Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  Mortensen believed this flowed from Bowerman’s not being a father figure. “My high school coach in Minnesota, Roy Griak, was like a member of the family,” he would say, “looking out for us, keeping us from harm. Boy, was Bill ever not like that. He expected us to be independent adults and make our own way. I believe that gave us more self-knowledge. We could run well for the rest of our lives because of his teaching us to do it on our own. Bill once told me he was proudest that all his Olympians set their personal bests years after they were out of school.”

  Well, Bill was hugely proud of Mortensen during the spring of his junior year, because he led a thin Oregon team to the national championship. The 1965 NCAA meet was at California. That year I watched with a cane, my TG-22 stress fracture still healing.

  In the steeplechase, Mortensen fought his way out of the pack and into the lead off the last water jump. Approaching the last hurdle, UCLA’s Earl Clibborn, wild to catch him, misjudged his steps, slammed into the 200-pound barrier, and went down with a sickening crack. Bruce drove on to win in 9:00.8. Clibborn arose and staggered in third on a broken leg, proof that steeplechasers bow to no one in what they risk. Mortensen, normally the mildest of men, was fearless during his races.

  Mortenson’s win juiced Steinhauer into launching his shot with an insane scream that echoed across the bay. The steel struck at 62 feet 6 inches, and Oregon had another ten points. Gerry Moro took third in the pole vault for six and Wade Bell was fifth in the 880 for two. That totaled twenty-eight, normally about half of what a team needs to win. But in this meet, points were scattered far and wide. Bowerman did a quick calculation and gathered the Oregon mile-relay team. “Fourth or better,” he said. “To win the team title, get fourth or better.” Al O’Leary, Butch Meinert, Jim Wood, and Gordy Payne delivered as ordered, with fourth place for four points.

  USC and Oregon tied with 32 each. “Ugh,” groaned Bowerman, “I should have told them third.” Mortensen was stricken. “I’d won the steeple, but I was in the three-mile too, the last day,” he would recall. “If I’d been tougher and gotten 1 point, we’d have had it outright.”

  Bowerman would nod and acknowledge such natural regrets, but didn’t seem to share them. He occasionally pointed out that victory is sweet, but you wake up the next morning and it has flown. Similarly, defeat dissolved. He tried to take a long view of it, as in his treatment of Harry Jerome. Occasionally his view was so long that it seemed a kind of enlightened disinterest. That was never more evident than in the question of who should coach Gerry Lindgren.

  Lindgren was the greatest distance talent to ever come down the pike. In the summer of 1964, barely out of Rogers High School in Spokane, Gerry had become the first American to beat the Soviets in the 10,000 in the United States-USSR meet, had run 13:44.0 for 5000 meters (a high school record that would last forty years), and had placed ninth in the Tokyo Olympic 10,000 despite gimping along on a viciously sprained ankle. The victor, the United States’s Billy Mills, would later say that a sound Lindgren would have won the gold.

  Earlier that year, Bowerman had written to Washington State’s Jack Mooberry, “You know if I can do anything to help you keep Lindgren I shall be more than happy to do so. I have every confidence that he would be in just as good hands with you as in mine. Let me know what your pleasure is. On the other hand, if everybody is after him and he’s not going to go to you, I’ll do what I can to get him.”

  Mooberry’s pleasure was to accept, and Bowerman bowed out. Lindgren always wondered why he had never received a letter of enticement from Bowerman.

  In January 1965, Lindgren enrolled at Washington State. Not being eligible yet for the varsity, he ran selected open events. Mooberry and Lindgren were shaping his 140 miles per week of training toward a rematch against Olympic 10,000 champion Mills in the AAU six-mile in San Diego. As usual, the AAU nationals would be the qualifier for the US team competing in Europe and the Soviet Union that summer. But as the meet drew near, word came that the NCAA would forbid collegians to enter the AAU meet.

  Back in 1963, President John F. Kennedy had assigned General Douglas MacArthur to slam the two groups’ heads together and solve this ridiculous conflict that would not die. MacArthur had cowed their leaders into a truce that allowed the United States to send a joint team of collegiate and open athletes to the Tokyo Olympics.

