by Kenny Moore
Amateur rules and rulers had permeated Bowerman’s sport since 1888. Each year, college coaches trained their athletes to a summer peak—and then were required to hand them over to AAU officials for international competition. This meant not just the Olympics or Soviet–American dual meets, but any competition for which an athlete stuck a toe out of the country.
The AAU had this authority because it owned the franchise. Both the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee recognized the AAU—and only the AAU—as the national governing body of track and field in the United States.
Under such leaders as Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage (who rose to be IOC president in 1952), the AAU was as controlling as a battering spouse. It kept the athletes paupers, because the amateur code (“that vestige of aristocrats,” Bowerman called it) decreed that only athletes who didn’t benefit financially from their competitive efforts were pure enough to take part in the Olympics. How pure? “A cheap hotel, a red-eye flight, and three bucks a day” was how Steve Prefontaine would put it on one of his more gracious days. Accept anything more from a meet director, endorse a product, even work as a coach and the AAU would destroy your amateur standing and end your career.
Anxiety about what the AAU might do was not paranoia. In 1954, the AAU banned Kansas miler Wes Santee for life for taking extra expense money from one of the AAU’s own officials. In 1962, shortly after hurdler Jerry Tarr won the highs in a meet record 13.4, beating defending champion Hayes Jones, he signed with the Denver Broncos “for ten grand and a Buick,” as Burleson would recall. Tarr was cut by Christmas and when no other teams called, not only was his football career over, but he was forever barred from competing in track and field. In 1963, an anxious Otis Davis wrote Bowerman from where he was teaching in Fresno, saying, “My proposed book is well under way, but if I want to keep my amateur standing, would I have to omit instructional workouts for kids?” In other words, would that be considered enriching himself by coaching? Bowerman wrote back that Davis could leave the workouts in “if you emphasize this is for recreation, not competition.” In 1971, when mile world record holder Jim Ryun was a junior at Kansas majoring in photojournalism, he was asked by Sports Illustrated to shoot a photo essay of other Olympians training for the upcoming Games. The AAU’s track and field administrator, Ollan Cassell, informed Ryun that he’d lose his eligibility if he took the pictures because it would be turning his “athletic fame to personal gain.” Ryun withdrew from the assignment.
The AAU surveillance system required that any invitation to compete in an international event had to come first to the AAU office in New York. If the invitation was approved, the AAU sent a “travel permit” on to the athlete. In 1954, Bowerman got a letter from the director of the New Year’s Eve Midnight Road Run in São Paolo, Brazil, inviting Bill Dellinger to take part in the race. Bowerman told the race director he’d have to go through the AAU, but when it got to be late in the fall term and he hadn’t heard anything further, he called Brazil. The race director said he’d sent the invitation three months earlier. Bowerman called Dan Ferris, the honorary secretary and de facto chief of the AAU, a pink, white-haired little boulder of a man who sat in the office at AAU House in New York. “Ferris was always very pleasant,” Bowerman would recall, “but he said, ‘I never received their letter.’”
Bowerman asked around and learned that every coach with a decent athlete had had a similar experience. It wasn’t just incompetence, the coaches felt—it was greed. “The AAU always wanted to know how much money a race director would cough up to send ‘our’ runners,” Bowerman would growl. “If the AAU didn’t get a cut, the invitation just never made it through.” Dellinger stayed home. But Bowerman remembered.
The hypocritical rules of “amateurism” were only part of the problem. The AAU governed not only track and field, but as many as sixteen sports. College athletes who’d made national teams returned from European meets with horror stories about incompetent support staff or officials for whom the trip seemed to be sheer boondoggle. In 1969 the US team competed in three major dual meets in Europe. Food and lodging were fine in Stuttgart and London, but between those two stops came Augsburg, site of the United States vs. West Germany contest. The US team and coaches stayed in the Zur Post hotel, six floors with no elevator, four to six tiny beds to each dank, claustrophobic chamber. Sewage stained the walls and carpets of many rooms. As for meals, “We had brown food and green food,” hammer thrower George Frenn would recall. “The brown was salad and the green was meat.” The $3 per diem wouldn’t buy replacement groceries in the markets.
