here’s how it will go,” said Bowerman. “You sprint the first turn, then float, and in the middle of the backstretch, look left. Tobacco is going to be flying by. See if you can’t go with him, maybe make a dent in his lead in the last hundred.”
The race began. Davis sprinted, floated, and looked left as instructed. No Tobacco. “So Otis slowed down,” Bowerman would remember. “Otis waited, let Tobacco pass him and get five yards ahead, then came back and beat him in the stretch.” Davis, when he was able, made his way to Bowerman. “Worked like a charm!” he called. “Now that,” Bowerman shouted back, “is coaching!” But he knew what he’d seen.
The next day Bowerman came to Davis and said, “Oat, Oat, we got something else for you to do. It might be that you have a date with destiny in a place called Rome.” Davis thought, “Oh no, here we go again,” without really grasping what Bill was talking about.
Someone else thinking about Rome was Bill Dellinger, who had joined the Air Force after graduating in 1956 and soon found himself stationed at a remote radar station on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. He was eighty miles from anything like a track, but he did have access to a hard, level beach.
“Bill mailed me interval workouts to do,” Dellinger would recall, “so I did them”—did them in a character-illuminating way. He knew that his stride was about six feet, so he counted steps. “I would count to myself each time my right foot touched down until I reached ten. I’d put one finger out to keep track. Twelve fingers would be one 440. I ran up and down that beach doing everything from 220s to 1320s by counting, for eight months, without ever stepping on a track or knowing how far I was running or how fast.”
When he returned to Eugene in 1958, he ran a mile time trial in 4:05. That year he broke American records in the 1500, two-mile, three-mile, and 5000 and had his great race in Moscow. “The funny thing was,” he would say, “when I got onto the track it took me only ten fingers and two strides to do a 60-second quarter. I’d been running everything fifteen percent too far.”
Dellinger not only was the first Bowerman runner to win an NCAA mile, he was the first to do what the Russians and Brits and Germans who’d beaten him so badly in Melbourne did: continue to run after leaving college, when most Americans quit. He proved that a runner’s prime years were in his late twenties. Over two consecutive weekends in February 1959, he broke the indoor world records for two miles (8:49.9) and three miles (13:39). At twenty-six, he, too, was looking good for Rome.
As if two Olympic candidates weren’t enough, there was also Bowerman’s first extraordinary high school recruit. Dyrol Burleson, from Cottage Grove, was the best high school miler in the nation in 1958, running 4:13. Oregon State hired his high school coach, Sam Bell, in hopes of attracting Burleson. (Bell would coach national champions Dale Story, Morgan Groth, and Tracy Smith in Corvallis and the first American to break thirteen minutes for the 5000 meters, Bob Kennedy, at Indiana University.) But Burley, as all called him, never wavered. He came to Oregon with complete trust in Bowerman.
When Burleson was a freshman, Grelle was a senior and the country’s best college miler. The freshman craved a race. “But Bill kept us apart that whole year,” Burleson would say, still frustrated decades later. Bowerman protected Grelle because Burley could cover a relay 440 in under 48 seconds and would always have the edge coming down to the wire.
Bill made Burleson wait until the 1959 National AAU 1500 meters in Denver. Ravenous by then, Burley left Grelle standing during the last 100, beating him 3:47.5 to 3:48.4. That win qualified him for the United States vs. USSR meet, held that year in Philadelphia, where he won the 1500.
The following spring, during a dual meet on April 23, 1960, I was sixteen and on the hurdle crew when Burleson whipped around Stanford’s brave, pace-driving Ernie Cunliffe off the last turn and finished in 3:58.6. It was Hayward Field’s first sub-4:00 and it broke Don Bowden’s American record by a tenth. I was left shaking uncontrollably and with a fixed idea of how a runner had to look. I have it still. It is Burleson’s leanness, Burleson’s quad muscles like bridge cables, sliding and jumping under the thinnest sheath of deeply tan skin.
Davis, Dellinger, and Burleson peopled my daydreams as the Olympics approached. Could three real guys from just down the road have any chance against the world’s best?
