by Kenny Moore
It was no surprise that Bowerman, great friends with Winter, was the same way. At Tahoe, Bill became a big, strong, smiling wall against the forces that wanted to get to the athletes. With their personal coaches he was collegial, with their families he was familial, with their shoe-company reps he was professional, with reporters he was expansively distracting.
With the athletes Bill was protective, refusing to carry any message that wasn’t about the subject at hand, and the subject was track. “Coach Bowerman was a very important person in my career,” Lee Evans would recall. Evans, who had transferred to San Jose State from San Jose City College in 1965, had seriously considered Oregon.
“I studied the history of my event and saw he had coached Otis Davis,” Evans would say. “I felt I could have broken the world record in the 800 meters if I had gone there. So I sought Coach Bowerman out. Even after I went to San Jose State, I talked with him whenever I saw him at meets. It was in Tahoe where Bowerman and I became close.” Bill timed Evans on the sprinter’s two long interval days, 500s and 300s. “He was very interested in my schedule and seemed to really like my hard work. He got excited when I told him I wanted to break the world record in the 600 meters up there. We planned a 46.5 first lap, but Ron Freeman brought us around in 48.5. Bowerman thought I could run 1:12. I ran 1:14.3, which still stood for sixteen years.”
Bowerman walked exuberantly away from Evans’s 600-meter record and saw, coming through the woods, an ululating Sasquatch. It was Neal Steinhauer, showing up from the Army track team. Bill knew Steinhauer had slipped a disc and he wasn’t expecting to see him. But in June Neal had gone to see Dr. Don Slocum in Eugene and had found some relief. Bowerman started him on easy throws, 50 feet at first, and he began improving a yard a week. As the Trials approached he was getting up near 67 feet. “But three days before,” Neal would recall, “I blew out my ankle.”
As bad as it was to end that way, it was worse for Van Dyk. “I was either late or didn’t show up at my job one evening,” Jere would remember. Bowerman sent discus-thrower Jay Silvester to tell Jere to come see him. “I recall being scared, because Jay seemed a changed person,” Jere would say. “In five seconds, Bowerman told me to get out of the camp and go home. I left, my Olympic dreams crushed.” For the second time, Jere had failed to do the job Bowerman had assigned him.
The US Olympic Track and Field Trials began without either Steinhauer or Van Dyk, on a schedule never before followed. Bowerman was tired of watching people make the US team and then—like Ryun in Tokyo—not be able to get through all the rounds in the Olympics because there were no rounds in our Trials. So he insisted with all his persuasiveness that they run the Tahoe Trials on the same eight-day schedule as the Olympics, with all the heats.
But before they could begin, there was a terrible meeting. At a grave assembly of athletes chaired by Bowerman and USOC track official Hilmer Lodge, the rules were changed. The need to address the rules flowed from realizing that different people were responding to altitude differently. Specifically, the distance winners at the sea-level LA Trials might not be able to place in the top six at altitude, let alone the top three. If we wanted to send the most competitive team, we’d send the top three from Tahoe, but if we wanted to be fair we’d honor the promise made to the winners of the LA Trials and take them no matter what. It was an awful bind, and it was only settled when LA 1500-meter champion Dave Patrick rose and said, “If I can’t make the top three here I don’t deserve to go.” LA 10,000 champion Bill Clark bravely said the same. Bowerman would always remember their gallantry—especially since neither Patrick nor Clark made the team.
In the 1500 final, the pace was slow all the way, and Jim Ryun (3:49.0), Marty Liquori (3:49.5), and Tom Von Ruden (3:49.8) kicked in Olympians. Patrick was fourth. Roscoe Divine was fifth in 3:52.0 and Dave Wilborn ninth in 4:03.8. Roscoe felt uncrushed, not unlike like Burleson after Rome. He knew he was young yet, still only twenty.
Wilborn, the most pessimistic of milers, came away blaming himself. Heats and final had all pooped along slowly and concluded with furious kicks. He needed it hard all the way, but almost surely wasn’t strong enough to drive the pace himself. In the end, what tormented him was that he had sat back and not tried. “It was my fault that it was slow,” he would insist years later. “An individual is at fault if he doesn’t take it out when he has to. I was also a basket case by the final. That was the most disappointing effort of my entire life.”
