Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  We tied for first, in 2:15:58, and the understanding that Shorter described was such that no picky officials bothered to check the finish photo to see who had really won. They let the tie stand.

  Anyway, the excitement was back in third place. Bacheler took it in 2:20:30, after he and Galloway had run through thirty men. Jack got an ovation out of moral relief—everyone knew how good he was and didn’t want him to be shut out just because Jon Anderson had made it.

  The crowd that last day numbered 23,000. They had not come to see us. They were there for Pre, and they rose to him in the last mile of the 5000 final, when he broke three-time Olympian George Young with ruthless laps of 63.4, 61.5, and 58.7 and cut seven seconds from his American record with 13:22.8. His great sense of theater led him to grab a “Stop Pre” shirt (that Gerry Lindgren had been booed for warming up in) and run 69-second victory laps in it. The sight of their champion parading the arena wearing the metaphoric pelt of the vanquished foe (Lindgren didn’t make the team) made for atavistic hysteria.

  Since Mike Manley had won the steeplechase in 8:29.7 and Steve Savage took third behind Doug Brown of Tennessee, five men—half of the team’s distance runners—were Bowerman-trained.

  Four of the top seven finishers in the Trials marathon wore Nike shoes. The brand’s excellence was demonstrated, even though BRS’s first attempts to make the word lodge in memory were failures. The lowercase letters on the box looked like “Mike” to a lot of people. And the swoosh in motion was hard to tell from the Puma side stripe. Art Simburg, the Puma rep, had lovingly cajoled and paid only sprinters to wear Pumas, but from the stands the mark of this “regional brand” looked so much like his own that Simburg kept exclaiming over how well Puma was doing in the distances. Finally Knight leaned over from behind and shouted, “That’s not Puma down there. That’s a brand called Nike!”

  They wouldn’t be Trials if dreams weren’t broken. At the start of the 1500 final stood two men in the gray Club West uniform. Jim Ryun was a little self-conscious because, to minimize his exposure to Eugene’s pollen, he had warmed up miles away in clean McKenzie air and taken a helicopter to the field. But Jere Van Dyk’s unease was existential. “I felt like an outsider, no longer home. I was running on a different track, all-weather now, more modern—less pure than what we had known.” In an echo of what Archie San Romani had felt before this race eight years earlier, Van Dyk wished he had someone to talk to, to give him encouragement and tell him how to run.

  The night before, Jere had eaten in an Italian restaurant, alone with his thoughts. Dellinger had come over and told Jere he could do it, he could make the team. “I wished he were my coach,” Jere would say. “He was the only person from Oregon I felt was on my side. I felt everyone hated me, with Bowerman leading the way.” Yet Jere couldn’t summon the strength to enlist Dellinger in advising him on the spot. “I didn’t think to ask him,” he said years later. “I was too solitary. I just figured that I was on my own.”

  We who thought we knew him never suspected that Van Dyk flayed his soul like this. In the evenings he was charming; in the mornings more chastened, but we never imagined him projecting such torment on Bowerman. His words seem one long yearning for reunion. Half of him wanted to transfer the burden that God hadn’t assumed to Bowerman, to the only coach Jere could accept (otherwise he would have sought Dellinger’s help). But Bowerman was as ignorant of this as we were.

  Jere knew how good Jim Ryun was—“running with him was like running with a stallion,” he once said—but felt that if he could just hang in there, he had the speed to kick in at the end. Van Dyk’s tactic, therefore, would have to be to save that speed as long as possible. The modest pace was in Jere’s favor, and with 600 to go he was in perfect position. He just had to be patient for another 350. But as he entered that stretch, the crowd came to full voice. Deeper needs assumed control.

  Jere took the lead with 500 to go—and knew it was a mistake. “But I loved the roar of the Eugene crowd and wanted the people to know that I could do it, on my own, without Bowerman,” he would recall. It wasn’t enough to let him break away. Duke’s Bob Wheeler got around him on the first turn of the last lap, and Dave Wottle and Ryun soon after. Jere got boxed in and others went by with 200 to go. He finished ninth, in 3:45.7. Ryun outkicked Wottle and Wheeler and won with a huge, uncharacteristic grin. At the line he thrust his arms out wide, crucified with joy.

