by Kenny Moore
Ron Clarke was a front runner, yet not in the classic mold of an athlete who has no finishing kick and therefore must set a hard pace out of desperation. When he followed instead of leading, he out-sprinted such fast finishers as Kip Keino and Harald Norpoth. Shunning expediency, Ron Clarke was a front runner out of principle. He accepted each of his races as a complete test, an obligation to run himself blind.
“The single most horrible thing that can happen to a runner is to be beaten in the stretch when he is still fresh,” Clarke said. “No matter who I was racing, I tried to force myself to the limit over the whole distance. It makes me sick to see a superior runner wait behind the field until 200 meters to go, and then sprint away. That is immoral. It’s both an insult to the other runners and a denigration of his own ability.”
(Some will wonder whether Dyrol Burleson, who never raced any other way, ever met Clarke in a dark alley. I have no idea, but I do know that Burley and Prefontaine never seriously discussed their defining tactics, which was fortunate.)
. . . Among distance runners, who understand something of what Clarke attempted, will be found his most thoughtful judges.
In 1966, Clarke spent a week in Prague with Emil Zátopek, who at that time was not yet cast into official disgrace for having supported the liberal Dubcek government. Clarke retains the whole of that week in softly gilded memory. He speaks of his boyhood hero’s grace, his standing in the eyes of his countrymen, his unabated fitness and energy. As Clarke departed, Zátopek accompanied him through customs and, in violation of regulations, onto the plane itself.
“He stood by me and then slipped a little box into my pocket. He seemed embarrassed and clearly didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done. For a moment I wondered what I was smuggling out for him. Later, when the plane was in the air, I unwrapped it.”
The memento that dropped into his palm, inscribed, “To Ron Clarke, July 19, 1966,” was Zátopek’s Olympic gold medal from the 10,000 meters in Helsinki.
“Not out of friendship,” Zátopek had whispered to Clarke as he turned to go, “but because you deserve it.”
Pre got chills reading that, he said, because it gave words to the front-runner’s creed. He also liked the article because I quoted him on the ordeal of the leader:
The follower has only to match the leader’s pace. He enjoys a comparative calm in which he can relax and conserve his emotional energy for a final, unanswerable assault. Given these realities, few men running at the head of a pack can avoid the feeling of sacrifice. Steve Prefontaine, explaining the savagery of his bursts to break contact with his followers, said, “I hate to have people back there sucking on me.”
In the fury of that hatred, in the success of that breaking away, Pre had brought something unprecedented to the Bowerman stable. Bowerman himself would have to come to terms with it.
By June 1970, Pre had gotten his mile down to 4:00.4, and it was time. The occasion, as it had been for so many before, was the Twilight Meet. Dave Wilborn arrived for battle in good shape. Roscoe Divine, now a senior in his last home meet in the lemon and green, had been running sub-4:00s almost routinely in dual meets. It didn’t sit all that well with Divine that a self-absorbed kid who wasn’t a true miler was the focus of attention in his event. As he warmed up, he recalled being tempted to run away from him on the beach. Maybe it was time to conduct a little demonstration.
The early pace was modest, 2:01 at the half. Pre surged into the lead and the crowd came up with him. The time was 3:00 with a lap to go. Divine was fifteen yards back in fourth, in 3:02. The cheers down the last backstretch were of two orders, first, the jubilation that Pre was obviously strong, was obviously going to go well under, and then the involuntary “OOOOHHs” as Roscoe caught up and rocketed past him on the turn. Pre ran his last lap in 57 and finished in 3:57.4. Roscoe ran his in 54 and won by eight yards in 3:56.3.
The race showed both how fast Pre was improving and how prodigious was Divine’s ability. In a fairer world, it would have heralded great races to come for both of them. But as Roscoe trotted his victory lap with Pre, their mile pecking order now firmly established, he was aware of a faint stiffness above one heel. It would worsen. Due to the hard new urethane track put in the year before, he had partially torn a few strands of an Achilles tendon. He would undergo two operations to repair it over the next three years, but would never race well again.
The 1970 NCAA Championships were at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Three days before the three-mile final, Prefontaine was relaxing, playing around the motel pool with teammates, when his bare right foot struck an unprotected bolt that had been left sticking up after cement work around the diving board. He came away with a gash between his first two toes that took a dozen stitches to close.