Bill Clark was the subject of emotional cheers in the 10,000, but Tracy Smith, Tom Laris, and Van Nelson ran away from the field. I had a bad day and was seventh—and was never more grateful that I had the marathon slot in my hip pocket. In the steeplechase, Bill Norris didn’t make the final, but Bob Williams did and finished a valiant fifth, in 9:17.2. Lee Evans won from Larry James and Ron Freeman in a world record 44.0 for 400 meters.
But another LA champion, Dick Fosbury, had driven his stuff to Medford, flown back, and learned to his shock that because of the new rule he wasn’t guaranteed his spot after all. And the trip had left him far from springy. “In the finals, I wasn’t jumping well, kind of hit-and-miss, and at seven-two, I was in fourth place, because I’d made it on my third try.”
Three others had cleared too, Ed Caruthers, Reynaldo Brown, and John Hartfield. “The bar went to seven-three, a PR for all of us. I got psyched up, had a great jump, and made it. My coach, Bernie Wagner, said it was the best he’d ever seen me do. I was, I hoped, back on the team.” But both Caruthers and Brown made it. If Hartfield cleared as well, Dick would be back in fourth. Hart-field turned away and began psyching himself up.
“Because seven-three was our OSU school record, Bernie asked the officials to measure and confirm the height,” Fosbury would remember. “That took some time. When John turned back, ready to go for his last try, all pumped, the officials were in the way, still measuring. They took so long, John lost that emotional edge and missed. He ran off into the forest and I didn’t see him again for years.”
Watching were discus-thrower Al Oerter and decathlete Bill Toomey, both of whom had made the team. “You know what number the Japanese believe signifies death?” asked Oerter.
“Four.”
“How’d you know?”
“What else could it be?”
After the final trials, people scattered and then reconvened in Denver to be outfitted. “There,” Lee Evans would recall, “we learned that IOC president Avery Brundage had attacked the black athletes. He said we were lucky to be allowed on the team. If he hadn’t come out like that, I don’t think anything would have happened.” What happened was one last, poignant meeting. “Imagine the eagles we had there,” Evans would say. “And we were going to run. But what else could we agree to do?”
“It boiled down to a clash,” Larry James would remember, “between the goal—doing good for all mankind—and the gold: the individual’s self-interest. There was, shall we say, counseling back and forth to sort out the two.” Finally Tommie Smith stood. “I hold no hate,” he began, “for people who cannot make a gesture, whatever the reason. But I have to reserve the honor of Tommie Smith. I’m an American until I die, and to me, that means I have to do something. I don’t know what I’ll do. But we have to make worthwhile this last year.”
And there it was left. As Evans would remember it, “We all went out and got haircuts.”
Bowerman’s view of the Olympic Project for Human Rights over the years was positive, because he and Bud Winter knew for a fact that Smith, Carlos, Evans, Freeman, James, Ronnie Ray Smith, Leon Coleman, Willie Davenport, Erv Hall, Vince Matthews, Bob Beamon, and Ralph Boston—regardless of whether they would have actually boycotted the Games—were brothers with the rest of the team in their purely athletic need to improve. They were good men with legitimate complaints. At every workout, Winter and Bowerman marveled over the mechanical perfection of the sprinters and hurdlers. It broke their hearts that these athletes would consider withholding that beauty from the wider world.
The coaches’ relief was almost equal to that of the athletes when the boycott was abandoned.
But if Smith, Carlos, and Evans thought Bowerman might feel even neutral about their cause, they needn’t have worried. Bill understood that what they were doing was crucial for them, and felt as well that they were not just addressing American racism. They were also addressing the entire stultifying IOC aristocracy, which had supported the AAU’s malfeasance for so long. If you were going against Avery Brundage, Bill Bowerman would be with you. Solidarity had beamed from of his face every day he worked with the San Jose guys.
“Bowerman, like Bud, never got involved in our politics,” Evans would recall. “They did not hold our politics against us, either. I really believe the 1968 team was so successful because of Bowerman being the head coach before the Mexico staff took over after the Trials.”
