Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  Some were easy. With shot-putter George Woods, who’d spoken so memorably about being an athlete first, Bill asked if it was still the case that when everyone else had gone off on some grand distraction, he’d still be here putting his shot. Woods nodded that it was. It wasn’t as easy as he’d made it sound, but he was still here, still ready. “Good,” said Bill. “Good.” Woods went on to take the silver medal in the shot.

  With high-strung George Frenn, whose parents were born in Lebanon, Bowerman observed that the terrorists in some ways were mirror images of Olympians. They were fanatics, prepared to die for their cause, their suffering people. But that from that suffering they brought forth death. “They surrendered to the cycle of violence,” Bill said. “They were every victim become destroyer.”

  “Your point is we can’t be like them,” said Frenn, whose temper was known and respected. “Don’t go into that cycle.”

  To George Young and Mike Manley, both teachers, Bill observed that if there was one place where war doesn’t belong, it was here. “From 776 BC to 393 AD Olympians laid down their arms to take part in the Games.” They knew there is more honor in outrunning a man than killing him.

  And with me, he had an answer when I told him what Dutch 5000-meter runner Jos Hermens had said as he went home without competing: “If you throw a party and a gunman comes in and murders a dozen guests, you don’t break out another keg and go on with the party.”

  “This is no party,” said Bill. “This is the species’ great moral advance. This is our answer to war.”

  With time and such reminders, we came not only to see that but also to feel it. “The day we watched as the hostages were held, and the day off for the memorial service,” Shorter would remember, “we went through the stages humans must go through in times of brutal stress: from denial to anger, to grief, to resolve.” Bowerman’s person-by-person guidance had done much to nudge us there. The question became what to do with that resolve.

  “We have to spread the word by our performance,” said Shorter, “that barbarism only makes Olympians stronger. We have to say, ‘This is as scared as I get. Now let’s go run.’”

  At 3:00 p.m. on the last day of the Olympics, sixty-nine marathoners heeded the gun, did two laps of the stadium track, swept through the marathon gate and out onto the roads. The day was hazy and humid. After a mile, I got caught in a jam on a corner and tripped. I curled into a ball until an opening appeared in the slapping feet and was up quickly, with a stinging elbow and knee and a thirty-yard deficit. Frank was among the leaders ahead, as was big Jack Bacheler.

  Six miles from the start, I’d eased back up to the pack. We entered Nymphenburg Park. The paths were unswept. The yellow dust rising behind the official bus leading us was proof of that promise broken. Now, somehow, in a week with burning helicopters, it didn’t seem that big a deal. We came to the first water station. Frank and I had spent a silly half-hour in the shower that morning shaking the fizz out of Cokes and pouring them into squeeze bottles. These were now arrayed on tables beside the path. An Ethiopian took Frank’s. Frank took mine. I took nothing. He couldn’t return my bottle to me because those prying eyes on the officials’ bus knew it was against the rules to aid another runner. “Sorry,” Frank said. Britain’s Ron Hill and Japan’s Akio Usami had been leading. After nine miles, Frank cruised through the front group, now down to eight. As we ran beneath maples lining a murky canal, he surged ahead.

  Nobody went with him, though I considered it mightily. The strength of my race was my strength, meaning late stamina. I ran thirty- to thirty-five-mile runs every two weeks. Frank seldom went above twenty (though he often did twenty several days in a row). If we were together with four or five miles to go, I would have trained specifically for those conditions. To prevent me from being anywhere near him that late in the race, he used his superior track speed to bolt out to a big lead and then hang on. He had won the previous fall’s Fukuoka race by taking off like this at halfway. But this move was with seventeen miles to go. It was hot. He seemed to have spurted too sharply. So we all let him go, assuming he’d pay for his profligacy later.

  After the twenty-five-kilometer water station, with eleven miles to go, I was running second, beside the defending champion, Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia. He ran soundless of foot and breath, with his head tipped slightly forward. I sensed his presence only from that distinguished widow’s peak floating above my left shoulder. We ran along boulevards, around statues, fountains, arches. But we were beyond noticing the scenery. Our universe was asphalt, tram tracks, and a faint blue line.

  Mamo was knock-kneed and pointed his toes out slightly. I was knock-kneed and also toed out, both conditions being accentuated by fatigue. Once in a while our shoes brushed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Wolde said each time.

  At about that time, back in the stadium, the thirteen finalists in the men’s 5000 meters were leaning over the starting line. Pre’s plan was unchanged. With four laps to go he would begin a mile-long drive to run all pursuers off their feet. The field was the strongest ever assembled, the best being Gamoudi, Puttemans, Norpoth, Viren and his countryman Juha Vaatinen, as well as Britain’s Ian Stewart and Dave Bedford. Bedford, the world cross-country champion, had earlier been vocal in his opinion that Prefontaine was a cocky little prick in need of quieting.

  In the 10,000, Bedford had set a world record pace, but hadn’t broken away and finished sixth. Now, he was doing no further favors. No one was. The USSR’s Nikolai Sviridov and others led, but listlessly, and the pack remained a tight, worried clump. Many felt a fast pace was to their advantage. Vaatinen had run the last 400 in the 1971 European Championships in 52 seconds. Obviously he had to be exhausted or escaped from. But no one would sacrifice himself to do that. The mile passed in 4:30. Prefontaine had been 4:20 in the Olympic Trials.

  Pre all this time remained in the middle of the pack, taking elbows and spikes. Everyone else’s racing cowardice (or intelligence, depending on how they finished) was combining to create terrible luck for him. Never happy in a pack at the best of times, it was all he could do to keep his cool. He did so by visualizing how great it would be to be free.

  They passed two miles at 8:56.4. It was almost time. On the homestretch with four to go, Pre cocked his head, moved out, and took the lead. They had been going 67 pace. He ran the next lap in 62.5 and followed with a 61.2. Only five men were in contention by then, Prefontaine, Viren, Puttemans, Gamoudi, and Stewart.

  With 800 to go, Viren passed Pre, perhaps as a little psychological blow against the kid, who had to be feeling his blazing last half-mile. Puttemans went by too, as if he felt Pre was shot and was going to now fall back. Pre responded on the backstretch by charging past both of them and retaking the lead with 600 to go, just where Dellinger had led in Tokyo. He finished that lap with a 60.3.

  At the bell with a lap to go, Viren passed him again, and Bowerman said later that he thought the Finn was sprinting too soon, that if Pre could tuck in and draft on his back, he could run him down late. But Pre wasn’t hanging anywhere. As soon as they hit the backstretch with 300 to go, Pre moved out to pass Viren. But Gamoudi, who had done this to Billy Mills in the Tokyo 10,000, sprinted by, hit Pre so hard he drove him inside, and made his own charge to seize the lead. Pre was third with 250 to go.

  Again, Bowerman felt that if he gathered and waited, he could catch them in the stretch. Again, Pre refused to wait. With 200 to go he went wide and got to Viren’s shoulder. He gave a tremendous effort, his head going side to side, but couldn’t get past before the turn. Gamoudi cut him off again and went back into second. The top three men ran the last turn a yard apart, praying that after all these moves and countermoves they would have something left in the stretch.

  Only Viren did. He drew gracefully away to win in 13:26.4. Gamoudi was seven yards back in 13:27.4. Prefontaine died. At the line he was staggering. The madly sprinting Ian Stewart just caught him to steal the bronze in 13:27.6. Pre was clocked in 13:28.3. He had run his last mile
in 4:04. Viren had run 4:02.

  In the stands, Pre’s girlfriend, Mary Marckx (now Mary Creel), didn’t know what to do. “In the minutes right after the race I was upset,” she would remember. “I didn’t know how to reach Steve through the bowels of the stadium, so I started running up to the top of the stands. I was alone, crying. I couldn’t imagine what he’d do. Would he kill himself? He’d been completely shut out, even of the ‘horrible bronze’ he’d disparaged.”

  At the top of the stadium there was a broad concourse. “You could walk all the way around up there,” Mary would recall, “so I began, and there were Bill and Barbara Bowerman. I said, ‘I don’t know if he can take this. I don’t know if I can help him.’ Bill gently patted my arm and said it was a heroic effort, he couldn’t have done any better. ‘He’s young.’ Bill said. ‘He’s got a lot of races ahead. He’ll be fine. Believe me, he’ll be fine.’”

  Mary felt a little better, but she knew her man. This was not going to be easy. Mortification, to use a word from her Catholic background, did not sit well with Steve Prefontaine. Bill and Barbara escorted her down to the “mixed zone,” where the family and press could stand behind a barricade and visit with the athletes. There, Mary would say, “it seemed every third person was telling Pre that fourth in the world isn’t bad.”

  Blaine Newnham of the Eugene Register-Guard was one of those people. “I know you feel bad,” Newnham said, “but we’ve got to talk.”

  Prefontaine said, “I’ve got nothing to say,” and headed for the darkest corner.

  Newnham said, “Wait a minute, you’ve got to talk to me. What about all those people back in Eugene, the people at Hayward Field, Pre’s People? They’ve lived this race for you, they can understand what happened and we’ve got to talk.”

  Mention of his people stopped him. Newnham asked, “How old are you, twenty-one? And you finished fourth in the world, how bad is that?”

  “Well, that’s not too bad.”

  Newnham said, “Did you run for third or second? No, you ran to win, you took the lead with a mile to go, you ran your butt off, and you finished fourth, now how bad is that?”

  “No, it wasn’t that bad.”

  “What he needed,” Newnham said later, “was someone to put his arm around him, to kind of hug him and say it’s okay, we understand. Pre’s People understand. And so, goodness, he started talking, and twenty minutes later he was all pumped up again.”

  When Bedford came over to say he was the toughest little prick he ever saw, Pre shook his hand thanks and said, “How about us losers have a beer at the Hofbrau Haus later. Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?”

  With six miles to go, Wolde and I were running in the English Garden. People shouted that Shorter was over a minute ahead. A hundred yards behind us was a pale little man in white. The day had cooled. Frank had once told me, “I’ve never really tied up, you know. I’ve never really died after getting a lead.” I believed him now. Wolde and I were running for silver.

  A mile later, on a rutted part of the path, a cramp shot up my right hamstring. Wolde passed immediately. He watched me hobble, clutching the back of my thigh for a couple of steps. His expression seemed to say this was all wrong, that he’d been expecting us to duke it out to the end. Then he turned and ran on.

  I accelerated carefully to just below my previous pace. I couldn’t risk a second attack. Karel Lismont of Belgium, the man in white, stormed past, running with his head down and a powerful arm action.

  Mercifully, the park ended and we returned to level streets. I found a rhythm and began to move. There was no reason to look back. The last medal was disappearing ahead of me.

  If it is run right, a marathon inflicts some damage. Muscle cells rupture. Joints, crunching together 22,000 times, wear away at tendons and cartilage. I ran it right, the crowd’s approval roaring in my head, on a cushion of blood blisters. I tempted my twinging thigh, forcing the pace. But as the stadium neared, Lismont was out of sight and Wolde still had me by 200 yards.

  Along the road outside the stadium, a final snafu was brewing. As Frank would learn later, a local high school student had hatched a prank with a friend, which they carried off with frightening precision.

  The friend had a job during the Games of driving a golf cart around the outside of the stadium, delivering supplies to the concessions. He was thus familiar to all the guards. Just before Frank reached the stadium, the high school kid jumped on the cart wearing a track uniform and fake number. The friend drove unimpeded through the security and past the access tunnel to the track. The young imposter hopped off the cart and ran down the tunnel before anyone could stop him.

  “He emerged about fifty seconds ahead of me,” Frank would remember, “and accepted the roar of the crowd unique to the Olympic Marathon winner. By the time I emerged . . . to the silence, he had completed three-quarters of a lap and was one-half lap from the finish. I had turned right and was 100 meters ahead of him and never looked back so I never saw him.”

  Though robbed of a little of the immediate glory, Frank was the first American to win the Olympic marathon in sixty-four years. Crossing the line in 2:12:20, he put his hands on his head in amazement at what he had done. Shorter had taken all the sorrow and turned it into performance. Barbarism had only made him stronger.

  Lismont took second in 2:14:32, Wolde third in 2:15:08, and I fourth in 2:15:39. Jack Bacheler hung on for ninth, in 2:17:39. Ours was the best finish by three runners from a single nation ever.

  I walked the Munich infield trying to know how to react. The thought came of what Bob Newland would always tell us back in high school: “Lift up your head. You ran the hardest you humanly could.”

  Bobbie was there, holding me, and I came apart, pain and frustration forcing out tears. “I tried so hard,” I said. In a few seconds I knew it was all right. She was more important than any medal and it didn’t matter if I cried. I was amazed at having the moisture.

  Prefontaine saw me in the tunnel and ran over. “Kenny, you have got to be proud!” he said. “Out of all the billions of people in the world you were fourth. I order you to be proud!”

  I realized his race was over. “Pre, what did you get?”

  “I got fucking fourth, man. It’s the worst place you can ever finish.”

  That self-mocking, double-standard laugh showed he was on the way back. Pre went on to an uproarious evening downing steins with nonmedallists at the Hofbrau Haus and flew home the next day.

  The instant his duties were over, the instant the last American trackman was safely signed out, Bill Bowerman walked from the Village, swung up and took a seat beside Barbara on a tour bus with the Giustinas and friends, and allowed himself to be driven to Switzerland.

  It was a departure, Barbara would recall, with all too many echoes of their leaving Rome in 1960, going through these same Bavarian Alps and imagining, with hope in their hearts, what a Munich Olympics could be and signify. But now, the pinnacle of Bowerman’s career had been savaged. Someone on board unwisely asked Bill how he had liked his prestigious position.

  “Did I enjoy being the coach of the 1972 Olympic team?” he replied. “Worst experience in my total athletic career.”

  But it was also, as Barbara came to believe, the most necessary. Bill’s problem-solving abilities under fire, his bringing in the Marines, his gifts for sizing up individuals and defending them against the bureaucracy, his putting the Olympic ideals into a few well-chosen words, all kept his Olympians safe and ushered a number through grief to the other side. No other leadership figure exhibited anything close to competence after the terror struck. When mortal pressure was applied, few besides Bill Bowerman acquitted themselves well.

  So over the years, when he’d repeat his worst-experience-ever mantra, Barbara would demur and explain that it was the worst set of events ever, but a magnificent use of her man. Those of us who were there would attest to that. We’d have been lost without him.

  CHAPTER 26

  Tra
nsit and Sorrow

  ON HIS RETURN FROM MUNICH, STEVE PREFONTAINE SETTLED IN FOR HIS SENIOR year. He lived, as he had for many months before the Games, in a metal trailer in a riverside mobile home park in Glenwood with three-miler Pat Tyson and now with Lobo, a German shepherd puppy he had rescued from the pound and trained to be an obedient running partner. He resumed photography and broadcast communications classes, his major.

  Pre never questioned Bowerman’s race plan in the Munich 5000. He complained to friends or coaches only of the slow pace and of Gamoudi’s spikes, scratches, and punches. “If it had been 8:40 for the first two miles,” he told Track and Field News, “I would have had gold or silver. It would have put crap in their legs. It was set up for Gamoudi and Viren.” After watching the tape fifty times, I disagreed. I came to feel that if he’d let Viren lead the last 800 and made a single, all-out sprint with 250 to go, he’d have been second even as the race was run. His wild abandon was why he had been staggering blind before the line.

  That autumn, as planned, Pre didn’t compete in cross-country. Bill had him simply train as he felt, until the fire returned. Once, when Pre joined the team for some easy repeat miles at Laurelwood Golf Course, Bowerman asked him if he’d felt ill-served by their plan. Pre said, No way.

  Bowerman had probed, wondering aloud whether maybe going hard the last two miles would have been better. That Bowerman, who seldom rehashed beyond a quick, postrace lesson, would bring it up seems a measure of his regret that Pre’s incredible effort hadn’t been rewarded.