Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  This outbreak of common humanity, ignited by a great run, gave those of us on that field reason to hope that other such outbreaks—ignited by sport or science or art—might overcome the fear indoctrinated into those soldiers on the plane. It would be no surprise that the thing it took to first pry open Communist China was ping-pong.

  At the end of our lap, Mikityenko sat down on the grass, dug in his bag, pulled out enameled wooden toys—gifts from his kids—and handed them around. Prefontaine’s eyes were alight. “These are so Russian,” he said, “these dolls that fit inside each other.”

  “That’s Russian character,” Mikityenko said. “Many people within people, hidden.”

  “I believe that,” said Pre. “After this crowd! God, won’t it be something someday to get these out and tell our kids about this? Even though there’ll be no way to really explain.”

  Some years later, Van Dyk, who had taken second in the 1500, would remember the Leningrad meet: “I keep a picture in my bedroom of me carrying the flag at the closing ceremonies. Pre is there, back in line, looking straight ahead, his hair combed, no moustache, his eyes wide open, bright and half-smiling, happy to be alive, happy to be there, as we all were. I will always love the memory of sitting in the infield with you and Frank and Pre after that meet, talking about what we were going to do in life. There are few things that can compare to being young and healthy and a part of a team that you want to be on, and doing well, as well as you could, and being proud.”

  When I finally made it home after a summer of racing in Scandinavia, I was discharged from the Army and resumed work on an MFA in creative writing at Oregon. It was a many-layered pleasure, then, to walk up the Bowerman lane, notebook in hand, for my own goal-setting session, now that I was back in his care. When I described the events of Leningrad, he was moved. “What a man this Shorter is!” he said. “His coach at Yale, Bob Geigengack, is a great friend, but he’s never hinted Frank might be capable of this. I’m covetous of your being there when he turned that crowd. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? Boy, is that not why we do these things?”

  If you wanted to ask Bill Bowerman why he did things, then that fall of 1970 would’ve been a great time. What with coaching the national champion Oregon varsity and mulling a new shoe that might safeguard tendons such as Divine’s on Hayward Field’s new track, he had an overflowing plate. So why on earth did he accept the Lane County Republican Party’s invitation to run for the Oregon State House of Representatives?

  Was it simply a favor to politically connected friends, the bankers and mill owners who’d been telling him for years that his legacy as the son of a Republican governor and his spellbinding ways at Oregon Club lunches should be used to defend the GOP-held legislature against a rising Democratic tide? That was part of it. Many of those friends had given generously to his university. He was naturally grateful.

  And Lane County was changing. As late as the 1940s, Oregon had been called “the Vermont of the West” (when Vermont defined Republicanism) by writer and later Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger. At one point, the GOP outnumbered Democrats in the legislature by an absurd fifty-eight to two. But Lane County is huge, stretching from the Pacific to the 10,000-foot Cascades, and with the arrival of cheap Bonneville Power Authority hydroelectricity, industry came to the woods and mills, employing men who voted ever more Democratic.

  In 1954, Weyerhauser executive Robert Straub became the first Democratic Lane County Commissioner in forty years. In 1956, the father of one of my elementary-school chums, Charles O. Porter, became the first Democratic congressman in the history of the Fourth District.

  As attractive Republican candidates grew scarce, the pressure on Bowerman mounted. Finally he relented, perhaps hoping that he could coast to a win on his reputation as a problem solver and educator. The statement he prepared for the 1970 Oregon Voter’s pamphlet mentioned no desperate public need that compelled him to serve. After a short bio—he was a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and had organized the McKenzie River Protective Association in 1955 to clean up the river—he pledged to work to preserve the environment, end air and water pollution, relieve residential property taxes, and “ease tensions of student unrest.”

  Any other politician could have pushed all those causes effectively—except, perhaps, the last. Bill had seen several campus antiwar protests, including the February 1970 burning of a PE building that contained ROTC uniforms. He viewed them with a dismay that stopped well short of hysteria.

