Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  The night before, Bowerman and Dellinger had split a bottle of Sapporo beer and put their heads together. Clarke seemed the key to the race. In the 10,000 he had driven the pace all the way and been memorably outkicked by Billy Mills of the United States. Clarke did not want that to happen again, but, with all the fast milers in the field, neither could he dawdle. If Clarke set off at world record speed, which Dellinger wasn’t sure he could handle, what should he do? Bowerman reminded him that he’d run some quick, speed-sharpening 200s the week before and that he could kick as well as most of the big names. Dellinger nodded and said, “But what if Clarke goes wild?” Bowerman reminded him that he was primed, as never before, to run a tough last 600 meters.

  “But what if Clarke goes?”

  “No one in this race knows himself as well as you do, Bill,” Bowerman said. “No one else could have run intervals for a year on a lonely beach by counting his steps. So if Clarke goes wild, let him. At least let other people be the ones to go chasing after him first. You run like you did in your first NCAA mile, when you worked through the whole field. You run what you feel is right for you. You do that and I don’t think any Ron Clarke is going to get very far in front of you. You do that until you get to 600 to go and you can make it hell for anyone to pass you after that.”

  The early pace was slow, and at four laps it was still slow. Bob Schul, near the back of the tight pack, watched Clarke beginning to move up. “Following him was Dellinger,” Schul would write in his 2000 autobiography, In the Long Run. “Then suddenly [England’s Mike] Wiggs fell in front of me! I jumped to the right and barely missed his leg as I landed. Wiggs’s spike must have caught Dellinger’s shoe, because Bill staggered slightly and then glanced over his shoulder. It happened in a split second and there hadn’t been time to think.”

  Schul and Dellinger composed themselves and watched Clarke. What would he do? Clarke had realized that on the soft track he couldn’t just run away. Yet he had to do something to weary the big kickers. So he surged. Off the turn he took off at a four-minute-mile pace. Jazy, Norpoth, and Baillie stayed nearest. Schul and Dellinger let them go. Then Keino went by and Schul wondered if he should be going, too. But after a hard 200, Clarke had to slow and the pack began to catch up. As they passed the start, Clarke looked over his shoulder. Schul thought he had to be demoralized to see how many were still with him.

  Lap after lap, Clarke surged and slowed, the pack an accordion behind him. Dellinger remained about eighth, running absolutely even pace. “You probably couldn’t see it through the rain,” Dellinger would recall, “but I was almost smiling. Clarke not only was killing himself, he was hurting a lot of other guys. I thought Jazy was dumb to stay as close as he did.” Bowerman, watching from under an umbrella with Barbara and being of identical mind, beamed for him.

  With three laps to go, Clarke slowed and Jazy went around him into the lead. With two to go, Schul, in fifth, felt a great charge of late-race adrenaline as he neared Clarke in fourth. “I move up on Clarke’s shoulder,” Schul would write, “and look at him as we go into the turn (with 600 to go). At that moment, Dellinger flies by me and takes the lead.”

  “I imagined it happening just this way,” Dellinger would say. “A brutal last six hundred, the distance I first won on the playground when the faster kids died. I imagined it a hundred times, and always winning.” There were six men he’d have to prove that to. Jazy looked supremely smooth. Behind him, Norpoth, Keino, and the USSR’s Nikolai Dutov were abreast, trapping Schul inside them.

  At the bell with a lap to go, Jazy was in second. He looked right, saw Dutov coming up, and flew into an absolutely maniacal sprint. Jazy shot past Dellinger so fast he gained five yards in the next twenty.

  “It was amazing,” Dellinger would say. “I thought he had to be tired from the surging. He looked like Snell blasting off.” (In fact, the following year Jazy would cut Snell’s mile world record to 3:53.6.) Jazy hit the last backstretch with a yawning twenty meters over Norpoth, Dellinger, and Dutov. Bob Schul had finally gotten unboxed. Sprinting wildly, he made it past Dellinger and Dutov into third.

  The gap behind Jazy seemed hopelessly huge. Schul got by Norpoth and began, incrementally but significantly, to gain on Jazy. With 200 to go, Schul could see Jazy was tying up, and there is no sight on earth that imparts greater drive to a runner. “Coming off the turn,” Schul wrote, “I’m a step behind. I come to his shoulder as we fly down the final 100. Several times he glances over, eyes wide. With 50 to go I pass and pull away. For the first time in the race my legs are heavy but it doesn’t matter now.”

