by Kenny Moore
By a vote of thirty-nine to six, the committee awarded the Trials to Eugene. The athletes that Bill would be taking to Munich would select themselves at Hayward Field over eight days in July 1972. “Newland and Rau returned home,” Landers would say, “with expansive smiles and nervous stomachs. There was work to do.”
Bill Dellinger races at Hayward Field in 1960. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
Otis Davis levitates upon learning he has won the Rome Olympic 400-meter dash in a world record 44.9, in 1960. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
“Peering out under their eyebrows” Jerry Tarr (right) and Mel Renfro place first and second in the 120-yard high hurdles at the NCAA Championships, June 16, 1962. © PHIL WOLCOTT, JR., EUGENE REGISTER GUARD
Bill shows off his pool of runners for the 1962 attack on the four-mile relay world record: From left, Bowerman, Clayton Steinke, Dyrol Burleson, Archie San Romani, Keith Forman, Vic Reeve, Sig Ohlemann, and Mike Lehner. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill counsels shot putter Dave Steen in 1962. © UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES
Robin and John Jaqua (left) became Barbara and Bill Bowerman’s neighbors in the early 1950s, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. © NIKE ARCHIVES
For a promotional photo taken on the Bowerman hillside in 1964, Bill leads a crowd of joggers that includes Barbara Bowerman and Robin Jaqua (far left). © UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES
With 600 yards to go, Bill Dellinger (USA) takes the lead en route to winning the bronze medal in the 1964 Olympic 5000 meters. From right, Ron Clarke, Michel Jazy, silver medalist Harald Norpoth, gold medalist Bob Schul, and Kip Keino. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
The 1966 team gathers around injured Bob Woodell at the Twilight Meet Bowerman arranged to help with his medical expenses. © UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES
The 1968 high-altitude training camp rises above South Lake Tahoe, California. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bowerman slips in a word (top) before releasing Steve Prefontaine to run his first sub-four-minute mile in May 1970. Afterward, Pre grabs Bill’s arm to press home his thanks. Both photos © JAMES DRAKE, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
“There’s not a picture where they’re not asking, ‘Who’s boss here?’”
Bill whittles excess rubber from waffle shoe sole in about 1972. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
A mustachioed Steve Prefontaine grins in Bill Dellinger’s favorite photo of himself with Pre, taken in 1973. Collection of BILL DELLINGER
Barbara Bowerman, Phil Knight, Bill Bowerman, and Penny Knight with the two Knight sons, Travis and Matt, relax after a Nike strategy session in the mid-1970s. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill and Bill Cosby clown around at the Penn Relays in April 1993. Photo by JIM SHEA
Bill and Phil Knight cackle on the balcony of the Bowerman Building, circa 1994. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Former Oregon Athletic Director Len Casanova (left) pays a call on the Tuesday Ad Hoc Group lunch in 1997. Photo by KENNY MOORE
Bill and Arthur Lydiard on their last visit, in Eugene in 1997. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill and director Robert Towne plan the film Without Limits on the Bowerman deck in 1996. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bill and coproducer Tom Cruise at the movie’s opening in Eugene in 1998. Photo by JACK LIU
Bowerman expounds on the merits of his Dexter herd. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Bowerman feeds his sheep. Photo by BRIAN LANKER
The Bowerman sons—Tom, Jay, and Jon—gather with their parents on Jon’s ranch in July 1995. Collection of BARBARA BOWERMAN
Barbara and Bill were sweethearts for seventy years. Photo by BRIAN LANKER
Bill Bowerman, 1911–1999 Photo by BRIAN LANKER
CHAPTER 24
BRS Becomes Nike
EUGENE’S PITCH FOR THE 1972 TRIALS WAS GREATLY ENHANCED BY BEING ABLE to claim one of the fastest tracks in the land. The eruption of world records on the Tahoe and Mexico City Tartan tracks in 1968 had finally convinced Bowerman to improve on Oregon’s cinders. He approached the Donald M. Stevenson lumber family of Stevenson, Washington, and listed the virtues of artificial surfaces. They asked how much these cost. “Well,” Bill said, “as with automobiles, there’s a range.” A Ford was rubber asphalt for $40,000 or $50,000. A Cadillac was the Olympic track—3M’s Tartan—at $125,000. The Stevensons hung up.
