by Kenny Moore
I’d ask about Dellinger’s younger brother, Fred, who’d been a senior at Springfield when I was a junior at North. Fred was more talented than Bill, more flowing, and he broke all of Bill’s Springfield records. But he never went to college. “Fred should have been born in Europe,” Bill said, “where you can run for a club and not have to go to school to get coaching and competition.” Over the years, we’d hear Fred was out doing some mileage or easy intervals, beginning again. But the mill jobs always took too much out of him.
One Sunday in February 1964, starting with 77s and finishing with 73s, we ran six miles in thirty minutes flat. We had toughened each other measurably. Sounding like my metallurgist father, I told him I felt annealed, tempered. “Calloused is the word,” Dellinger insisted, “physically and mentally calloused.”
“Hey, whatever you call it, thanks.”
“No, thank you.”
In April, he ran a solo three-mile in 13:27 (67 pace) and qualified for the Olympic Trials.
As the 1964 outdoor track season began, a familiar face reappeared at Hayward Field. Because of his long rehabilitation after his awful quadriceps pull in Australia, Harry Jerome had not competed in 1963, the year he could have graduated. With another year of varsity eligibility left (and having refrained from fulfilling the last requirements for his degree), he could run for Oregon in 1964. “Harry went into his first meet and I ran him a quarter-mile,” Bill would recall. “He did about fifty seconds. You know, I thought, he’s not good, but he’s not bad. Could be a lot worse.” Determined to bring Jerome back slowly, to let him build into his speed, Bowerman let him do only standing starts: “No explosive moves.” Gradually he began to smooth out and run better and better. On the day he first went under 22.0 for the 220 in practice, he yipped as he coasted to a stop. “Holding together never felt so good,” he said. “I believe I am back!”
He was needed. Oregon State, forty miles north in Corvallis, under Burley’s old high school coach Sam Bell, was building deeper, better teams every year. Seldom was an Oregon vs. Oregon State meet not tight. Indeed, the Duck–Beaver rivalry was so intense we met twice a year. At the first meet that year, in Eugene, I ran my epiphany two-mile to beat Dale Story. If I hadn’t won, we would have lost the meet right there. But then we lost the mile relay and with it the meet. We were short of points because, after watching Harry win the 100, Bill had pulled him from the 220.
When some poor soul at the Oregon Club had the temerity to question Bowerman’s decision, he expanded on his reasoning. “According to one of the Biblical philosophers,” Bill said, “when in a race, run all, but one takes the prize. So you do your damnedest to be that one. On the other hand, you keep a little perspective. There is short term and long term. There is choosing among goals of different value. If the Oregon State meet hangs on the 220 and Harry Jerome has had a little twinge while running the 100, you say, well, three years from now who’s going to remember Oregon didn’t win all its dual meets that year? And you sleep a little better knowing Harry didn’t rip out his tendon again.” In the rematch in Corvallis, Jerome won both sprints.
That spring, Bowerman gave Burleson his usual sharpening interval work and sent him out to test his finish in the big invitational races. On June 5, 1964, Burley (waiting and kicking) narrowly won the Compton mile from a great mass of men in 3:57.4. Archie San Romani broke four minutes for the first time with 3:57.6, in third, just ahead of Oregon State’s Morgan Groth at 3:57.9. Afterward Burleson showed a sense of history, yelling to reporters, “Hey, the story of this race is back in eighth place.” That was the gangly, head-rolling, seventeen-year-old high school junior from Wichita, Kansas, Jim Ryun. His 3:59.0 made him the first prep runner ever under four minutes. Ryun came from the same high school that San Romani did, Wichita East, and was coached by the same Bob Timmons.
Also on that historic night, eighteen-year-old Gerry Lindgren of Rogers High School in Spokane drove the pace hard in the 5000 meters, only to be destroyed in the last lap by Bob Schul’s kick. Schul’s new American record of 13:38.0 put him forty yards ahead of Lindgren’s high school record of 13:44.0. From then on, Schul was a powerful favorite to win the Olympic 5000. From then on, Lindgren’s gifts were known to be otherworldly.
A few weeks later, the NCAA Championships returned to Hayward Field. In that Olympic year, finishing in the top six in the NCAA or AAU meets qualified you for the preliminary Olympic Trials in New York City on July 4. The New York trials were preliminary because the Tokyo Games weren’t scheduled until October, the final trials would be held in LA in September.
