Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  But questions lingered. The tow-truck driver noted that the car had been in second gear. The Alvarados had not felt Pre had been speeding past their window. Why had Pre slammed into a rock wall on the far side of a road along which he was moving at moderate speed? Over the years, I came to believe that for the accident to happen as it did, Pre had to have approached that rock wall at a very specific angle. To attain that angle he had to make a forceful, leftward turn of his steering wheel. I concluded that he was taking some kind of evasive action. Something had been in his lane and (since there was steep hillside jutting up to his right) he avoided it by slamming on the brakes and swerving left. This view was shared by David Sonnichsen, a neighbor and researcher who, with the help of the Prefontaine family, spent years interviewing the principals. Sonnichsen, who meticulously established the facts presented in this account, also concluded that the police’s disdain for Pre probably did not rise to the level of an actual plot to discredit him or had done so only marginally.

  What was Pre trying to miss? It could have been a deer or a raccoon. Given that the Alvarados heard no other car besides Pre’s until Bill Alvarado reached the street, it could have been the MGB of Karl Lee Bylund. Alvarado said he heard it start from first gear right before it came around the turn and past him. That was about thirty seconds after the accident. So Bylund might have swung too wide around the turn from Birch onto Skyline and placed himself in Prefontaine’s lane. Bylund, although he was asked about it over the years, never changed his story that the car was already overturned when he came upon it.

  With time, these findings partially satisfied my own need for a coherent explanation. For me (and for Dr. Jacobsen), the issue of whether Karl Bylund had any part in causing the accident was secondary to his not going back and helping Bill Alvarado help Pre. That failure had potentially fatal consequences. I never met Karl Bylund. Over the years, my feelings about his actions would evolve from uncomprehending fury, through morbid curiosity, to a kind of academic pity at his having to go through life haunted by the knowledge that he could have done more.

  The effect of all this was to make us wild to cling to Prefontaine’s legacy, to define and protect it. He hadn’t left a will, but he might as well have. “I did not want to waste or squander any effort Pre put forward,” Shorter would remember. “I felt if you could keep momentum going on something he cared about, then you should.”

  Our leader in much of this was Bill Bowerman. Earlier that year, when Hayward Field’s new west stands were completed, the annual Restoration meet had been renamed the Bowerman Classic. Bill now scotched that. Pre was “part of the dream to replace the old, condemned stands,” Bowerman wrote in a press release. “He was the driving force in the two Restoration meets. Our Oregon Track Club Board concurs that in living memorial to Pre—his inspiration, his ambition—the meet he did so much to make successful should bear his name. Next Saturday evening you may attend the Steve Prefontaine Classic, a first step in a parade of opportunities to share directly in the dreams of Steve Prefontaine.”

  Bowerman got a note that week from university president Robert Clark. “Your gesture in naming Saturday night’s event for him was magnanimous indeed,” Clark wrote. “We owe much to Steve, but we owe even more to you for your years of service at the university and for the quality in you that brought Steve Prefontaine and others to us.”

  The Pre Classic would grow into the finest IAAF Grand Prix invitational in the country. And a living memorial it is, coming at the season he left us, when the roses and peonies are most potent, and blending the two opposites that warred in him, the voluptuary and the ascetic.

  A second step, Bowerman felt, was to embed Pre’s goals in an institution. To that end, Bill convened Ray Prefontaine, Walt McClure, Jim Grelle, Jon Anderson, Wade Bell (now a CPA), Roscoe Divine (now a lumber broker), attorney Greg Foote, and me. We departed the meeting having fashioned the nonprofit Steve Prefontaine Foundation. Its first major job was to build a running trail the equal of those Steve had enjoyed in Europe.

  Bowerman marshaled local producers. Mills donated sawdust. Trucking companies loaned vehicles and drivers. Pre’s Trail was to be in Lane County’s Alton Baker Park, across the river from the campus. County engineers helped plan the route and used a small federal grant to fund youth crews to lay a base of gravel for drainage. Then Oregon Track Club work parties and school sports teams spread the wood chips. Bowerman doubted that such cooperation would have been possible without everyone knowing for whose dream he or she labored.

