by Kenny Moore
Bowerman finally hired Bill Dellinger away from Lane Community College. “Bill was good in the running events. When he was at Thurston High, he’d tell his boys that when you get really fit, running’s easy, running’s like brushing your teeth,” Bowerman said. “Of course that wasn’t training. Training is like having your teeth cleaned an hour a day.”
Dellinger would be the first of Bill’s assistants to work directly with runners of distance. In the fall of 1968 Dellinger’s assignment was significant, because entering his senior year at Marshfield High in Coos Bay was one Steven Roland Prefontaine.
That spring, as a junior, Pre, as we came to call him, had set the state two-mile record of 9:01.3. Bowerman, who’d coached Marshfield coach Walt McClure in the 880, had arranged for Arne Kvalheim and Roscoe Divine to drive down and take a ten-mile training run with Pre. “I had just beaten Lindgren with my 8:33 national record,” recalled Kvalheim, “and Roscoe was in 3:57 shape, and this kid took us out on the beach and kept saying, ‘Am I going too fast for you? Can you keep up?’”
They not only could, they felt like leaving him standing, but reined themselves in for the sake of their mission. Later they would learn that Pre was bursting with a cockiness that had been long suppressed.
Pre’s father, Ray Prefontaine, a carpenter and welder, had met and married his mother, Elfriede, in Germany while he was with the occupation forces after the war. Elfriede spoke German around the home, so Ray did too. When Steve started school, he knew more German than English and suffered for it. “Kids made fun of me,” he would say, “because I was a slow learner, because I was hyperactive, because of a lot of things.”
In eighth grade, he found he could run well. All it took was being able to stand the discomfort of effort. His need to measure up, in the elemental ways demanded by his Oregon logging town and port, turned into a need to surpass. As a sophomore, he finished sixth in the state cross-country race, but not before wildly trying to steal the race from the favorites with a quarter-mile to go. Earlier, he’d announced to his folks that he was going to the Olympics some day. He knew it. He could feel it.
His mother, who’d grown up in a Nazi Germany where the last thing you wanted to do was stand out, blanched and ordered him to never talk that way again. She insisted that he was an ordinary little boy. His father gently, gradually explained to Elfriede that the great thing about this country was that it was okay to dream big, but some part of Elfriede never absorbed that. Later, when her son enumerated the errors of the AAU for eager reporters, it would gall and mystify her. Plenty of other people had the same problems. Why couldn’t they be the ones who stood up and exposed themselves to authority’s eye?
In fact, Pre’s bluntness was pardoned by anyone who grasped how good he was. In his senior year, all boasts were quickly followed by proof. He broke the national high school two-mile record by seven seconds with 8:41.5. He was getting close to Kvalheim fast. But even though Dellinger came to watch many of his races and McClure was nudging him toward Oregon (and was training him with workouts that Bowerman had suggested), Prefontaine wasn’t getting from Bowerman himself anything like the recruiting pressure he was getting from a hundred other schools. Finally, though, Bill wrote him a letter.
It was a handwritten note. “I could barely read it,” Pre would recall. “It said if I chose to run at the University of Oregon, he had every confidence I could become the greatest runner in the world.” Pre signed on. Then he and McClure hopped on a plane to Miami for the 1969 National AAU meet.
That’s where I met him, the night before his three-mile. Having been drafted and temporarily assigned to the Army track team, I’d finished third behind Jack Bacheler and Juan Martinez in the six-mile and qualified for the US team going to Europe. Afterward, I’d gone to talk to the feather-footed guy in a Yale uniform whom I’d sat on all the way and outkicked with a violent, 26-second last 200. “Sorry about that,” I said. “If I didn’t make the team, it was infantry training and ’Nam for me.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Frank Shorter, “Why didn’t you say something? We could have worked it out. You didn’t have to kill yourself like that.” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Another commenced that evening, when Walt McClure hailed me in the cafeteria and introduced Steve Prefontaine, who seemed properly abashed to be dining in the company of Olympians. I said I’d heard great things about him and that Jerry Uhrhammer, the Eugene Register-Guard sports editor, had commissioned me as a stringer to file a story on the meet, so what were his hopes? “That I survive this heat,” he said.
