Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  The first major meet of the 1963 season was a triangular against USC and San Jose State in Eugene. On his first try, Steen hit 61 feet 9 inches, a school record and the first time he’d thrown over 60 feet outdoors. It was also the number-one throw in the world so far that year. Earlier, he’d had a cortisone shot for a sore elbow and since the elbow felt okay, he took three more throws. After the meet—“just sky high, with all the work having come together”—he was alone down in the training room when Bowerman came in. “I waited and waited for him to say something,” Steen would recall. “Finally I said, ‘I did okay today, didn’t I, eh?’”

  Bowerman lit into him. “What you did was really stupid. You had it won on the first throw. With your elbow, you should have taken that one and quit.” He walked out.

  Steen was flattened: “I remember calling my mother, and I broke down on the phone, really struggling with the purpose of my life there. If it feels this empty after all the devotion and time, what good was it?”

  The next day, Bowerman called Steen on the phone and said simply, “I want to see you.” When Steen got to his office, Bill got up and they went for a walk in the Pioneer Cemetery across the street. “I want to apologize for what I said yesterday,” Bowerman said.

  “It was okay. It hurt, but you were thinking about my elbow . . . ”

  “No,” said Bill, “I spoke too soon. I was thinking about your elbow. I should also have been thinking about what a great meet you had. You had a great throw. Accept my apology.” Steen did so. Much later he learned that his mother had phoned his brother, Don, whom Bill had coached too, and Don had called Bill.

  A week later Steen’s father died. Bowerman drove him to the airport and said, “Go home, bury your father, take as long as you want.”

  “After I came back,” Steen would remember, “he was even more . . . I hesitate to say fatherly, exactly. But when you have a confrontation and reach some kind of understanding afterwards, underneath it all, you grow much closer. That’s the way we were.”

  At the NCAA meet in Albuquerque, Steen was among the minority of Ducks who had done respectably. Keith Forman was recovering from mononucleosis, “or something like it,” he would remember. “Bill put me in the steeplechase and I ran miserably. Then he cornered me and reamed me out because obviously I couldn’t be living right. I came away feeling dumped on. I thought I’d been doing everything the way he wanted.” Archie San Romani, one of the favorites in the mile but suffering a similar energy drain, finished fifth.

  Bowerman, of course, had his own suspicions. He had a habit of sending a runner to the doctor or dentist in the hope that a malady or abscess would be discovered, which, when cured, would yield a stronger runner. That September, San Romani came back from the dentist with gaping caves where infected, impacted wisdom teeth had been. Within a week he was feeling like his old self again. Vic Reeve tried to avoid such scrutiny, but he was not always successful. “Bill took note that I ate a lot,” Reeve would remember, “and became convinced that I had tapeworms. I thought he must be joking, but he had my stool tested for the presence of parasites. None were found.”

  Few stayed tranquil under such attention. “Bill could make life a living hell,” Reeve would say. “If you did things he disapproved of, you were inviting you knew not what.” Reeve shared an apartment with San Romani and Steen that they hoped to keep off of Bill’s radar. “Once he showed up at our apartment and quizzed the girls in the next apartment, one of whom would become my wife, about just exactly what they were doing with Archie, Dave Steen, and me.”

  Reeve was another of the few who had done well in Albuquerque. After the New Zealand trip, Bowerman had told him he needed more strength. “He put me on major foundation work that about killed me,” Reeve would say. “A hundred 220s at 35-second pace in the morning and fifty slow 440s in the afternoon. Then an easy day, then heavy work again. I guess cumulatively it gave me strength, but the entire season I felt tired.”

  Oregon runners were, of course, to finish workouts exhilarated, not exhausted. But Bowerman occasionally tested certain physiologies past that point. Reeve’s was one. This being a question of intuition, Bill didn’t share his reasons, at least not with Reeve. But Reeve peaked when it counted, in the Albuquerque three-mile, finishing second to USC’s Julio Marin.

  Forman and Reeve exemplified how Bowerman would order similar men to do different work. After watching two of Arthur Lydiard’s men win gold medals in Rome, he changed Forman’s training. “We started doing ‘out and backs,’ half an hour steady out, a half hour back, then forty-five minutes each way,” Forman would say. “After six weeks of long stuff, I was the second-best miler on the team after Burley. The improvement was so dramatic it changed my life. Before that, ‘long run’ on your workout sheet would be a long jog around the golf course.”

