Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  During this period Bowerman was coming out with a new experimental shoe every week. His best shoes used kangaroo skin—light, stretchy, but resilient enough to hold its shape. (After a while, though, kangaroo skin was hard to get. In the early 1970s, the United States would ban the importation of kangaroo products under the Endangered Species Act.) He tried velvet, deerskin, snake-skin, testing them on lower-value guinea pigs such as his middle son.

  When Jay Bowerman, a promising half-miler, was a sophomore at Coburg High he wore custom-made racing spikes: a spinach-green suede upper with elastic instead of laces and 11⁄4-inch spikes riveted to a translucent nylon plate that was glued to the shoe. “I used foot powder to get them on since they had that elastic across the tongue and fit like ballet slippers,” Jay would remember. The shoes worked well enough: Jay got third in the 1959 state small-schools meet, running 2:05.2.

  The first big win for Bowerman’s homemade shoes came at the 1959 Pacific Coast Conference meet. Favored in the 440 was Bobby Stanton of the University of Southern California, who had beaten Otis Davis a few weeks earlier at the Oregon–USC dual meet. But Otis, wearing the white shoes he’d nicked from Phil Knight, blew Stanton off the track. “I think,” Knight said later, “a seed was planted that day.”

  Bowerman never forced his shoes on anyone. His credo was “Be true to your feet.” If a runner felt more competitive in Adidas or Puma, Bowerman had no problem with his wearing those brands. But word of the Ducks’ odd footwear got around. “As you lined up for your race in a dual meet,” miler Jim Grelle would remember, “guys would look at your feet and say, ‘Oh, weird, what are those?’” The Ducks would allow as how their shoes were lighter than the clodhoppers the other guys were wearing, pointing out that the work of lifting an extra two or three ounces 900 times over the course of a mile (“That’s a hundred pounds right there!”) might be the difference between winning and being an also-ran. “People got to kind of hate us because we had better shoes,” Grelle would say. “You couldn’t buy anything like what we had.”

  Custom fit meant just that. Bowerman would draw an outline of a runner’s foot, measuring the circumference at different places and making notes on each drawing. “Grelle: thin ankle, size 101⁄2, a heel that extends,” for example, or “Otis Davis: 101⁄2, but real wide ball of the foot.” Then Bowerman would make a plastic shoemaker’s last of each runner’s foot, sanding it down or building it up with wood putty until, as Grelle would say, “it was exactly you.” Socks defeated the purpose. They might be acceptable in cross-country because the race was long enough that blisters would be a problem. But in a mile, a blister wouldn’t make itself known until the race was over anyway. The aim was always to take just a little more weight off and to have the shoe fit more snugly.

  Bill’s designs grew organically over time. Breakthroughs were brilliant, but rare. He made regular trips to the Tandy Leather Shop to see what had come in. One time it was some beautiful red suede that was tanned cod skin. His immediate (and seemingly logical) thought was “Fish skin is probably the ideal leather for when it’s wet.” He made a pair for his son. “Logical or not, he was wrong,” Jay Bowerman would remember. After a lap around the wet infield grass, the shoes had soaked up a half-cup of water each and had stretched from size 9 to size 12. “I was running with these great, soggy, floppy things in front of my toes, like oversize gym socks,” Jay would say. “When the shoes came off, my feet were a deep, lustrous red.”

  Access to the shoes that worked was strictly monitored, for reasons both practical and psychological. Bowerman would make his runners hand over their featherweight shoes right after their races, keeping each pair in a box labeled with the runner’s name. “You get these back next Saturday,” he’d say. Grelle would remember begging to wear the shoes in time trials, but Bowerman was unrelenting. “He got us thinking, Man, when I get those things on, it’s gonna be magic,” Grelle would say. “Magic shoes on Saturday.”

  The most successful purveyor of Bowerman footwear, of course, would be his first collegiate guinea pig, Phil Knight. Probably because of his shyness, Knight’s commitment to running wasn’t patently obvious to Bill at first. So, even though he was good friends with Knight’s father, Bowerman exerted characteristic pressure on the son. “Bill made me pay my dues,” Knight would remember.

