by Kenny Moore
If Bowerman seems to have been excessively hard on Van Dyk, perhaps it was because he perceived there to be a lot at stake. Bill treated him as he did the rest of us, with a little overkill because he could see that Jere was hugely talented and very bright. All the young Van Dyk could see, though, was that Bill was hammering him.
The news Jere delivered a few weeks later didn’t help matters. “I went to him, before the start of the UCLA meet,” Jere would recall, “and told him that the doctor had just told me that I had mononucleosis. It was from overtraining. But Bill thought I was playing around. I had tears in my eyes as he told me, behind the stands on the turn at Hayward, to go home. My season was over. I never felt very close to him again.”
By contrast, Bill connected instantly with Arne Kvalheim of Oslo, Norway. In the summer of 1966, Kvalheim had run 1:49.0 for the 800 and 3:42.0 for the 1500. A sprinter from his track club was an MBA student at Oregon, and his club coach, Arne Nyto, knew Bill through the International Coaches Association. The two convinced Kvalheim to choose Oregon.
With the equivalent of a year’s college credits because of superior Norwegian schooling, Kvalheim could run for the varsity as soon as he arrived in the fall of 1966. A long-striding, rangy guy with voluble wit, Kvalheim gave no conversational quarter, even as we mocked him for producing such lines as “I vant to vash the vindows of your Wolwo.” It took Bowerman all of five minutes to see that Arne was not only capable in English but also funny, so he conceived a memorable introduction for an Oregon Club lunch.
“We have with us today,” Bill told the crowd at the Eugene Hotel, “a great addition to our team and our university. Unfortunately, I learn that our Duck Club officers are unable to welcome this distinguished scholar to Oregon in the splendor of his own tongue. Therefore, on behalf of the club, it falls to me to say, ‘Arne, Ge hingenin freckensillen abelskiver morenen, byorn ramemnen byurr ostanden formic, hanimi and furtritern!’”
Kvalheim put his hand to his heart, touched, as if this gibberish meant he was getting the key to the city, and responded with a rapid-fire paragraph of thanks in high Norwegian. To which Bowerman nodded and humbly replied, “Aay nabetenden. Beplucken, beplucken, abelskiversfurallen andfuralleenfree. Frjobyornaballen offender kayy!”
They went back and forth like that until half the room was in tears and the other half standing in applause.
“Bill’s great lesson for me,” Kvalheim would say, “was the need to conserve energy, both technically, by running with shorter and more economic strides (‘Save those long strides for the last lap.’), and tactically in races, by trying to keep a steady reasonable pace instead of being provoked by a fast early pace or surging along the way—especially when running against Gerry Lindgren.”
In 1967 the team had three other prime milers, and Arne was soon fast friends with Divine, Bell, Wilborn, and Van Dyk. Arne dubbed them members of his Tjalve track club and said they were welcome in Oslo whenever they could make it. (One of the overlooked benefits of welcoming foreigners into college programs is that teammates suddenly have homes away from home for life.) On May 6, 1967, thirteen years to the day after Bannister ran the first sub-4:00 with 3:59.4, Kvalheim produced his first. Against Oregon State, he placed a close second to Divine’s 3:59.0 in . . . 3:59.4. The one-two-three sweeps that he, Roscoe, Dave, Wade, Jere, and Mike Crunican scored in the 880 and mile gave Oregon a comfortable win in that year’s Pac-8 meet in Eugene. One of Barbara Bowerman’s favorite photos was of the team taking a victory lap with Bill. “He didn’t want to, because he thought it would end up in the steeple water pit,” Steinhauer would remember, “but he jogged with us, and stayed dry, and Barbara always liked it because he’s both smiling and running.”
Van Dyk’s racing so well after being out with mono showed Bill that his potential was extraordinary and put Jere back in his good graces. Two weeks later, at the 1967 NCAA nationals in Provo, Utah, Jere’s parents were sitting with Barbara as Jere joined Wade Bell for the start of the 880 final. Bill hadn’t thought Jere had trained enough to survive the preliminaries, but there he was.
“In the final I was determined to follow Bowerman’s instructions and do what he’d drilled into us,” he would recall, “that when you pass someone, you go fast, jump him.” So when he took the lead, he went out hard. “Trouble was, it was with 330 yards to go,” he would say. “I held it into the final straightaway, thinking I could win the whole thing. With 50 to go, I died. My lack of training caught up and I went from first to last. But I was always proud of myself for going broke.”