  Even though Bill constantly reassessed what seemed to suit each individual, there was no guarantee he’d be right. Had Bowerman had another year with both runners, he would say years later, he’d have tried for a more exact coupling of work with subject.

  Why load such astounding intervals onto Vic Reeve? Perhaps because Bowerman had been keeping in touch with Jim Grelle, who had moved down to Los Angeles in 1962. Soon afterward, Mihaly Igloi moved his running colony to Santa Monica from San Jose and renamed it the LATC, which sensible observers felt stood for the Lactic Acid Track Club. On the day Grelle joined the team, Igloi had him doing thirty-five quarters.

  Bowerman had first encountered Igloi’s training methods in Pete Mundle’s 1950 term paper. Now he would talk to someone training with Igloi himself. “You never really left Bill,” Grelle would say. “If you were doing anything he found interesting, he’d give you a call out of the blue.”

  Igloi’s approach was diametric to Lydiard’s. The Hungarian scorned running slowly (saying it only made slow runners) and was contemptuous of easy days (“every day hard training must make”). His athletes ran intervals on the track, in spikes, twice a day, every day of their lives. And the workouts lasted two or three hours. Some of Igloi’s men were addicted to this work. As Grelle would put it, “They were like little puppets of the theory that he had. They hung out there and were running junkies.”

  The four best LATC runners were Jim Beatty, Grelle, Bob Schul, and Lazlo Tabori, and their races were extensions of Igloi’s dominion beyond the practice track. As Grelle would describe the process, five minutes before the start of a race Igloi would say, “Okay, Grelle, you take the second quarter, make sure you hit the half at 1:58, and Beatty take the third quarter, and it’s every man for himself on the last lap.”

  The man who improved the most under Igloi was Beatty. In 1962, he had had one of the great seasons in running history. In February, he became the first to break four minutes indoors with 3:58.9 in Los Angeles. In the summer, he won the AAU mile, broke the world record for two miles with 8:29.8, and set five American records over a sixteen-day span: the 1500 in Oslo, the mile in Helsinki, the 3000 in Avranches, France, and the three-mile and 5000 in Turku, Finland. He won that year’s Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete.

  Nearly forty years later Beatty would still wax poetic about the transfer of mind to master. “Imagine never having to go to a workout and ask yourself, ‘What am I going to do today?’” he would tell an interviewer. “Your mind doesn’t have to question, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ That element is eliminated. It’s already charted for you.”

  Jim Grelle was less obedient. In the spring of 1963, he and Beatty were slated to run the 1500 at the Pan American Games in Brazil. Igloi was there, too, and before the start he gave Grelle and Beatty instructions as usual: They were to run 2:00 for the half, at which point Grelle was to take the lead and carry Beatty on toward a record.

  To Igloi’s surprise, Grelle objected. The only real contenders in the race were the two LATC runners and, as Grelle would put it, “We were closer than snot and Beatty was always coming out on top, by just that much.” So, as Grelle would rec
all, he and Igloi “had a little argument.” Grelle told Igloi he wanted to try to win the race, that he didn’t care how fast it was, and that letting Beatty draft on him was not to his advantage. “He’s a good guy, he’s my friend”—here Grelle turned to Beatty—“but I’m not leading this race. You got it?”

  Beatty said he got it. He led the whole race with Grelle breathing down his neck. The pace was moderate, but, as Grelle would say, “it takes a little bit of sting off anybody to press the whole way.” Grelle got past Beatty in the last 120 and won by half a second.

  Grelle and Beatty remained friends, but Igloi wouldn’t talk to Grelle for a week. Grelle liked records and he liked to run fast, he would say, “but if it’s a choice of winning or losing, I’ll taking winning over going fast. And I know exactly where I got that—I got it from Bill Bowerman.”

  The Oregon runners soon learned from Grelle or the grapevine about Igloi’s ways. We would sit in the sauna and debate the effects that this cult and its guru were having on its members. One view held that when the puppets got away from their master they’d disintegrate without him to think for them. Runners such as we were, however, trained to plan and react as independent entities, would be better prepared for the high-pressure meets. Bowerman bore this for a while and finally snorted, “Too much wishful thinking and not enough good recon. No one running as well as Beatty is a cultist. Surviving Igloi’s work just shows the guy’s toughness and adaptive energy. He’s not going to shrivel up when he gets to the Olympics.”