“By God, I’ll do ‘er.” Bill’s maternal great grandfather, J. W. Chambers married the widow Mary Greene Scoggin (right) so his father would let him join the wagon train to Oregon. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill’s maternal grandmother, Mary Jane, and husband, Thomas Benton Hoover, would have five more children after Annie and Will, shown here, including Bill’s mother, Lizzie. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
The original homestead on the Thomas Hoover ranch, seen here in 1875, became the site of the first Fossil Post Office. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Shortly after graduating from Oregon Agriculture College, Lizzie Hoover met up-and-coming attorney Jay Bowerman. OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES (Lizzie); Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN (Jay)
Bill Bowerman and his twin brother, Thomas, were born February 19, 1911. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
After her divorce from Jay Bowerman and the death of her son Thomas, Lizzie Bowerman raised Beth, Dan, and Bill with help from her Hoover kin. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill Bowerman glowers in captivity—seventh grade at Hill Military Academy in Portland, Oregon. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
In 1928, the fall of his senior year at Medford High School, Bill was a football player and Big Man on Campus. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Barbara Young, a sophomore transfer student, met Bill at a dance that fall. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
At UCLA, Barbara was swept off her feet by Mike Frankovich (second from left), protégé of comedian Joe E. Brown (far left). Brown’s son Don is at right. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Members of the 1934 University of Oregon Mile Relay Team flank Oregon president Arnold Bennet Hall. From left, Sherwood Burr, Bill Bowerman, Hall, George Scharpf, and Howie Patterson. © UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES
Bill and Barbara seem to hover in mid-air after their wedding in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1936. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
In the winter of 1944, snow blankets Camp Hale in Pando Valley, Colorado. PHOTO BY HUGH EVANS in Soldiers on Skis, by Flint Whitlock, copyright 1992, Paladin Press, Boulder, Colorado
Barbara and Bill with sons Jay and Jon and their Airedale in Texas before Bill shipped out to Italy with the 10th Mountain Division in 1944 Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill admires his Army discharge papers at Camp Carson, Colorado, in October 1945. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill clowns around with Otto Frohnmayer during a camping trip after the war. Photo by DAVID FROHN
MAYER
Bowerman succeeded the legendary Bill Hayward (left) as Oregon track coach in 1948. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
The Bowerman house takes shape on McKenzie View Drive in 1950. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bowerman (front row, far right) sits with his first Oregon varsity track and field team in 1948. Next to him is Peter Mundle, with whom he developed his training methods.
Members of the 1955 Oregon cross-country team flank their coach. Bill Dellinger is second from left, Jim Bailey third from right. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
Jim Bailey runs the first sub-four-minute mile on American soil, 3:58.6 to defeat John Landy in the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1956. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
Bill works on his rubber asphalt research in the late 1950s. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill presses the air out of Dyrol Burleson while congratulating him on Hayward Field’s first sub-four, 3:58.6, in April 1960. © UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES
The Bowerman-coached athletes who qualified for the 1960 Olympics line up on either side of Bill: From left, Jim Grelle, Dave Edstrom, Sig Ohlemann, Harry Jerome, Bill Dellinger, and Otis Davis. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
CHAPTER 12
Rome
ALTHOUGH BILL WAS NOT ON THE OFFICIAL US COACHING STAFF FOR ROME, HE would spend every day at the athletes’ Village, meeting with the Oregonians who had made it to the Eternal City. The cognoscenti knew there was only one Duck with a medal chance, the twenty-year-old prodigy Dyrol Burleson. Burley exuded invincibility. Back home, he emptied the sauna by coming in chewing a sprig of poison oak. So competitive he could seem vulpine, he drove opponents ahead like caribou, thinning them out, waiting, glittery-eyed, before feasting on the last lap. “Burley kind of kept to himself,” Grelle would remember, “and did secret workouts, even though we were all on the same team.”
Burley was different. He had one of the few full scholarships Bowerman allowed, so there was no energy-draining job in the mill for him. He also was never hazed by Bowerman, never felt at cross-purposes with him. “Bill was always very . . . kind to me,” Burleson would say, almost apologetically. “Never any pranks. Of course I obeyed his every request. I had supreme faith in Bill. I never wanted to lose a race for him. And I can say I did that.” Burleson would be undefeated in college competition, taking three NCAA mile or 1500-meter crowns.
And it was the crowns that mattered, not the times. After his seemingly effortless 3:58.6 against Stanford’s Cunliffe, fans couldn’t help asking how fast he’d have run if he’d blasted off with half a lap to go instead of 100 yards. (The world record was Herb Elliott’s 3:54.5.) “It doesn’t matter,” Burleson would say and mean it. “I don’t run for time. I run to win. That mile was a credit to two men, and I’m not one of them. It was a credit to Bill for preparing me so well and a credit to Ernie for setting such a tough pace.”
Burleson’s belief in Bowerman was such that he raced with his cheeks weirdly puffed out, as if trying to blow a walnut through a soda straw. In Bowerman’s painstaking study of the physiology of exercise, something had caught his attention. Air pressure in the lungs affects how readily oxygen molecules hop across the alveolar membrane to be grabbed by red blood cells. Bowerman reasoned that if more pressure means more molecular hopping, a runner applying back-pressure when exhaling could force a little more oxygen into the system. Was this true? I have no idea. It would make a good PhD thesis. But Burleson did it, and that was good enough for me and many other Oregon runners. We still make noise when we run, blowing like horses, our lips flapping.
Otis Davis, whose struggles were painfully obvious, was also following Bowerman’s advice—and learning from every race. Because he had a swayback and a high rear end and a way of arching his spine like a bow when he got tired, Bowerman taught him to run with his hips tucked under him, to keep his trunk perpendicular to the ground. “We did drills for that,” Davis would recall, “high knee and stomach crunches. He never really tried to change me, just adjust me.” Bowerman found ways, too, to assure Davis he was world class. When Davis graduated in 1960, Oregon president O. Meredith Wilson handed him his diploma and said, “Good luck in the Olympics.” Davis thought, What has Coach been telling people?
