Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  “Don’t run?”

  “Wait until Dave laps you and then pace him his last three laps.” Now I was a damn rabbit.

  Arne finished with a 4:03.3 and passed the baton to Dave, who took off to roars. Tom Morrow came in ten seconds later, handed off to me and I just . . . lingered there. People in the crowd (not to mention Tom, heaving on the infield from the effort of getting that baton to me) yelled, “What’s going on? Come on, Moore, run!” I would have, but Bill had a firm hand on my arm.

  Finally, Dave completed his first lap and Bill let me go. I took off, fell in beside Dave, got a sense of the pace and gave him two straight 60s. He was 3:00 with a lap to go in his mile. And it hit me that there might be a way to salvage this ridiculous situation.

  I didn’t feel that tired. Someone must have started a watch when I finally began with Dave. If I didn’t kick with him on his last lap, but just held this 60 pace, I might have enough left to squeeze out a sub-60 on my last lap and thus break 4:00.

  And so it happened. Dave sprinted in beautifully, with a 3:57.5. I was twenty yards back, passing the line in about 3:00.5. Around the turn the bedlam died enough for me to hear announcer Wendy Ray saying, “A new four-mile-relay world record of 16:05! And thanks, everybody, for coming to a great meet!”

  By the time I emerged from behind the first-turn stands, the backstretch was filling with people jumping out of the bleachers. I yelled and bounced off a few until it was hopeless. I finished with an 80. I saw a guy from the mill. “Geez, Moore, what is it with you? First you won’t run, then you won’t stop.”

  At this writing, the record book lists the “Oregon Track Club’s” 16:05.0 as the fourth-fastest four-mile relay ever run, although it was never accorded official recognition. Keith Forman, one of the 1962 team who witnessed the charade, remains irate: “Bill’s switch absolutely demeaned what we four did alone.”

  I have always agreed. Bowerman never offered anything like an apology. Years later, at a 1991 reunion and tribute to Bill, I recounted the story and ended by saying that the memory still stung. He simply produced the same fiendish grin he had when he was rearranging us. That had to have been the face seen in 1959 by Dave and Don Christian, the identical twins who had refused to switch places behind the stands: the face of Bowerman at play.

  That was about the last time Bill got to loosen up in that momentous year, for his responsibilities were soon Olympian. In 1968, both the NCAA and AAU nationals qualified athletes for the first round of Olympic Trials, held at the Coliseum in Los Angeles in late June. The primary purpose of these first-round Trials was to select the pool of ten athletes in each event who would be eligible for the Lake Tahoe altitude camp and final Trials. But for incentive, the USOC said that the first placers in each event in LA would make the team to Mexico and only have to “demonstrate fitness” in thin air during the final Trials. Those victors, among them Villanova 1500-meter man Dave Patrick and Oregon State high jumper Dick Fosbury, could then focus on peaking for the Games, not for the final Trials.

  Also at the LA Trials, the black male athletes held a meeting. Of twenty-six favored to make the team, thirteen said they would boycott. But top 100-meter men Charlie Greene and Jim Hines were adamant that they would compete. “It comes down to whether you’re an American or not,” said Greene, who would go on to a twenty-year career in the Army. “I am an American, and I’m going to run.” To hold unity, the boycott was abandoned. Black athletes would take part in the Games, do their damnedest to win, and then, if conscience demanded, make a gesture on the victory stand. This was a huge relief to almost everyone but Harry Edwards. The athletes would be able to train with undivided purpose.

  They would, that is, if they could survive their first weeks in sky camp. Because Bill had to be with the Oregon athletes at the NCAA and AAU meets and LA Trials, he couldn’t monitor the contractors building the Tahoe track and attendant facilities. When Bowerman arrived, with Barbara, he was appalled. “The top echelons of the USOC had set this up, and we were on the edge of mutiny the second day,” he would recall. “The food was unsanitary, meager, and awful. The best shot-putters in the world were getting eight hundred calories a day. There was an open cistern, and the drinking water was polluted by wood rats and bird droppings. The athletes said they would really rather wait to get their dysentery in Mexico.” Bowerman called the USOC officials and threatened to resign if conditions weren’t improved immediately. He got results. “I don’t think that had as much effect as telling them I’d send all the athletes home too,” he would say later.

