by Kenny Moore
Let us freeze it there and explain. The javelin is not thrown for meat; it’s thrown for distance. To do that, it must become an airfoil. To do that, it must be fired through a tiny hole in space with graceful surety. If the shaft vibrates, it’s been compromised. If it goes a few degrees too high, it will stall, sicken, and drop, scattering officials. But if all the force of the run can be made to flow through the planting of the opposite leg, through the twisting hips and turning trunk and gathering, waiting, waiting shoulder, and final snapping arm into the shaft in a straight line, and if that line bears the proper relation to the horizon, then all the transferred energy will be revealed in soaring flight. By the time the javelin’s point stabs the turf, the crowd will have risen up and borne it along on astounded breath.
That’s what Tipton’s throw did. It stuck at 238 feet 4 inches, 8 feet past Sikorsky’s—and 20 feet farther than Tipton had ever thrown in his life. The crowd screamed for Sikorsky to come back. “Sikorsky was a heck of a thrower,” Bowerman remembered, “but he was trying so hard to get it over the fence that he kept launching it straight up in the air. He never did get off a decent one, and our John Burns—who’d been hurt—got third, so we went one-three and got a 5-point swing.”
The quiet that Bill had mentioned in the meeting was attained.
Then came the half-mile. “I hardly ever double,” Bill would recall with grim relish. “But we doubled. We came back with Burleson, San Romani, and a fresh Sig Ohlemann. Another nine points. They were trying to figure out what hit them.” The glorious pall deepened in the two-mile, as Ducks Vic Reeve, Keith Forman, and Mike Lehner ran away from USC’s Julio Marin in the last lap.
“Well, it finally happened,” began the Los Angeles Times article by Al Wolf. “USC lost its first dual meet in 17 years Saturday afternoon at the Coliseum. Bill Bowerman’s mighty University of Oregon team, not even working up a sweat to score in some events, ran, jumped and threw to a 75-56 victory. The last time anybody saw the Trojans drop a dualer was on May 12, 1945, to California. The way those Ducks performed Saturday, it may be that long before somebody comes along to beat them. Oregon broke USC’s back in the 880, mile and two-mile runs, sweeping all three races for 27 points. The visitors demonstrated all-around talent, though, by winning nine of the 15 events and sharing a first place in another. Jerry Tarr won both hurdles, the 120-yard highs in 13.9 and 220-yard lows in 23 flat, defeating Rex Cawley in the lows. Harry Jerome won both sprints in 9.6 and 20.8.”
Who were all these guys? One was Harry Jerome, who had recovered from the hamstring cramp that had kept him from making the Olympic 100-meter final in Rome and gone on, as a sophomore, to place second in the 100 in the 1961 NCAA meet. Jerome exhibited less sprinterly braggadocio than any others of that breed. In fact, he was quite shy. Miler Keith Forman, who was in the same class, found Jerome to be kind: “He didn’t race to crush the ego of the other guys. He raced to run faster than the other guys.” Jerome’s fellow Canadian, shot-putter Dave Steen, concurred. “After he pulled his hamstring in the semis in Rome,” Steen would recall, “one of the Canadian national magazines ran a headline: ‘Jerome Quits.’ That devastated him. There was nothing more unlike Harry than playing head-case sprinter games, faking injuries and things. He knew himself very, very well, and it hurt him to think people would think he’d quit.”
Jerome’s form was perfectly aligned, with no look of all-out effort visible in his all-out efforts. If he had a trademark, it was when he swept off the turn in the 220, even with the field, and then simply lifted—torso, hips, and knees high—moving away with the certainty of a machine while the competition, suddenly poor flesh and blood, stiffened and flailed.
Bowerman, because of Jerome’s gifts, reversed the colors of the team’s racing shirts and shorts, changing the shorts to green and the shirts to yellow, the brightest lemon on earth. “By God, if Harry gets half an inch of his chest ahead of Bob Hayes,” Bill said, “I want those judges to see it.” He made the green equally bright, “the green of sunlight through new oak leaves in May,” as he described it one May on his deck over the river, pulling down a limb, demonstrating.
If Jerome arrived with all his potential brightly in evidence, the other dominant force on the 1962 team slipped into town almost unnoticed. Jerry Tarr came from Bakersfield, on a partial football scholarship, as a 14.4-second high hurdler. His first spring, 1961, he cut that by half a second and narrowly won the NCAA highs in 13.9.
