by Kenny Moore
Pre had to have left this world with a fine regard for its absurdities, one being that he was dying on a road he loved to run, on a hill where he made others suffer. His last moments surely recapitulated his finest races, his blacksmith bellows gasping, his fighting down panic, his approaching death’s door, his needing the crowd to call him back.
Neal Steinhauer—on his way to the ministry—had talked with him a week before at the Modesto Relays about the seeming disorder of his life and priorities. Steinhauer ever since has hoped that he did enough, hoped that in Pre’s last moments his mind turned to the Almighty.
The Coos Bay funeral was extravagant to the point of circus, with Pre’s hearse doing a lap of the Marshfield track at about 70 pace. One pallbearer, Jon Anderson, was made so furious by the fear-mongering preacher (“Get right with God. Who among us is safe if our strongest can be taken in an instant?”) that he started knocking on the side of the casket. Said another bearer, Mike Manley, “I thought Pre was coming right up out of there.”
Bowerman, as he had in Munich, watched with Barbara from high in the stands. Afterward he told us that the Oregon Track Club would hold a memorial on Hayward Field two days later, June 3. Haggard in a way he had not been in Munich, he said that he would say a few words, but that the rest of the program should be up to the athletes.
The next day, we cast a wide net and assembled all the Prefontaine friends we could think of at our house to see who should say what. We ended up with twenty people in a circle, all pointing at each other and saying, “You knew him better than I did.”
Pat Tyson had lived with Pre for two years but felt he went to Frank and me for guidance. We, startled, said we suggested ideas about the AAU but never felt intimate with him. He loved to stay over at Mark Feig and Steve Bence’s apartment, but they said he came in so late and got up so early they never saw him. Geoff Hollister, who’d driven all over the state with him doing running talks, never knew until that moment that Pre had started a running club at the Oregon State Prison. We were stunned. Great quadrants of him were not known to more than a few.
The memorial service, we decided, would be the opposite of the funeral. It would be all about him, and it would be fast. It would give him one thing he never got in running: a world record.
At twilight on June 3, 4,000 mourners assembled in the east stands. They received a card saying that the clock would be started, that Pre’s fellow Olympians Bowerman, Shorter, and I would speak for ten minutes and leave the field. Then the clock would stop at 12:36, “a time with which Steve Prefontaine would be well satisfied.” It was the 63 pace he’d spoken of as a goal, eleven seconds faster than Emiel Puttemans’ world record. The scoreboard clock, where Pre’s eyes had always gone as he hit the line, was under the control of Bill Dellinger’s brother Fred. The seconds began to whip by.
Bowerman began. He was shaky at first, an image of the wrongness of a father burying a son. “Friends,” he said, “let us be grateful that we were a part of what Steve Prefontaine, the Champ, stood for, what he enjoyed and what he achieved. Thanks to his mother and dad for giving him those characteristics of truth, honesty, intensity, and physical ability.
“I first knew Pre through Walt McClure—when he was fourteen years old. Walt said, ‘Watch this freshman, he’s tough and will be a good one.’
“Four years later when he was a frosh, there was the early fall rain. Pre had finished his orientation lecture. Dressed in sweats, he was walking the halls of Mac Court. From inside the arena issued the undertones of the radical student unrest. Catcalls, rude questions, foot shuffling. Pre looked in and said to me, ‘I don’t believe it!’ He walked to the stage and asked, ‘May I speak?’ He was handed the mike. ‘I am a freshman—I chose Oregon—I listened to the orientation—I came to get an education and to run—Listen! You’ll learn something—Thanks! I’m glad I came to Oregon.’
“His great races are told better by the press and media. His desire burned to be the best—and he was. Step by step, as he matured he reached his goals. In high school he was state champion and national record holder. In the university he held every American record from 2000-meters, two miles, through six miles and 10,000 meters. In 1976 his goal was Olympic champion and the world records related thereto. He also burned with another great goal: Emancipation, freedom for the US athlete. Tens of thousands of dollars were his for the signing of a professional track contract. No! Help the athlete. Help the sport.”