In Mexico City, Bill and Barbara watched the athletes he’d help prepare win more gold medals than any track team from any country in history. Jim Hines took the 100 in a world record 9.95. Tommie Smith took the 200 in a world record 19.83. Lee Evans took the 400 in a world record 43.86. Willie Davenport won the 110-meter hurdles in 13.3. Hines, Charlie Greene, Ronnie Ray Smith, and Mel Pender won the 400-meter relay in a world record 38.03. Evans, Ron Freeman, Vince Matthews, and Larry James won the 1600-meter relay in a world record 2:56.16.
In the field, Al Oerter won the discus with 212 feet 6 inches, Randy Matson the shot put with 67 feet 43⁄4, Bob Seagren the pole vault with 17 feet 81⁄2, Dick Fosbury the high jump with 7 feet 41⁄4, Bill Toomey the decathlon with 8,193 points, and Bob Beamon the long jump with a historic world record of 29 feet 21⁄2. That totaled twelve gold medals in all, six with world records.
“I am convinced,” Bowerman would say some years later, “that it would have been thirteen wins and another world record had not Wade Bell come down with Montezuma’s revenge before the heats in the 800.” Bell had lost seven pounds between the team’s arrival in Mexico and when he ran.
“His workouts had been amazing,” Bill would recall. “Only two men in the world had a chance against him, and their tactics in the final would have set him up perfectly. Wilson Kiprugat of Kenya went out hard, and Ralph Doubell of Australia sat on him. Wade would have gone by Ralph just as Ralph went by Kiprugat. Doubell won in a world record 1:44.3. Wade would have been the first man to crack 1:44.”
As it was, Bell walked the streets of Mexico until dawn, trying to reconcile himself to the fact that microbes on a random piece of bacon had so destroyed his world.
After placing first and third in the 200, Tommie Smith and John Carlos mounted the victory stand, accepted their medals, and at the first strains of the anthem, bowed their heads and shot their black-gloved fists to the sky. They meant their unshod feet to represent black poverty, their black scarves and beads to signify black lynchings, their fists to mean black unity. Any resemblance to Lady Liberty lifting her torch was ironic, for Smith and Carlos were taking America to task for failing to extend liberty and justice to all. This was the gesture that Smith’s honor as an American demanded.
Bowerman’s first thought when he saw those arms go up was to realize who was who. Carlos was Harlem-born, skeptical, wary, a fountain of jive. His arm was so crooked he could have been hanging on a subway strap. Smith was a child of farm labor, a rule-follower, a ROTC cadet, a congenital improver of self and nation. His arm was ramrod straight.
Barbara Bowerman would remember a gasp, followed by silence among the people they were with. “I think Bill may have imposed that silence,” she would say, “by ignoring what was a frightfully embarrassing public breach of etiquette. He continued to discourage any references to or chatter about the scene. That was his usual reaction to a mistake. He didn’t believe in giving or receiving apologies or listening to any rationalizing.”
Harry Jerome, who had concluded his racing career by placing seventh in the 100 meters, was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company about Smith and Carlos’s action. “I agree with the principle of pushing for equal opportunity,” he said. “But an act on the podium takes away from other athletes in the event.” Harry felt that the USOC should have sat down with the black athletes and worked out an understanding. But he had spoken with Carlos, he told the CBC, “and he’s more interested in proving his point than anything else.”
Bowerman said later he had no sense that his nation was being shamed unfairly. He trusted Smith and Carlos to know the need for their gesture. He respected them for earning the place where they stood, from which no one could look away. He knew he was seeing not self-promotion but an act of conscience. It was so powerful he shivered at what it might cost them.
“Glad that’s over,” said a relieved Tommie Smith when he got back to the Olympic Village, one of history’s more inaccurate preliminary assessments. It would never be over. He was still shuddering a little at the hate-filled faces he had seen in the crowd. “It was the fist that scared people,” he said later. “Bowing wouldn’t have gotten the response that it did.” Avery Brundage and the IOC immediately banned Tommie and John from the Village. Ron Daws, Tom Dooley, and I helped stack the sacks of hate mail that began arriving the next day.
