Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  “Interesting,” he said. “Buck and I have a shipment of shoes on the dock in Portland and need some cash to pay the duty. This might be a fine time for you to take a thousand or two in stock.”

  I distinctly recall the cartoon image that came to me, of dollar bills flying away on little wren wings. “Seriously, Bill,” I said, “Man to man, what are the chances of the business really panning out?” Bowerman switched from venture capitalist to solicitous coach. “Kenny, here’s how I see it. It’s a good idea. Buck’s a good partner. The Cortez is a good shoe. I wish I could guarantee we’ll turn your two thousand into a lot more, but I can’t. It’s a risk. It’s a risk.” I thanked him and ran for the airport. I used my windfall for a Christmas vacation in Hawaii.

  Running shoes were hardly the only recipients of Bowerman’s inquisitive inventiveness. In the dog days of August and September, as his runners tested shoes (and themselves) on long runs, Bill would drive along with us, stopping at stores en route, then catching up and handing out sodas, juice, water, iced tea—whatever he could find to keep us hydrated. Bowerman kept a notebook on what each of us absorbed best on the run, mulling the fact that no single liquid on the market provided the body with all of the substances lost in sweat.

  This was ten years before Gatorade. He already knew what electrolytes needed to be replaced—basically, potassium, calcium, and sodium. So he began experimenting. One time he mixed a scientifically sound concoction of warm lemonade (calcium), salt (sodium), mashed banana (potassium), honey, and tea (caffeine). I spewed it instantly.

  “What do you think this is, the Cordon Bleu?” he asked. “If it makes you run faster that should be enough.”

  “Have you tasted it?”

  He took a sip, smiled, and acted as if it was terrific. We waited to see him swallow. Surrounded, he blew out his mouthful, too. “All right, all right,” he said, “it’s sheep’s piss.”

  To my knowledge, he never tried any other blends. From then on, when you called to say you were doing the twenty-six-mile loop from town past his house on McKenzie View Drive, he would go down and put a big glass jar of Barbara’s lemonade in the mailbox, the halfway point. When Gatorade finally came out, Barbara recalled Bill drinking deeply of it and saying, “These people are geniuses!”

  Nothing affected us that Bowerman didn’t examine. If it was not our training, our feet, or our precious bodily fluids, it was our clothing. In the early fifties, he had observed Dellinger and Mundle returning from runs in the rain with their groins and upper thighs knotting from the weight of their bulky, waterlogged sweatpants. Bowerman bought white cotton long underwear and found it acted like a wet suit, keeping their legs warmer and freer longer. But in the following days, he would remember, he got calls from “shocked Eugene biddies” irate over the indecency of the attire, even if worn under regular shorts. Bill stopped the fuss by dying the long johns dark green, which in turn dyed the legs of the runners splotchy green.

  Second only to his hours spent improving our shoes were those devoted to what our shoes ran upon. The sensual glory of sinking your spikes into and striding away over a groomed cinder track such as Hayward’s was possible during about a third of the Oregon year. Even then, the surface had to be dragged and rolled and the lanes marked with lime. A fixture in my memory is Bill, his long overcoat flapping in the storm, driving a long steel rod into the lake that formed on the first turn during heavy rains, digging through the top layer of cinders so the water could drain into the gravel below. There were few places more likely to prod a man into thinking of something better.

  He began small, with runways. He’d observed that wooden indoor tracks provided good spring and grip, although they had dead spots where the planks sagged between supporting joists. In 1956, for the Olympic training meet and decathlon trials, he’d worked with university carpenters to design temporary long-jump and pole-vault runways of strong, one-inch plywood elevated eight inches above the infield grass. They’d worked well, but the athletes’ indoor spikes had penetrated nothing fancier than green-painted wood.

  Afterward, he lugged home some four-by-six plywood panels, upon which he tried affixing assorted surfaces. “Tar was too sticky,” he would recall. “Road asphalt was too hard. Tire rubber was too delicate. I wondered if I threw them together, would I get something useful?”

  He bought a little cement mixer, added a gas-burning heater from a roofing company, and put in about equal weights of sand, rubber grindings (“buffings”) from Wyatt’s Tire Company, and liquid tar. Then he fired up the heater, let the mixer turn until the ingredients melted, shoveled the black, gooey, stringy, smoking mess onto the plywood panels, and smoothed it with a trowel as it hardened.