  “Bill Bowerman is absolutely frank,” Yale coach Bob Geigengack, who had helped Bill pick the Tahoe site, once said of his friend. “If I ask him a question, I know he’ll give it to me straight, regardless of whether I’m going to like what I hear. That bluntness is rare. Almost all of us will bandy words. We’ll circumlocute. We’ll try to soften the blow. Not Bowerman. In fact, when I think of Bill, I’m a little ashamed of being diplomatic. I wonder if I might have compromised somewhere.”

  At Tahoe, the athletes lived in trailers and nearby cabins, eating and lifting weights in prefab structures covered with taut, shiny fabric. There can never have been a more ethereal setting for a track. The clearing was at the base of a ski run. From the top of the hill, the scene below became a bonsai, an oval Tartan plate sweeping around an infield of granite boulders and the ancient trunks of High Sierra forest. The long-jump runway emerged from the woods, with Bob Beamon the most deerlike upon it.

  On the high-jump apron, Bill renewed his acquaintance with Dick Fosbury, then an Oregon State junior. As Bowerman viewed the history of high jumping, Bill Hayward and Les Steers perfected the Western roll high-jump technique in 1940. “Then Fosbury, as a sophomore at Medford High in 1963, developed something better that rightly bears his name—the Fosbury Flop.”

  All high-jump styles, Bill would say, are gymnastic moves to apply the most upward force to the body’s mass and let the center of gravity go a little under the bar while the jumper—in different sections—goes over. “A five-six jump used to be pretty good,” Bill once said, “because everybody jumped with the scissors. It was like you hurdled the high bar, but lay back along it while you dropped your lead leg down and then lifted your trail leg over. The scissors wasn’t the best, as Hayward proved with the roll, but the reason they used it was they jumped from one piece of hard ground and came down on another piece of hard ground. Fosbury couldn’t have done what he did without improvements in landing areas. Coming down on the back of his neck on those old piles of wood shavings or sand—he’d have ruined himself the first time he tried it.”

  That fateful spring day in 1963, as Fosbury would remember, was at a dual meet at Grants Pass. The landing area was fat foam blocks held together with netting. His coach had been trying to get him to learn the modern variant of the roll, the straddle, but when he needed a clearance to stay in the competition, he reverted to the scissors style, with all its limitations. Except this time, as Fosbury put it, “My body found a way to remove those limitations. It wasn’t out of some idea I’d had, or a model. It was by feel—and the need not to lose to guys.”

  Fosbury changed the angle of his approach, charging almost right at the bar. “And in the air, when I tried lifting my hips to keep from knocking it off with my butt, the natural, equal-and-opposite reaction was that my shoulders went back.” When they did, it was easy for him to keep his legs together and lift them over the bar. And since he could safely land on his neck and shoulders, he had found a new way. Fosbury improved his personal record by 6 inches that day, and went on to win the 1965 state meet with 6 feet 7 inches.

  He still has the telegram he got from Bill after that, saying that he’d love to have him visit his university. But when he replied that he wanted to be an engineer, Bill said, More power to you. “Oregon State was great for him,” Bowerman would say later. “Where else was he going to study engineering? And he had a terrific coach there, Bernie Wagner, who was the best in the high j
ump.”

  “Bill’s teams always brought out the best in Bernie,” Fosbury would remember. “And that had a huge effect on all of us. The Friday before every Oregon meet, Bernie would have a team meeting and go through the scoring chart and compare our athletes with theirs, and we would always finish about 1 to 3 points behind on that chart. Just a little bit behind, so pressure was put on everyone equally to take up that little slack. You knew you’d be a hero if it was you.”

  As furious as those meets were, Ducks and Beavers were able to shake hands afterward and “have the camaraderie of knowing you gave your best,” as Fosbury put it. Often, bonds grew. Now, in the Tahoe camp, the Beaver was hanging out with Ducks again.

  Bowerman had found the Oregon Track Club contingent a cabin up a nearby side road. “And the Oregon athletes,” Dave Wilborn would say, “were two orders of magnitude wilder than anyone else up there!”