  Hazing kicked in during winter term, with Bowerman frequently wondering aloud whether Phil really wanted to be on the team. “I couldn’t do anything right,” Knight would say. One time Bill scheduled a three-quarter-mile time trial on a day when Knight felt terrible, achy with flu coming on. But he went out to the practice track anyway, only to find that Bowerman wasn’t there. He waited fifteen minutes, felt worse, and was just heading up to Mac Court when Bill showed up.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “In. Feel awful.”

  “Phil, who would you say is the coach of this track team?”

  “You are.”

  “Well then, you go in fifteen minutes.”

  Knight couldn’t believe it: “He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.”

  Bowerman clicked the watch, noted the time, mildly observed, “You don’t look that sick to me,” and walked away knowing a great deal more about Knight’s command of self.

  “When I hung in,” Knight would say, “he saw character, and that was the end of it. Later, it was funny to watch him hazing other guys the same way—funny after you’d been through the cycle.”

  Jim Grelle would describe Knight as so quiet that he “probably took his schoolbooks on a date,” and drawing Knight into college-boy pranks was nearly impossible. But Grelle claims to have managed it once. During their senior year, 1959, after Oregon beat Washington State in a dual meet in Pullman, a bunch of guys that Grelle swears included Phil “went out looking for fun.”

  They came across a yellow school bus with the door open and the key in the ignition. Grelle got the bus started and the whole crew piled in, Phil protesting all the way. “I’m driving,” Grelle would recall, “and the bus is long and tips up on two wheels on turns, and guys are standing up hanging on, and I’m honking, and Phil yells, ‘Stop! Let me out! I’m a CPA! I want a career!’ Finally, we realized this is not a huge city. People had had enough time to call the cops. So we left the bus in the middle of an intersection and ran back to the dorm. And you know what? To this day, Buck Knight will try to tell you he wasn’t there in that bus that night.”

  Knight, in ways slow and inevitable, would have his revenge. “As a freshman,” he would say four decades later, “I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians in Dellinger, Bailey, and Grelle. Four, if you count Burley coming in my senior year. If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman. Not simply the shock, but the way to respond. He attached such honor to not giving up, to doing my utmost. Most kids didn’t have that adjustment of standards, that introduction to true reality.”

  Knight said this at a quiet lunch with Barbara Bowerman in 2001. Barbara leaned over and said, “It always bothered Bill having you and Jim Grelle in the same class.”

  “Not as much as it bothered me.”

  “But he always cared,” said Barbara, patting his wrist.

  “He lied to me about my splits once,” said Knight, “to encourage Grelle.”

  Knight had a perfectly respectable career at Oregon, running bests of 1:53 in the 880 and 4:15 in the mile. He won a couple dual-meet races and a small cross-country meet when Bowerman didn’t send the big guns for some reason. “My racing was spotty, with a lot of ups and downs,” Knight would recall. “Bill and I never quite got the formula for how to train me. We were close, th
ough. Maybe in one more year . . . ” He left that hanging, as do many who go on, unrequited, to other things. Knight graduated from Oregon in 1959. Masking his relentlessness with his quiet demeanor, he would not rest until he competed to the ultimate level in something.

  The time since Bowerman’s return from the Games in Rome had been filled with the usual plethora of duties, but he had not forgotten Arthur Lydiard in New Zealand. Snell and Halberg’s coach hadn’t written for months, so Bill had asked why. In April of 1961, in a seven-page, handwritten letter, Lydiard poured out his heart in answer.

  Upon returning from Rome he’d found the small factory he managed a month behind schedule and had had to work sixty to eighty hours a week. “Then, on the athletic side, the rest of my time was fully taken by everyone thinking I could make them Olympic champs overnight. I became completely jaded mentally and physically.” Lydiard was trying to earn a living to put his kids through college, but had no time to spend with them. “I could get no let up,” he wrote, “so I took the only course open. I tossed my job in and took on a milk round with my phone number unregistered. I am on my own at night on the milk round and it has helped me to settle down and think.” He still loved running “better than anything,” Lydiard continued, “but for an amateur coach it got too big for me. This whole business has mushroomed and I am not in a financial position to do anything about it. Sorry if I have bored you with all this, but I had to explain to someone and I think you will understand, Bill.”