“But they called back the next day,” Bowerman would recall, “and said, ‘Get the Cadillac.’”
He spent Cadillac money but decided against Tartan. He felt it was slipperier when wet than the urethane track of a company named Pro-Turf. Installation of Pro-Turf’s liquid urethane over an underlying asphalt base was tricky, though. That base had to be level as a pond. Bowerman went to a friend, Eugene Sand and Gravel Company owner John Alltucker, who had certified Oregon’s rings, approaches, pits, barriers, and runways for the NCAA and AAU meets. Alltucker came in with his crew and instruments and, as Bill would say, “put a road under our urethane that was level within a quarter-inch over a quarter-mile.”
When the track was done in the summer of 1969, it was the color and abrasive texture of beach sand and let a runner stride out as confidently in a downpour as on a sunny day. Sprinters and hurdlers loved Stevenson Track’s consistency. “Every step is the same as every other step,” said the nation’s best high-hurdler, Rod Milburn. “That’s the key to hurdling.” Its first world record was the 44.5 seconds it took UCLA’s John Smith to win the 1971 AAU 440-yard dash.
But the track was hard. The disintegration of Roscoe Divine’s Achilles tendon during the 1970 Twilight Mile was not the only injury. Bill soon ordered us to train more on the cinder practice track or the inner sawdust trail or to use flats. But flats weren’t spikes, not at any appreciable speed. As Pre was fond of saying, “If you’re going to run a damn fifty-seven-second quarter, you need damn spikes. Light ones.”
So as a tongue returns to a canker sore, the Bowerman mind kept revisiting the idea of a forgiving spike, a spike with some cushion. One day, while demonstrating hurdle drills, he found himself scuffing his heel against the Pro-Turf substance. “I had a thought,” he would recall. “If I made a racing shoe with a urethane sole, I would have urethane to urethane contact. Like on like. As with fish skin in water, this would either be very good or very bad, very slippery or very grippy.” He procured a sheet of urethane, used it to sole a pair of racing uppers, put them on an unremembered sprinter, and sent him out to cruise a few turns. “Grippy or slippery?” he asked.
“Grippy. Definitely grippy.”
“So at least I knew,” Bill would say later, “that it wasn’t entirely dumb to fool around with urethane. The real question was, What sole configuration would make it grippiest?” The smooth soles he’d fashioned were not much grabbier than other flats. “But you could have some kind of pattern of grooves or ridges,” he’d say. “Should they be suction cups, or football cleats, or ripples, or what?”
Bill realized he needed a mold that he could heat. One summer Sunday morning in 1971, when Barbara was at church, his roving eye fell upon their waffle iron. He opened it and ran his fingers over its square little iron nubs. “They felt,” he recalled, “halfway between spikes and cleats.”
He absconded with the waffle iron to his shop, poured in some liquid urethane, turned on the heat—and bonded it shut. He hadn’t put in the agent to release it. In any case, he realized, he wouldn’t have gotten those little nubs. He’d have gotten a plastic waffle, with little holes for syrup and butter. No, the nubs he wanted were the reverse of a waffle.
Bill bought two more waffle irons. He replaced Barbara’s and poured plaster in the second, making a mold that would yield nubs. He took that to a friend at Oregon Rubber Company and asked that molten rubber be poured in and pressed. The mold broke. He brought another. It melted. He brought a third, one he’d had a machinist create by punching nub-sized holes with an awl, one by one, into stainless steel. It held. Finally, he was able t
o peel off an eighteen-inch-square sheet of rubber nubs.
Using the same mold at home, he made his holy grail: golden sheets of urethane nubs. At last he was able to sole some experimental shoes—but for whom? Prefontaine, Manley, and I were at the Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia. But Geoff Hollister was back from the Navy. Bill called him.