“I didn’t know how lucky I was,” Tarr would say later, “to be dropped into a school of hurdle training that Bill had been polishing since the Middle Ages.”
Well, at least since 1954. That year Bowerman returned from Pakistan, where he’d been doing coaching clinics for the State Department, with the idea of stretching elastic across the top of the hurdle as a more forgiving barrier than solid wood. Soft-top barriers were not idle babying, but a commonsense approach to training any animal. “You hit your horse on the nose every day,” Bill would say, “pretty soon he’s going to remember and shy away. A hurdler will do the same if he hits that hurdle in practice and it hurts. Now, if he hits it in a meet he doesn’t feel it because he’s got adrenaline working for him.”
Bowerman actually began using a less expensive loop of canvas instead of elastic, and that year Doug Basham dropped the school record from 15 flat to 14.4. “I never had a year after that, using the soft hurdles, that I didn’t have somebody under fourteen seconds,” Bill would say. In 1962, he had four guys under 14: Tarr, Mike Gaechter, Harry Needham, and Mel Renfro.
Renfro, a brilliant athlete from Portland’s Jefferson High, had done 13.5 over the thirty-nine-inch high school hurdles (college hurdles were forty-two inches high). Bowerman would coach Renfro only his sophomore year, but would declare him “a great football player and athlete, one of the best to go through this institution.” Upon graduating in 1964, Renfro was promptly drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and would go on to become a Hall of Fame defensive back and punt returner.
Bowerman often worked with the sprinters and hurdlers at the top of the backstretch, where he would offer a primer on technique. A lot had to do with the angle of the runner’s torso as he bucked forward, lead leg lifting and shooting out toward the hurdle. “Some hurdlers drop their heads completely as they dive toward the barrier,” Bowerman would intone. “Some of them fall on their faces because of it. But, gentlemen, neither should you look up in the sky. So what we do, we look at our crotch. We try to keep our shoulders level and peer forward right out under our eyebrows. We do not dive head down because we will hang our balls on the hurdle if we do.”
Tarr was big—six feet one and 195 pounds—and had exceptional speed, but exhibited a flaw. “Bill finally got me to tuck in the foot of my trail leg, keep it as close to my butt as possible,” said Tarr. “When I swung it wide it slowed me down. He told me fifty times that once I got that, I was world class.”
Tarr got it. Every week in 1962 he was faster. He won the highs and lows against USC. In a subsequent meet in Eugene, he came to the track ten minutes before the highs with a headache, eased gingerly into the blocks, came to the set position, blew over the hurdles in a school record 13.6, coasted to a stop, put an ice bag on his head, and was led back to bed. This had to do with his not yet having mastered life under Bill. Tarr had played cards until two in the morning at his Sigma Chi house, soaking up beers. His frat brothers had rousted him out and half-carried him, hungover, to the meet. They’d brought along the ice bag.
Monday, Bowerman had Tarr come in to his office and closed the door. “I’m hearing things,” Bill said.
“What things?” asked Tarr.
“Sightings. Appearances in the east side of town [this meant Springfield’s ruinous, logger-heavy taverns]. Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, so I’m asking you to knock it off.”
“You can’t tell me how to live.”
“No, but I can say who is welcome on the Oregon track team.”
“You’re serious? I�
�m the national champion.”
“I’m serious. Don’t let me hear any more.”
He didn’t. And at the Coliseum Relays in LA in May, a clean and sober Tarr cut his best to 13.3, just a tenth off the world record.
The Coliseum Relays were not the only event that May to keep Bowerman’s 1962 team occupied. For nearly a year, Bill had been plotting how to counter the coup scored by his friend Lydiard’s New Zealand national team.
In Dublin, Ireland, on July 17, 1961, Kiwis Gary Philpott, Barry Magee, Murray Halberg, and Peter Snell had chopped the world record for the four-mile relay from Hungary’s 16:25.2 to 16:23.8. As two-miler Vic Reeve would remember, “Bill started planning the assault right then, running different combinations, seeing who could do what.”