The semifinals were the next day. “He was absolutely incapable of running,” Dellinger would remember. “He’d never have made the final. There was one hope. If sixteen or fewer three-milers showed up for the semis, they’d be cancelled and everyone advanced to the final, and he’d have two days to try to recover.”
But rumor of the wound had spread, to potential ruin. “If the coaches of the other three-milers had known how bad it was,” Bowerman would recall, “they’d have poured their guys into the race until there were more than sixteen, and that would’ve forced semis to be run and Pre would’ve been cooked. So it called for a little thespianism.”
Half an hour before the semifinal, Pre put on racing shorts and shirt in his room, did some pushups to work up a sweat, was driven to the meet by Dellinger, walked gingerly into the warm-up area, checked in, and sat down in the clerk’s circle, spikes at the ready, exuding twitchy Prefontaine eagerness. “Several contenders looked at him and jogged right on by, convinced he was good to go,” Bowerman would remember. “They went to the mile or six-mile instead. And so there were only fifteen declared entrants. He got his two days.”
Pre spent them with his foot packed in ice.
In the final, foot wrapped as tightly as Bowerman could pull on the tape, Pre ran without a hint of impairment. This too was great acting. He led, but made no effort to break away, each stride being one into the unknown. With two laps to go, two tough men, Minnesota’s Gary Bjorklund and Villanova’s Dick Buerkle, challenged. Prefontaine reacted instinctively, refusing to let them pass. He ran two 60s in a row to keep them back, winning in 13:22.0.
“There’s nothing like a little discomfort here,” he said, pounding his chest, “to take your mind off a little somewhere else. But I haven’t looked at it yet. I’m scared to look at it.”
When he did, in the shower (with Bill right there, because his great fear was that by running Pre would split the flesh between those toes), it was no worse. The 10 points for his win lifted Oregon into a 35-all tie with Brigham Young University and Kansas. It was Bill Bowerman’s fourth national team title.
The subsequent week was a true test for Prefontaine. He could only jog lightly in preparation for the 1970 National AAU meet in Bakersfield, the qualifier for the US squad going to Europe. I was running there as well, in my second year on the Army track team, as was a transformed Jere Van Dyk, who had qualified for the mile. Jere, who thought of Pre as a younger brother, invited him into his room to wait out the 108-degree day before their evening races.
In the last two years, Jere had dealt with the distress of not making the 1968 Olympic team by first seeking the cultural offerings of Paris. But then, like a character out of Lawrence Durrell, he kept right on searching. “After France,” he would say, “I hitchhiked to the Mediterranean. In Spain, I looked across the water and thought of North Africa. Wanting adventure and to escape the West and my failures as an athlete, I took an old boat across to Morocco. There I discovered the world of Islam, and felt God calling me into the desert, God who would make me strong enough to be a great runner, the runner I knew I could be.” In the final months of 1968, Van Dyk hitchhiked across North Africa, sometimes subsisting on orange peels.
He went all the way
to Turkey. “In the Istanbul youth hostel,” he would recall, “I met a beautiful Israeli woman, and changed my plans.” They headed for India in an old Volkswagen. But then Jere got word from his father that his draft notice had arrived. “I liked America and felt she had given me a great deal,” he would say, “especially when I saw so much poverty on my trip. I turned around at the Iranian border, hugged Susan good-bye, and went home and into the Army.”
Van Dyk did basic training at Ft. Lewis, near Olympia, Washington, where 50,000 troops per eight-week cycle were being trained for Vietnam. After a few contracted spinal meningitis, the Army issued pain-of-death orders that trainees were not to mix beyond 150-man companies. Ropes and cables had been strung up everywhere to keep companies separate on the streets. No group could enter a barbershop or lecture hall until all others had left.
One snowy night in early 1969, I was a melancholy squad leader, four weeks into basic training, marching my men past the Post Exchange, when I saw a familiar profile among a squad coming out. I shouted, he turned, and the intervening ropes meant nothing. We reached each other and hugged like bears in the snow, a Dr. Zhivago reunion, while our screeching sergeants tried to separate us and, failing, started hitting us and ordering our squads to drag us apart, doing everything but drawing their .45s. I remember us, our hats torn off, laughing at each other’s scabbed, shorn heads. For some reason, they didn’t throw us in the stockade. Well, I know the reason. We were jocks.