Hollister was two years my junior and had been such a promising miler at South Eugene High that Bernie Wagner had offered him a scholarship to Oregon State. There was zero chance of him going, however, because he’d grown up even more imprinted by the sight of Oregon runners than I.
He was fourteen when he first set foot on Hayward Field. It was in the summer of 1960, on an afternoon when the US national team—Otis Davis among them—was working out before that year’s Olympic training meet. Geoff gloried in the length of their leaps and throws, then collected autographs until everyone had left and he was alone with the hunched old grandstands and history. He slipped off his tennis shoes and socks, went to the starting line, and crouched there like Davis until he heard the report of a distant gun. Hollister ran a single lap as hard as he could. When he sank gasping onto the infield, his feet were burning. Hayward’s cinders had abraded them down to their oozing quick.
Hollister had just enacted a microcosm of his varsity racing career. He had genuine talent in the mile and steeplechase, but became famous for his uncontrollable starts. We, Bowerman included, would wince and turn away from his ripping yet another 59-second first lap and then crawling in with yet another 4:09 mile. If Geoff had once begun with a conservative 62 and been able to use his considerable speed late, he could have approached four minutes. He seemed a classic case of wanting it too much.
Then, in the fall of 1965, when I was a senior and he a sophomore, he seemed to mellow out, gain more command. In cross-country, he was running better and better, always in our top seven, the number we took to the nationals. The race that Bill decreed would settle the spots on the team was the Northern Division meet, in the mud of Corvallis’s Avery Park. Bowerman, knowing the going would be sloppy, made special shoes for Geoff.
The mire sucked them off twice. Geoff went back for the first. The second he left and ran on, finishing with feet almost as raw as they had been at age fourteen. He was seething. Bill himself had broken the nothing-new-in-a-big-race rule, but it was Geoff who paid. Bowerman left him off the team to the nationals in Kansas. “He wasn’t in our top seven at division,” was Bill’s entire statement.
“The reason I wasn’t in the top seven,” fumed Geoff, “was Bill’s stupid shoes!”
It made no difference that we all ran terribly at those nationals; Hollister wouldn’t let it go. For months, he avoided speaking to our coach. He came to workouts, did them, avoided Bill’s eye, and left.
In the spring, Bill cornered him. “You’re still pissed at me for leaving you off that team,” he said.
“You bet I am. What you did is hard to forgive.”
Bill paused enough to make what came next a pronouncement. “Well then,” he said, “it looks like you have a decision to make.” He walked off. Geoff either had to quit the team or return to it in spirit as well as in body. Whether he truly forgave Bowerman is known only to Geoff, but he got back on the team in all other respects. Which Bowerman noted and accepted.
The next year, 1966, Phil Knight asked Bowerman to suggest a candidate to do what Phil himself had done during the company’s early days—drive all over making Tigers known to teams and coaches, a job requiring boundless energy and morale. Bowerman said, Let me talk to Hollister.
Hollister would recall that it wasn’t too long after Bill had given him the standard lecture about not doing too many extracurricular things that he called him in and said he had another job for him, selling shoes for Buck Knight.
Hollister had never heard of Knight, but called him up. They had burgers and shakes at the Eugene Dairy Queen, for which Geoff paid because Buck seldom had cash. Knight offered him the two-dollar commission that Grelle and others were getting. But he gave Hollister the whole of Oregon for his territory. Long before Hollister graduated, he was covering the state constantly, conducting running clinics in small towns and large, where he’d throw open the trunk of his little silver Moretti and sell the Tigers that tumbled forth to bedazzled, yearning young men not unlike himself. This was a perfect use for Hollister’s native zeal. He felt part of a burgeoning mission to spread running, and the strength of that feeling made it happen.
Yet the work compromised Hollister’s own training, and no one knew that better than Bowerman. Bill seemed to have written Geoff off as a future tiger, but knew that the very emotion he struggled to control on the track would carry him through the demands of the job. As it happened, Geoff was a better fit on Knight’s team than on Bill’s.