  No matter what was said in the sauna, Dyrol Burleson refused to get worked up about any of it. He’d always been able to outsprint both Grelle and Beatty. After graduating in 1962, he’d stayed in Eugene to train with Bowerman for Tokyo—which both of them felt meant training for Peter Snell, now the world record holder. However, the closeness of the races Burleson and Snell had had lately (namely, the “diller” of an 880 in New Zealand) gave Burley faith in his current training and in his usual wait-and-kick tactics.

  Then, in May 1963 came a race that argued otherwise. Burley was lucky not to be in it. It was the Modesto Relays mile. With a lap to go, Marine Lieutenant Cary Weisiger was leading the pack in 3:00, just ahead of Grelle and Beatty. Snell loped along in fourth, in 3:02. A huge US TV audience was getting its first real look at the beefy, five-foot-ten and 170-pound Snell. He had a weird, low arm action—a Kiwi thing, taught by Lydiard—that called to mind a man carrying heavy buckets. At 60-pace he seemed to overstride. Then he reached the last turn. Grelle was about to pass Weisiger when he glanced to the right. “Snell looked like he’d been lassoed by someone on a horse and jerked past us,” Grelle would remember. Snell sprinted his last 220 in a ridiculous 24.5 and won, having eased up, in 3:54.9, a half-second short of his world record. Eighteen yards back was Weisiger, who finished in 3:57.3. Beatty and Grelle did 3:58.0.

  All who witnessed this display were shaken. Snell was not only better than ever, Snell was better than anyone had ever been. With Tokyo less than eighteen months away, Burley had to take measures.

  His choices were few. One was to reconsider the strategy that had allowed him to go undefeated at Oregon. But he chose not to do that. With Bowerman’s guidance, he had devoted his training and persona to wait-and-kick tactics for one simple reason: It takes more energy to run at the front of a pack, forcing aside still air or a headwind, than to draft closely behind the leader. In a mile among equals, Landy against Bannister being the classic example, the pacesetter almost never wins. He exhausts himself protecting his stalkers while they husband their resources for a final attack. That’s why in record attempts a rabbit is hired to take the pace for two or three laps and why the ultimate race without a rabbit—the Olympic 1500-meter final—often begins at an infuriatingly slow tempo. No one wants to lead.

  Burley, confident of his own finishing speed, had thought that was going to be just fine—until Snell ran that 24.5 last 220 at Modesto. In response, Burleson didn’t seriously contemplate changing his racing tactics. He thought of making his own kick more lethal.

  Burley thought back to the New Zealand tour and Lydiard’s telling him that Snell’s speed at the end of a race was the product of stamina-building “marathon conditioning”—100 miles per week, including a rugged twenty-two-mile Sunday run in the Waitakere Range above Auckland. Burleson asked Bowerman if such a weekly long run could be incorporated into his preparations for Tokyo. Bowerman didn’t see why not, as long as he built up to it gradually.

  Burleson already had a distance day in his schedule, a fifteen miler on the hilly, piney, gravel road around Spencer’s Butte, south of town. Indeed, he took vicious pleasure in using “the Butte” to introduce freshmen to the sensations of running long when unready. He had done it to Bruce Mortenson and me. Bowerman had warned us, saying, “Listen, Burleson is mean.” But we were so honored we couldn’t resist. An hour and three-quarters later he returned us to the campus. “You’re carrion,” said Bowerman. We were worthless for a week, but Bill said no more. We might have been hens deciding pecking order.

  The following year, rooming together, Bruce and I embarked on what seemed even to us a quixotic quest—to find out how far we really could run. Adding a mile here and there to our Sunday jaunts, we worked up to twenty, then twenty-five, and finally thirty miles. So in October 1963 it was a different pair of runners whom Burleson demanded keep him company on his first really long run.