Because of that, Jere and I, along with Neal Steinhauer, Bill Norris, Les Tipton, and Mike Deibele, were all assigned to the Army track team, whose members gathered every March at heavenly Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro, California. Ft. MacArthur had a thick, parade-ground lawn for morning runs and a marina next door. We awoke to the sight of date palms and the sound of clinking sailboat masts. We were loosely coached by an old friend of Bowerman’s, retired Oklahoma State coach Ralph Higgins (whom Steinhauer dubbed Cold Chicken “because that’s what he sounded like on the phone! ‘Hello, this is Col’ Chiggennnn.’”). Olympians Charlie Greene, Mel Pender, Tracy Smith, Bob Day, and Tom Von Ruden were assigned to the team, too.
Coach Higgins had a single motivating sentence, the truth of which awoke you at 3 a.m.: “It’s later than you think!” He was talking about the cutoff dates for making the qualifying marks for the AAU or Interservice meets. If we failed, we went back to our Army units. If we made those marks, we remained on TDY—temporary duty—until we had competed in those two June meets. If we then made the US national team at the AAU meet, Army Regulation 635-10 said our unit, wherever it was in the world, had to give us time off to join it. While half a million Americans were under fire in-country, we were running footraces in France and Norway. In the parlance of the barracks, we had it dicked, man.
The effect of being in heaven and not wanting to descend to the inferno was that a lot of people did very well, especially Jere Van Dyk, who built such strength by 1970 that he became a dangerous miler, especially kicking off a slow pace. Thus he had qualified for the Bakersfield AAU mile, and had invited Pre in to relax and wait.
In that mile, the pace was slow and the pack rough. Howell Michael’s 4:01.8 won from the 4:02.1 of South Africa’s Peter Kaal. The crucial, team-making third and fourth places went to Marty Liquori (4:02.4) and Jere Van Dyk (4:02.5). Bakersfield showed what Frank Shorter had become. A year before, just out of Yale, he’d scraped onto the AAU team and not broken 28:00 for six miles. In the Bakersfield six-mile, he displayed the results of nine months’ training with Jack Bacheler in Gainesville. He and Jack tied for first—holding hands, which infuriated AAU officials—in 27:24.0. Gary Bjorklund was third in 27:30.8, I was fourth in 27:54.4, and Gerry Lindgren was fifth in 28:05.0.
In the three-mile, Pre led into the last lap, but his post-wound lack of training caught up with him as Shorter (13:24.2), Rick Riley (13:24.4), Lindgren (13:25.0), and Bacheler (13:25.4) all outkicked his 13:26.0. He was worried that fifth place wouldn’t make the team, but Bacheler was getting his entomology PhD and couldn’t go. Because so many people had doubled, the head coach, the inestimable Dr. Leroy Walker of North Carolina Central, simply took the top five in both distances.
Three major dual meets were scheduled for that summer, against France in Paris, Germany in Stuttgart and the big one, the USSR in Leningrad. First stop was Paris, where we arrived at the Claridge Hotel on the Champs-Elysée at four in the morning. Paris being a city of some light, Van Dyk led us on a memorable run around the boulevards, arches, ponts, and iles.
Prefontaine, who was still finding his training legs and wanted to be sharp for Stuttgart, didn’t compete in Paris. Gary Bjorklund and I did, in the 10,000 against Noël Tijou and René Jourdan, who’d been fifth and sixth in the World Cross-Country meet and so were vastly favored. Frank Shorter’s French let us decipher L’Équipe, the French sports daily, in which track expert Robert Pariente, whom we’d met, had written, “The improving young Bjorklund might be tough but Moore is a marathoner and therefore has vitesse limitée [limited speed].”
Tijou and Jourdan, perhaps having read that too, led all the way but didn’t set a hard enough pace to get rid of Gary and me before the last lap. I kicked past them with a 26.5 last 200 and won in 28:47.6. The fates arranged that as I coasted to a stop, who should I see by the side of the track but Robert Pariente.
“Vitesse limitée enough for you, pal?” I panted.
“Mon dieu!” he moaned. “I have let down my countrymen!”
Years later, recalling Prefontaine during that week in Paris, Van Dyk said, “To me, there was always a kindness in him, a gentleness. He ran hard and was tough, but only on the track. He did not go around with a chip on his shoulder. He seemed relaxed without a great need to prove himself. Maybe I am idealizing him.”