Hollister was Blue Ribbon Sports’s third employee. The second was Phil Knight’s sister, Jeanne, who shipped orders from the Knight family home, answering the phone in Phil’s bedroom.
The first had been Jeffrey Owen Johnson, a bright, bookish romantic who grew up in Menlo Park, California, the son of an airline executive who’d begun an office-equipment company. Johnson was a middle-distance man with too little speed for the 800, so he dreamed of being a miler and two-miler, “Not that I had the strength either,” he would say, “but it seemed a more reasonable dream.”
Johnson at nineteen found himself miserable in the University of Colorado track program and looking to transfer. He applied to Oregon and Stanford and was astounded when both accepted him. He chose Stanford, but always wondered what Bowerman would have made of him. In the spring of 1962, he ran the prelims of the Stanford intramural 880. In his heat was a pale, blond, business graduate student in old Oregon shorts.
At the gun, Phil Knight led. The taller Johnson tucked in and studied him. Knight ran smartly and sprinted away from Johnson to win, 2:04 to 2:05, but Johnson felt he’d be able to take him in the final if he kicked on the backstretch. But before that final, Knight was disqualified, the rule being that anyone who had lettered in a varsity sport (as he had at Oregon) couldn’t run intramurals. Johnson won unchallenged in 2:01.
Johnson took his anthropology degree in 1964 and entered UCLA’s graduate school in that department. He took a series of jobs, doing social work for Los Angeles County and selling shoes for the Adidas distributor. Johnson was at a track meet at Occidental College, in Glendale, when he saw Knight again, and he uncharacteristically (Johnson was not the most social of souls) walked up and said hi. In the course of the conversation, Knight showed Jeff a bag of Tigers. When Jeff was convinced of their quality, Buck said, “I’m looking for guys who can help me sell them. Interested?” Johnson was, mildly, but had no time.
By early January 1965, however, Johnson was married and living in a Seal Beach apartment, with a daughter on the way. He called Knight and said, “I’m now free to do this. I’m not completely gung ho. I just haven’t anything better to do at the moment.” In February, he made his first major order, fifty-two pairs, worth $387.25. Some retailed for up to $11.95, and he got a $2.00 commission on flats, $2.25 on spikes.
He’d ordered four models, the TG-22 road training flat that would stress me unto fracture that year, the TG-23 Limber Up for cross-country, the TG-26A spikes, and the light, TG-4 road racing flat. Showing them around for the first time at a road race, Johnson took thirteen orders.
“It dawned on me that people needed these shoes,” he would say. “I was doing them a favor. Tigers weren’t as good as Adidas, but they were also not twice the money and five times as hard to get. That night I stopped worrying about selling shoes and started worrying about how to get them.” He called Knight’s office and found out there wasn’t a single pair of TG-4s left in stock. So, with absolutely no guidance from Knight, he built a customer mailing list, got BRS stationery, took out a business license, ran mail-order ads in Long Distance Log, and learned rudimentary bookkeeping. He soon had the top LA road racers, including 1960 Olympic marathoner B
obby Cons, in Tigers.
That fall, Johnson realized he couldn’t sate all of LA’s desire for shoes during cross-country season if he didn’t work full-time at it. He quit his social worker job and Knight advanced him $400 a month against commissions. It paid off. At the end of 1965, BRS’s first full year in business, the company had retailed more than $20,000 of shoes. Many of those Johnson had sold in the LA area and by mail order. Gross profit was $7,260. The company’s net was $3,240.
By 1966, Johnson was selling so many Tigers that his commissions were outstripping his advances. Johnson suggested two things to Knight, that he become BRS’s first salaried employee and that he open a retail store. “I had to,” Johnson said later, “if only to keep athletes out of my apartment twenty-four seven.” Buck agreed to both.
“Jeff was a real shoe nut,” Knight would say. “But it turned out he was also just bright as hell and really into this business, so he soon became a lot more than just the shoe peddler.”