The three-mile was run in ninety degrees and eighty percent humidity. Lindgren and Tracy Smith ran away early and dueled to the line. Smith barely took it, though both were timed in 13:18.4. Pre began strongly but fell back to seventh with a mile to go. He looked doughy and white, not the kind of body to endure these conditions. But then he started passing people on sheer will and drove in fourth, in 13:43.0. Since Martinez in third was Mexican, Pre had made the national team.
“So,” he asked the next day, “whadja write?”
I showed him: “Today, America’s two best three-milers battled it out to the line, then turned and watched the future racing up at them.” He kept that clipping in his wallet for a while.
I knew about his wallet because we were roommates on the European tour. One discussion in a hotel in Stuttgart, Germany, was so delicious I entered it in my notebook. Pre, Lindgren, Shorter, and I shared a single messy hotel room. For the sake of team relations (and in my case, atonement), we agreed to listen to steeplechaser Bob Price’s Campus Crusade for Christ presentation. We were all there except Pre when Price came to the room and distributed little booklets. Page one showed how The Fall estranged man from God.
Lindgren held up a timid little hand. “Have I got this straight?” he asked. “Adam and Eve didn’t know right from wrong until after they ate the apple?”
“Right,” said Price. “The Bible says, ‘and then they were ashamed.’”
“Okay, well, so how fair was that of God?”
“It was fair. God had told them not to eat it. They disobeyed.”
“But they didn’t know right from wrong yet. They didn’t know they’d be ashamed until they were ashamed. It seems like blaming a puppy. You’d think He’d give them another chance, after they could feel shame.”
“And God cut us off over that?” asked Shorter, who was in law school.
“Cast us out of the garden. And it’s our job to repent and take Jesus into our hearts to get back, get right with God.”
“It sounds more like God has to get right with us,” said Lindgren.
“With us? Why?”
“He made generations suffer for our sinful nature when we didn’t have a sinful nature. We had an ignorant nature. Wouldn’t you give a puppy a second chance to learn? We deserve another chance!”
“You know what this was?” said Shorter. “Entrapment. Any fair-minded court . . . ”
“Another chance!” said Lindgren. He began to chant. “Another chance!”
Price was saved by Pre, who burst into the room and started rummaging through his clothes.
“Steve, hey, you made it!” said Price, “We’re talking about the most important things in eterni . . . ”
“Bob, Bob, you’re absolutely right,” said Pre. “I know, I agree, and I promise I’ll sit and listen, I will, I will, but not right now . . . ” He found his wallet and checked his cash. “The hoods back in Coos Bay asked for switchblades and I found some great ones!” He ran out.
The silence was finally broken by Shorter. “Now, Bob,” he said ever so gently, “remember when you talk to the kid about Jesus, he’s going to be armed.”
Prefontaine occasionally evinced a tough hoodlum front, implying that but for the grace of finding running he’d have been back dragging the Gut in his lowered Chevy with proto-gangsters. But he was so far from being a delinquent when I met him that I think it was simply a handy façade that
let him reach out to hardworking friends and fans and be a riveting counselor of truly at-risk kids. He wasn’t running to compensate for his upbringing or some gnawing inner failing. He may have begun that way, but ultimately it was wrong to think of him as running from anything. He was burning his abundant energy in the expressive art of all-out racing, driven by the innocent desire to be better and better and better still. He was running for something.
In the Western Hemisphere vs. Europe 5000 meters, he hung with Lindgren and East Germany’s Jürgen May until the last two laps and clocked his best time to date, 13:52.8. We went on to Augsburg for the West German dual. Pre led all the way to the last turn, where the cadaverous Harald Norpoth exploded around him and won effortlessly.
Pre was mad from the instant he crossed the line. On the victory stand, while receiving their medals and pewter cups, Pre got into Norpoth’s face. “I think it’s chickenshit,” he hissed, “for an old guy like you to let a little kid do all the work and humiliate him in the end.” The crowd saw he was hot and started to jeer. Norpoth replied eloquently without a word, lifting his gold medal to the crowd and then holding it right under Pre’s nose. This was a dual meet and the win was the thing, not politesse.