Three days later, Bill sent me out to run the marathon. “Any last words?” I asked flippantly as we chatted before the bus took me to the start. “Only what I told Grelle before the 1959 NCAA mile,” he said. “It’s never a bad idea to stick with the champ.”
The champ was Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, who, having won the 1960 Rome Olympic marathon barefoot and the 1964 Tokyo Olympic marathon in a world record, was setting out to win three Olympics in a row. I, amazed and idolatrous, rolled along happily at Bikila’s side in the early miles. Bikila, protecting his line before a turn, even gave me an elbow. I wanted to say there was no way I’d ever drive him into the crowd lining the road, but knew no Amharic. He had tape above one knee. We had heard he’d been hurt.
After ten miles, Bikila turned and beckoned to an ebony wraith of a teammate, Mamo Wolde, the 10,000-meter silver medalist and a fellow officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s palace guard. Wolde wove through the pack to Bikila’s side.
Thirty years later, Wolde would tell me what had transpired. Bikila had said he wouldn’t be able to finish and ordered Wolde to win. “Sir, yes, sir,” said Wolde, and took off. He won by three minutes, in 2:20:27, the greatest winning margin in Olympic history.
I got blisters. It turned out I had unwittingly disobeyed Bowerman’s law to do nothing new in a big race. I’d wrapped the US trainer’s new “breathable” adhesive tape around the balls of my feet, where it breathed in the lanolin I’d dabbed on my toes, came unstuck, and rolled up into ridges of fire. At seventeen miles, in sixth place, I sat down, took off my shoes, and ripped the tape off one foot. A crowd of campesinos surrounding me was instantly spattered with scarlet, not unlike certain doctors had been back in Los Alamos. The skin had come away with the tape. I did the other one, got my shoes back on, hobbled for about three miles until I bled out and went numb, then was able to pick up the pace and start catching people. Approaching the stadium, I was in fourteenth.
As I came out of the tunnel into the light, a vast cheer erupted. It was for Dick Fosbury, who had just cleared his winning height. He was galloping around so heedlessly I thought I’d have to dodge him when I passed by with 300 to go. But he heard me yell, “Way to go!,” turned, and saw that a Mexican marathoner was forty yards ahead of me. “Get that guy!” he ordered, so I sprinted for him, the stadium screaming for the gringo to fail. The gringo got the forty down to three, but the gringo failed.
The Mexico City Olympics ran late into October. So when Bill and Barbara returned to Eugene, it was to rain, blazing maples, and football. The sense of the seasons hurtling by forced Bill to look ahead to the next Games—which the year before had been awarded to Munich, West Germany. An Olympics in Munich was exactly what he and Heinz Munsinger had thought in 1960 would be most fitting, to seal Germany’s return to decency.
Now Bowerman fired off a letter to Munsinger, asking how the German planning was coming.
CHAPTER 23
Enter, Prefontaine
AFTER MEXICO, BOWERMAN HUNG HIS SERAPE AND SOMBRERO ON A NAIL AND thought about how to make the best use of the next four years. The first entry on his list read, “Get more help at UO.” Bowerman had had dozens of graduate assistants over the years, but never a fully paid position. He thought perhaps the time was right to remedy that condition.
By 1967, Leo Harris had amassed two million dollars in athletic department surpluses. Portland donor Tom Autzen chipped in another million, and that year the university built Autzen Stadium, solely for football, across the Willamette from the campus. Harris then retired, resentful that the stadium didn’t bear his name despite his having labored for it since the 1947 day he’d taken the athletic director job. Hayward Field was now exclusively Bowerman’s for track and field.
The new AD was football coach Len Casanova, a little easier touch than Harris had been. Bill won from Casanova a living wage for an assistant’s position. “Bob Newland is the one I’d like to have had,” Bill would say, “but hell, he was paid twice as much being North Eugene vice principal as I could offer.”
Bowerman thought Newland was probably a better track coach than he was. “Of the records that my kids established at Medford,” Bill once said, “and they were pretty damn good records, all of them were broken while Bob coached there, all except one, and that was Ray Johnson, the high school quarter-miler of the decade. Ray ran 47.8 and if that had been an Olympic year he might have been Olympic champion. Or if I had been smart enough to put him in the mile, he’d probably have been the first person in the world under four minutes.”