In the 10,000 meters, I was hoping to win but was sure I’d score in the top six. San Jose State’s Danny Murphy strode to a well-paced win. I ran with ever-greater weakness, feeling lost and embarrassed in front of my pleading crowd, and wobbled in ninth. I sat in shock, watching the 100-meter final. Harry Jerome, making his comeback complete, won it.
Jerome and I bumped into each other later, walking up to shower off the mud at Mac Court. He noted my pitiable posture. “Well,” he said, “we’re in the same boat now.”
“Harry, how the hell do you figure that?”
“We have to completely forget whatever happened to us today and give it our all tomorrow.”
Later, as I stepped out of the shower at Mac Court, Bowerman’s hand closed around the base of my skull and guided me onto our big scale by the training room. My best running weight was 144. The pointer bobbed at 136. “What do I have to do?” he growled, “shovel in every bite?” He marched me to the cafeteria and made me eat a big steak, two baked potatoes, and half a pie. The next morning he made me choke down two plates of French toast and a quart of orange juice. Finally properly fueled, I finished fourth in the 5000, qualifying for the Olympic Trials.
Afterward I sat at peace and watched a historic outpouring in the javelin. Les Tipton was leading with 249 feet 101⁄2 inches. Teammate Ron Gomez was in second with 232 feet 9 inches. A third Duck, slender senior Gary Reddaway, was in last place. Reddaway had thrown 233 feet 11 inches early in the season, but then, in a cold rain at the Washington dual meet, his elbow had popped.
“I couldn’t throw feathers after that,” he would remember many years later. “Just the motion put a red-hot paring knife in the ulnar nerve.”
Weeks went by and he grew no better. Bowerman knew this was driving Reddaway (the most devout of trainers) wild. He offered a parable. “The pole-vaulter Don Bragg was hurt going into the 1960 Trials,” Bill told him. “He had no idea whether he could vault. The day of the final he sat there and waited. He waited while guys missed and went out. Eventually, the bar got to a height that would make the team. He found out whether he could vault by clearing that bar. He went on, of course, to win in Rome.” Reddaway got chills at this and vowed to wait, to not wreck his arm with constant checking.
By the nationals, he’d gone six weeks without training and felt no better. Bowerman had him into his office. “If you don’t want to throw,” he said, “don’t throw.” Reddaway said he was throwing. He had waited as asked. It would kill him to never know how far the last throw of his college career would have been.
In the prelims he reached 219 feet 10 inches, which barely put him in the final. “But that massacred my elbow,” Reddaway would say. “The next morning Bill sent me to Dr. Slocum, who irrigated my puffy joint with cortisone for ten minutes. I came back to the field with iodine all over my elbow.” In the final, when Tipton and Gomez went into the early lead, it seemed to be a meet-turning development and brought appropriate thunder from the crowd.
Reddaway’s first try was tentative, exploratory. His elbow, he sensed, wouldn’t last long. It had to be now. “You read stories,” he said later, “of huge adrenaline rushes, of people tearing the doors off cars to save people. I knew this was the last throw of my college life. I was crying as I stood back in the tunnel at the start of the runway. I just shook the spear, ran, and threw. Someone yelled, ‘Don’t scratch!’ I stopped leaning over the line, bare
ly controlling my balance.”
Reddaway had put every foot-pound of his kinetic energy into the spear, and released it at the proper angle. It flew 246 feet 11⁄2 inches. He’d bettered his lifetime best by thirteen feet. He was in second place. When no one improved on that, Oregon had swept the javelin for 24 points. No team had ever taken first, second, and third in any event in the NCAA outdoor nationals. “If you want something bad,” Reddaway would say, “and if it’s reasonable, if it’s genuinely, physically possible, then there’s at least a chance you can get it.”
Then Jerome was second to Bob Hayes in the 200 and San Romani took second in the 1500 behind Morgan Groth. In the steeplechase, five-foot-three, 117-pound Mike Lehner was second to Villanova’s Vic Zwolak in a huge school record of 8:46.0. Clayton Steinke and I got fifth and sixth. We topped out at 64 points. Oregon was again national champion.