First he had to make the US team. The 1960 Men’s Olympic Trials were jammed into two July days in Stanford Stadium. The semi and final of the 400 were the same day, and after the semi Davis felt too tired to race. He bent into the blocks aching, repeating Bowerman’s last words, “Oat, you can only do what you can do.” At the gun, Cal’s Jack Yerman and Abilene Christian’s Earl Young rocketed away. At halfway, Davis was last. And then it came to him—“and I mean, came to me in a religious sense,” he would declare—that he had better move up. He obeyed, caught sprinter after sprinter, and just edged Colorado’s Ted Woods for third. He was on the team, barely.
Other Oregon runners had found the Trials ho-hum by comparison, with Dellinger running easily to qualify in the 5000 and Burleson and Grelle going one-two in the 1500. The 1960 team would also include Bowerman’s first Olympian who wasn’t a runner. Saying, “The more milk you have, the more cream that will rise,” Bowerman for years had taught a PE decathlon class as a way to keep an eye out for talent. Up had floated Dave Edstrom, who could hurdle, leap high and long, and put the shot. Bill taught him the other six events and Edstrom made the decathlon team behind UCLA’s Rafer Johnson.
A second set of Ducks would race for Canada, led by a nineteen-year-old freshman sprinter, Harry Jerome, who had tied the world 100-meter record of 10.0. Coming, too, was 800-meter man Sigmar Ohlemann, perhaps the smoothest strider ever to leave Eugene spectators agog. “Who on earth is that?” Robin Jaqua had cried upon seeing his tan, his grace, his amber waves. “Oh,” said Bowerman, “our transfer from the School of Nordic Gods.”
The weather in Rome was volatile, the daytime heat sending up evening thunderheads, but Otis Davis was glad about one thing: the 400-meter rounds were a day apart. The 400-meter semifinals had revealed two favorites, and he was one of them. Feeling no need to hold back, Davis had won his semi in an Olympic record 45.5. The other heat was won by Germany’s brush-cut, oak-thighed Karl Kaufmann in an eased-up 45.7.
Kaufmann had not been beaten in two years. “You could see why,” Bowerman would say. “Great sense of pace. Stamina of a half-miler. Man after my own heart. He was going to keep close to the leaders and run right by them at the end.” So Davis’s instructions were to use his effortless float and not make a big move in the last turn as was his habit. Bill told him to “save enough oomph to make it a two-man race all the way down the stretch.”
The afternoon of the final was overcast and calm. Davis was in lane five; Kaufmann was inside him, in lane two. So the German would be the one aware of who was doing what on the first turn. At the gun, South Africa’s Mal Spence went out maniacally, hitting the 200 in 21.4. Davis and Kaufmann, eyeing each other, were absolutely even in 21.8, four yards back. “Perfect,” said Bowerman. He and Barbara were sitting almost above the finish line, and he felt that the hard part for Davis—mastering his excitement—was over.
It wasn’t. “Into the second turn, seeing the others,” Davis would say. “I was filled with emotion. I swore if they were going to win this they were going to have to come over me to do it. I ran on that emotion. I put everything into it. I moved at the top of the turn.”
“Moved” is not the word. Davis ripped through the 100-meter curve in 10.8 seconds and came into the stretch with a lead of seven yards over Kaufmann. Bowerman and 90,000 others came to their feet to see if he could keep it. Kaufmann gained all the way, and the nearer the line, the faster he closed as Davis, back arched, head rolling skyward, desperately tried to hold together.
Davis felt a string touch his chest and right shoulder. He looked left. There was Kaufmann diving across the line, actually biting the tape, a perfect lean, the price of which was a descent to the cinders. “He landed flat on his face,” Davis would say. “I thought I’
d won but I couldn’t tell. So we had to wait.”
The officials peered at the finish photo for a quarter of an hour. Davis put on his sweat top, took off his shoes, paced. The nine runners in the next race, the men’s 1500-meter final, were trotting around on the backstretch and still the verdict hadn’t come. Two of those finalists—Jim Grelle and Dyrol Burleson—were having a hard time concentrating. “I couldn’t believe it,” Grelle would remember. “This is Otis, my teammate from Eugene, who has just appeared to win the quarter-mile? Finally the announcer says, ‘Results, 400 meters . . . ’ And they go through fifth place, fourth place, third place . . . and there’s a long pause. Then ‘In second place, from West Germany. . . ’ So you knew.” Davis, standing in the middle of the infield, started jumping up and down. ‘ . . . In a new world record time of 44.9, the Olympic champion . . . ’” The crowd was screaming so loud Grelle couldn’t hear Davis’s name.
In the tenth 400-meter final of his life, Otis Davis had won the Olympic gold. Kaufmann also was timed in 44.9, as both became the first to crack 45 seconds for 400 meters. Bowerman’s reaction, he would confess later, was “eighty percent ecstasy, twenty percent unworthy.” The perfectionist in him felt that if Davis hadn’t disobeyed and exploded through the turn, he wouldn’t have crawled down the stretch and might have run a tenth or two faster. “But you can’t blame a guy for being brave,” Bowerman would add, “and did he ever make it work! He may well have been second if he’d run the way I told him.”
