Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

To give the US Olympic marathoners more recovery time between the Trials and the Games, the marathon was held in Eugene in early May, six weeks before the rest of the track events. I felt myself a contender. But a week before the race, trotting back from an effortless interval workout, an odd feeling of weakness crept in. I was barely home when I was shaken with chills and fever. When a dream is taken by pneumonia, it’s over quick. One’s every gasping breath is so clearly one’s last that any regret over not being a three-time Olympian pales.

  A week later, I was strong enough to get out of bed, fire the pistol to start the Trials marathon, and go back to bed. Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers floated stylishly away and took the top two places, Frank winning in 2:11:51. Don Kardong had run every mile with his great friend and Stanford teammate, Antonio Sandoval. Then Kardong sprinted in third, making the marathon team a deep and able group. I told him fate had obviously brought me down so he could be an Olympian. He said, “Then, God, don’t breathe on me.”

  In the track Trials in late June, the women, in the persons of sprinter Evelyn Ashford and miler Francie Larrieu, didn’t so much steal the show as prove to Eugene what it had been missing. Lynne Winbigler became Oregon’s first female Olympian by winning the discus. On the men’s side, the ’76 Trials saw the apogee of a man Bowerman had launched, Mac Wilkins. That spring, in the winds of Mt. San Antonio College and Modesto, Mac had four times dropped his discus down beyond the chalk world record line, lengthening it by six feet, to 232 feet 6 inches. He won the trials with a meet record 225 feet 4 inches.

  Bill Dellinger had trained two Ducks to be Olympians, Centrowitz in the 1500 and the gifted Paul Geis in Bill’s own distance. In the 5000 final, Geis, the 1974 NCAA three-mile champion and a sub-4:00 miler, went with Dick Buerkle’s pace until they were alone and the team was selected. Buerkle won in 13:26.6. Geis was third in 13:38.4.

  In the 1500 final, Centrowitz’s plan was to go hard the last 440. But at the gun, Ohio State’s Tom Byers, swept up in the occasion, became the tiger that Bowerman always warned you not to be, the one who sprints the first lap in 55. Byers, running tall and wild, kept right on going, leaving the elongated field behind and passing 800 meters in 1:52.0. This was an impossible pace, 3:30 pace, when the 1500 world record was 3:32.16, held by Tanzania’s Filbert Bayi.

  Centrowitz had worked hard to be where he was, a distant second, but well ahead of the rest of the astounded field. With 700 to go, Byers began coming back to him so fast it forced a decision. “It was windy on the backstretch,” said Centrowitz. “I was praying he’d keep going and protect me until off the turn with 500 to go, which he didn’t do.” Centrowitz was tempted to tuck in. “But I didn’t want to let the guys who started slower back into the race.” So he took the lead with a long 660 to go. In so doing, he made sure that the three Olympians were the ones who stayed sane in the presence of mania. He led past three laps in 2:52.7. In the homestretch, 800-meter record holder Rick Wohlhuter and his Chicago Track Club teammate Mike Durkin edged past. Wohlhuter won by two yards in 3:36.4. Centrowitz repassed Durkin for second and destroyed Prefontaine’s school record of 3:38.1 with 3:36.7, the equivalent of a 3:53 mile.

  Montreal would be the Olympic debut of Nike, the shoe with the swoosh. Blue Ribbon Sports was now a $14 million company, and coming off a big legal win. In mid-1975, the Onitsuka company had agreed to settle their lawsuit by paying BRS $400,000. The sum basically just covered Phil Knight’s legal fees, but the settlement freed the company from an oppressive legal cloud. Already selling Waffle Trainers by the carload, BRS continued to do so—but, as ever, it needed to borrow money to order shoes. That fall, the company applied for a loan from the US Small Business Administration. The SBA loan officer asked both Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman to personally guarantee the loan.

  Knight had done this before, but Bowerman never had. So Bill sat with John Jaqua and did some reappraising. He’d leapt into the BRS partnership eleven years earlier more for the chance to make decent shoes than to get rich. He’d never minded profits being plowed back into the company’s growth, but he was retired from the university now, on a fixed pension. He had no intention of risking his home above the river if BRS went under. So he and Jaqua worked out a plan whereby Bowerman would sell most of his BRS stock to Knight. This allowed him to keep a slice of the company but avoid personal liability. He parted with forty-four percent of the company for cash, an insurance policy, and a $15,000 per year consulting contract.

  Bowerman had no sense of having relinquished any great future hopes. In fact, relieved of worry about his home, he returned invigorated to his R&D projects—and thereby developed a complicated relationship with someone who admired him immensely, Jeff Johnson, back East in Exeter.

  Production capacity at the Exeter factory was a meager 200 pairs a day at a time when the company could have sold fifty times that. A second factory was opening in Maine, but the only place to find the requisite volume was overseas.

  Overseas manufacturing had its risks, however. In a huge plant, one that might also make shoes for other brands, Nike would have no control over who saw its best ideas—which might start showing up elsewhere. “So our best, most creative stuff we wanted to make in Exeter,” Johnson would say. “We also used the factory to train people before sending them out to train the foreign mega-factories.”

  Meanwhile, in Eugene, Bowerman operated a little development lab out of the rented basement of a medical arts building. Here, Bill kept his own secrets, hiding new things he was working on before receiving visitors with cameras. And, being competitive in all things, he began to feel increasingly pitted against Johnson’s research shop in Exeter.