  Now, the truce had come apart. The colleges began using their athletes as clubs. I was one. By April 1965, I’d run a winter’s worth of thirty-mile runs and worked extra nights in the mill to afford a plane ticket to the Boston Marathon. I was ready to maybe scrape into the top twenty. Bowerman made me a pair of new flats. While I took a test run (a team rule, on pain of dismissal, being Never try anything new in a big race), he called the NCAA offices in Kansas.

  Executive Director Walter Byers said the colleges were again trying to prove that the NCAA controlled the majority of the athletes. Since Boston was an AAU race, Byers said, it was now not “sanctioned” for college entrants. “If Moore runs,” Byers said, “you must take his scholarship.”

  “Aha!” said Bill. “He doesn’t have a scholarship, Walter. And he worked in a damn plywood mill to pay for this.”

  “Then we’ll take his eligibility to compete for Oregon.”

  When I next saw Bowerman’s face, it seemed not so much deflated as desiccated. He kept his fury contained, but it gnawed at him that his own group, his NCAA, was hurting his runner.

  Looking back now, to my moral dismay, that was the end of it. The NCAA clearly was wrong to sacrifice my right to run for its hope of leverage in a dispute, but I never considered running and risking my collegiate career.

  Two months later, Gerry Lindgren wouldn’t be so cowardly. Again, the terminology was that the AAU nationals had not earned the NCAA’s “sanction.” The AAU saw no reason to seek such a blessing, because it alone determined the national team qualifying process. So the NCAA told Lindgren that if he ran he’d forfeit both scholarship and eligibility at WSU. Word got out that he was vacillating. Lindgren would remember getting calls from college athletic directors saying he had to take their word on this and not run or they couldn’t guarantee his safety.

  Lindgren ran. He and Mills fought a historic, seesaw six-mile battle, Mills winning with a diving lean. Both broke Ron Clarke’s world record with 27:11.2. In response to Lindgren’s spectacular defiance, Byers was preparing to notify WSU to strip him of his eligibility when Washington’s senior senator, Warren Magnuson, held hearings to find out why this absurdity kept happening.

  Gerry was the star witness, pale, scrawny, squeaky, and devastating. “I just couldn’t believe all these men who said they had my interests at heart would really kick me out of my school for running a race,” he said. “A race I needed in order to represent my country. I couldn’t believe they’d do that.”

  If Lindgren had not become a hero in beating the Soviets the year before, he was a hero now. Yet Congress didn’t pass any new law. It just threatened to, if peace wasn’t restored and Lindgren left alone. The NCAA, revealing Byers’s visceral fear of government interference, backed off. But the terrible balance remained.

  Lindgren’s defiant 6-mile was not the only epochal race at the 1965 AAU meet. The other was the mile. One of its protagonists was Jim Grelle, then in his mid-twenties. Mightily frustrated by how poorly O’Hara, Ryun, and Burley had run in the Olympic 1500, he had determined to keep running even though he had moved back to Portland and was essentially training alone.

  Grelle would remember “running things by Bill on the phone, and combining Igloi’s intervals with Bill’s easy days.” The combination worked. In 1965 Grelle would break the American record and beat the indomitable Peter Snell. He almost did it twice.

  In their first race, in LA in June, Snell made his trademark move with 300 meters to go. But as he came out of the curve, he caught a glimpse of someone in white moving up strongly. Snell thought it must be Jim Ryun. They reached the tape in a dead heat and Snell took a despera
te dive at it. As they slowed, Snell saw that the white shirt was Jim Grelle’s Multnomah Athletic Club singlet.

  Grelle, who’d been in far more close finishes than Snell, knew he’d lost another one. Both were clocked in 3:56.4. “It was exciting to get that close,” Grelle would say. “But you could see Peter wasn’t that fit.”

  In their next race, on a rough track in Vancouver’s Empire Stadium, Grelle drove hard the whole last two laps. He reached the finish, turned, and saw he was a hundred yards ahead of Snell, who had a gastrointestinal bug and had dropped back early. Grelle, so determined to break away, had run 3:55.4 and taken the American mile record. The record lasted a week, until the AAU mile.

  In that race, Snell was feeling much better and planned, as he would put it, to “sit on Grelle” until the last straightaway. He had not reckoned on the young Jim Ryun. With 300 to go, Ryun took the lead. “Grelle and I covered him comfortably to the 220,” Snell would recall later, “where Grelle began challenging. He couldn’t make it past Ryun and they ran together round the bend. I could get past Grelle but not up to Ryun.”