Bowerman told how Prefontaine had done that by challenging track and field’s resistance to change. “In the history of our sport,” he went on, “no one man had ever been permitted to arrange and bring a foreign athlete or team to the USA. The door was always locked by national red tape and dictatorship. Pre opened the door by persistence and difficult communication. You saw the Finnish athletes. Theirs was the first such visit in this century.
“His legacy to us is truth, honesty, and hard work, work that the good things of track and other sports may be freely enjoyed by athletes and spectators.
“Pre the little champ opened the international door. I pledge to Pre, I know these close family and friends join me, and we invite all true sportsmen to fulfill his great dream—freedom to meet in international sport and friendship.”
Frank spoke of how their friendship had unexpectedly blossomed when they had shared the pace in a race and, unlike the year before, Frank actually kept the agreement. “And after that, it seemed I’d passed a test. He was my friend.”
Frank told of inviting him to train two months earlier in Taos, New Mexico, for a week of runs above 9,000 feet, altitude being one element that Pre hadn’t fully explored. “We were running in blowing snow that had melted and frozen again, and this pelting corn snow was hitting us and blowing in our faces and I had Pre all dressed in goggles and mittens. Steve was a guy who complained under the best of conditions. He was whining, he was asking why, what am I doing here?
“I turned to him and said, ‘Steve, you know nobody in the world is training harder than we are right now.’ It was the only time I ever ran with him that he got quiet. For the rest of the run, he didn’t say a word. We helped each other get better because we knew how to train and not be competitive, when to turn it on and when to turn it off. I’ve lost a great friend.”
I finished with an attempt at summarizing the thoughts of our meeting of friends. “He conceived of his sport as a service,” I began, “in the way an artist serves. Without that, he would never have given us all the records. They were out beyond winning or losing, which a runner does for himself. They came from those furious minutes near the end of a race when his relentlessness and our excitement blended into a joyous thunder. All of us who now say, ‘I had no idea how much this man meant to me,’ do so because we didn’t realize how much we meant to him. He was our glory, and we his.
“In Munich he lost. Within an hour, he showed us, not for the first or last time, how meager was our faith. When he came home, we began to see that while the competitive fury was still there, he was no longer driven. He began to channel and refine the prodigious energy that ran in him. He visited schools and spoke so graphically about juvenile delinquency and venereal disease that the teachers blushed. He organized a sports club in the Oregon State Prison. He stormed at state legislators about field burning and said later he preferred the company of the prisoners.
“He answered every single critical letter he ever received. He and his grandfather together built a sauna, of which he was insufferably proud. He continued to give powerful and profane voice to the right of all athletes to be free to compete when and where they chose. Combining that cause with his sense of his roots and people, he brought the team of athletes from Finland to compete around Oregon. And we knew he was happy.
“He was a man of all these parts, and more not mentioned here, and still more that we never knew. It is up to us now to hold him in mind clearly, to remember him exactly as he touched us, infuriated us, and challenged us.
“Time holds
him, green and dying, though he sang in his chains like the sea.”
When I was done I looked over. “There are still two minutes on the clock,” I added. “He could run a half-mile.”
The three of us walked across the track and took our seats in the stands. The infield was cruelly empty. As the clock ticked, a spot or two of sun broke through the westerly scudding clouds. People began to rise and a few cried, “Go Pre!” In numbers they stood and applauded. With a minute to go, it was as if he were into his last lap. His people all were up, roaring him home as they had done four nights before. When the clock stopped, there was a visceral “OOOF!” and five seconds of dead silence. Then people were pointing, cheering, imagining him on his victory lap. The clock read 12:36.4.
The evocation of Prefontaine was more graphic than we could’ve imagined. Several people were so emotionally disturbed it was days before they stabilized. Two who would have been devastated anyway were Bowerman and Dellinger. Bowerman was so distraught that when Blaine Newnham of the Register-Guard asked him to speak of how long he’d known Pre and how he coached him, Bill, as he often did, abbreviated and thereby neglected to give Dellinger full credit for his recruiting, coaching, and guidance. Dellinger, just as disturbed, read the article, was hurt, and called Bowerman on its shortcomings: “I thought you taught us all to give credit where credit was due.”