Reeve was one of Bowerman’s prized Canadians. He’d shown up in Eugene at age eighteen, at a 1959 summer meet between Oregon and British Columbia. “When I ran 4:14 in the mile and finished ahead of George Larson,” Reeve would recall, “Bowerman came over and asked what college I had in mind. I asked what kind of chemistry department he had. He said, ‘I’ll set up a tour.’ It was a fine department, and my best Burnaby South [BC] High School friend, Dave Steen, was going too, so it was easy. I had a dozen college offers, but Bill was the only track coach who cared about my academics. In fact, he gave me his old dissection kit that he’d used in his biology classes in his pre-med days.”
When Reeve got his best mile down to 4:03, Bowerman put him in the pool for the four-mile-relay attempt. Also in the pool, and in Reeve’s class, was Keith Forman, who’d run 4:26 for Portland’s Cleveland High. Forman had received a dose of Bowerman essence on a 1959 recruiting visit.
“Bill met me at the door of the Athletic Department,” Forman would say, “and showed me around. Leo Harris’s office was empty, except that on the carpet was a pretty fresh, pretty obvious deposit of dog doo. Bill’s eyes lit up and he ran out and came back with an Adidas box. He put it over the excrement, sat down in Leo’s big chair with a big grin and we started chatting about my running. I didn’t know until later that Harris had a curly-tailed dog. I have no idea what Bowerman’s joke was going to be. But when you’re eighteen and want with every bone in your body to run for him, a thing like that works on your mind.”
Undaunted, Forman signed on. He couldn’t have known Bowerman didn’t see much promise in him. Over Bill’s career there were three runners he would liken to bumblebees. This was a perverse badge of honor. “Engineers can prove,” he’d say, “that a bumblebee, with its heavy body and little bitty wings, can’t fly. But nobody tells the bumblebees. And they fly just fine. Keith Forman’s rump was too big. He was not a classic miler, but he didn’t know that and I never told him and he ended up running just fine.” (The other two bumblebees were Alberto Salazar for his low, choppy back-kick stride and me for my knocking knees.)
With training, Forman’s great, muscular legs became leaner and dramatically faster. As a sophomore, he took third in the 1961 NCAA mile at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, behind Burleson and Kansas’s Bill Dotson. By early 1962, Bill’s four best horses were juniors Reeve, Forman, and San Romani, and Burleson, a senior.
Bill began looking for an appropriate time and place to go for the four-mile-relay record. After a couple of false starts, he got the West Coast Relays, held in Fresno every May, to switch the race to high noon, the calmest hour in the interior valley. But the rest of the team was committed to a Seattle dual meet against the University of Washington, so Bowerman couldn’t be in Fresno to watch. Freshman coach Chuck Bowles accompanied the milers.
Fresno’s track was hard clay, so hard that Forman would describe it as “carved out of the natural ground.” The big events of the Relays were in the evening, so not many people were there to witness what transpired at noon. San Romani led off. Only one other team was in the race. Archie tucked in second, but after a lap he heard “sixty-three . . . sixty-four . . . ” and felt sick. He had run so well against USC that he’d been sure he could approach four minutes, but he’d let the first lap dawdle. Shooting ahead, he blasted his last three-quarters in 2:59 for a 4:03.5 mile.
Reeve was up next and San Romani had given him a sixty-yard lead. Reeve took off wildly, churning a 58, and his team yelled to slow down before he died. He did—but then had to come back hard in the last half-mile. The uneven pace took its toll. Primarily a distance man, Reeve made it down what he called “the lengthening tunnel of oxygen debt” in the stretch and handed off to Forman. He’d run 4:05.2.
Forman powered on, alone. From the end of the first lap of the first leg to the last lap of the anchor leg, each of Bill’s runners raced just himself and the clock. The only person who had someone ahead to shoot for would be Burley, when he was lapping someone. Forman drove to a controlled 4:02.5.
Their split time with a mile to go was 12:11.2. To break New Zealand’s world record, Burleson needed just a 4:12 mile. “This was a rare moment for him,” Bowerman would say later, “the goal being more than just winning.”
Stirred by the efforts of his teammates, Burleson ran with huge purpose. “Looking back,” he would say in 2004, “that was a highlight of my life.” He ran his anchor mile in 3:57.7 and crossed the line in 16:08.9.
Four young men from one college had removed 14.9 seconds from a standard set by a national team containing two Olympic champions. It was such an astonishing margin that it would start destiny’s wheel turning. After this, the two great teams coached by the two great friends would have to race.