At a team meeting, the coaches confirmed that the official chief of mission was the AAU’s secretary, Dan Ferris. But he wasn’t staying at the Zur Post. Sprinter Charlie Greene, Oregon shot-putter Neal Steinhauer, and Steve Prefontaine, then just out of high school, tracked Ferris down and found him breakfasting on eggs and fresh orange juice at his immaculate hotel with views of the cathedral. Ferris said that he doubted the team’s quarters were truly unsanitary and that nothing could be done in any case, so the athletes should endure without complaint. The team sent a telegram to the Nixon White House, saying conditions were impairing American competitiveness and demanding that Ferris and the AAU be rebuked and reformed. The telegram went unanswered.
Bowerman would liken the AAU to a dictatorship. Its governing board of twenty-five had a representative from each sport’s association and one or at most two from the NCAA. “I was on both the AAU and United States Olympic Committee boards,” Bowerman would say, “but the AAU always had the majority. That was written right into both AAU and USOC constitutions.”
Bowerman, suspicious of any bureaucracy, was hardly a natural politician. Yet he was magnetic at meetings of his peers, the college coaches. He was respected for producing good athletes and he respected other coaches who did the same, especially those who taught as well as they recruited. In the 1950s, after he had coached Dellinger and Bailey, he was elected president of the National Track Coaches Association (which included high school and junior college coaches as well). He and his colleagues felt they had less and less ability to look out for the welfare of their best athletes.
Bowerman and the coaches nursed a plan whereby American track might shake off the yoke of AAU domination. Finally, in 1961, after being denied yet another request for AAU votes proportionate to their programs, they voted to form the US Track and Field Federation (USTFF) to try to supplant the AAU. Since colleges produced almost all the finest athletes and had all the facilities, the coaches felt sure they could prove to the IAAF that they should be given the chance to govern what they created.
First, they quietly lined up top Olympians for support. That summer, some of Bill’s correspondence took on a subversive, burn-this-message tone. In August 1961, he wrote to Ed Temple of Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University, coach of Wilma Rudolph. “This is confidential,” he began. “A group of coaches is considering forming a United States Track and Field Federation. Please do not discuss this with the newspapers or anyone else. What we wish to know is will you as one of the coaches in the NCAA be interested in joining us and would Wilma Rudolph be interested in joining? The athletes who have already indicated interest are Rafer Johnson, Bill Dellinger, Max Truex, Hal Connolly, and Parry O’Brien. We need Wilma and we need you.” Both Temple and Rudolph were supportive.
Bowerman kept Arthur Lydiard in the loop. “You may or may not know we are having a down and out fight with our national AAU here in the US,” he wrote in September. “I am one of a committee of five coaches that has led and instigated this. Arthur, the objective of the college coaches is to take international competition and running of track and field completely away from the AAU.” The AAU obviously wasn’t going to sit still for this, so the coaches were casting about for a way to demonstrate AAU malfeasance to higher authorities. He already had letters, Bowerman told Lydiard, indicating “that Dan Ferris . . . was down-right dishonest.�
� Ferris apparently had assured an American ambassador in one country that a certain athlete would be invited there, but had not sent it on to the athlete himself “and tried to send one of his own pick” instead, as Bowerman wrote. “He [Ferris] denied that he knew anything about it, but I have a copy of the Ambassador’s letter. Also his reply to the Ambassador. I need copies of your information because if necessary, we’re going to take this to our United States Senator for investigation purposes.”
The senator in question was Wayne Morse, a Bowerman friend who’d been dean of the Oregon Law School when Bill was in college. In another possible tack, Bill said in a memo for the record that the new federation hoped to use the US State Department to increase their clout with the international bodies.
In the fall of 1961, the coaches’ group, with the support of the top fifty track athletes and the NCAA as a whole, announced the federation’s formation. At first, the AAU treated it as the bleating of a disgruntled few. “This uproar,” Dan Ferris fumed, “has been stirred up by about five percent of the track coaches.” In fact, when polled, over ninety percent supported the federation’s challenge. “This is a power play by the NCAA,” Pincus Sober, chairman of the AAU’s track and field committee, thundered, “to take over amateur athletics in this country.”