  “You have no idea,” Bowerman wrote back, “how well I understand.” Bill was coaching fourteen events and had so many good throwers, sprinters, and hurdlers coming on that he was feeling oppressed. To solve both their problems, he extended an extraordinary offer and sign of respect: “Presently, in the University of Oregon, I have ten of the finest runners in the United States. It would be a great thing for me and for these young men if they could come under your direction. Seven have run the mile under 4:10, five under 4:05.” Bill suggested finding Lydiard something in public relations with one of the lumber companies. “I envision finding some kind of appropriate employment where you can earn a reasonably good living between the hours of 10 o’clock and 3 o’clock. You could devote your morning and late afternoon to the training of out-of-school or in-school runners. There is no doubt in my mind that if you were here, our runners would reach their full potential.” Before Bowerman could find him the kind of position he’d described, however, the Rothmans cigarette company made a similar offer and Lydiard stayed in Auckland. Bowerman would train his embarrassment of riches by himself.

  Those riches were making themselves known in the service of another of Bowerman’s innovations, one that would become a hallowed Oregon tradition. Only five weeks after Burleson’s American record mile of 3:58.6 in 1960, Jim Beatty had improved it to 3:58.0 at Modesto. On May 24, 1961, word rippled around town that Burleson might take a crack at getting it back that evening. It had to be in the evening. Virtually all sunny afternoons in the Willamette Valley are accompanied by strong winds from the north, frustrating anyone trying to hold a pace through Hayward Field’s backstretch. But when the sun sets, the wind dies. A warm evening takes on extraordinary stillness. This, Bowerman and Burley planned to exploit.

  Four thousand people had somehow found out. As they arrived, they saw Burleson warming up with a young man in fuzzy, green and white EEAA club sweats. This was Archie San Romani, who had transferred as a sophomore to Oregon from Wichita State University and was serving out his ineligible year before joining the varsity. San Romani possessed a regal lineage. His father, Archie San Romani Sr., had finished fourth in the 1936 Berlin Olympic 1500 meters. Archie had run 4:08.9 in high school, four seconds faster than Burley had, and Bowerman was coming to believe he never had a runner more talented. Archie’s raw 220 speed was phenomenal, his acceleration amazing, his stride all grace and economy. On that day he was in no shape to challenge Burleson, but he had vowed to make his first effort at Hayward Field unforgettable.

  Bowerman took up his bullhorn and addressed the packed west stands. “It’s come to our attention,” he said, “that with the longer days, and the fragrance of the peony in the land, students have begun strolling into these old stands, we can only presume to study. So we of the sporting department have arranged a short program for your diversion. We hope it meets with some approval.”

  For a record to count, it had to be set in an official meet, with five events. So a 100-yard dash and high hurdle race were run and the high and long jumps contested. Then announcer Wendy Ray introduced the milers, the runners trotted out of a bullpen on the infield, and the race was begun.

  San Romani’s judgment was perfect, putting in one 59.5 quarter after another, for 1:59.0 at halfway. Burleson, leaner than ever, shadowed him. San Romani slowed slightly in the third quarter. Burley drifted with him for a while, but then Bowerman said to go around. Burleson did and was on his own. The time at three-quarters was a second or two over three minutes, but Burley was a great kicker and with the crowd emitting the sound of ten he came home in 3:57.6, taking the American record back by four-tenths of a second.

  On that day Bowerman got a glimpse of the future. “Eugene, Oregon,” he would say, “had all the attributes that let Paavo Nurmi, Gunder Hägg, and John Landy set records in Scandinavia. We had the calm air. We had the demanding crowd.” The Oregon Twilight Meet was born.