  Today the trail is six miles of springy cedar bark and wood waste path. Fulfilling Pre’s expressed wish, it has a parcours of exercise stations. Some loops are so smooth they are good for shock-free, 60-pace interval training. After a few years, we would recall running with Pre himself in favorite sections. It would bring us up short to realize he never saw it, that he knew only the paved bike paths along the river.

  Once the trail was finished, the Prefontaine Foundation took on a mission close to Pre’s heart—to help the most talented in our sport, wherever they may be, whatever they may need. Pre had observed with disgust that there was little support for gifted young female runners. He’d been wildly protective of 15-year-old Mary Decker, whom he’d met on the AAU national team in 1973. He’d called her often at her home in LA to check on her training and moaned to us that her mother and coach were overworking and over-racing her. So his namesake foundation funded young athletes, especially women, to competitions appropriate to their ability.

  Bowerman also used the foundation to help schools and towns around the state upgrade their tracks from muddy cinders to rubber asphalt. He always insisted, when helping with a new track, that the foundation put forward money only if it was matched by the community receiving it, to nurture a sense of ownership. Somehow, donors and matchers always pungled up their halves and the tracks got built.

  The last item on Pre’s wish list was fixing the governance of American track, specifically to free athletes so they could develop and compete as they saw fit. “The AAU was what we were discussing, sitting in the car that night he died,” Shorter would recall, “and I think it was only natural for me to go on with the fight.” This was actually a matter of rededication for Shorter and me, because two years earlier, embarrassed by all the snafus at Munich (and coaxed by 1964 Olympic swimming champion Donna De Varona), the USOC had agreed to form the Olympic Athletes’ Advisory Council (AAC). Shorter and I were invited to be founding members.

  Olympic athletes had never had vote or voice in the USOC unless they were prepared to spend years working their way up through different committees, by which time they were no longer purely athletes. But the new USOC AAC had one unconflicted competitor from every Olympic sport—winter and summer, men’s and women’s—thirty or more active or recently retired athletes. All had in common the grounding Olympic experience, yet they were vastly different otherwise. That mix of common purpose and cross-pollination made the AAC a rousing group of achievers.

  The AAC was no more than advisory at first, but it quickly began urging the Olympic Committee to open all its governing boards and subcommittees to a fixed percentage of athletes. Frank and I had told Prefontaine all about this and said that every top athlete was welcome to attend, but he was always too impatient to go to AAC meetings. He had a million suggestions, however, which usually boiled down to getting some power over the AAU that the NCAA hadn’t been able to attain.

  We got right on it. In our very first meeting in Chicago in 1973, we were asked to weigh in on a bill then before Congress authored by Senator James Pearson of Kansas that would break up the AAU and set up a central amateur sports association. This body would be empowered to establish rules under which “US Sports Associations” could be issued federal charters as international franchise holders in their respective sports. Significantly, an association would be prohibited from holding more than one charter and would be required to grant active athletes twenty percent of voting power in the association. />
  USOC President Phillip O. Krumm and Executive Director Colonel F. Don Miller made impassioned speeches to the athletes’ group, saying the American Olympic movement had always been free from government money and government strings and that it was desperately important to our way of life to keep it that way. We were on a toboggan run to socialism if we didn’t resist this attack. Senator Pearson said the Olympic sports and the AAU were so unlikely to spontaneously improve that Congress had to step in.

  The athletes debated and agreed, by a vote of twenty-five to four, to support the bill. Air Force Captain Micki King, the AAC president and 1972 diving champion, went before the full USOC board of directors to deliver that message. She came out white. “If Phil Krumm had had an M-16,” she said, “I’d be in my grave.” Ignoring its athletes’ considered views, the USOC opposed the bill hysterically and it was defeated.

  Bowerman was fascinated by these echoes of his own battles in the early 1960s. “Promise me,” he said once after I’d briefed him on a meeting, “that you and Frank won’t bang your heads against this wall for fifteen years like I have. Life is too short.” (One heard that life is too short a lot after Pre died.)