  “It was terrible after that, of course,” Jere would recall. “My parents were there and I felt that I had let down my father, and didn’t talk to them. They drove home and I wanted to disappear.” Jere didn’t disappear. He would go on to succeed in other arenas, becoming an accomplished international journalist and author of In Afghanistan, a book on his experiences living with the mujahideen during their struggle against the Soviet Army. Despite the emotional roller-coaster that seems to have been his career, Jere would not regret ignoring Ray Van Asten’s oracular advice. “I am glad I went to Oregon,” he would say more than three decades later. “I could not have gone anywhere else. My best friends in the world are track guys. I was never happier than when running the 440 or anchoring the mile relay and running, I felt, as fast as the wind.”

  Through all this drama, Bowerman abandoned his usual practice of watching from high in the stands. Instead, he was a presence on the infield, a genial general, welcoming new members to the team he was taking onward.

  There, he pulled every string for them. Just as the 200-meter finalists were bending into their blocks, ABC wanted a delay for a commercial. Bowerman overheard the TV cameraman’s walkie-talkie ordering him to run onto the track and take a slow shot of every tense face, thereby blocking the start until ABC was ready. The cameraman trotted to obey, but before he reached the track his camera refused to go any farther. He turned to see Bowerman standing on his cord. Bowerman nodded to starter Ray Hendrickson and the sprinters were sent on their way on time—meet time, not media time.

  The last day’s sellout crowd on July 9 brought total attendance to 141,100, the largest ever for an Olympic Trials, exceeding the 108,000 at Stanford in 1960. “Final ticket sales were $329,300,” Newland would report, “with a net of $187,800.78. This was the most profit ever turned in to the USOC Track and Field Committee.”

  Bowerman wanted to put that profit to immediate use, but the USOC wouldn’t hear of it. The USOC contract with the OTC expressly forbade the club from paying any athletes’ expenses. Early on, having noted that stipulation with some disgust, Bill had solicited a pledge from General Motors for $50,000 to cover athletes’ room and board. But the USOC had refused permission to accept it, saying that GM would have to put its money in the general pot and the USOC would decide where it went. GM withdrew the offer.

  Bowerman then had petitioned the USOC on behalf of the athletes, asking that the top twelve or sixteen qualifiers in each event be reimbursed for their expenses and that machinery be set up to do it in the future. The USOC said there would be no reimbursing, not now, not ever. “Think of the horrible precedent that would set,” said USOC Vice President Phillip O. Krumm.

  “I’ve heard our officials make plenty of sanctimonious noises,” Bowerman would tell me later, “when they were looking at a guy with a rap on him (boxer Bobby Lee Hunter) who might make their team, wondering if his morals were up to theirs—and then they won’t pay back some fine athletes, some of whom weren’t getting enough to eat.”

  So when the Trials were over, Bowerman took an idea to John Jaqua. “We’re sitting on this $190,000 we made for our greedy USOC. Can’t we use that for a little leverage? How about we seek an injunction preventing the Oregon Track Club from turning over the proceeds until the matter is adjudicated? We might lose in court but Krumm and [USOC President Clifford] Buck might cough up a little money for the athletes in order to get their hands on the rest.”

  “I salute your cunning,” said Jaqua. “Let me think about it.” When they spoke again, Jaqua had done some character study. “If you threaten somebod
y and they don’t give in,” he said, “you put yourself in a bad position. So our question is, if we sue, will these old AAU and USOC guys give in? My judgment is they have made their bones by not giving in. They don’t give in on reforms urged by college coaches. They didn’t give in on your gift from a big company. They don’t give in enforcing the amateur code. Their entire reason for being is not to give in.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You give in. You give them a big, fat, beautiful check, and you are nothing but smiles.”

  “And? There’s gotta be an ‘and.’”

  “And in two or three years you sweetly remind them where they got that check, and if they want the track fans of Eugene to write another one, maybe a bigger one, maybe a quarter-million for the 1976 Trials, there will have to be an adjustment or two, one being the athletes’ expenses.”

  Bowerman, exultant that this was not defeat but rather the first step in a larger intrigue, gave in. He flew to Brunswick, Maine, where the men’s team and staff was gathering at Bowdoin College before heading to Europe.