  With that perfect last sentence, Schul roared on to win in 13:48.8. Behind him, the crazy brave Jazy had entered rigor mortis so completely that Norpoth and Dellinger ran him down too. The skeletal Norpoth just held off Dellinger for second place, 13:49.6 to 13:49.8.

  It wasn’t long before Dellinger was showing Bill and Barbara an embossed, beribboned emblem. “Finally something to take home after one of these Games,” Dellinger said. He shared Jerome’s perspective on his medal. “Whew,” Dellinger said. “You know, Bill, there were some real good guys in there.”

  “Yes, there were,” said Bowerman, patting him on the thigh, counting him among them. “Yes, there were.”

  Only the 1500 remained. Watching Jim Ryun struggle in the semifinals, Bowerman again regretted that Jim Grelle had not made the team instead. “Ryun had the fifth-fastest time going in, but didn’t make the finals because he wasn’t old enough or strong enough to run three races in four days,” he would say. “Our Trials was one race, one day. Grelle would have made the final in Tokyo.”

  Grelle was 6,000 miles away, but he was furious at another man who’d beaten him. “Tommy O’Hara,” Grelle would recall years later, “didn’t train from the time he made the team at the Trials. He did not work out the rest of the month. It was party time. He didn’t make it past the first round in Tokyo. He had the second-best 1500 time in the world. That’s what ticked me off.”

  The only American to make the final was Burleson. He looked tan and fit and feral. At the gun Michel Bernard of France led, just as he had four years earlier in Rome. Burleson, remembering how Bernard had set a fast pace for Herb Elliott then, went right to second. They passed the first lap in 58, Snell easing along at the back of the pack.

  After his hard first lap, Bernard slowed down. “He motioned the runner behind into the lead,” Snell would write in No Bugles, No Drums. “This was tricky because the front isn’t the position Burleson likes to be in at that stage. So there was a confused lull for 200. No one wanted to set the pace. John Davies had hoped to begin making it tough from 600 to go. He had to make it a hard race for his own preservation. So, entering the homestretch for the second time, he moved round into the lead a lap sooner than he intended.”

  Earlier that year, Bowerman had written to Washington State coach Jack Mooberry, a respected colleague, and asked, “How in the hell can you keep a guy from running what I would like to call a ‘stereotyped’ race? Burleson always runs the same kind. He’s very mulish about it. I should take a club to him, try to get his attention as one would a mule. Everybody knows how he’s going to run and of course when he gets against the good ones, they know what he’s going to do, when he’s going to do it, and all they have to do is do something different and they have him. I don’t mean runners in the USA, but when he runs with a Peter Snell, all Peter has to do is wait for Burleson to move and then out-sprint him because he can.” Because adding long runs to Burleson’s training had not made him dramatically faster in the last half lap, Bowerman hoped that his letter to Mooberry “wouldn’t be too damn prescient.”

  At 800 meters the time was just over two minutes. Snell moved to second behind his teammate and got boxed in. “With just over a lap to go, the field began jockeying for the all-important position for the run home—and I found myself trapped,” he would recall. Burleson and Britain’s John Whetton had him sealed against the rail. If Burley had blasted off a
t that moment, Snell would have had real trouble getting out. Burley could have hit the last turn with a fifteen-yard lead. The thought of doing so didn’t enter his mind.

  “Fortunately,” Snell wrote, “it wasn’t necessary to use the discourteous elbowjolt so common in races of this kind. I merely glanced back to see who was behind me and extended my arm, rather like a motorist’s hand signal to show my intentions. I breathed a sigh of relief when the athlete on my shoulder, John Whetton, with the manners of a true Englishman, obligingly moved aside. As simply as that, I was out.”

  Burley had missed what—with hindsight—was his main chance. “Into the back straight,” Snell continued, “I was well positioned and unworried. With 200 meters left I threw everything into the final bid. As I let go, I had the strange feeling that this was just what all the rest had been waiting for me to do, as if it were an inevitable part of the race over which they had no control.”