  Much of the tone for the OTC crew was set by one William H. Norris. As a Massachusetts high school mile star, his first choice of college had been Oregon. But Bowerman had returned his eager letter and high school clippings (“for your safekeeping”) without any further invitation or mention of aid. So Norris had gone to Boston College and become a three-time Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes in America (IC4A) steeplechase champion. But Norris was undeterrable. “Delayable,” he would say, “but not deterrable.” After he took his degree in business, he moved to Eugene in the fall of 1966, began grad school, and showed up in muddy cross-country workouts among Koch, Morrow, Williams, Kvalheim, Bukieda, Divine, and Wilborn.

  Well, not among them—behind them. “I was in terrible shape,” Norris would remember. “I was fifty yards behind even on slow half miles.” But Bowerman noticed that this awkward, arm-thrashing, hip-rolling creature was staying a little closer each week. He also was taken, as were we all, by Norris’s Boston Irish wit. By the end of the year, Norris was a proud member of the Oregon Track Club, with Bowerman as his coach and strategist. In 1968 he ran a best of 8:44 in the LA Trials steeplechase and qualified for Tahoe.

  Norris was a great adventurer. He drove the “Green Ghost,” a faded lime, International Harvester Forest Service vehicle with a bullet hole in the driver’s side door. On foot, he and Wilborn covered remarkable distances on the trails: “We took six or eight hours to run in past Aloha Lake along the crest of the divide. Another example of having too much fun for our own racing good.”

  Meanwhile, I was being sensible back in Los Alamos. Earlier in the year, Bowerman and I had felt that the 10,000 meters was my best chance to make the team. But over the weeks at altitude, we realized that I might have a shot at the marathon as well. The trial to make the Olympic team in the marathon was to be held in August in Alamosa, Colorado. It was open to anyone, but the USOC had funded about twenty of the best American finishers in other marathons for two months of altitude training beforehand at Adams State College in Alamosa.

  But it had taken me four months just to be able to cover twenty-six miles at 6:30 pace in training at altitude, let alone race it. That told us that two months wasn’t going to be enough for any competitor to fully acclimate. I would have had five months by the date of the marathon trial. Bill and I decided that I should take advantage of that and race. There would be a month to recover before the 10,000 at the Tahoe Trials.

  The Alamosa course was five loops around the little town, and so flat and open you could look across the fields and see back to the start. Australian Kerry Pearce, in it to impress his nation’s Olympic team selectors, set a brisk early pace. Billy Mills and steeplechaser George Young let him go, but I went with him, thinking to put some pressure on the “two-monthers,” the subsidized entrants. Pearce fell back at seventeen miles and suddenly I was way out in front of the Olympic marathon Trials. I got a little dehydration twinge in one hamstring with four miles to go, so when Young passed, I let him, and he won in 2:30. I held second in 2:31.

  George Young, then thirty-one and a tough old friend of Bill Dellinger’s, was the American record holder in the steeplechase with 8:30.6, but had never run a marathon before. Yet he lived high, in Casa Grande, Arizona, and had had the same thought as I—that fully acclimated guys like us would beat the two-monthers. We also felt we’d proved that track runners would be better marathoners than plodders, our term for pure road men. The only plodder to make it was a distinguished Minnesota eccentric, Ron Daws, who finished third in 2:33.

  I was an Olympian—and even happier that the slot was in my fallback race. I flew home and gave my report to a beaming Bowerman, observing that the race had gone not to the plodders but to the swift. Bill corrected me on the lesson. “You and Young were the two guys most at home up there. That race went to the calloused.”

  I recovered so quickly that Bowerman let me run a rainy 10,000 against Gerry Lindgren a week later in Eugene’s Olympic training meet. The Olympic sea-level qualifying time was 29:00, which took 70-second laps. Bill ordered me to begin no faster than that, regardless of Gerry’s early rocketry. At three miles Gerry had carved out a ten-second lead, but he slowed and I caught up to him with a mile to go. The storm clouds thickened and the light was going. Hayward Field had no lights. Cars parked around the north turn hit their high beams so we could be seen battling on through the rain. On the last backstretch, I gave it everything I had and drove into the lead. Gerry stuck right with me around the turn and up the homestretch. I beat Lindgren for the first time, by two feet.