  But many others did not. Tensions on campus had already led to tragedy. In 1968, Oregon President Arthur Flemming, having exhausted, he said, his political capital, had resigned to become president of quiet little Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was replaced by a friend of the Bowermans, forty-seven-year-old Charles E. Johnson, an accounting professor and dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

  War protests had so flayed feelings across the state by that fall that when obscenities appeared on a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) flyer distributed on campus, the office of Governor Tom McCall was deluged with frenzied letters of complaint.

  McCall, in what was not his finest hour, wrote acting president Johnson, “There’s no one more fair on free speech than I, but after seeing its abuse in these and other recent instances, I’m afraid your way-out people are inviting restrictive sanctions by the Oregon legislature . . . . I plead with you to exert a measure of control so that a generally excellent campus climate is not drastically altered through an ever-gathering backlash reaction. Sincerely, Tom.”

  That would have been fine, except McCall released the letter to the press before Johnson even received it, triggering a storm of demands for Johnson to “clean up” the campus.

  Bowerman seemed to have a muddy foot in each camp. The campus problems, he told journalism professor Ken Metzler (mixing a couple of metaphors), resulted from years of “running around in so many different directions that no one, least of all the man at the head of the ship, took the time to get rid of the accumulation of manure.” But he also said Johnson’s job would be easier if “so-called friends” [presumably his own friend McCall] would quit “taking potshots and throwing rocks at the university.”

  Things escalated from there. Johnson defended the students’ right to free speech, but in that year when so many absolutely refused to grant their antagonists a shred of human feeling, he could never convince the most radical students of the strength of the backlash McCall had warned about. It was a virtually impossible job. Johnson, a perfectionist who believed in the rationality of both friend and foe, essentially consumed himself in a year of trying. He began to experience strange fugue states, coming to consciousness with torn clothes, finding he’d taken long walks of which he had no memory.

  Another Bowerman friend, speech professor Glenn Starlin, said of Johnson, “This great, good, gentle man was cast in a modern tragic mold—he cared too much. He felt too deeply. As fatigue moved in, as disappointments overshadowed his solid achievements, despair replaced hope.” On June 17, 1969, a few days after he was passed over for the permanent presidency in favor of San Jose State’s Robert Clark, Johnson drove his Volkswagen up the McKenzie highway and, likely experiencing another fugue state, drifted over the centerline on a blind turn and slammed into an oncoming log truck. Johnson was killed instantly.

  Governor McCall would be haunted by Johnson’s death, once telling a reporter that he felt as though he’d murdered him. “I think he had tremendous disillusionment when he wasn’t made the permanent president,” said McCall. “I think he’d be alive today if he’d had that vote of confidence.” It was a vote that McCall had withheld.

  These were the stakes, then, in higher education in those years. It would have been a good thing, therefore, for the University of Oregon to have Bill Bowerman in the House of Representatives to reassure members from Pendleton or Medford or Coos Bay or Fossil that the school was not in the grip of Hanoi-loving traitors. When he ran to “ease tensions,�
�� surely he was hoping to chill the lawmakers as much as the students. And surely he also ran, though he never quite said so, to pick up the fallen standard of Chuck Johnson.

  About the war itself, he and his state were similarly conflicted. Two of his heroes and friends, Senators Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield, opposed it bravely. Morse was one of only two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing war, presciently predicting a quagmire. Hatfield, who had seen the smoking, melted remains of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, never voted for a defense budget in his life. Such was the respect Oregon voters paid to independence that Hatfield was returned to Washington, DC, by greater margins each time he ran.

  Nonetheless, Bill was a decorated member of the Greatest Generation, one of the thirteen million patriots who had dropped everything to fight a just war against an immediate menace. As easy as it was for him to imagine US Army generals being arrogant and ignorant, it was hard for him to accept, in 1970, that the war was unsalvageable.

  He talked military matters with Colonel Embert Fossum, who commanded the university’s ROTC department. “Fossum was an alumnus,” Oregon Vice President Jim Shea would recall, “a big guy, craggy, the aging warrior. Actually, he was a rather sweet man with a wry sense of humor, who’d served both in World War II and Korea. I’d catch him and Bill at lunch at the student union and just listen to their warfare stories, or the japery of earlier UO days. (It was there I first heard the contradistinction between UO and OSU expressed as the difference between culture and agriculture.)