  The eighteen-year-old Ryun finished with his head rolled back. He won in a new American record of 3:55.3. Snell was two feet back in 3:55.4 and Grelle ran 3:55.5, even as he lost the record to Ryun. “I sold a few extra pairs of Tigers for Buck because of those races,” he said later. “Snell and I agreed this kid was for real.” Ryun’s high school record would last into the next century.

  A talent second only to Ryun’s had grown up voracious among the woodlots and sloughs near Vancouver, Washington. Roscoe Divine was seventeen when he ran 4:10.5 for Columbia River High School in the spring of 1965. Washington, Stanford, and Oregon State, among many others, dangled offers of full rides. But Roscoe knew he was going to Oregon. He had met Bowerman after a 4:13 mile at the Portland Indoor. Bill had told Roscoe that Oregon would prepare him to compete in more ways than the physical. The remark stayed with him.

  Tall and charming, with a quick, dazzling smile, Divine gave every appearance of being the preppy product of a stable home. But he had grown up poor, with a disabled father, and would have gone hungry had not the neighbors fed him. By the time he came to Oregon, his father was declining toward death and his mother was too pressed for time to come to meets. Roscoe felt very much alone and, as he would put it later, “I had a money complex.”

  Bowerman, believing Divine was a middle-class white kid, hazed and embarrassed him as he had Knight and Forman and me. Roscoe didn’t respond well to that, his temper flaring when he felt his worth was being challenged. “If he’d peed on me in the shower,” Roscoe would say, “I’d have hit him.”

  Yet on the track, Bowerman quickly found workouts that suited him and, during Roscoe’s ineligible freshman year, he chose open races to season him in. In the spring of 1966, Divine took second to Jim Grelle in the Modesto Relays mile in 4:03.5 (but, as he would remind Grelle years later, he was “leading with thirty yards to go”). He was on the verge.

  Divine didn’t have the recuperative adaptive energies of a Grelle. He would never run a killing three-mile. But he came to a peak more dramatically than any other miler. Bill’s late-spring intervals carved five pounds from his running weight and gave him an elegance at speed that was mesmerizing, at no time more so than during his first sub-4:00.

  On May 1, Oregon long jumper Bob Woodell, class of ’66, with twenty of his frat brothers, was straining to heave a platform of timbers on oil drums across a muddy lawn and into the Millrace, a languid, duck-filled campus stream. Sorority women waited to turn it into a float for the annual May Day fête. The platform unexpectedly rose, buckled, twisted, and toppled. Everyone ran but Woodell. It mashed him to the gravel. When the crowd lifted it off, he could raise his arms but not his legs.

  “I was a paraplegic from that moment,” Woodell would recall. “Crushed first lumbar vertebra. I spent seventeen days in Sacred Heart Hospital, a year in Portland hospitals.” Before Woodell went up to Portland, Bowerman came to see him. “He asked my permission to give a benefit meet for my expenses,” Woodell would say. “In my drug-induced stupor, I thought he was saying he was doing a barbecue at the house and passing the hat.”

  It was a little more than that. On May 6, 8,000 of the faithful showed up at twilight and paid a dollar to witness the varsity go against selected alums. Paramedics wheeled Woodell onto the field on a stretcher, green blankets and white sheets cinched over his chest. Given an ovation, he worked his arms free and waved and shook hands with the athletes, giving them the strength that only comes upon us when we are running for a larger good. It was in that atmosphere that Roscoe Divine, Wade Bell, Jim Grelle, and Dyrol Burleson stepped to the line in the mile.

  Bell would recall Bowerman’s prerace instructions: “We’ve done a lot of work to make you ready,” Bill said, “and you are, so here’s how we’re going to do this. Take over the lead on the second lap and keep the pace up all the way in.” Half-miler Don Scott led early, reaching the quarter in 59.0. Mike Crunican brought them by the 880 mark in 1:59.0. Bell, following his orders, surged into the lead.

  Everyone’s supercharged nerves made for a tightly jostling pack. On the next turn, as they disappeared behind the stands, Grelle was kicked in the ankle so hard he lost the use of it and had to drop out. Down the backstretch of the third lap, Divine moved to second behind Bell. Burleson went with him.