  “I’m not in shape yet,” he said. “I’ll accept that,” I said. We both had gotten the Olympic qualifying time, but still had to finish in the top three in the final Trials.

  Barbara Bowerman would never forget the party that night, as people took refuge from the storm in Dean and Shirley Pape’s huge house below Hendricks Park. She radiated relief and success—“my relief and Bill’s success.” A month earlier she had taken a reconnaissance trip to Tahoe with him and had felt real qualms about the entire undertaking.

  “I wondered if he knew how much responsibility he had assumed,” she would recall. “He had huge expectations and many doubts from the Olympic Committee, not to mention other critics. He appeared to have made all the arrangements His Way, from choosing the site and placing the track in its little clearing in the forest, to the arrangement of this trip back to Eugene for most of the Olympic team to put on a special meet for the thanks and enjoyment of his home crowd. Yet he never seemed to lose a hair or an hour of sleep, just relying on his own careful preparation, loyal support from well-chosen assistants, and well-trained teams.”

  The training of Bowerman’s two Olympic 800-meter candidates, Wade Bell and Jere Van Dyk, could hardly have been going more differently. At home in Vancouver, Van Dyk had been mending. Since he’d been on the Pan Am Team and had ranked seventh in the world in the 800 in 1967, he had successfully petitioned the USOC Track Committee to let him go to Tahoe. However, the USOC also told him that he had only two chances to run the Olympic qualifying time for the 800, in meets at sea level. “I wanted to go to Tahoe, of course,” Jere would say, “but was scared, Bowerman being the training center coach. In early August I sat on the front porch with my parents and asked them what I should do. My mother said, ‘You have to try.’ My father was quiet.”

  Jere went with his mother. “Bill Norris and I drove down in his old Green Ghost, laughing and having a grand time, but I was as nervous as could be. When we got there, we checked in and saw Bowerman, briefly. He assigned me a job, as he assigned everyone a job in the camp administration. I was to guard the track for a time in the evenings.”

  Soon after he got to Tahoe, Van Dyk took his first shot at a qualifying time at a training meet at Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) and barely missed. “I was close,” he would remember. “With another couple weeks I knew I could be ready. I honestly felt that I could make the team. Everyone thinks that, I know. I was sure all I needed was to get into the 800-meter finals, and then I would do it.”

  One thing that lengthened
Jere’s odds of making the top three was the fitness of his old friend and teammate Wade Bell. Wade had improved year after year and now held the American 800 record, at 1:45.0. New Zealand’s Peter Snell had retired, so Wade was the early book favorite for Mexico. He handled altitude fine, had 46.3 speed in the mile relay, and had become a classic exponent of the long, Oregon-honed, 300-meter kick. He could bolt to top speed a long way out and just keep going.

  Bowerman felt Wade needed socializing, though. He called him in once and said, “Wade, I’ve had a couple people talk to me about you. Seems you do a lot of whistling when you talk. When other people talk, you’re looking around, whistlin’, watching the birds . . . Now, Wade, I want you to look straight at people when you talk.”

  “It turned out,” Bell would recall, “I’d been acting in this evasive way to reporters. But I’d only learned it from Bill when he watched the birds and wouldn’t talk to us when we were freshmen.” Bill would use that tactic and more with the newsmen prowling the training camp. Their handling was crucial, because Tahoe crackled with tensions, one of which was not knowing how to act on the question of race.

  Dozens of coaches that year, including Payton Jordan, were quoted in Track and Field News as refusing to accept that the boycott proposal might be a response to real grievances. Most of these coaches worked with black athletes. But the fact was that many had no shame about how racism permeated their work. John Carlos had discovered this at East Texas State. “Football coaches called a black receiver who dropped the ball ‘Nigger’ or ‘Nigra’ or ‘Boy,’” he would recall. “The athletic department called a meeting of black athletes and told us, ‘You don’t like it here, you can leave.’” Carlos had, for San Jose State and Bud Winter.

  Winter was the best coach of sprinters of his era. Tommie Smith, the 220-yard world record holder, would say of him, “Bud, this white, middle-aged gentleman, coached Lee Evans, John Carlos, Ronnie Ray Smith, and me at a time when we were all quivering with the politics of the black athlete, and never said a word to us about any of that. He left us free to live our lives creatively.”