Six weeks later, Pre drove his light blue, jacked-up ’56 Chevy the 108 miles up the Umpqua River from Coos Bay to Eugene to register at Oregon. He soon met a freshman classmate, then-javelin-thrower Mac Wilkins. Together, they strolled into Bill Dellinger’s office to say hello and find out the time of the annual welcoming picnic at the Bowerman home.
Wilkins’s intelligence shone from intense, inquiring eyes. If he did not always respect everyone he met, he hid it well. His demeanor away from a throwing circle or runway was always politely restrained. As Dellinger welcomed them and gave them material on academic requirements and class schedules, Wilkins spotted a glass-framed photo on the wall and realized what it was. “Wow,” he said softly.
Dellinger saw where he was looking. “My finest hour,” he said. “Tokyo, on the victory stand.”
Pre went over, peered at Bob Schul hung with gold and Bill Dellinger hung with bronze, and started stabbing his finger at the picture. Wilkins thought he was going to break the glass. “That’s the guy!” Pre yelled. “That’s the chickenshit guy who sat on me in Germany!”
Wearing silver, of course, was Harald Norpoth, whom Pre by now had sworn to hunt down and defeat. “He’s a smart runner,” said Dellinger. “In fact, I like to think that picture is of the three smartest guys in the race. We didn’t chase after Clarke when he tried to surge away, and we didn’t try kicking from 400 out like crazy Jazy.”
“I would have run like Clarke,” Pre announced with conviction that carried down the hall. “I would have made it hard all the way!”
“Notice,” said Dellinger, “Clarke isn’t in that picture. Clarke got eighth.”
Later, Bowerman asked Dellinger what all the excitement had been about. Dellinger sketched the scene. “Ah, with the talent,” Bowerman sighed, “comes the temperament.” He sighed that occasionally over the years, but more often in the Prefontaine era. The exchange in Dellinger’s office had been Pre’s first salvo in a debate over front-running.
That week, after an orientation run through Hendricks Park with some upperclassmen, Pre went with them to the sauna, where they discovered Bowerman already there. Still coming off his trip to Europe, Pre told how the AAU’s Dan Ferris had put the US team in an unsanitary hole of a hotel in Augsburg, Germany, while Ferris himself lived high on the hog across town. As Pre was getting worked up, Bowerman stood as if he was leaving, but then sat down right next to him, covering his key ring with his towel. Many eyes noted the keys. Many glances were exchanged.
“Apropos of the AAU,” Bill said, “I’m sorry to tell you that the USOC has again refused to recognize the NCAA-backed Track and Field Federation. The AAU is still our governing body. I don’t know how those old men figure to keep from stagnating if they don’t let in new blood.” He stood again. “It’s understandable,” he said. “They’re crotchety old men, those kings of Olympic House. They don’t want to change. It hurts to change.”
Bill slapped his keys on the inside of Pre’s thigh. “Doesn’t it hurt to change?” he asked in his merry way, pressing down as the heated brass did its work.
“Sometimes it hurts more,” Pre finally shouted, “just to sit and take it!”
Bill hadn’t expected this. As he went out the door, the others could see he was impressed. Pre, inspecting the welt, came to a realization. He turned on everyone there. “Oh, you fuckers!” he yelled. “You didn’t warn me! What kind of teammates are you? You set me up!”
“Welcome to Oregon,” someone said, when the hysterics had at least died down enough.
It apparently was a few days before Pre could feel it an honor.
Having both Dellinger and Prefontaine there that fall made for a change in the stress put upon cross-country. The Bowerman philosophy had always been that it was great to run over autumnal landscapes, but only insofar as it made you better at running over a vernal landscape, the track. The fall atmosphere was meant to be one of renewal and going back to basics, and for many years Bill didn’t want to compromise the restorative nature of such training by peaking for major cross-country races. In his first dozen seasons, even though Dellinger and others had dominated Pacific Coast Conference meets, Bowerman had never sent a team to the NCAA cross-country championships. But in 1961, under Sam Bell, Oregon State did. Dale Story won the (then four-mile) individual race and the Beavers took the team title.