While the milers cavorted in Fresno, Bowerman led the rest of his Ducks into Husky Stadium for their dual against Washington. Bill cheered them with news of the record. And he noted that in the Washington school paper, “they’re pissed about our not bringing our whole team.” He passed the paper around. Somebody said, “Well, if they feel we’re only sending ‘a skeleton crew,’ maybe we oughta unload on ’em!” So they did. They destroyed the Huskies, 98–46.
The Ducks were on a roll. Two weeks after that, Renfro, Tarr, and Gaechter, the three football player-hurdlers, anchored by the pure sprinter Jerome, won the 440-relay at the Modesto Relays in 40.0, tying the world record. And Forman won the mile in 3:58.3, becoming the fifth American to break four minutes. They had the longest relay record. They had the shortest. They were ready to take on the world.
Or at least the NCAA.
Some eighteen months earlier, Bill had pried from Leo Harris the funds to widen Hayward Field’s track so that the school could bid to host the national collegiate championships. As night follows day, the NCAA rules committee, which happened to be chaired by Bowerman, awarded the 1962 meet to Bowerman on Bowerman’s first try.
The nascent Oregon Track Club leaped into action. Bowerman would be the official meet director that June weekend, but Bob Newland assumed most of the organizational duties, assigning me, at eighteen, a coveted spot on the hurdle crew. My crew, wearing stiff white ducks and sweatshirts from the Oregon PE Department, worked frantically to keep the meet on schedule, but we never lost track of the score.
At that time, the nationals awarded points for the top six places, on a 10-8-6-4-2-1 basis. Jerome began by placing second in the 100, behind the 9.4 of Villanova’s Frank Budd, then came back to win the 220 in 20.8. Eighteen points.
Burleson almost disdainfully pulled ahead of Kansas’s Bill Dotson in the stretch to win his third straight NCAA mile, in 3:59.8. Forman was fourth. Fourteen more points.
Jerry Tarr won the 120-yard highs in 13.5 and came back to win his first ever 440-yard hurdles in 50.3. Twenty more points.
Mel Renfro placed second to Tarr in the highs, then trotted over and took third in the long jump behind Oklahoma’s Anthony Watson and Ohio State’s Paul Warfield. Fourteen more points.
That would have won it right there. But Dave Steen placed fifth in the shot put, Mike Lehner and Clayton Steinke were third and fourth in the steeplechase, Les Tipton was fifth in the javelin, and 5-foot-81⁄2-inch Terry Llewellyn tied for second in the
high jump at 6 feet 103⁄4 inches. Twenty-one more points.
The only Oregon contender to be cut down was Vic Reeve in the three-mile. He was wearing a new pair of Bill’s kangaroo racing spikes. “It was like running barefoot,” he would remember, “but one of the Boyd twins from Oregon State made it a point to try to spike me during the first laps. He came down on the back of my foot, with his spikes parallel to my Achilles tendon. They went through my heel and tore the shoe off. I was left bleeding on the side of the track, my own shoe ripped asunder. I never wore Bill’s spikes after that. Adidas were heavier but they protected you better.”
On the infield the final day, as the triumphs mounted, the crowd grew intoxicated in its hunger for more. But the great Oregon outpouring of emotion was so unlike meets elsewhere that after a while most of the other coaches leaned back and simply marveled. They would remember the crowd that day—the crowd that Bowerman’s nurturing of the community had created—not as partisan, but as Olympian.
Oregon won with 85 points, more than the next three teams combined. USC’s Sikorsky did win the javelin, in a bit of revenge on Tipton’s home ground, but no one noticed. Bowerman seemed to be everywhere, at his beatific best, calming, congratulating, in full command. The next day, however, he had trouble controlling his emotion when he opened the Eugene Register-Guard. There was a photo of Renfro and Tarr midway through the highs, “both looking just the way they were taught,” Bowerman said, “peering out under their eyebrows.”
CHAPTER 15
The AAU Dictatorship
THE DAY AFTER THE NEW FOUR-MILE-RELAY RECORD WAS SET IN MAY 1962, Bowerman had written Lydiard and proposed they get the Oregon team down to New Zealand in December and January to race during the Kiwis’ summer season. Lydiard was all for it. Both began planning, but each cautioned the other that their respective amateur track governing bodies—in Bowerman’s case, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States—would be obstacles. Bill was the first to be right.