  “The good colonel’s program could be counted on as a refuge for a trackman with a shaky academic record who might otherwise be shipped to the Army and on to Vietnam. Bill always built bridges with faculty and others for the benefit of the program.”

  Bowerman felt Oregonians could disagree over the war. It was the intemperate character of the debate that he lamented. So, as his contribution, he ran for office. Unfortunately, to win he had to endure hours of panel discussions and questions on every issue from potholes to lumber prices. He tired of this in a hurry and stopped serious campaigning.

  One writer said of his campaign that he didn’t run so much as he jogged. Some felt the yellow and green colors at his booth at the county fair were a little overdone. As political reporter Mark Kirchmeier would see it, Bowerman’s coaching fame was a big asset, “but one could overplay it and he did. Voters clearly respected, even revered him as a coach, but noticed that he wasn’t taking the time to be a top drawer elected official.” The Register-Guard would endorse eight of the nine Democrats in that election. Bowerman was the only Republican. “But,” Kirchmeier would say, “about the strongest statement they could make was he was a ‘team player.’”

  Bowerman’s opponent, Leroy Owens, was a Lane Community College professor who beguiled South Eugene matrons as easily as Oakridge mill workers. “He was a good-looking, personable guy who hustled and mastered legislative issues,” Kirchmeier would recall, “and swamped the paper with letters to the editor with the tone of ‘We want more than a jockstrap at the state Capitol.’”

  Bill was a moderate Republican, not unlike his father the governor. “He was pro-education, live and let live on social issues, pro-choice,” Kirchmeier would say. On the latter topic, he would recount a memorable exchange with Bill:

  “Fall 1970, I’m visiting the UO campus and walking down the slope from Mac Court to Agate Street. I find myself walking beside legislative candidate Bowerman and I ask him, ‘Mr. Bowerman, what is your position on abortion?’ Bowerman puts his arm around me, a complete stranger, and as we walk, says, ‘You remind me of a young woman who the other day asked me that very question. So I leaned toward her and said, ‘Ma’am, do you have a problem you want to share with me?’ Bowerman shrugged and smiled, concluding, ‘I think I lost her vote.’ His backwoods, borderline bawdy playfulness was completely innocent, but nothing that any rational Republican or Democratic politician would ever try on an incendiary issue like abortion.”

  Barbara felt there were two mistakes that cost Bill the campaign. One was that, at her urging, no Bowerman signs were planted on lawns (she felt it tasteless). “The second,” she said, “was Bill’s surprised answer to a question asked at a Republican candidates’ rally. He had delivered a short, good, ‘nothing to be against’ speech when someone asked, ‘What would you do if you find you don’t like being a representative?’ He answered directly and without a sign of thinking about his purpose, ‘I’d resign.’”

  Barbara realized then that Bill had stopped caring if he won. Indeed, at some point he had confessed to Tom McCall that he didn’t think he was cut out for the politician’s life. “You can’t quit now,” McCall told him.

  It didn’t help to be a Republican when there was a recession and lots of mills were down. Also a problem was word (from a Sports Illustrated story by Pat Putnam) that Bill had once wired a quarter-stick of dynamite to his mailbox when a trucker wouldn’t stop hitting it and blew off a tire. The story, it turned out, was a typical Bowerman exaggeration. He had, in fact, booby-trapped his mailbox—with planks studded with big spikes that punctured the trucker’s tires. Yet he told Putnam the dynamite version and never corrected the matter, even when it became an election issue.

  In any event, Bowerman lost to Owens by just under a thousand votes out of 65,000 cast. It was quite possibly the first thing in his life, at age fifty-nine, that didn’t go swimmingly.

  Defeat, however, had freed Bill of his messy, good-idea-at-the-time distraction just in time. At its winter meetings, expressly rewarding his conceiving and managing the Tahoe training camp before the Mexico City Olympics, the US Olympic Track and Field Committee elected Bowerman to be the head men’s US Olympic coach for the 1972 Games in Munich. Bowerman, who was in attendance, “was speechless,” said University of Florida coach Jimmy Carnes.