  That was absolutely not true of Burleson. Snell’s move shocked him to the core. It tore at him to discover he wouldn’t win. When half the field ran by in pursuit of second place, he let them go. “I screwed up,” Burleson said quite some time later. “I was real cocky, too cocky. I was an idiot. After Snell took off, second felt no different from last.”

  Snell ran his last 300 in 38.6 and won in 3:38.1. Josef Odlozil of Czechoslovakia took the silver in 3:39.6, Davies the bronze in 3:39.6. Burley came to life at last in the stretch and kicked in fifth.

  Later, Jim Grelle would say, “Burley was easily the second-best runner in that race. He should have gotten a medal.” Burley was man enough not to say that bronze or silver was crap in the company of Dellinger and Jerome.

  Before they departed Tokyo, Jerome and Bowerman reached an arrangement whereby Harry would help coach Oregon’s sprinters and do graduate work. Bill Dellinger announced that as of this beer he was retired as a runner and aspired to do college coaching. Bowerman said he should go for a position at Lane Community College. Burley said he planned to take his young family and train in Sweden for a year.

  Bowerman, in considering Burley’s race, thought it might’ve been a good thing that Snell was superhuman. “It kills Burley to lose anyway,” he would say, “but losing to a horse like that, who knows, it might be easier.” Still, for weeks, Bill would have recurring queasy regrets that he hadn’t convinced Burleson to prepare some plan B, some searing long move, something to drive the race so hard that Snell’s tired legs would rebel. The 1500 final was, after all, Snell’s seventh race of the Games; he’d run four rounds to win the 800. Bowerman worried that he’d enabled thickheadedness. He’d let Burley be an idiot. He’d described, months before, how the race was going to go and he’d been right, yet he’d let his runner down, let his profession down, by not somehow intervening. “I hope,” he finally said, “this becomes the world’s biggest two-by four. I hope this will crack open that skull.”

  CHAPTER 19

  A Curious Mind

  THE GAMES OVER, IT WAS TIME FOR BOWERMAN TO DO A LITTLE SHOE BUSINESS. The shinkansen, or bullet train, whisked Bill and Barbara from Tokyo’s chaos to the quiet of a small ryukan hotel in Kobe. Bill was carrying two pairs of track shoes he’d just finished, prototypes for the Tiger factory to produce according to his design specs and Phil Knight’s marketing expectations.

  The Bowermans were invited to tour the Tiger factory and meet with company founder and CEO Kihachiro Onitsuka, who quickly won Barbara over. “He was surprisingly informal and outgoing,” she would say, “with a bubbling sense of humor. He and Bill were immediately congenial and grew to be good friends, almost familial, within the week.”

  The two men hit it off because they had so much in common. Onitsuka had begun the company fourteen years before, in a Japan crushed by defeat. He had commanded an Imperial Army training regiment and believed the virtues of war—teamwork, living for a cause greater than oneself—were also the virtues of sport. After the war, he had worked in a shoe factory, learned the craft, and then begun his own tiny shop to make basketball shoes. Barbara was touched upon hearing how he’d created his original lasts by melting candles from a Buddhist shrine and shaping them to his own feet. Onitsuka had come up with the shoes’ suction-cup-like sole, which had let Tiger take over the Japanese basketball market, when eating tako sushi. Tako, of course, is octopus.

  Bill returned to the factory several times to converse with designers and workers. He studied Onitsuka’s cutting and stitching machines, absorbing how they performed the tasks he did by hand. One of the obstacles to importing Japanese products was translating English specs into their Japanese counterparts. Bill hoped the foremen and crew bosses would remember the big, warm gaijin, the better to do his bidding from afar. For years, though, whenever a Tiger shipment arrived in Oregon with products that had misconstrued his instructions, he would groan and wish he could snap his fingers and be back there on the shop floor.

  Knight had enlisted Bowerman in starting Blue Ribbon Sports well aware that Bill would always be an overpowering critic of anything but a perfect shoe. Sure enough, when enough Tigers had been on enough feet for enough time, there were problems.