No, that was the nineteen-year-old Pre all right, at least whenever he wasn’t racing Harald Norpoth. A few days later in Stuttgart he was doing just that, and I had a great vantage point because it was also my first race with Pre. I was tired from the Paris 10,000 and had to run another in Leningrad, so Coach Walker gave me a break and put me in the 5000. My tactical orders were to beat the second-best German, Werner Girke, for third place’s 2 points, which I did.
Again, Pre led all the way. Again, the twenty-six-year-old Norpoth took off with 200 to go and won by thirty-five yards, 13:34.6 to 13:39.6. Again on the victory stand, Prefontaine growled, “Chickenshit then, chickenshit now, chickenshit forever,” but Norpoth, who spoke accent-free English, pretended not to hear. After that, whenever Pre came home and talked about how he couldn’t rest until the Europeans were truly beaten, we all knew he didn’t mean the Europeans. He meant Norpoth.
If the German meet was personal for Pre, the Soviet-American one was public service for the entire US team. The Cold War was bitter in 1970, the second year of the Nixon administration, the sixth of Vietnam. We flew to Leningrad from Helsinki in a terrifying Aeroflot jet that never seemed to get above the treetops. Before we were allowed to disembark, armed guards came on with burlap sacks, into which we threw our passports as we filed out. Seventeen-year-old 1500-meter runner Francie Larrieu missed the sack with hers and they screamed at us to freeze until it was found. We saw that these perfectly uniformed, machine-gun-carrying soldiers, who had to be the most highly trained in their service, were sweating with fear. What monsters had they been told we were?
We were made to stay in the crumbling Sputnik Hotel outside of the city, the better to demoralize us. That was redundant. As Grelle, Burley, and Dellinger had tried to explain over the years, when you walk into an arena jammed with 65,000 malevolent Russians, as Lenin Stadium was that wet July weekend, you are oppressed by the gravity of the occasion. When their new sprinter, Valery Borzov, beat Ivory Crockett in the 100, the baritone delirium that followed let us know we were among enemies.
In the 5000, Prefontaine ran strongly, but was outkicked by Rashid Sharafyetdinov. He held second in 13:49.4. The track was gritty black. “That track,” Pre said, “is
a hard road.” It was supposed to have some rubber mixed in with the asphalt, but you couldn’t feel it.
Upon that road, Shorter and I faced Leonid Mikityenko and Leonid Ivanov in the 10,000, a distance at which the Soviets had never lost to Americans on Russian soil. Frank responded by running a race for the ages. Expressionless in his focus, he began with 66s, passing the mile in 4:25, world record pace. I let him go and found a tempo I could carry, 70s. But Mikityenko and Ivanov had no such luxury. The honor of Mother Russia demanded that they stay close. And they did for 21⁄2 miles, but then Frank glided away, running with a light, driving precision, passing 5000 meters in 13:55, a stunning pace, one held before only by Ron Clarke.
When the crowd—that great, educated Russian crowd—heard his split time, it came to its feet and thundered. Its love of track overcame love of country. It switched sides to roar Frank toward a record. At that moment, we both felt a weight lifted from our shoulders. I’d been laboring in fourth, a half-lap behind, but when the ill will evaporated, I felt free to run again. I caught Ivanov and set out for Mikityenko, who was dying ahead.
Frank was so gripped by the crowd’s urging that he tried too hard to hold record pace. He would have destroyed Billy Mills’s American standard of 27:17, but got a side stitch in the last mile and had to ease. He won in 28:22.8. I just made it around Mikityenko on the last turn to take second in 28:50.4. We not only beat them, we swept them.
As we four 10,000 guys did a weary victory lap, the sky over our heads filled with hundreds of hand grenades, flying end over end, lobbed from the crowd. They were cellophane-wrapped roses.
Everything had changed. What Frank had done was the single most dramatic example of sport catalyzing understanding I have ever witnessed. He was Van Cliburn making them cry with their own Tchaikovsky. His turning a stadium of indoctrinated Soviet citizens into 65,000 singing supporters should have let us see that the Cold War couldn’t last forever. Eventually our two great peoples would get past our blood feud over whether central planning or the free market is better at distributing goods and services.