Bowerman didn’t rectify the omission publicly. But two days later, on June 5, he wrote this to Dellinger: “Dear Bill: I have your note. If I have offended you, it adds to my grief. Of the people I spoke to regarding our community and personal tragedy, only Blaine Newnham interviewed me. I recalled the high points of Pre’s career, his background from Coos Bay and Walt McClure briefly. That, as head coach, I did designate the physical coaching to my very able assistant. During that time, philosophy (if that be the correct word) was frequently communicated with the Champ and others, where they seek me.
“If you find offense, it grieves me more.
“Sincerely, Bill.”
Dellinger did continue to find offense. They were estranged.
CHAPTER 27
Legacy
THE DEATH OF STEVE PREFONTAINE SPARKED AN OUTPOURING OF LETTERS AND poems of condolence to family, coaches, and newspapers, their authors all struggling to convey what Pre meant to them. Senator Mark Hatfield, seeking to explain the hold Pre had over Oregon’s imagination, rose among the master politicians in the United States Senate and celebrated Pre for refusing to be politic.
“I have helped officiate at various meets in Eugene,” Hatfield said, “and I know the spirit that fills the University of Oregon track stadium, Hayward Field. The last was during the 1972 Olympic Trials, and the atmosphere was alive with emotions. Pre was the favorite of this crowd in a way few athletes can ever be. We often read of a cocky athlete alienating a crowd. With Pre, confident and cocky as he was, the Oregon track crowds loved him. Perhaps it was for a couple of reasons.
“Pre never was the type that the Amateur Athletic Union or the Olympic fathers, or even the NCAA brass, wanted to parade around as an all-American athlete. Oregon fans had long known that track athletes were not always treated as well as they should be. Oregon fans knew the various squabbling factions cared more for their own petty concerns than they did about the rights and benefits of the athletes. As a result, Pre’s willingness to stand up for what he believed in did not cause any loss of his popularity in Oregon. It increased it. Pre was each of us fighting against a bureaucracy caring only about its own preservation.
“A second reason Pre was so loved in Oregon is that everyone knew he had turned down one of the largest offers to compete in professional track. His answer was that he wanted to run in Oregon, for ‘his people.’ His willingness to go against the grain set him apart. Perhaps people saw in him a spirit they felt they had within themselves. In a state such as Oregon, with our strong traditions of individualism, he stood as a true native son.”
The manner of that son’s passing would lead to apprehension over how he would be remembered. The day after the accident, the Eugene Police Department announced that his blood alcohol level had tested at 0.16 percent, well above Oregon’s (then) legal limit of 0.10. It would break Elfriede Prefontaine’s heart that this led many to accept a simpleminded version of her son’s death. The legend grew that like James Dean, another charismatic rebel, Steve had gotten drunk, slammed his car into a stone wall, and killed himself.
Because Pre had been sharing beers with us at Hollister’s party, none could deny that he had been drinking. And 0.16 percent is a lot, a level assumed to cause real impairment. Yet Frank Shorter—a cautious man, who was such a friend that he would not have hesitated to take the wheel—didn’t feel at all concerned about riding with him. “He was in the same condition I was in,” said Frank. “We’d had three or four beers and he seemed fine. I trusted him to drive.” Pre had simply said he was tired.
It turned out that police had deviated from standard procedure when they had taken a blood sample from the body at the funeral home and released the figure to the press. The normal practice was for the county medical examiner to do a blood alcohol test during the autopsy. The examiner who performed Prefontaine’s autopsy, Dr. Ed Wilson, was criticized by the family for (they presumed) revealing the 0.16 level. In a letter to Bill Dellinger, Wilson stated that he never got the vial of blood the police had taken at the funeral home, never tested it, and so had not been responsible for that finding. “This was done in an unusual manner,” Dr. Wilson wrote. “I don’t remember ever having it happen that way before or since. I was very angry about it.”