Bell won going away in 1:47.6, but his would be the only Oregon victory of the meet. In the mile, everybody was intimidated by Provo’s 4,500-foot altitude and by Kansas’s Jim Ryun, who beat Roscoe Divine with a 4:03.5. Dave Wilborn was fifth in 4:07.9. Kvalheim had been denied entry over a foreign student eligibility problem. In the shot put, Steinhauer placed second to an awakened Matson. Oregon’s 40 points was second to USC’s 86.
The milers quickly cast their eyes toward Bakersfield and the 1967 National AAU meet. There they would be joined by Jim Grelle, but not by Dyrol Burleson. One of Bill’s greatest tigers had seen the writing on the wall.
After his post-Tokyo year in Sweden, Burley had returned to Eugene to win the emotional Twilight Mile at the Bob Woodell meet. He had then joined Grelle and a field that included then-freshman Jim Ryun in the mile at the 1966 AAU meet in New York. Ryun led the whole race, with Grelle and Burley tucked in behind him, then simply pulled away with 200 to go and won in 3:58.6. Burleson finished ten yards back in 4:00.0 and Grelle was nearby in 4:00.6. This would be Burley’s last race.
Grelle believed Burley quit racing because the nineteen-year-old Ryun had just proved he was better than anybody else. Burleson was twenty-six and, in Grelle’s estimation, couldn’t cope with the idea of someone younger being so much better because he had always been the youngest. “So he quit prematurely as far as I’m concerned,” the thirty-year-old Grelle would say.
Later that summer, with Bell’s help, Ryun established his superiority with unmistakable clarity. In the mile at the 1966 United States vs. British Commonwealth meet in Berkeley, Bell rabbited, towing the field past the 880 in 1:58. Ryun flew away with a 57, hit three-quarters in 2:55, and ran a 56-second last lap. He finished in 3:51.3—cutting 2.3 seconds from Michel Jazy’s world record of 3:53.6. The time was disconcerting, seeming to herald the coming of the 3:50 mile when minds had barely begun to adjust to sub-4:00. Ryun, having run it, had no problem believing he could better it, with a more even pace.
So in the 1967 AAU meet, on a clay track in Bakersfield, he took a shot at it. Ryun led every step of the way and took two tenths from his world record, with 3:51.1. In retrospect, this was Ryun’s most extraordinary performance. Run essentially alone on a crumbling dirt track, it was the equivalent of a 3:47 run behind rabbits on Scandinavian Tartan, a time fifteen years in the future.
Five seconds back, Bowerman-trained men were flooding in. “I waited in the pack,” Grelle would recall, “knowing Jim was going to go out and kill everyone. I just made it past Dave Wilborn for second in 3:56.1.”
Wilborn had been only fifth in the NCAA mile, but in Bakersfield he had the kind of unrelenting pace he was born to run. So the first time he broke 4:00 he broke it big, with an Oregon school record of 3:56.2. Divine was not at full strength because he’d had to go home to Vancouver after Provo to put his failing father in a better care facility and returned knowing his father didn’t have long to live. Roscoe still was fifth, dropping his PR (personal record) to 3:57.2, “but heartbroken. I could have done better.”
Nine men went under 4:00, including high school senior Marty Liquori, with 3:59.8. The three Oregon runners who’d finished ahead of Liquori took him over to see Bowerman. Also there were Bell, who’d won the 880 in a meet record 1:46.1, and Van Dyk, sixth in 1:47.8.
“Where are you from, son?” Bill asked.
“Essex Catholic High School in New Jersey,” said Liquori. “
Coached by Fred Dwyer.”
“A good man,” Bowerman said. “Well, that’s pretty far. You ought to go to school back there.”
“I think I will,” said Liquori. “I’m going to Villanova.”
“We couldn’t believe it,” Grelle would recall. “They shook hands and that was that. I’ve wondered ever since whether Bill had been in touch with Jumbo Elliott at Villanova and knew he coveted him.” If Elliott did, no letter remained in Bill’s files. As Grelle would put it, “Bill wanted you to want to come.” Had Liquori—who would be the second-greatest American miler of the Jim Ryun era—voiced that feeling, the distance from home would have mattered not at all.