  Soon he had a recipe that gave him material with a nice bounce. But would it endure? He had done all this in his driveway. Wondering how to test it, he looked out across the neighboring pasture—and paid a visit to the Jaquas. He came bearing gifts: half a dozen four-by-six panels covered with rubber asphalt. “We put them around our cattle feeder,” John Jaqua would say. “They lasted through four years of excited hooves stamping on them.”

  In the mid-1960s, by such means, Bowerman put himself in the vanguard of the designers of a new generation of tracks spreading across the land, smooth, black, springy roads from which puddles could be swept and on which meets could be held in all weather. Yet Bill, even after our runways were rubber asphalt, held back from changing the ancient cinders circling Bill Hayward’s field. “We have the luxury of a great groundskeeper,” he said. “I think at its best, this track is as good as the best artificial ones, and it’s easier on runners’ legs.”

  It was a time of feverish innovation in surfaces, and Bowerman, if only to know what shoes to use on them all, had to keep abreast. “When it got hot,” he said many years later, “the Grasstex brand would disintegrate. Spikes got clogged with crap that looked like little kid’s modeling clay. Every year somebody was coming out with something different. When the 3M Company got a contract to put their Tartan brand of polyurethane in the Mexico City Olympic Stadium, I decided to wait and see how that went.”

  Bill didn’t try to capitalize on his leadership in the rubber asphalt field, at least financially, but he was always proud of his research. He kept his mixer around for years, generating, when runways needed fixing, a few jobs for the daring. This was because rain would seep into the mixer. When it was turned on and its heater fired up, the trapped water would flash to steam and spatter its scalding contents far and wide, leaving lasting scars on anyone within range.

  Bowerman had a few himself. In 1963, Charles Wade Bell of Ogden, Utah, had won the prestigious Golden West high school mile in 4:17.1. In July, he visited the Oregon campus. Keith Forman brought him to the track.

  “There was a man at the end of the long-jump runway with a cement mixer full of rubber asphalt,” Bell would remember. “We got closer and saw he had holes burned in his overalls and his boots were smoking. Keith introduced us and Bill crushed my hand and left it covered with hot tar.”

  Bell savored the aroma. He’d saved a newspaper clipping about Burleson’s 3:58.6 mile in 1960 and had been reading about Bowerman’s oddities ever since. “I’d concluded that Bill had coached more sub- four-minute milers than anyone,” Bell would say, “and since that was what I wanted to be, Oregon was where I should go. But he exceeded my every expectation. He looked like he’d come through a disaster in a steel mill.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Rites of Passage

  ONE THING BOWERMAN DIDN’T PREPARE YOU FOR WAS HOW TERRIBLE OTHER coaches could be. When Dave Deubner, my old North Eugene teammate, first slipped on a Stanford uniform as a freshman in the fall of 1962, he’d broken the school three-mile record with 13:57. Head coach Payton Jordan congratulated him and said, “You’re going to be quite an addition, Dave, as soon as I break your spirit.” Deubner couldn’t believe he’d heard right, and then thought Jordan surely was joking.

  But he had, and Jordan wasn’t. As a sprint
er, Jordan knew little about middle-distance training, yet he enforced a “system” of his own. What had worked for half-miler Ernie Cunliffe (daily intervals and unquestioning faith) should work for all. When Deubner’s physiology and scientific mind didn’t adapt well to that, an all-too-familiar cycle, repeated by abused runners everywhere, began. Dave would conclude the fall cross-country season strongly, run a few promising races in early spring, go stale from all the intervals, run 4:15 in the heats of the NCAA mile, and not make the final.

  Sick of this by his junior year and told by Jordan that he could use the Stanford track only if he did Jordan’s workouts, Deubner quit the team. Later, having trained on his own for sanity’s sake, he looked good enough that Jordan let him enter the 1965 Pac-8 mile in Pullman. Deubner placed a close second to UCLA’s Bob Day in 4:03.2. Dave asked Jordan if he could run the NCAA mile. “Only if you do my workouts,” said Jordan. Deubner did them, ran 4:16 in the heats, and didn’t make the final.