  Bill had long been ambivalent about the Olympic head coaching position because for decades one wasn’t allowed the honor without acquiescence from the AAU. Back in 1961, in the midst of the push to set up the Track and Field Federation, Bill had written to Michigan’s Don Canham: “As far as I am concerned, track and field is the biggest thing and, as far as seeing the Olympic Games is concerned, my preference would be to go with my friends, be a spectator, and enjoy the thing to the full. In other words, I would prefer not to be an Olympic Coach, even though I recognize it as the greatest honor that can come to a person in track and field.”

  Now that the honor had been extended to him by his colleagues, he was sobered. He accepted it in the spirit it was offered, vowing to shepherd and train the nation’s best trackmen with even more care than he had in 1968. He mentioned how the Games’ location in Munich was a great instance of peace overcoming the horrors of war, his war. And he added that he just happened to have some friendly nationals in place and could use their local knowledge for the good of the team. Then he went home and began pouring the ideas that were crowding his mind into the closest thing Eugene had to an Olympic movement, the Oregon Track Club.

  The club almost immediately stretched its muscles by putting on the 1971 National AAU meet in Eugene and placing some new faces high among the finishers. The steeplechase showcased two, Wisconsin-born Mike Manley, who’d moved to Eugene and begun training with Bill after duty in the Marines, and Oregon senior Steve Savage, who’d run a 3:59.2 mile in the 1970 Twilight Meet. Manley’s 8:27.6 and Savage’s 8:29.6 put them second and third behind Sid Sink’s American record of 8:26.4.

  In the three-mile, Pre faced Steve Stageberg, who’d gone to South Eugene High and then to Georgetown University for its school of international relations. There, Stageberg had turned into one tough runner. Not that Pre’s crowd felt that that was an entirely good thing. “We were both from Oregon, we were both Steves, yet he was the favorite, I the outsider,” Stageberg would note, a little miffed at the one-sidedness of their introductions. “He got an ovation. I got little pitty-pats.”

  With two laps to go, Pre threw
in a 63-second lap and shook off all pursuers except Stageberg. Down the last backstretch Stageberg went wide and almost got past him. The noise was two-thirds excitement and one-third disbelief. On the last turn, Pre began to inch away and won, 12:58.6 to 13:00.4.

  Bowerman shook Stageberg’s clammy, disgusted hand. “You just gave Steve a helluva lot closer call than anyone expected,” he said.

  “I should have won,” said Stageberg. “I should have won.”

  “You’ll have your chance. I’m sure of that.”

  The 1971 AAU meet—directed by Bob Newland—was conducted flawlessly and highlighted the growing sophistication of the Oregon Track Club. Not long afterward, the club received word from the US Olympic Track and Field Committee that if it cared to bid for the 1972 Trials, it was certainly welcome to try. So in mid-August, Newland and OTC board member Bill Rau flew to a USOC meeting in New York with armfuls of brochures and letters from Oregon officials. After Seattle dropped out, the choice came down to Los Angeles or Eugene.

  LA made their presentation first. “They emphasized that they very much wanted the meet,” Newland would recall, “and would run it on a two-day schedule, as had been done through 1964, to maximize attendance and therefore USOC profits. At Tahoe, of course, Bill had insisted on the full eight-day Olympic schedule, and that had worked out very well in terms of medals won.”

  When the OTC’s turn came, Newland stood up. “Properly staged,” he said, “a track meet is a thing of beauty. We feel we can do that on a Munich eight-day schedule.”

  While Newland sketched in the proposal, pointing out that the climate and elevation of Eugene duplicated that of Munich, Bill Rau overheard the LA officials chuckling that the Eugene plan was a box-office impossibility.

  “How can interest be sustained for ten days,” they whispered, “in a meet that could be run in two?” As promotions committee chair Bill Landers would later put it, “The Los Angeles promoters could not know what Bowerman and his friends knew—the inner workings of the Oregon track fan.”