  Bowerman bowed us all, along with two-miler Dan Tonn and 880-man Don Scott, into his moldy station wagon and drove up the Willamette highway until we reached a point twenty-six miles from Hayward Field. Once we were running, Bill drove ahead, to water us every five miles, to pick up stragglers, to watch and learn. Scott, a sophomore, wouldn’t be allowed more than ten miles.

  At ten miles, Bowerman fed us juice and took in Scott. “Everybody okay?” he asked. Everybody was, though Burley just nodded. I thought real distance was having a calming effect on him, the way it can. At twenty miles we reached Interstate 5, the shoulder of which we’d use for the last six. “Tough to creep along in the car and watch you on the freeway,” said Bowerman. “Everybody make it home?” We all nodded. He looked from face to face, stride to stride, and left us.

  A mile later, clouds covered the sun and the air cooled. Mortenson and I did a little surge together, testing our legs, finding relief in a different gear, and suddenly we were unintentionally thirty yards in front of Tonn and Burleson. We were alerted to this by a keening bark: “We do not race in workouts!”

  Bruce and I turned. Burley was crimson, his gait stiff. I looked over at Bruce. He didn’t want Burley as an enemy. He slowed to rejoin him through what had to be five miserable miles.

  I, for some reason, just kept sailing away. That this was sweet revenge entered my mind, but I did not run on cackling for long. The rage in Burley’s “Get back here now!” haunted me. Then there was only silence. Bruce looked at Burleson’s face and wondered what other college I could transfer to.

  The last mile was up East Fifteenth. Bowerman stood with water by his car. He noted my time and looked up the road. The others were blocks back. I sucked down liquid, trying to form some words. A sudden image—of having to dance around behind Bill to escape Burley—struck me as comic.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “God, I hope it’s funny.” I gasped. “We have a situation . . .”

  “Bill!” came Burley’s cry. “Please tell that . . . that . . . sophomore we do not race in workouts!”

  Bowerman emitted not a flicker. After a pause he handed Burley a Coke, turned, and said, “Mr. Moore, Mr. Burleson is correct. We do not race in workouts. We never race in workouts. Never have. Never will. Do we not agree we never race in workouts?”

  “I sure agree,” I said. Bruce and Dan agreed too.

  Bowerman looked at the stricken Burley, beginning to cramp. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad we got that settled.”

  When Bowerman told that story twenty years later, he allowed himself to show
some of the pleasure he had concealed at the time. “That was the senior finally getting a lesson from the underclassmen,” he said. “Sometimes the best teacher is Darwin.”

  Burleson was undeterred by hitting what marathoners call the wall. He ran frequent twenty-two-milers throughout that pre-Olympic winter. His stamina grew, but it would be spring before he could test his kick.

  One of the toughest of life’s transitions is that between Olympian and former Olympian. Bill Dellinger, now twenty-nine, refused to accept it. After not making the 5000 final in Rome, he had come home to coach and teach at Springfield’s Thurston High School. Bowerman felt Dellinger didn’t need races; he needed to start from square one and build his fitness all over again.

  Most of this training Dellinger could do himself, alone or with his high school runners. But every two weeks or so, Bowerman had him run a time trial, three miles at first, then four, five, and six. The pace was whatever he could handle at three-quarters effort. Having just seen that I’d grown stronger, Bowerman asked me to assist. I can still taste the volcanic grit from the old practice track as Dellinger and I alternated the lead every 880, slopping through the twenty-four laps of a Saturday morning six-miler in the rain.

  We began these with 80-second laps (5:20-mile pace). Every two miles Bowerman would ask us to take them down, first to 77s, then 75s (5:00-mile pace). Each time we ran by him, he’d call our target and then our actual: “Okay, you should be 10:40 here and you’re 10:38!”

  Dellinger, three inches shorter, utterly balanced, splashed through puddles unslowed. Never did he give the faintest instinctive surge when I passed. He was there to do work that would make him faster and that was it. Bowerman seldom spoke, but we could feel his eyes upon us. “Keep it tidy” meant I should stop overstriding.

  We would not kick it in at the end, but rather just be glad we had held the pace. As we drew on our faded old sweats and hoods, we had to manage conflicting reactions. Dellinger would mask how hard running these pedestrian 75s felt to him, when his goal for the 5000 was 66s. I’d try to mask the fact that I’d just set a lifetime best for six miles. But he knew.