  From then on, historians agree, the noise of the crowd exceeded any previous sound heard at Hayward Field. “Wade made the race,” Divine would say. “He took the whole third lap.” The time at three-quarters was 2:59.0.

  “I led all the way to the last backstretch,” Bell would say, “when Burley took off around me, and then Roscoe.” Burleson won going away in 3:57.3. Divine maintained form and finished in 3:59.1, becoming the second college freshman ever to break 4:00, after Ryun.

  Bell, coming off the turn, felt, “I’m not going to make it.” Panic drove him in, in 3:59.8. He was the eleventh Oregon man to go sub-4:00. The race was so exciting, and for such a good cause, that it overrode memories of Burley’s 3:57.6 in 1961, and would be for many the emotional beginning of the Twilight Mile.

  “At the end Bill gave my family $10,000, and that went a long way,” Woodell would say later. “But the energy that came from being there so far overshadowed the money that I simply can’t encompass it. It let me deal with all the issues that lay ahead.”

  One of those issues was that he would never walk again. At the time, Woodell was swearing that he would. When he finally came to terms with reality, Bowerman would be there for him again, to suggest a line of work.

  Rallying to Woodell’s needs cemented the 1966 team. A week later, athletic director Leo Harris told Bowerman that the sixteen Ducks whose marks qualified them for the NCAA nationals had to be cut to ten. Harris insisted the budget permitted only ten to be funded and that he was cutting back on all sports. He didn’t say that it was because he had almost squirreled away enough money to begin building a new football stadium.

  Bill broke the news in a team meeting, to uproar. There was a shout: “Go over the AD’s head. Go to the president!” Bill said, “I cannot. I have sworn to respect the chain of command. Whatever may reach the president’s ears, it cannot come from me!” Abruptly, looking from one team co-captain (me) to the other (Steinhauer) with a certain you-take-it-from-here nod, he left us.

  That night, commissioned by our teammates, Neal and I paid an unannounced visit to the president’s mansion on McMorran Street. The only lighted area of the house was the rear entrance, shadowed by rhododendrons. Neal, excited, ran up the steps and knocked, still rehearsing, bouncing on his toes, clearing his throat. Delicate Mrs. Flemming opened the door and froze. Neal, thinking she was the maid, said it was urgent that we see the president. His stirring baritone increased her fright so much that she seemed about to hurl the door shut, so he stepped in, lifted her by the armpits, and set her to one side. Her shriek brought Arthur Flemming from the kitchen, dinner napki
n in hand. Neal said, “Mr. President we have an emergency. . . Uh, Kenny, you tell him.”

  After assuring Mrs. Flemming that Neal was under my control, we stammered out that the athletic director was making qualified teammates stay home from the nationals. Flemming noted a name or two, thanked us for our concern, and made no promises. We escaped, howling at our ineptitude.

  A day later an expanded roster for the NCAA meet quietly went up, with sixteen names on it. On the plane to Bloomington, Indiana, Bill revealed that he’d bumped into Flemming at the Faculty Club and gotten the story. The president had called Harris and said that he hated to see a promising sprinter such as sophomore Mike Deibele get left behind and that he really hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to do so. Harris had said, “Doctor Flemming, you are remarkably well informed about the minutiae of my department. Say, you didn’t happen to come by this information from Bill Bowerman?”

  “Mr. Harris, I most certainly did not.”

  Leo could never prove that Bill had gone over his head. We, having abetted an instructive insubordination, felt prepared to take on bureaucracies in later life.

  After all that effort to bring the whole team to Indiana, we did worse than any Oregon squad had done in the nationals for years. UCLA, coming into its own under Bill’s friend Jim Bush, won commandingly with 81 points. Brigham Young University took second with only 33. Deibele made it only to the semis in the 100. “The ‘agony’ of defeat was apt for me,” Deibele would say. “It simply hurt for days. It didn’t come from my teammates or Bill. He was evenhanded. He could see we were doing our best. It came from me.” In later years, all Deibele would remember about Bloomington was that he and Dave Wilborn, who hadn’t scored in the steeplechase, “went out and got gorgeous pieces of Indiana limestone for our rock collections.”