  D ellinger stayed behind to oversee Prefontaine’s increasingly rigorous preparation. “I can lose in Munich and live with it if I give 120 percent,” Steve said, “but if I lost because I’d let it go to the last lap and got outkicked . . . I’d always wonder whether I might have broken away.”

  The Bowerman-Dellinger race plan would leave no room for that kind of regret. Conceived with Dellinger’s experience in Tokyo in mind, the idea was for Prefontaine not to simply surge and slow, as Ron Clarke had done, but to free himself with inexorably faster laps late in the race. His battle against Young in the Trials, when he’d run the final mile in 4:10, was a dress rehearsal, but all involved knew he could run far faster.

  Dellinger, both to enhance that ability and to know exactly what Pre could stand, put him through training to simulate that long last mile. There were three key workouts. One was four three-quarters in 3:12, 3:09, 3:06, and 3:00, with one lap recoveries, followed by a bunch of repeat miles. One was warming up, going to the line, and running, all alone, a four-minute mile. Pre did it in 3:59.0, changed shoes, and nonchalantly continued with his day.

  The last workout gave him real concern. It was two essentially back-to-back runs of a mile-and-a-half in 6:30, with an 880 jog in between. These were brutal because the pace dropped every half-mile, from 70 to 65 to 60. No one could stay with him on both of these six-lap efforts, so Dellinger asked young Oregon miler Mark Feig and me to alternate halves. I drew the two-minutes-flat final 880 of the first run. Pre kept the pace, but you could see he was going all out to hold it. He finished and looked so chartreuse that Dellinger was about to say, Knock it off for today. Pre didn’t let him.

  “The next one will be easier,” he said, and threw up a sticky yellow mass all over Dellinger’s new Adidases. “Didn’t give those last three Danish time to digest.” The second one was easier.

  Most of the team spent the last two weeks of July at the Maine training camp at Bowdoin College. It was ten days of scenic runs along the coast, clambakes with two lobsters per plate, uniform measurements, physical exams, and vaccinations. Bowerman introduced assistant coaches Stan Wright for the sprints, Hoover Wright (no relation) for the jumps, Ted Haydon for the distances, and Bruce McDonald for walks.

  He also introduced head manager George Wilson. “The letter of USOC law,” Bill said later, “is that the head manager outranks the head coach. That is a fact not widely appreciated. I didn’t appreciate it one damn bit, but it meant that George Wilson and I had to get along.” Wilson, technically a civilian, was deputy chief of the Army Sports Branch in the Pentagon and showed a worrying determination to stick to every nitpicking rule. But Bowerman, with the aid of the Tenth Mountain decal on his briefcase, soon had him eating out of his hand.

  Bill so deferred to Wilson’s authority—by insisting that he call all the team meetings and make all the official announcements—that Wilson quickly became uncomfortable. During a walk they took among the pines, Wilson told Bowerman that he saw the manager’s role as handling the logistics of housing, feeding, and moving the troops. But the head coach’s job—Bill’s—was training, tactics, and inspiration. Wilson said he didn’t want to overstep. Bowerman said he appreciated that, but he hadn’t been. Wilson said it was hard for him to judge morale on a team of individualists. Bill said, “Let’s ask.”

  The next day he opened a squad meeting by saying, “Gentlemen, I can report that the morale of the coaches and managers remains high. We are absolutely honored to be here. We have been trying to keep things flexible, and our first job is to convince you magnificent stud horses that we want to help, and not just tell you what to do. Olympic coaches don’t do much real coaching, certainly not until they’re asked. Do you know George Frenn?” He stopped and looked right at George. “You’d get a hammer in your ear if you tried to tell him anything he didn’t want to know.”

  The laughter, including that of a burgundy, nodding Frenn, went on so long it was clear even to Wilson that the team was won. Bill listed a few Olympic champions that each assistant had coached. “But,” he said, “all Stan Wright will do here is hold a watch on you. All I will do is measure your throws or heights. If you desire anything more, you have but to ask. I imagine some small wisdom will trickle out.” The applause was full of the release of being understood.