To be a track Olympian you must finish in the top three in the final trials. When there are several great athletes in one event, judgment day is guaranteed agony. Over the summer, Dyrol Burleson, Jim Ryun, Jim Grelle, and Loyola University of Chicago’s Tom O’Hara would race each other three times. In LA in September, one of them would not make the team.
“In the AAU meet in Rutgers,” Grelle would recall, “it was a fast pace, and Tommy O’Hara set a new American record in 3:38.1. Burleson was second in 3:38.8. It was the first time Burleson ever lost to O’Hara. I was third in 3:38.9, and Ryun was fourth in 3:39.0. All four of us broke Beatty’s old record of 3:39.4.” They were now the four fastest metric milers in American history.
A week later came the first Olympic Trials in New York. The top eight finishers would move on to the real trials. With a temperature of ninety-four degrees and ninety-four percent humidity, the pace was much slower. “Burley won,” Grelle would say, “O’Hara second, Grelle third, Ryun fourth again.”
Two months later, in the final trials at the LA Coliseum, it was the same four, plus Archie San Romani. (Jim Beatty, who was injured at the time of the New York Trials, was advanced on the strength of his great record to the LA finals in both the 1500 and 5000. But Grelle knew from training with him that Beatty couldn’t do speed work and so would surely choose to run the 5000.)
San Romani was as blatantly talented as a runner could be. He had the most amazingly sudden acceleration. With his strong hips and hamstrings and low back-kick, he could scoot from 60 pace to 50 pace in two steps. His best 220 was just over 22 seconds, faster than Snell’s. Bowerman once told John Jaqua that if he could have convinced Archie that a mile was a boxing match and not a race, he’d have never lost. “San Romani was a real nice guy, and a hell of a runner,” Bowerman would say, “but he was not mean. Not like Burley was mean.”
An hour before the start, San Romani was still trying to settle on his race plan. “I felt like an orphan,” he would say years later, “because there in the warm-up area was my high school coach, Bob Timmons, who was great with strategy, but now his first allegiance had to be to Jim Ryun. Bowerman and I talked, but it wasn’t specific, not like picking the perfect spot to kick. Just stay out of trouble, he said. I don’t know if it was just me, but he seemed more tuned in to Burley and Grelle. Then I looked from guy to guy to guy and realized, There is no one here who can outsprint me.” He had his plan.
The race, befitting its Olympian gravity, was slow. “I felt smooth and easy,” San Romani would say. “I wasn’t even breathing hard at the three-quarters.” In the middle of the backstretch, he struck. He instantly had five yards. As Grelle would tell it, “With 250 to go, Archie blasts off and tries to steal it. He’s flying into the last turn and I decide I better get back up there with him because it’s going to be a dogfight at the end.”
Archie’s fantastic acceleration had been achieved at equal cost. “I don’t know what gave me the idea I could run a forty-four-second last lap,” he said later. “I moved fifty yards too soon.” On the turn, Grelle began to close it up. He could see Archie was in trouble. “Right behind me are Burleson and O’Hara,” Grelle would say. “O’Hara hadn’t raced for a month and Burley had been sick. I think to myself, I can win this. I go right on by Archie.”
Grelle was on the rail, leading by a few inches. “We come into the last 110 and I can see Burleson on my shoulder and O’Hara on his shoulder. I poured it on, pedal to the metal, and they inched, just inched by me and had a yard lead.”
Forty yards from the finish, with the sun casting their shadows ten feet up the track, Burley and O’Hara still had a yard on Grelle. “I’m still burning everything I’ve got,” Grelle would recall, “and I see another shadow coming up on the outside. We hit the line and I see Ryun out there about four lanes wide. I lean and fall across the finish and he beat me by an inch—and I was not going back to the Olympic Games.”
Burleson was first, O’Hara second, Ryun third, Grelle fourth, San Romani fifth. “If Archie had waited another fifty yards to sprint,” Grelle would say, still shaking his head many years later, “we both might have made it. But he killed us off with that move.”
In the 5000 trials, Jim Beatty had been able to train so little he needed a miracle to win. He didn’t get one. He was out of contention by two miles. Bob Schul won easily, with Bill Dellinger a safe second. Dellinger was happy he hadn’t had to put forth a huge effort that would keep him from resuming his training. “Bill and I had planned the whole year to peak in Tokyo,” he would say. “Not peaking for the Trials had its risks, but once Lindgren went to the 10,000, there was no one left I couldn’t beat on a bad day.”