  But then, in late 1975, news came that President Gerald Ford was naming the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports (PCOS) to hold hearings for a year to fully document what was wrong with American amateur sport and arrive at how to fix it. The one thing Bill’s experience had shown was that there could be no reform of the AAU-NCAA power struggle unless it was mandated in federal law. Shorter and I assured Bowerman that the PCOS had the power to recommend just that and to shepherd an act through Congress, if the various powers with clout (especially the NCAA) could be brought on board. Bill said he’d believe it when he saw it, but if we needed him for anything, just to ask.

  Another conflict—the Bowerman-Dellinger estrangement—though painfully real, was publicly muted. Bowerman had almost pointedly not included Dellinger in the original leadership group of the Prefontaine Foundation, but there was plenty of overlap. The Pre foundation, the varsity coaches, the OTC all-comers-meet people, the road-run people—all would be there at the Wednesday OTC breakfast meetings, where Dellinger and Bowerman were always elaborately cordial. Dellinger trained his team well and talked it up effectively at Oregon Track Club board meetings. Nonetheless, he was soon at odds with Bowerman over personnel.

  Bowerman had coached every track and field specialty, and he invited each athlete to become “a student of his event.” He was coach because he knew them all, but one could absorb enough about one’s own sport in four years to be regarded as a colleague. Dellinger didn’t have quite the breadth to follow suit. More of a running specialist, he depended on assistants for the field events.

  To help in coaching Mac Wilkins, Dellinger planned to hire Frank Morris, from an athletic Medford family. “But Frank in his youth ran afoul of the law on some incident that put him on Bowerman’s not-good list,” Bill Landers would say. “And with Bill that was pretty much a lifetime assignment. So when he learned that Frank could be coming into his life’s work he went ballistic.” Although Morris may have continued to coach Mac, he was never hired as a permanent assistant.

  Bowerman’s great strength and great weakness occasionally seemed like two sides of the same coin. Along with his dogged kind of genius and refusal to accept defeat came an equally dogged refusal to tolerate people who disappointed him in some important way. Once one lost his respect, one never regained it. “He disappeared people,” was how Jim Grelle had put it. Bowerman would never go that far with Dellinger. Still, these were two proud men, Olympians who held Olympic-level expectations for those they admired and respected.

  Their estrangement after Prefontaine’s death seemed harder on Dellinger. Bowerman’s first champion always felt he owed an unpayable debt to his coach and he didn’t want to go through life at odds with him. But Dellinger genuinely felt Bowerman had not done enough to give him due credit for Prefontaine’s success. Bowerman, as he did when he believed himself crossed or betrayed, seemed to dismiss any need for reconciliation from his mind. Dellinger saw that and gave up on mending the breach.

  The two Bills didn’t feud. They simply went on in their own, characteristic ways. Bowerman took refuge in his little research shoe lab, turning out several more of what would amount to hundreds of templates and designs. And he actually became more sociable. He began a regular Tuesday lunch group with Hendrickson, Newland, Chris Christensen, and Bill McHolick. Les Anderson and Wade Bell would drop by, too, and UCLA coach Jim Bush when he was in town. McHolick dubbed this the Ad Hoc Committee because it rendered cackling, caustic judgment on pretty much every issue of the day, and on its members as well.

  Dellinger, for his part, was so shaken by Pre’s death that he doubted he could ever grow personally close to an athlete again. He had never hesitated to become friends with runners and throwers, and he connected with Pre as he had with no other. Now Dellinger, in his grief (some part of which was a pang of guilt that he hadn’t gotten Pre to cut down more on his drinking), asked himself whether Bowerman might not be right about that. Keeping more distance might have made the blow more like a doctor losing a patient rather than a family losing a son. He didn’t feel capable of ever opening himself up as much again.