Years later, Dave Wilborn would reread the leather-bound training log in which he had carefully recorded each day’s workouts and feelings. The entry for Friday evening, June 23, 1967, shows a warm-up jog of twenty minutes, 3 x 165 strides, some stretching and high knee drills, more jogging, and a list of the finishers in the mile: “Ryun 1st in WR of 3:51.1, Grelle 2nd in 3:56.1, me 3rd in 3:56.2,Von Ruden 4th in 3:56.9, Divine 5th in 3:57.2 . . . ” The page is free of any other notation.
Wilborn would find it remarkable that he had put no more emphasis on his fine race than on running a dozen quarters. “Why no ‘On top of the world!’?” he would wonder. “Why no ‘Finally, the goal after years of struggle’? The reason has to be that I always thought I was capable of more. So even 3:56 by then didn’t seem like that much to celebrate. God, I want to go back and operate that body with a fifty-year-old head! It was always my head that set me back.”
In any other year, the top placers in the swift AAU mile, including Ryun, would have gone on planning their Olympic training, confident that they knew how to prepare. But in 1967, things weren’t so simple.
Earlier, Bowerman, despite his lack of favor in high USOC councils, had been asked to address how American Olympic athletes should train for Mexico City’s 7,350-foot altitude. The Games were a year and a half away, and the IOC was catching hell from writers and medical people alarmed about the dangers to endurance athletes battling in atmosphere containing twenty-five percent less oxygen. Could lowland runners adjust to racing on tracks a mile and a half high or were they doomed to stumble along a lap behind Colombians and Ethiopians? If they could not adjust quickly, how long it would take them to catch up?
“I think it was one of those things that no one knew enough about to object to me taking it on,” Bill would say. “The track coaches’ association had already resolved to study altitude, so when the Olympic Track and Field Committee met, they said, ‘Bowerman you’re the one with the Tenth Mountain patch on your briefcase. You’re our Olympic high-altitude training coordinator.” This assignment had been engineered by Hilmer Lodge, chairman of the track and field committee and meet director for the Mt. San Antonio Relays. “We had to learn how to train at altitude and learn it fast,” Lodge would say. “We also had to find a place for our Olympic Trials. If there was somebody better than Bill at interfacing between athletes, coaches, and doctors, he didn’t raise his hand.”
Bowerman canvassed all the colleges, ski areas, and municipalities at altitude, perused their responses, and cut the list to four. In July 1967, he sent teams of runners, coaches, and researchers to scout Los Alamos, New Mexico (led by Arizona’s Carl Cooper); Flagstaff, Arizona (Harley Lewis of Montana); Alamosa, Colorado (Ralph Higgins of Oklahoma State); and South Lake Tahoe, California (Bob Tracy of St. Cloud State in Minnesota).
He wanted at least ten runners at each site, and got many of the finest. At Alamosa, a young physiologist named Jack Daniels monitored Jim Ryun, Tom Von Ruden, steeplechaser Conrad Nightingale, and other champions for as long as eight weeks. Von Ruden, fourth in the AAU mile in 3:56.9, got his altitude time down to 4:12. Ryun ran but 4:16.
Bowerman assigned seven Oregon runners to Los Alamos and went along himself. The Oregon runners were Roscoe Divine, Jere Van Dyk, me, Tom Morrow (another late-maturing North Eugene grad at Oregon, now below 4:04), Bill Keenan (Jim Grelle’s brother-in-law and national high school record holder in the steeplechase), Steve Bukieda (a tough, dryly profane three-miler originally from Chicago), and Australian Gary Knoke (who’d placed fourth in the 1964 Olympic 400-meter hurdles in Tokyo). Gary had flown into Eugene from Sydney to start school and was shipped right out again to Los Alamos. Jere came still sprinkled with the luster of finishing fourth in the 800 in the Pan American Games in Winnipeg. Bill especially wanted him there because he was racing fit. The amount that he slowed would be attributable to the altitude.
We stayed in The Lodge, the historic timber structure that was all that remained of the old scout camp that had popped into Robert Oppenheimer’s mind when the Manhattan Project needed to find true isolation. Los Alamos had piercing blue skies, chalky canyons dividing piney mesas, a daily afternoon lightning storm, 1,500 PhDs, the highest rate of twin births in the nation (we had no doubt why), and a good rubber asphalt track at the high school, elevation 7,350. Upon it, we were subject to the deepest scrutiny of our lives.