  The only exception to the tone of common purpose was in a meeting called by Dr. Dan Hanley, the USOC’s chief medical officer. He affirmed, as we’d learned at the Trials, that drug tests would be given to the top six placers in every event in Munich. He listed the categories of stimulants and narcotics that were illegal under IAAF rules, the last being the recently banned anabolic steroids. Someone asked, “How effective are steroids?”

  “To the best of our knowledge,” Hanley said, “research shows anabolic steroids have absolutely no effect on strength or performance.”

  All the weight men got up and quietly walked out. Whether they took anything or not, the throwers’ knowledge was, as it would be for the next several Olympiads, well ahead of the authorities’.

  On July 29 the team flew to New York and took an overnight charter to Oslo, Norway, where we would prepare for three weeks before going on to Munich. On the plane, pole-vaulter Jan Johnson and Steve Prefontaine, who had become inseparable companions, softened the tedium with nips from a flask wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  In Oslo we lived in the spare, functional, glass and birch Panorama Sommerhotell and trained at the Sports and Physical Education College of Norway, both on the shores of Sognsvatn Lake, a few miles north of downtown. The track was of Rekortan, the surface in the Munich Olympic Stadium. We were also free to use the European equivalent of Hayward Field, Oslo’s Bislett Stadium. Most of the distance runners had raced in Bislett before, and visited Arne Kvalheim and his younger brother, Knut (who would break all of Arne’s records at Oregon). We loved the sawdust and sand trails through the pine forest, used by skiers in winter, runners and hikers in summer.

  Over the weeks in Maine and in Oslo, I had gotten to know and like javelin-thrower Bill Schmidt. I mentioned to him that when I was a kid, the javelin was the first image that riveted me at a track meet. He said I was not alone. “I think it’s because the implement is clearly a weapon,” he said. “The javelin is a great example of sport elevating mock conflict above war. But it’s a real spear.”

  Schmidt proved that within days. One afternoon, I was running 300s on the Bislett track with Bowerman timing me. Nearing the end of a set, I looked left and saw a middle-aged banker, a local track club official, walking across the infield just as Schmidt launched a practice throw 240 feet away. The javelin struck the man in the abdomen and drove him to the turf. Bowerman was about the third person to reach him. Carefully, they pulled aside his clothes. The spear point had lodged in his hipbone but had missed everything vital. Bowerman stood over him and said in a voice that carried to the Frydenlund brewery, “You forgot your shield!”
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  Schmidt on the runway had been so focused on his target of a few square inches of sky that he never saw the man. He threw horribly for weeks after that, always searching downfield for wanderers.

  In Oslo, we tried out what the USOC had sent us to compete in. When we’d first donned the attire back in Maine, none of us was wowed. “Our running uniforms have always been awful,” Bowerman would say, “far too heavy, with stupid braid and elastic so strong it practically gives you constipation. The Olympic Committee has never seemed to know what it feels good to run in. I tried to explain to Marion Miller, the equipment man at Olympic House, that distance runners don’t wear jockstraps any more. They wear a skimpy nylon bikini. He sent some samples and asked if they were what I had in mind. They were like Bermuda shorts.”

  In the end, Bowerman hated the thick, official racing shirts so much that he had alternatives done for those who wanted them. He found some kind of feathery knit material in Maine and ordered singlets made from it, but they arrived bearing heavily embroidered USA patches that outweighed the shirt and hammered the chest like a piece of Navaho jewelry. So Louise Shorter, Bobbie Moore, and Carol Bacheler spent hours unstitching the patches and ironing on a hot-pressed “USA” the “Dump Nixon” way. Most of the team’s runners chose them. The shorts weren’t hideous, just thick nylon. Shorter wore his navy blue Yale shorts. Bobbie dyed my weightless, green Oregon shorts the blue of our country’s.

  Pre, never one to mind an extra ounce or two, ran in his official issue for the two-day tune-up meet at Bislett. To rehearse going through the heats in Munich, he ran the 1500 on the first day and the 3000 on the second. He took a strong second in the 1500, running 3:39.4 to Pekka Vasala’s 3:38.3. “I don’t mind getting second to the best in the world,” he said. And indeed, Vasala would be the Olympic 1500-meter champion. A day later, Pre won the Oslo 3000 in 7:44.2, which took ten full seconds from Jim Beatty’s American record.