  Ten years later, Dr. David Deubner was managing the cancer research institute at Duke University’s School of Medicine, so I guess you could say he had a little success in life. But he could have done all that and been a 3:54 miler as well.

  Over the years Oregon runners would race and defeat more talented people whose coaches had, if not ruined them, certainly impaired them. Only gradually would we realize how training sensibly, especially taking easy days, was heresy to the zealots who believed the more you work the better you get.

  When I went to Stanford Law School for a year in 1966–67 (before realizing I’d better be a writer), I watched a Jordan assistant named Jerry Barland put the cross-country team through unrelenting intervals. One day he politely asked me not to use the practice track unless I ran hard, because it was difficult for his men to see me only jogging barefoot on the grass for three miles and then beating them by more and more in local cross-country races. When I tried to tell him that I ran brutal workouts on the road and that these were my recovery days, Barland turned and walked away so calmly it was as if he’d been called to the phone. Later I realized that I’d been uttering blasphemy.

  I wrote to Bowerman about it. “As a coach, my heart is always divided,” he wrote back, “between pity for the men they wreck and scorn for how easy they are to beat.” (Bill’s competition was more against coaches than against individual athletes, and different coaches elicited different reactions. He never minded the score getting lopsided against Payton Jordan’s Stanford, but he wouldn’t run it up against Brutus Hamilton’s Cal or Jack Mooberry’s WSU.)

  Two men on the 1965 Oregon team were responding to Bill’s care by becoming hard to beat. One was Wade Bell, who improved to 1:48.0, in placing second to Oregon State’s Olympic 800-meter man, Morgan Groth, at the Pac-8 meet. The other was shot-putter Neal Steinhauer, another of my North Eugene teammates.

  Following his older brother, Neal went to Westmont College, a small, nondenominational Christian school in Santa Barbara. At six-foot-three and 170 pounds, his combination of long levers and quickness said one thing to coach Jim Klein—raw potential. Neal needed only to pack on some muscle.

  Steinhauer hadn’t really considered going to Oregon after high school because at the time his distances weren’t even close to competitive. But when he came home to Eugene after a year at Westmont, he had, in his words, “mega-morphed” into six feet five inches and 240 pounds of springy power. He decided to be a Duck after all.

  In his redshirt year, Neal reconnected with Dave Steen, now doing graduate work at Oregon, with whom he had trained when he was in high school. That winter, Steinhauer and Steen practiced in a cramped, dirt-floored room in the Oregon PE building. “The wall was fifty-five feet,” Steinhauer would remember, “and I was hitting the concrete at the base of that, but I really didn’t know how far I was throwing.”

  While he was waiting to be allowed to compete for Oregon, Steinhauer threw for the Emerald Empire AA. Neal became eligible just before the 1965 Oregon Indoor in Portland, but it slipped Bowerman’s mind to get him varsity gear. Competing in his Westmont jersey, Steinhauer shocked two-time Olympic champion Parry O’Brien and went over 60 feet. As Steinhauer would tell the story, “The press all yelled, ‘Who are you? What’s Westmont?’ I said, ‘I’m a Duck, Oregon eligible.’ ‘Why no uniform?’ ‘I don’t know, ask him.’ I pointed over at Bill and I could see him redden. I had not exactly gotten off on the right foot.”

  Even though they worked together daily on technique, it would take them months to get comfortable with each other, because the change Bowerman knew Steinhauer most needed to make was the one hardest for him to accept. “His basic lesson, both in throwing and in life,” Neal would say, “was don’t rush it. Pace yourself. Take it slow in the beginning. In training, don’t go too hard or fast for your body. Do what you can, and don’t expect to get there all in one day.”

  Bill was telling this to a man who twitched and rumbled with joyous impatience. Rather than seek calm, Steinhauer whipped himself toward greater intensity, placing a huge sign over his locker that read “YAGOTTAWANNA!!” Bowerman felt he already wanted hard enough, too hard in fact.

  “Bowerman’s was the right lesson,” Steinhauer would say years later. “It’s what I teach kids now. I just wasn’t there yet. I slowed down my technique, sure, but never listened in any deeper way.”