  Miler Matt Centrowitz, however, was being affected by Dellinger’s withdrawal. Centrowitz, from Power Memorial High School in the Bronx (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s alma mater), had been the fastest high school miler in the country in 1973 with 4:02.7. He began at Manhattan College that fall and qualified for the NCAA cross-country meet out in Spokane, Washington, where he met a couple of Oregon runners, including Prefontaine, in his final college race. “Pre showed us around,” Centrowitz would recall, “and I met Bill Dellinger that afternoon. My coach and I talked with him about the Oregon training methods. Hard and easy, on the East Coast, was part myth. I was fascinated by that.”

  Centrowitz transferred to Oregon the following summer and had to support himself through an ineligible, redshirt year in 1974–75. Fortunately, there was work at hand, and a taskmaster. Bowerman gave Centrowitz the job of shellacking the new west stands, assigned his hours, and, because the city boy had never done any painting, taught him the proper way to wield a paintbrush. “He worked with me as an equal,” Centrowitz would say, “and trusted me in tracking my hours. I remember him saying, ‘You want to round up, now.’ He made you feel good about yourself, not just welcome but valued.”

  Centrowitz never did a specific workout just for Bowerman, but he ran with—and soaked up lore from—Roscoe Divine. “I heard the stories, the rationale, the whys of what we were doing under Dellinger,” he would say. Because Centrowitz wasn’t varsity eligible and Pre had graduated, they frequently trained together that fall and winter. Matt once asked Pre which of the two Bills was better. “I need them both!” Pre said. “I go to Dellinger for the best workouts. I go to Bowerman whenever I need my head tuned!” Centrowitz found Bowerman more outgoing than Dellinger: “He was more verbal. And those eyes! An amazing presence, whether joking around or tinkering with my shoes. Dellinger was more the reserved, Western distance-runner type.”

  Except in the liberating presence of Prefontaine. “When Pre was around, Bill Dellinger was happy,” Centrowitz would say. “They both were happy. They were like brothers. Theirs was like no coach-athlete relationship I’d ever seen or ever will see. Pool, darts, girls, they played and talked about absolutely everything. So when Pre was there, you saw that side of Bill. But when Pre went away you stopped seeing it.” And when Pre died, Centrowitz would say, “we saw the bottom drop out of things.”

  Centrowitz, who grew up without a father in New York City where the drinking age was eighteen, unwittingly drew Dellinger back into some intimacy with his charges. “At home, my mom sanctioned my drinking, within bounds,” Matt would say. “At Oregon, Dellinger did everything he professionally could to discourage me. I’d promise to stop and that would last about a week. I’d come s
it down in front of him in a tavern and he’d be so disappointed. I was a determined guy, without a father, who wanted to be around an older guy.”

  Dellinger later said that if he had not had Centrowitz and the team needing him to be emotionally present for them, it would have taken far longer to come back. Eventually he began to open up again. In return, Matt developed great loyalty to Dellinger. “I knew even then that it was a trade-off,” he would say. “I was giving away something on the track in return for something I got in that tavern sitting with Bill. As an adult, I cherish those lessons, that guidance, more than any championship. But that was me. That’s for maybe one guy out of ten.” Centrowitz’s own children would never see him take an alcoholic drink. Neither would the runners he coached.

  Dellinger began to hear criticism about his sitting in a bar with a varsity runner, a practice unheard of under Bowerman. Centrowitz went to Dellinger and asked how he could help the situation. “You help by speaking with your performance,” Dellinger told him. “You help by making this Olympic team.”

  Bowerman, meanwhile, had ensured that Hayward Field would once again be the venue for the Olympic Trials. The 1975 AAU meet had been held in a Eugene still under the pall of Prefontaine’s absence. But with Bob Newland at the meet’s helm, it had been another artistic and financial triumph for the Oregon Track Club.

  Thus, three things happened at the next meeting of the USOC Track and Field Committee. First, the 1976 Olympic Trials were awarded to Eugene (and the OTC would be allowed to pay the top athletes’ expenses). Second, the women’s track Trials were combined with the men’s (“which would not only enhance the meet’s appeal,” said Newland, “but spread fairness in the land.”), and third, Newland himself was elected an assistant manager of the 1976 US men’s Olympic track team going to Montreal.