Because different test methods can affect readings by as much as twenty percent, the change in procedure gave rise to suspicions. Did the police have their own agenda, a wish to emphasize Pre’s drunkenness? Dr. Wilson would later say that when he informed police chief Dale Allen that he was unhappy with how the case had been handled, Allen had replied to the effect that he wasn’t unhappy that Steve Prefontaine had been shown not to be a god, that he was human like anyone else.
Chief Allen’s remark was not inconsistent with the estimation more than a few police officers had of Prefontaine. Pre didn’t handle authority well and often bridled at the sight of cops. They often bridled back. Prefontaine’s prodigious, incurable, what-you-see-is-what-you-get honesty—honesty that let him perform and enrapture the crowd as he did—also meant that he had never been a hypocrite about his drinking. But there were more important elements to the story than a fishy blood test.
The home closest to the accident belonged to Bill and Karen Alvarado. Their front door opened ten feet from the twisting, two-lane road that is Skyline Drive. The Alvarados had gone to the track meet, visited friends, and come home just after midnight. It was a still, warm evening. They made sandwiches and sat in their bedroom with the windows open to the fragrant woodsy air. They heard a loud sports car engine on the road just below their window. It passed and there was a screech of tires, an impact, and silence. “It was so absolutely still,” Karen Alvarado would say, “we knew something was wrong.”
She told Bill Alvarado to go see. Within twenty seconds he was downstairs, out the door and onto the street, looking left downhill toward where the sound had been. The rightward curve of the road just prevented him from seeing what had happened. As he peered into the night, he heard a car starting down there, just around the bend. In a moment he was blinded by its headlights. “I thought he’d hit the stop sign,” Alvarado recalled ten years later. “I stood in the street and waved my arms. But there was no way he was going to stop and I had to get out of the way in a hurry.” As the car shot past, he saw that it was a light-colored MGB. In seconds it was around the turn uphill, out of sight. Alvarado got angry at the driver’s having taken off like that. He hopped in his Jeep and followed. He drove up the hill and into Hendricks Park, but never found the pale MGB. It had pulled off onto a side street.
Alvarado, driving slowly in his hunt, took a looping route to get home, aro
und onto Birch, left on Skyline, and at last—four or five minutes after it had happened—found Pre’s overturned car. He parked and ran far enough toward his house to yell to his wife that someone was hurt and to call for help. He returned to the car. “I didn’t know who it was, but he was still gasping and somehow I managed to lift the car partway off him. But that was all I could do. I couldn’t get the car completely off and I couldn’t pull him out.
“I’m not a medical person, but I know he was still breathing. If I could have had help lifting the car, if the other car had stopped, we could have saved time and maybe we could have lifted it off of him.”
When Alvarado realized he was no good to the man alone, he ran to call for help. While he was gone, the Eugene police arrived. By then, Steve Prefontaine was dead. The first medical person on the scene, Dr. Leonard “Jake” Jacobsen, was a tough, experienced surgeon who’d also taught at the university. He had been called by the Alvarados and gone down a hillside path through the ivy from his home directly above the wreck. He pronounced Pre dead. Later, the two police officers would report they smelled alcohol at the scene. Dr. Jacobsen, a veteran of much trauma, said that was untrue, that it was only vomitus.
The police had come because they had been called by the driver of the MGB that had roared past Bill Alvarado and vanished. When that driver didn’t return to the scene, the police located him a few blocks away, at his family home on Kona Street. Twenty-year-old Karl Lee Bylund said he’d arrived at the site after the accident, seen someone pinned underneath, panicked, and driven off to get his father, Richard Bylund, a doctor. Because neither Bylund had returned to render aid, the police were suspicious and treated it as a potential hit and run. But there were no scratches on Bylund’s car. A week later, the police reported that Karl Bylund had passed a lie detector test in which he held to his story. The case was closed, listed as a single-car fatality.