  CHAPTER 14

  The 1962 Season

  OF ALL THE INSTITUTIONS THAT HAVE BECOME SHADOWS OF THEIR FORMER selves, traditional dual meets are the greatest loss. For the crowd, a dual was the equal of a football game, the score seesawing, the battle for each place crucial. For the combatants, each race or throw or leap was charged with duty to home, to cause, to sacrificing for the holy good of humiliating Oregon State University. Or USC.

  In the spring of 1962, the University of Southern California had not lost a dual meet since 1945, racking up 129 victories in those seventeen years. Moreover, under coaches Dean Cromwell and Jess Mortensen they had won the NCAA team championship twenty-one times between 1926 and 1961. There has been no comparable dominance in any other sport before or since. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tex Maule, who’d been following Bowerman’s milers in the indoor season, sensed the brawl to come and arranged to document it.

  It was as if Bowerman had been born, raised, and sent to war in order to learn how to win dual meets. These contests took recon, lightning-quick adjustment, occasionally even disinformation. A dual is scored five points for first place, three for second, and one for third. The mile relay was five points for the winner, a pitiless zero for the loser. The way to conquer, thus, was less with outright victories than with depth. Team A could win thirteen of fifteen events, but if Team B grabbed all the seconds and thirds and then swept the last two events, it would win the meet by a single point. Bowerman, therefore, looked to engineer one-two-three sweeps.

  On that hot, dry day in the LA Coliseum, the total possible points in the fifteen events was 131. The first one to reach 66 would win. Over breakfast, Bowerman acknowledged the power of USC’s intimidating history, its crowd, and its 1932 Olympic stadium. “But we can make all that go away,” he said to his team. “All we gotta do is get ’em quiet.”

  The first race was the mile. “We wanted to take one-two-three to start it off,” Bill would recall later with great satisfaction in the telling. “Their miler was sure he could get second. So we entered our big guns, Burleson and San Romani, and a good steeplechaser, Clayton Steinke, whose best mile was about 4:08. The problem was how to help Steinke beat the SC guy.”

  The Ducks slowed the early pace so Steinke could keep up. With a lap to go, the Oregon men moved into a wing, with San Romani leading, Burley off his shoulder, Steinke off his shoulder, and the USC runner “boxed in the pocket,” as Bowerman would put it. With 300 to go, Steinke blasted off and built a twenty-yard lead down the backstretch. “When the USC guy got out and went after him,” Bowerman would say, “Burley and Archie h
eld him outside. He was so frantic to get past them he had to sprint out in the third lane all around the last turn. He burned out, died in the stretch, and our guys exploded away from him and caught Steinke and we got our sweep.”

  To counter, the partisan crowd of 12,393 looked to the javelin. USC was sure to go one-two with world-ranked Jan Sikorsky and Dick Tomlinson. Sikorsky’s opening effort was 230 feet 4 inches—10 feet farther than the best Duck had ever thrown.

  Next up was sophomore Les Tipton, overflowing with “exuberance to do well,” as he put it. Tipton stepped onto the runway, regarded the vast stadium, inhaled, snorted like a wide-eyed mustang, ran, reared back, cocked his hand too much, and hit the tail of the javelin on the runway behind him. Thrown off balance, he tried to adjust, slapped the shaft against his back, got his feet tangled up, and released the implement as if he were fighting off some attacking creature.

  The spear went maybe twelve feet. From the crowd came a voice: “Way to go . . . SPASTIC!” Laughter mounted into shrieks.

  Bowerman, as was his habit, was sitting across the way with a manager handy. “I got him to get Lester to come over,” he remembered. “He’d actually done the right thing. When he got all askew, he didn’t want to tear his arm apart so he’d done that goofy flip. I told him, ‘Hey, just play like you’re in practice. Think through your technique and throw it about three-quarters effort and see what happens.’ He got a grin on him and went back out.”

  When Tipton took the runway for his second attempt, people in the crowd called, “Look, look, here’s the spastic again!” And so every eye in the stands was privileged to see him run with deliberation, draw back the shaft, send it out without a shiver at an angle of eighteen degrees, and watch as the air lifted it to a steady thirty-three.