“The NCAA,” answered its executive secretary, Walter Byers, “has no desire to control all track and field activity in the United States. We do feel that we should have proportionate representation on any governing body. We do not have that under AAU rule.” Until they did, the body would stick with its coaches.
The Byers quote appeared in a January 22, 1962, Sports Illustrated story by Tex Maule entitled “The Coaches Take Over.” Maule made it seem almost a fait accompli. “Track meets are run on college facilities by college coaches,” Bowerman was quoted as saying. “They [the AAU] talk about their junior development program. They don’t have any. Do you know of any track in this country owned and operated by the AAU?”
Maule outlined the USTFF’s plans to hold its own competing national championships at the LA Coliseum the same weekend as the AAU nationals in Walnut. Hal and Olga Connolly, Jim Beatty, and Dyrol Burleson all said they would compete at the Coliseum. “By the time this thing is set up,” Olympic shot-put champion Parry O’Brien was quoted as saying, “the AAU will realize it can’t beat the federation. It would be a stupid and senseless thing for the AAU not to join the track and field federation.”
“If the AAU survives at all,” Maule concluded. “It will be as a considerably weakened member of several larger organizations.”
Maule’s prediction did not come to pass. The coaches’ “takeover” had depended on showing the fairness of their cause, and they had done that well. But the AAU didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, didn’t need to worry about being caught in double-dealing, didn’t even need the goodwill of a single athlete. All the AAU had to do was pull rank. It simply passed along word from Avery Brundage that the IOC and IAAF would never bend, would never admit the new group, and there was no force on earth that could compel them to.
The athletes knew how true that was. The plain fact remained that any athlete who wanted to make the US team for international competition had to qualify through AAU meets. Burley, Beatty, and all who had come out for the federation had to run those meets or be reduced to running time trials for the rest of their careers. The coaches didn’t have anything like the leverage for which Bill had searched. Athletes and coaches couldn’t sue. They couldn’t do a thing, because Brundage and the IOC answered to no one.
It probably wasn’t sheer coincidence that the AAU then tried to keep one of the ringleaders of this failed revolt from taking his four-mile-relay team to race in New Zealand. First the AAU informed Dyrol Burleson that he would not be going to New Zealand unless he raced in the 1962 AAU national championships, a week after the NCAA meet. Burley’d had no plans to run the AAU meet at all, because a class he had to attend fell on the day of the preliminary heats for the mile. Bowerman tried to finesse the issue by putting Burley in the AAU three-mile instead, but, as Bill would put it, “that just made for more misery.” As he would describe it in a letter to Lydiard, “Burley went through the motions, but he was in no mood at all to run. He dropped out at the end of two miles.”
Meanwhile, Lydiard drafted a formal request for the specific Oregon runners who had broken the Kiwis’ record and for their coach. At Bowerman’s prompting, he included Leo Harris as official team manager. (Harris had been hearing from Bowerman for so long about the glories of New Zealand that he wanted to see it for himself.) Lydiard sent the invitation to the AAU office in New York, sent a copy to Bowerman, and awaited further orders.
Bowerman, once burned, crafted a plan to bring in real muscle. When it got to be November and he still hadn’t received anything from the AAU, he called Lydiard. “I don’t think we’re going to hear,” Bill said, “so why don’t you send a letter and a copy to our governor, Mark Hatfield, and another to our State Department?”
Lydiard did just that. Governor Hatfield was more than a fan. He was a javelin official at Oregon meets, though he never liked it made public. Prepped by Bowerman about Dan Ferris’s tactics, Hatfield and a State Department official called the AAU. As Bill would tell the story, the callers asked Ferris, “Are we or are we not sending these fine young men down to race the New Zealanders who have requested them?”
Ferris said, “Well, uh, we have a better team of other runners.”
Hatfield replied, “Oh, really? Has somebody broken Oregon’s world record? Somebody better than Archie San Romani Jr.? Better than Keith Forman’s 3:58? Better than Dyrol Burleson’s 3:57?”