Spurred by OSU’s success, Bill entered us in the nationals for the next three years. In 1963 and 1964 we finished second, to San Jose State and Western Michigan, respectively. The next year, the NCAA went to a six-mile distance over brutally undulant cornfields at the University of Kansas. Five of us were running strongly and thought sure we were ready to conquer. But some inexplicable weakening agent seeped into us all. Lindgren won, Western Michigan took the team with 81, and we were eighth with 229. Bowerman was so dismayed, and so concerned about the damage that repeated six-mile races can do to milers, that he didn’t send a team to the nationals again for three years.
That all changed with Pre, and with Dellinger there to devote full-time to preparing the squad. Prefontaine and Lindgren, who had one season of cross-country eligibility left at WSU, produced three great races in 1969.
In the Northern Division, in Corvallis’s Avery Park, Pre wore spikes and Lindgren flats. Pre won by getting away over the trail’s sloppy turns and just holding on. They both wore spikes in the six-mile Pac-8 race on the Stanford Golf Course. Pre ripped off a 4:23 first mile. “We were never more than eight yards apart the whole race,” Lindgren would say. “I’d try to shake him, and then he’d try to shake me. Neither of us could.” They were still banging shoulders when they hit the line. Lindgren had won it, but they warmed down together, brothers in effort.
Race number three was the NCAA meet in New York City’s Van Cortland Park. Lindgren and Air Force’s Mike Ryan broke away from Pre in mid-race and consigned him to third place. Texas-El Paso won with 74, and Pre led an all-miler Oregon team of Mike McClendon, Roscoe Divine, Tom Morrow, and Terry Dooley to third in the team race with 111. “I don’t know what happened,” Pre said afterward. “I like a fast pace, but I just wasn’t right today.” Bowerman knew: “People don’t appreciate how much a hard six-mile takes out of you, and that was his third that fall. The young man is eighteen. Mr. Lindgren is twenty-three.”
As Pre and Bill assessed one another, Bill, for one, noted similarities. Both were from small towns. Both were blunt. Bowerman sometimes called Pre “Rube” for his hopeless candor, but did so with a wink because it applied to him too. “Or at least it did before I grew old and crafty,” he said later.
How do you handle a hardheaded man? At their first goal-setting session, Prefontaine announced that it was great that Bill was the finest coach of milers, because that was the race he wanted to ultimate
ly rule. Bowerman asked how fast he hoped to run. Pre said, “Three forty-eight.”
Knowing that the record was 3:51.1, Bowerman kept his counsel, noting only that 3:48 was 57 pace. But over the wet winter and spring of 1970, he observed that whereas Pre was hugely gifted over longer distances and capable of fully recovering from most workouts with a single night’s sleep (no extra easy days for him), he didn’t have anything like the foot speed of a Divine or a Ryun. Speed, unlike stamina, can be improved only so much by training. Pre would never quite crack 50 seconds for a quarter-mile.
“But that winter,” Bill recalled years afterward, “all he wanted to do was train for the mile, run the mile. It got to where on our spring trip to Fresno, when I put him in the two-mile, he didn’t want to run it. ‘I’m not a two-miler,’ he said, ‘I’m a miler.’ I suggested that he might want to give some thought to which university he’d be running for if he didn’t try this particular two-mile because it wouldn’t be ours.”
At that, Pre had turned and run out of the room. In fifteen minutes he was back. He said, “Okay. Fine. Got it,” and won the two-mile in 8:40.0. After that one quick test of the waters, Pre never seriously defied Bowerman again.
In April 1970, running all alone in the WSU dual-meet three-mile, Prefontaine clocked 13:12.8, the fastest by an American in two years. He was a natural three-miler, and so good that any immediate concern about his kick was rendered ludicrous by the pace he could sustain. “The man was designed,” Bill grinned many years later, “to run away with things.”
Psychologically, Pre could not have been more opposed to the Burleson tradition of wait and kick. His bounding energy seemed to make it impossible to do other than drive hard all the way. His model in this was Australia’s Ron Clarke, who broke seventeen world records between 1963 and 1970. The greatest was his 27:39.4 for the 10,000 in 1965, which hacked 34 seconds from the previous mark. Pre’s favorite article of mine was a 1972 profile of Clarke for Sports Illustrated. In part, it read:
