by Kenny Moore
First, though, there were the AAU nationals to contest. There, in the dry heat of Bakersfield, the two seniors won again, Wilkins with 211 feet 11 inches, beating Olympians John Powell and Tim Vollmer. In the three-mile, an improving Dick Buerkle pressed Prefontaine all the way. Pre responded with a new American record, winning in 12:53.4 to Buerkle’s 13:00.2.
Four days later, a crowd of 12,000 witnessed the Hayward Field Restoration Mile, double what attendance would have been without this duel. Prefontaine took over after the half and hit an eye-opening 2:56.0 for three-quarters. Wottle shot out to a ten-yard lead in the backstretch and held it to the end, which he reached in 3:53.3 to Pre’s 3:54.6, both lifetime bests. Wottle had missed Ryun’s record, but was now the second-fastest American ever. Bowerman exulted that Pre was fully, emotionally back. “He ran a great race,” he said. “If Wottle had drifted five yards off, he’d have gotten whipped!”
The meet cleared $23,204. “How many world-class guys,” Landers would say, “would agree to a race they knew they were going to lose? Would Burleson?” Afterward, Norv Ritchey congratulated Pre for his magnificent gesture. “Well, Pre,” Ritchey said, “this is a great thing you’re doing and it will repay every bit of grant-in-aid you ever received.” Pre looked Ritchey right in the eye and said, “I did that the first race I ever ran at Hayward Field.”
Pre then headed off on the Scandinavian tour, which was jammed with races, small and great. A week after the Eugene mile, he was outkicked by Emiel Puttemans in a 5000 in Helsinki, but finished in a new American record of 13:22.4. The next day, he ran a PR 3:38.1 in the 1500.
Then his schedule started to gnaw at where Prefontaine was weakest, his lower back. Facing down old ghosts, he returned to Munich to run his sixth race in fifteen days, a 5000 against Harald Norpoth in the United States vs. West Germany vs. Sweden meet. He led most of the way. “But when I wanted to bear down and step up the pace,” he said later, “I couldn’t. I wasn’t tired, but my back would tighten up and I couldn’t go any faster.” Norpoth zipped around right where he always did (with 200 to go) and won, 13:20.6 to 13:23.8. Prefontaine heeded his sciatica and went home.
Pre always seemed most vivid when he’d just come back from somewhere because in his absence it was impossible to remember how intense he was. He ran hard, castigating those who didn’t, and he loved hard—girls, kids, love, the rush of life. No matter what time he went to bed, he was up every morning at six and out the door doing six-minute pace. His morning ten-miler was to keep him from getting fat on the pizza and beer of the night before. His metabolism was so efficient he swore that if he didn’t run, he’d gain four pounds a day, indefinitely. This of course needed proving. When he gained eight pounds in two days, we believed.
Not long after his return, running along the bike paths by the river with a mob of Oregon runners, Pre told the story of Norpoth’s latest perfidy. Three-miler Dave Taylor whipped off his sweat top and sprinted ahead. On the back of his T-shirt he had had printed NORPOTH. Pre flew into a rage. He caught up to Taylor and began choking him, shouting, “If that skinny sonuvabitch, if he ever does that to me again, here’s what I’ll do to him!” Said Taylor, “He was beating me up on the run.”
Nineteen seventy-three was a year for combat on all fronts. In March, Blue Ribbon Sports and Philip Knight filed suit against the Onitsuka Company in US District Court in Portland. They alleged that the Tiger maker had breached their contract by soliciting new distributors and demanding that Knight sign over control of BRS for the right to go on distributing Tigers. Knight also alleged that Onitsuka had infringed on BRS’s trademark by selling the eight models that BRS had registered in the United States. He asked for $33 million in damages.
Onitsuka countersued, saying, essentially, that those were their trademarks and they hadn’t solicited anyone until after BRS started bringing in those “Nikes.” If Onitsuka won, BRS would lose the exclusive right to sell the shoes Bowerman had designed. “This lawsuit,” Bill said, “is win or die.”
After a preliminary struggle over jurisdiction, the trial was held in Portland. It took ten days in April 1974. I was called on to testify.
One issue was whether the Cortez represented such a momentous leap in shoe design that it could be patented. The BRS side presented me not only as the possessor of the feet that inspired the prototype but also as an expert on quality running shoes. (Because I’d been on US national teams from 1968 to 1973, all the major makers had pressed me to try their free samples.)
To test this expertise, the Onitsuka attorney arrayed eight or ten shoes in front of me on the stand. Starting from one end, he asked me to name each model and say when it was first available. The first few were easy, ordinary models of Adidas, Puma, Tiger, Spot-Bilt, or New Balance, but the two pairs on the end I had never seen before. I grew more expansive about the shoes I knew about, all the while thinking, I’m going to look like an idiot when I have to say, Whoa, that’s a new one on me.
Perhaps it was a ploy to make me sweat, because right before we got to the mystery shoes, the lawyer gathered them all up and said, “We stipulate his expertise, your honor.”
Then I was led through the tale of my broken metatarsal and how Bill created the Cortez so that would never happen again. On the question of patentability, Judge James Burns asked me directly whether the Cortez was such an extraordinary advance as to be one of kind and not degree. I somehow knew not to say absolutely yes. “All I know,” I said at last, “is that I never broke my foot again.” He seemed to sit back, satisfied. Later he would find that the design was protected.
The patent aspect was a side issue compared to the stunning Onitsuka claim that the Cortez had been designed not by Bill Bowerman but by a German professor years before. This fabrication was quickly disproved. Nike attorneys Rob Strasser and Doug Houser located the professor and took an affidavit from him refuting the Onitsuka claim.
Onitsuka’s playing fast and loose with the truth would come back to bite the company. Strasser made that behavior (reflected in Shoji Kitami’s offering in other testimony four different dates for when he found out about the Nike line) the heart of his argument, Onitsuka was “unworthy of belief,” Stasser declared. When Judge Burns convened the court and issued his decision, it was clear he had listened.
“Based on careful observation of Mr. Kitami’s demeanor on the witness stand and review of his inconsistent and false statements under oath,” wrote Burns, “Mr. Kitami’s testimony cannot be believed unless separately supported by other credible evidence.”
Since there was none on the solicitation issue, and since the disputed shoe designs had been developed jointly, Burns awarded both BRS and Onitsuka the right to sell them. But only BRS could use the models’ names because of common law trademark. Therefore, BRS was entitled to damages for Onitsuka’s infringing upon those trademarks. Burns appointed a special master to assess how much BRS was due. Onitsuka appealed and sold the same shoe as the “Corsair,” but in the interim, the Nike Cortez was the only legitimate Cortez. BRS had won. The company would live to sell Bill’s creations.
And did he ever have a creation to sell. The waffle sole, the company had finally realized, was fantastic at cushioning feet on track and road. Bowerman had assembled a crack research and development team in Eugene, with himself, Geoff Hollister, orthotist Dennis Vixie, and Dr. Stan James, a gifted orthopedic surgeon who’d joined Don Slocum’s practice and become Prefontaine’s orthopedist. At James and Bowerman’s direction, Vixie customized a waffle-soled shoe for Pre, with a beveled heel that he really liked. This was the forerunner of the Nike Oregon Waffle, a yellow and green cross-country racing flat that was released late in 1973.
The problem suddenly was getting shoes to an exploding market. Frank Shorter’s win in the Munich marathon had set off an American running boom. If, earlier, it had been win or die for BRS, now it was grow or die. Even venerable firms like Adidas and Puma were having trouble meeting demand. For Phil Knight’s company, the tricky thing was b
alancing small orders from long-standing customers against large orders from new customers without alienating one or the other. The Oregon Waffle never did make it into most retail stores, but its sophisticated successor, the Waffle Trainer, a beveled midsole flat, did.
The Waffle Trainer was the company’s first big moneymaker, but its effect on the bottom line was muddied as BRS scrambled to deal with hitting the big time. As part of an effort to improve supply, BRS decided it would make at least some of its shoes in the United States. Renaissance man Jeff Johnson, plunging ever deeper into things he had zero experience doing, supervised the refitting of the old Wise Shoe Company plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. In September 1974, the first American-made Nike came off its assembly line, a Cortez.
That year, company sales were $4.8 million. In 1975, they grew to $8.3 million. Blue Ribbon was turning out product as fast as it could, but was also stretched thin, dependent on bank loans to order the shoes from the factories, dependent on quick sales to pay off those loans.
Exactly how dependent was shown in May 1975. Jeff Johnson was startled to learn that the local Exeter bank wouldn’t cash the paychecks he’d just issued because a recent check he’d deposited from Nike’s Bank of California account hadn’t cleared. This was because another deposit check had bounced out in California. As in a power outage, a short in one wire shut down the whole grid.
This had happened, in part, because as revenues came in, Knight had been repaying loans first to Nissho Iwai, the Japanese trading company that had financed the first Nikes made by Nippon Rubber, and letting other creditors wait until the last possible moment. BRS had been cutting those moments close, but didn’t feel they were illegally kiting checks because everyone always got paid. Strictly speaking, however, in sending out checks before deposits came in, kiting was just what they had been doing. The Bank of California examiner saw that, froze all their accounts, and sent in regulators.
Blue Ribbon had more than half a million dollars in outstanding loans from the Bank of California. The bank declared them all in default and immediately due. The bank allowed Blue Ribbon to keep operating, but every week BRS’s officers had to show up and get approval to write company checks.
“We had been kicked out of one bank,” Knight would recall in 1992. “The second, it was touch and go. The Bank of California had their auditors out, and we couldn’t ship anything without their approval. We couldn’t cash a check for two or three days.”
Nissho Iwai bailed them out of this humiliation in grand fashion. “Nissho was on the hook too for our shoe order loans,” said Knight, “but they said, We’ll not only give you an extra month to pay all this stuff, we’ll take the bank out altogether. They wrote a check for a million bucks to the Bank of California and paid all those loans and said, Gentlemen, you are out of here.”
The American banks had all studied BRS’s business and set a credit limit based on sales staying about the same. “But Nissho had been following our growth curve,” said Knight. “They looked at it differently. They said, ‘You know you are going to be a big account five years from now and we want you then.’ So it was good business they were doing. I didn’t forget that.” Knight was still with Nissho Iwai more than thirty years later, a fact of which he was justly proud. “That’s kind of an untold story about international business,” he would say in 1992. “We’d be cheaper by a little bit if we just dealt with American banks. We choose not to do that. It’s not just loyalty. We think that’s good business.”
Nike’s great success would spawn two categories of story, those of unlikely people who joined or invested early and grew rich, and those of people who, for one reason or another, didn’t open the door when opportunity knocked. As the company became a huge concern, paying millions in interest and fees to other financial institutions, the Bank of California executives who’d had no faith in the fledgling outfit would have an ever-greater epic to tell—or not tell—about the check-kiters they drove away.
Because of the Munich Games, Prefontaine had not run cross-country in 1972 and because he wouldn’t graduate until winter term of the 1973–74 school year, he was eligible to race in the fall of 1973. But his sciatica had limited his training and his confidence was at an all-time low. “I’d never seen Pre act like he did before the NCAA meet in Spokane,” Dave Taylor would recall. “He’d injured his back and he was in a panic. He was just a regular person at that meet. He even locked himself in his room at eight that night.”
His main rival would be Western Kentucky’s Nick Rose, the world junior cross-country champion from Britain. “I’d been racing the way I do best,” Rose would say, “just hammering for about four miles and then hanging on the last two.” Rose, possessed of a high, rangy stride and great downhill relaxation, flew to a sixty-yard lead at halfway. Runners all over the course recall being astounded to see that gap.
Pre told Taylor later that he was really hurting, “so it was either do or die.” He began to gain. Rose knew he was coming “and had this strange feeling I wasn’t going to beat him.” Pre came alongside with three-quarters of a mile to go and charged on to win his third NCAA cross-country crown.
Behind him, Terry Williams was twenty-second, Dave Taylor thirtieth, Randy James thirty-third, and Gary Barger fiftieth. Oregon won Bill Dellinger’s first national team title with 89 points to Texas-El Paso’s 157. If this was a dynasty, it hadn’t skipped a beat.
Once Prefontaine graduated, he faced a reality that would be unbelievable to later national champions: penury. To run his best, he needed the freedom to train and travel. A full-time, entry-level job in his major field of communications—lugging equipment at a TV station—wasn’t compatible with that. So the bulk of his income came illegally, or at least in violation of the amateur code. He would run bursts of European races, where meet promoters would pay in cash or fungible airline tickets. Wedging in additional European races was what hurt his back in 1973.
He did part-time things, such as driving Datsun 240-Zs from LA to Portland, where they sold for a thousand or two more, this financed by an entrepreneurial friend. And he tended bar at The Paddock, his own favorite haunt. The Pad always did great business when Pre was drawing the pitchers.
Bowerman heard about this and sat Pre down for an unscheduled goal-setting session. It didn’t take long, because he knew his man by now, knew to lead with the irrefutable. “No one in Oregon,” Bill said, “can influence kids the way you can.” Once Prefontaine had nodded in prideful agreement, the discussion was essentially over.
However free Pre might feel to lead his own life, said Bowerman, he wasn’t free to set an example that, if followed by the youngest of his people, would do them harm. “You’re right, Bill,” Pre said on very little reflection. “I’ll quit. You’re right.”
Bowerman said later that he and Prefontaine seldom engaged in lengthy talks. “But there wasn’t a picture of them,” Barbara would observe, “where they weren’t looking at each other and saying, ‘Hey, who’s boss here?’” Each operated by laying out a position and presuming the other would respect it. “When we disagreed about Pre’s wanting to be a miler, or his working at the bar,” Bill said, “he’d just jump up, run out, come back in fifteen minutes, and say, ‘Okay.’”
Shortly after the session with Bill, Nike took Prefontaine on as its first paid track athlete spokesman. Even though his $5,000 a year was in violation of AAU rules against enrichment from sport, and even though Bowerman usually advised everyone to honor those rules until they might be changed, it was Bowerman who directed that the arrangement be made. Pre wrote his own job title, National Public Relations Manager, and had business cards made up. His main activity was joining Geoff Hollister, Olympic decathlete Jeff Bannister, Mac Wilkins, and others in clinics and presentations.
But he also scanned the horizon for deserving runners to help. When in 1975 he saw that an unknown guy from the Greater Boston Track Club had been third in the World Cross-Country in Morocco, Pre fired off some shoes and a letter of congratulat
ions. Bill Rodgers wore those shoes to the first of his Boston Marathon victories, breaking Frank Shorter’s American record with 2:09:55.
And Prefontaine never turned down a chance to talk bluntly to at-risk youth. “He became convinced,” Mary Creel would remember, “that physical training could cure most of the world’s problems. I think that’s why he got involved with Nike. He thought they would be the means to spread that word. Obviously, this was Bowerman’s influence.” Bowerman had certainly done the groundwork with jogging. But Prefontaine’s morning ten-mile runs were his own example of being rejuvenated by sheer effort. Why couldn’t that work for everyone?
On April 27, 1974, Pre ran his first serious race of the year, a 10,000 at the Twilight Meet, in rain and wind. Mike Manley led him through the mile in 4:28 and then Pre took off. It would be a lonely race. The west stands had been bulldozed, and although 7,000 people were in attendance, they were all huddled in the remaining seats on the far side. Lap after lap, Prefontaine ran 67s, but he ran them by sprinting 32s with the wind in front of the crowd and muscling 35s against the wind on that lonely backstretch.
A lot of Oregonians rose to Pre’s front-running battles against the clock because a lot of Oregonians’ labor in the woods and mills was so dangerous it could only be done with skill and endurance. The mill workers, steel fabricators, tire-store owners, and filbert farmers (and lawyers, professors, Sunday school teachers, and out-of-their-minds sixth graders) didn’t just see a chesty, beetle-browed kid driving into the turns. They saw work being done that they knew was hard unto impossible.