We ran time trials the first day—an 880, mile, or three-mile. I didn’t feel that bad warming up, but after a lap of the three-mile, it seemed that cold, heavy lead was being injected first into my arms, then into everything else. I had clocked an easy 13:55 two weeks before at sea level. Here, I had to will myself to a dismal 15:15. Already acclimated, altitude native Web Loudat of the University of New Mexico beat me easily. “Oh, wow,” we all gasped, “it’s not psychological. It’s real.”
Los Alamos also had scurrying men in flapping lab coats. They had taken four cc of blood from each of us before we began. Now, to measure how our systems were handling lactic acid, technicians tackled us as we finished, steering us over to tables of needles and drawing four cc within ten seconds of finishing, four after a minute, and four more after five minutes. We were there for three weeks. Every Friday we repeated the drill. Our times, hemoglobin counts, and hematocrits (percentage of red blood cells) improved each time.
There were other tests, including a way of measuring lean muscle mass that gave some of us nightmares. For this we were taken into the depths of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to a wing that contained a room-size metal cube about twelve feet on a side, inlaid with dials and gauges. Bowerman, forewarned, came along to watch.
“What we have here,” said a scientist, patting the thick, welded walls, “is a human counter.” (“Don’t need it,” said Steve Bukieda. “Eight of us here. All done.”) “This cube is made of foot-thick, battleship steel. Inside, it’s completely full of heavy oil. What that does is block all outside radiation. So when you’re in here, any radioactive impulses we pick up will be from your K-40, the potassium isotope in your muscles.” (“Uh, when we’re in there?” asked Tom Morrow.)
The scientist touched a button. From the steel wall issued a hollow torpedo tube. We could see its polished metal interior, earphones, and a little switch on a wire. “That is the panic button.” For those who weren’t all that claustrophobic, it was easy. I dozed off during the few minutes that it took. Morrow came out wild-eyed, fists balled, ready to swing at the technician. It turned out our ratios of muscle to total weight put us up there with climbers and wrestlers. Gary Knoke, our sprinter, did best.
Before our final time trial, the medical researchers said they wanted to up the ante a little. All the samples they’d been taking were of our venous blood, blood that had come from the muscles and was loaded with lactic acid and carbon dioxide. But what did our arterial blood, fresh from the lungs, look like? It was decided that whoever won the three-mile time trial would submit to the usual venous needles in one arm and an arterial needle in the other.
Morrow, Loudat, and I ran together most of the way. When I kicked, canny Tom, skittish about that extra needle, let me win. I crossed the line and was grabbed and braced over a little fence, with technicians poking at both arms on the other side. Gasping, head down, surviving those first few seconds, I heard, “Oh shit!”
I loo
ked up. The white lab coats of three doctors were being machined-gunned by crimson blasts from my wrist. The instant the needle had entered the artery the force of the blood had filled the syringe, blown it out of my arm and kept spurting. None of us, not even Bowerman, had thought to mention that my heart rate would be over 200 beats a minute.
“ARM! Stick up your ARM!” yelled Bowerman. The attendants held it up for me. Fortunately, when you completely stop after running all out, the faintness you feel is due to blood pooling in the body. When it did, the pressure in the artery decreased and the bleeding stopped. “You know,” said Bowerman ever so gently to the spattered doctors, “I think I may know the reason they don’t do arterial studies.”
Except for that one little thing, I loved Los Alamos and wanted to stay. I’d run 14:30, forty-five seconds faster than three weeks before. How much longer could I go on improving? Besides, I still couldn’t do long runs. Track work was getting easier, but a steady ten-miler to the ski area above 9,000 feet brought on nausea very much like altitude sickness. Clearly, to train as I was accustomed, with a two-and-a-half or three-hour run every ten days, was going to take more than three weeks to get used to. It was going to take months.
That, coupled with offers of part-time jobs and homes to stay in during the next year, convinced Bowerman that it made sense not for me to stay on right then, but for some of us to come back to Los Alamos in the spring, for the five months preceding the Olympic Trials.
The arrangement took some deck clearing. In transferring from Stanford Law School to the Oregon graduate writing program in the spring of 1967, I had lost all legal grounds for further student draft deferment. Bill wrote the Eugene draft board and proposed a two-part plan for the nation to get the most out of me: “Give him to me for another year, and I’ll see that he makes the Olympic team, and we’ll be strengthened that way. Then draft him and I have great confidence he will serve with honor in any duty assigned.” The board actually bought it. Only in Eugene, Bill’s Eugene.