“The AAU was pissed,” Bowerman would recall with satisfaction. “But there was nothing they could do. We were cleared to go. They even let Leo Harris be our mission chief.”
CHAPTER 16
Jogging
IN MID-DECEMBER 1962, WHILE HIS MILERS CRAMMED FOR FINAL EXAMS BEFORE the Christmas break, Bowerman formed an advance party of one. Leaving Leo Harris to accompany the team in a few days, Bill took off across the Pacific. Twenty-five hours later, his Pan Am 707 descended over the wind-scoured Hauraki Gulf. “Beautiful place, New Zealand,” he wrote in the first of a series of articles for the Oregon Journal. “Green hills, pastures intermingled with trees, the coastline literally thousands of coves and inlets.”
Soon he was being shaken by the strength of Arthur Lydiard’s grip. The compact little coach ran every day and usually got in twenty pull-ups as well, yet derided weight lifting for runners. This was one of the few differences between Lydiard and Bowerman. In defense of weight lifting, Bill would point out that folks still pitched hay and cut wood in New Zealand: “If we did that,” he said, “we wouldn’t have to lift weights.”
Bill was stiff after the long flight. As a remedy, Lydiard suggested he call for him the next morning, a Sunday, and take him on an easy run. Lydiard drove them to a rolling, pastoral expanse called Cornwall Park, swarming with a couple of hundred runners. “I thought a cross-country race was going on,” Bowerman would recall, “but they were men, women, children, all ages, all sizes.” Lydiard told him he’d begun this Auckland Joggers Club about a year earlier. “We found that the best thing for my champions was also the best thing for everyone else,” Lydiard said, “a good, long Sunday romp. Different packs go different distances. You’ll manage in the slow pack.”
Bowerman was then fifty years old and, as he described it, “I was used to going out and walking fifty-five yards, trotting fifty-five yards, going about a quarter-mile and figuring I’d done quite a bit.” Lydiard indicated something in the distance and told Bill the run was headed to One Tree Hill, which Bowerman estimated to be about a mile and a half away. As he would later tell the story, “We took off and it wasn’t too bad for about a half-mile, and then we started going up this hill. God, the only thing that kept me alive was the hope that I would die.” For the rest of his life, Bowerman would utter his truism �
��The hills will find you out” with genuine feeling.
Lydiard had vanished ahead. Bowerman dropped to the back of the last group. “Everyone had left me,” he would say, “except one old fellow moved back and said, ‘I see you’re having trouble.’ I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Then he said, ‘I know a shortcut.’ So we took off down the hill and got back about the same time as the people who covered the whole distance.”
Bowerman’s savior was Andrew Steedman, who was then seventy-three. Steedman kept stopping and waiting for Bill, encouraging him to keep going. “It gave Bill the bloody shock of his life,” Lydiard would remember. “He was nearly in tears when I got back from my own run.” A second jolt was discovering Steedman’s medical history. “I’m a coach of athletes,” Lydiard would remember Bowerman saying. “And that old guy has had three coronaries and he had to wait for me. From now on I’m into training.”
Bowerman didn’t need a two-by-four twice. He would run almost every day during his six weeks in the country. He pumped Lydiard for information on how running en masse, this heresy that middle-aged people are trainable, had spread. Lydiard told him all his original joggers (the word was simply the one he employed to command runners to trot as slowly as possible) were, like Steedman, post-cardiac patients.
“They came to me a few years ago,” Lydiard said, “kind of pleading to exercise. Their general practitioners were scared to death of letting them do anything. I asked some sports medicine experts. Anyone with a whit of coronary training knew those hearts were muscles. Those hearts had to be exercised.”
So Lydiard had bravely, blithely told his trusting subjects, their first time out, to try to run a mile or so, while closely attending to how it made them feel. No one died. What didn’t kill cured, or at least transformed. Before Rome, Lydiard had been talking up the benefits of running for the average New Zealander. “After his guys came home with gold medals,” Bill would say, “the media engulfed him, and he used that. He said, Look, the principles of training work the same for everybody.”