Tokyo would see three Oregon repeats—Jerome and Burleson, now two-time Olympians, and Dellinger, going to his third Games. Javelin thrower Les Tipton rounded out the Duck contingent.
The first of Bill’s Ducks to compete was Harry Jerome, running for Canada. The 100 meters required four rounds over two days. Jerome executed solid starts in his heat and quarterfinal, winning both in 10.3. It didn’t take the eye of Bowerman to see that he was going to have trouble with Bob Hayes. In the first semifinal, Hayes won in 9.9, a tenth under Jerome’s world record, but it didn’t count because he’d been blasted along by an eleven-meter-per-second tailwind.
In the second semi, the wind turned against the runners. Mel Pender of the United States got an incredible start, but slowed at eighty meters. “It felt like something tearing loose inside me,” he told a reporter afterward. Jerome won that semi in 10.3 from Cuba’s Enrique Figuerola. Past the finish, Pender went down screaming and was carried off on a stretcher. He had torn muscles attached to the lower ribs on his right side. The medical team packed him in ice and ordered him to scratch from the final. Pender refused, “I came for a medal and I’m going to run,” he said.
Bowerman fretted that Jerome, witnessing such a reminder of his own past tears, would be affected in the final. But Harry was cool. “It’s rare in a big race, especially in late rounds,” he would recall, “when guys aren’t going down like flies. I just told myself stuff like that is normal. As long as I felt fine, I wasn’t going to hold back, and I felt fine.”
The deepest hush in sport falls over the stadium before the Olympic 100-meter final. Hayes was in lane one, Figuerola three, Jerome five, and Pender (with eight injections of painkiller) eight. The start was almost perfectly even. After ten meters, Hayes, Figuerola, and Jerome had two feet on the rest of the field. Then Hayes kept right on going. He didn’t even bother to lean at the tape because he was winning by two meters in a world-record-tying 10.0. Figuerola just held off Jerome’s closing rush and took second by less than a foot. Both sprinters clocked 10.2. Mel Pender finished seventh and spent the next three days in the hospital.
Jerome accepted his bronze with joy, and the more he reflected the happier he grew. “That was my best race of the year,” he said afterward. “I thought I was going to get Figuerola at the line, but hey, does anyone remember where I’ve been? I’m really pleased to get any kind of medal in such great competition.”
Bowerman wished he could have a
withdrawn a cc of Harry’s self-control and injected it into Les Tipton’s strong arm. Tipton had been second in the US trials and thrown well (270 feet) in training meets in the summer, but he was twenty-two and in his first international competition.
Taught by Bill to emulate the form of the great Russian champion Janis Lusis (“We used film loops of him. I’d studied and been in awe of him.”), Tipton was unprepared to meet the flesh-and-blood man himself in the Olympic Village—to sit and have a hot dog with Lusis. “The thing for me was trying to comprehend where I was and what I was doing,” Tipton would say. “Hot dog or not, nice guy or not, I didn’t feel I belonged in the same company with the greats.”
In the javelin’s qualifying round, each athlete has three throws. The top twelve go to the final. “I went out there,” Tipton would say, “with Lusis, Pauli Nevala of Finland, Terje Pedersen of Norway [the first man to throw 300 feet], and all the rest, having made it larger in my mind than anything my neuropatterning could handle. I was so out of control I released one throw—my best throw—ten feet before I got up to the line.” That would be galling because he missed the final by only six inches.
Bowerman, who was not an official US coach, couldn’t send a message to Tipton as he had at the thrower’s first USC meet, nor could Tipton come chat with him in the stands. After his event was over, he returned on the day Bill Dellinger ran his race: “I took a little heart knowing this was Bill’s third Olympics, that you can get better at this.” Tipton vowed to be back.
It was raining steadily on the day of the 5000 final. Seven former, current, or future world record holders stepped to the line, including the two favorites, France’s Michel Jazy and the United States’s Bob Schul. Bill Dellinger was there too, as well as Bill Baillie of New Zealand, Harald Norpoth of Germany, Kip Keino of Kenya, and Ron Clarke of Australia.