  Besides churning with yagottawanna-style belief, Neal was also a devout Baptist, which led him to play a part in a drama I will never be able to relate without mortification. The night before our 1965 triangular meet with San Jose State and Cal at Berkeley, Bruce Mortensen and I happened to read in the California campus newspaper that Bob Price, the man I would be racing in the mile, was deeply involved in Campus Crusade for Christ. It was entirely due to his faith, Price was quoted as saying, that he was running well. That same week Time magazine had come out with its funereal black cover asking “Is God Dead?”

  I don’t remember who put two and two together, but we ended up writing, on a little square of adhesive tape, in tiny letters you had to be three feet away to read, “Yep. God’s Dead.” Mortensen stuck this between my shoulder blades as I went to the start of the mile. The early pace was slow. I made sure to run in last. Price was in midpack. In the second lap I moved up and settled in right in front of him. I can still feel the frisson of anticipation, waiting there around the turn. Would he even see it? What would he do?

  He saw it. Fired with righteous anger, Price tore into the lead and passed the half-mile running 3:56 pace. I was sure I had just made the dumbest move of my life. Fortunately (for me, if not justice), Price couldn’t hold such furious speed. He began to stiffen even before the last lap. I caught up, went around, and won by quite a bit in 4:08.8. There is only so much the spirit can do to get you through oxygen debt.

  I’ll always remember coasting to a stop and suddenly being lifted in triumph and carried into the infield by my teammates’ strong arms. Well, by one teammate’s strong arms, Steinhauer’s. Only when I was roughly skidding on the grass did I realize that Neal had not lifted me in joy. He was enraged. I came to my knees gaping up at Neal’s long brown arm, pointing down at me from an awful height. “Don’t you ever do that again!” he thundered.

  He had heard Mortensen cracking up during my last lap, saying, “It worked, it worked,” and had asked what was so funny. Bruce had told him and instantly realized his mistake, but it was too late. Neal, his message delivered, turned away to find Price and apologize.

  Not too many days later, as I sat in the Mac Court sauna after an easy run, Bowerman opened the door and saw that I was alone except for a rubber-suited wrestler trying to make weight. He came in with his keys and towel, sat down beside me, and studied the tortured, cherry-red face pouring sweat opposite us. “You know,” he said finally, fixing the guy with a look, “there are good ways to do things and less good ways to do things . . . ” The wrestler twisted and leaned back, trying to get more steam between himself and Bill’s eyes.

  “. . .
And there are truly imbecilic ways to do things,” he went on. “Every once in a while, you see someone do something so dangerous to himself and his university that even though it’s not your place to say a goddamn word . . . ”

  “I’m out! Don’t worry! I’m gone!” yelled the wrestler, lurching out.

  When the door was shut I said, “Wow, way to go.”

  “I was talking to you.”

  “Me?”

  “There are better ways to destabilize an opponent than mocking his faith.”

  I must have turned redder than the wrestler.

  “I know,” I finally was able to whisper. “I know now. It will never happen again.”

  I waited, torn between wanting him to leave it at that and wanting to try to explain. But he had elicited my promise. He would say no more.

  Bowerman often quoted scripture in team meetings, but it was always parable, never proselytizing. In the sauna, where the heat shortened and sharpened conversations, making you yell your last point before running for a cold shower, he seemed like Plato in ancient Athens, listening to different athletes’ beliefs but volunteering little about his own, apart from a conviction that there were no atheists in foxholes. Once I asked if there were any agnostics. He just gave me a look, as if that was splitting one hair too many. When I learned of the foxholes he’d survived, I felt a fool.

  Now, all I could stammer was “I’m not an atheist, you know. Logically, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist because we haven’t looked everywhere.”

  “Big deal,” said Bill. “The thing is, you can’t know that people aren’t experiencing what they say they are.”

  We agreed, for the future, to honor any and all religious expression as truthful reports from the heart.

  After the decades had bestowed their perspective, Mortensen could chuckle about the stunt with Price. “Even if it wasn’t the kindest idea,” he would say, “it was a great story. It gave us all something to think about. It gave you a chance to grow up a little. And it was typical of how Bowerman taught. He gave us our workouts, our lessons, our tactics, but then he gave us the freedom to execute them ourselves.”