  I am here to vouch for that. In 1965, with 250 yards to go in the only 880 of my college career, I didn’t look back before moving wide and the spikes of my passing teammate, Butch Meinert, ripped open the outside of my right foot. I somehow finished, my Bowerman-made shoe twisted sideways, my foot spilling blood and taking on cinders. Bowerman supervised our team physician, Dr. George Guldager (whom he called Gravedigger for his heavy hand in such work), in cleaning out and closing the gash with seven stitches. For two weeks I couldn’t run except a little in the pool. Then, tightly taped, I managed to win both the steeplechase and three-mile in the Pacific Conference Pac-8 meet in Pullman, contributing to our team title. On the plane home, Bill asked what I planned to do the next day. I said I was looking forward to a nice, long Sunday run.

  “Fair enough,” he said, “but you haven’t done one in three weeks and you’re pounded flat from your tough double, so I just want you to do ten miles.”

  I nodded and the next afternoon set out to run an easy twenty. At 101⁄4 miles, at the Coburg Shell station, I felt a funny ping and some pressure in my right foot. It quickly hurt so much that I couldn’t run. I had to call my mother to come get me. The X-ray showed a clear white line across the third metatarsal—a stress fracture. No NCAA meet for me.

  I went to Bowerman’s office. Later he would crow to UCLA coach Jim Bush that he knew his runners so well that all one had to do was go a disobedient quarter-mile farther than he had ordered and the runner would break down. All he said to me was “You will lay before me the shoes you wore.” I did. They were lightweight, blue and white flats, Tiger model TG-22. Bill ripped them to pieces right there, without benefit of any band saw.

  He was incredulous. The shoes had spongy padding in the heel and under the ball of the foot, but no arch support whatsoever. “If you set out to engineer a shoe to bend metatarsals until they snap you couldn’t do much better than this,” he said. “Not only that, the outer sole rubber wears away like cornbread. This is not a shit shoe, it’s a double-shit shoe.”

  (Unbeknownst to Bowerman, Onitsuka had actually designed the TG-22 as a high-jump training shoe and identified it as such in their first catalog. “It was us,” Blue Ribbon Sports’s first employee, Jeff Johnson, would say years later, “who sold it as a running training shoe. Our bad.”)

  Six weeks later, the day he cleared me to run again, Bowerman tossed me a pair of prototypes he’d made. All the issues with the TG-22 as a running shoe had been addressed. The outer sole was industrial belting. A cushiony innersole ran the entire length of the shoe, under a shock-absorbing arch support. That summer and fall I ran more than a thousand miles in different versions of those shoes, giving them back for weekly inspections, then testing prototypes that the Onitsuka factory made and sent back for Bill’s approval. Early models still had two distinct pads and a heel so narrow that m
ore than a few buyers turned ankles. After a year, the shoe was given the full-length midsole Bill had conceived and a wider heel.

  Once the shoe went into production, what to call it? Adidas had the habit of naming models for upcoming Olympic cities, such as the Roma or the Tokyo. Knight thought that was smart, imparting an aura of currency. He and Bowerman at first named the new flat the Aztec, in honor of the upcoming Games in Mexico City, but had to give it up because Adidas already had a shoe named Azteca Gold. They brainstormed. Bill suggested the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. “Trips right off the tongue,” said Knight.

  “Well, then who conquered the Aztecs? Who’s that Spaniard responsible for 400 years of Montezuma’s revenge?”

  “Cortés,” said Knight. “Hernán Cortés.”

  So in 1966, Onitsuka introduced the Tiger Cortez. I was elated because for years, I’d be able to go into a store and walk out with custom-made shoes. Buck and Bill were elated because people bought them in great numbers.

  The Cortez made BRS a viable company. John Jaqua, who would join the board of directors, would recall the many times Nike tried to discontinue the Cortez. “But people kept wanting them, so they kept making them,” he would say. “It was the first stable, cushioned shoe for the roads, a comfortable shoe, and so many people liked it that it was the first shoe that made running shoes acceptable in fashion.”

  That year I took my BA in philosophy from Oregon and was accepted at Stanford Law School. I’d worked in the plywood mill that summer to pay for room and board, and then found I’d won an NCAA postgraduate grant and a Stanford scholarship that added up to an extra $2,000. I whooped about this to Bowerman, it being the first time in my life I was more than fifty bucks ahead.