  Bowerman’s group, which included Bob Newland, orthotist Dennis Vixie, and orthopedic surgeon Stan James, developed two projects before the Montreal Olympic year. One was a series of spikes called the Vainquer, distinguished by a larger spike plate developed by Bill. The trend in spiked racing shoes had been toward smaller spike plates and tighter, snugger toe boxes. Bill asked, Why not spread out the toes, give them room to be a foot the way feet were evolved to work?

  Not unlike fish-skin shoes, larger spike plates made great sense in theory. In practice, though, they just felt—odd. The men wouldn’t wear them because it felt too much like being barefoot. And the women objected to the width. “At one point,” Johnson would say, “I had to do a factory ‘stealth run’ of shoes with smaller spike plates for our best people in Nikes.” Bowerman was not pleased, in part because such stealth seemed designed to keep him in the dark.

  Bill’s other pet design was a sturdy flat, the LD-1000 Trainer. The shoe featured a flared sole, suggested by Dr. Stan James, to increase stability and reduce torque in the knees. The medical community raved about the idea. “But when the production models arrived from the factory,” said James, “I thought Bill was going to have a heart attack. It was an abortion.” The heel was so wide that if the shoe came down at any angle other than perpendicular, the flare would hit the ground and lever the foot. “Instead of stabilizing, it accelerated pronation,” Johnson would say, “and hurt both feet and knees.”

  “It was good for doctors,” said James. “It was a bonanza for knee doctors.” The heels were narrowed in subsequent versions.

  Then there was a battle over something that one imagines would have been known by 1976, namely, whether human feet are straight or curved. James and Vixie had perused some anthropological research and found that most people’s feet were straighter than the lasts their shoes were built on. So Bill’s lab made a straight last (called the Vixie last), on which he fashioned uppers for different models and got some nice shoes. They sent the Vixie last to Johnson in Exeter.

  The factory-made shoes turned out to be too narrow because the machines tugged too hard on the uppers. Nobody could get a foot into the shoe. “What had happened in Bill’s lab,” Johnson would say, “was they had given it a hand job. They’d draped an upper over the last and tugged and smoothed and caressed until it fit. Machines co
uldn’t duplicate that.” Bowerman refused to acknowledge the problem.

  Johnson sent the same prototype to Knight, who couldn’t get it on either. Knight told Johnson to reshape the last enough to allow the manufacture of the shoe Bill had created. Johnson did just that, but Knight, in classic fashion, didn’t convey the decision to Bowerman. “So Bill thought that I was trying to undermine him,” Johnson would say. In any event, once the shoes were on the market, they met with a lukewarm reception. Most of the best runners, including Frank Shorter, didn’t like the straight-lasted shoes because their feet were curved.

  In 1976, Johnson came out to Eugene for the Olympic Trials. By then, Bowerman was steaming. Johnson remembered it well. “We at Exeter were the main supplier of all shoe-related stuff Bill needed for his shop, so he’d ask for, say, a box of uppers to be sent to Vixie’s lab. So within twenty-four hours we sent them to Vixie’s lab. But Vixie wouldn’t tell Bill they arrived and Bill would complain to Buck.” This went on for other things—spike plates, midsoles.

  “Bill complained to Buck that he didn’t get them, and who was this Johnson working for because it didn’t seem to be us. I never knew there was a problem, but one day during the Trials in Eugene, Knight got Bill, Vixie, and me together under the new stands, turned to Bill, said, ‘Go,’ and stood back.” Bill started in with his list. “I didn’t get these uppers . . . ” Johnson said he’d sent them out in twenty-four hours to Vixie’s lab. Dennis, did you get them? Yes. Vixie said yes to every item on the list until Bill finally said, “I’ve had enough of this shit,” and stormed out. “That has always been one of Buck Knight’s favorite stories about our fantastic corporate communication,” Johnson would say.

  Johnson went back to Exeter thinking it was a hell of thing to admire a man as much as he did Bowerman and, in his phrase, “always be pissing him off by getting trapped into these misunderstandings.” But one morning at 6:30 the phone rang. It was Bowerman, calmly asking about some unremembered aspect of the shoes they were planning. Johnson, realizing it was three hours earlier in Oregon, thought, Goddamn this man is serious about shoes! They got along better after that. Bowerman came to appreciate that Johnson was far from just a shoe dog. Johnson, as a coach himself, most appreciated Bowerman for his indifference to those who opposed him on the worth of the hard-easy approach. “Bill simply asked, Who ya gonna believe, those who don’t want to change or the evidence before your own eyes?” Jeff would say. “Bowerman seemed born to be brave that way, to stand firm in defense of simple, humiliating truth.”

  There was abundant humiliation for the world’s traditional track powers at the 1976 Olympics. First, the Games were vitiated by a black African boycott over the IOC not booting New Zealand for carrying on rugby exchanges with banned South Africa. Then Montreal became the first Games dominated by doping-assisted regimes.

  East Germany—a country of seventeen million the size of Ohio—won forty-nine total medals, eleven of them gold. The United States took forty-six and six. In track and field, East German women took eight golds. The Soviets and Poles took most of the rest. The usually strong US women won not a single event and had only three medallists, Kathy McMillan’s silver in the long jump, Kate Schmidt’s bronze in the javelin, and the 1600-meter-relay team’s 3:22.8 for silver, thirty yards behind East Germany’s 3:19.23.

  Fifteen years later, after the Berlin Wall was hammered down and East German secret police files were unearthed, it was revealed that virtually every East German athlete, knowingly or not, had been given anabolic steroids as part of his or her training, usually for years. The East German athletes passed all their Olympic drug tests because East German officials brought a lab of their own and tested every entrant the week before. If he or she had not cleared traces of the drugs from his or her system, he or she was said to have suffered a convenient injury and was withdrawn, uncaught. Unless the IAAF could force year-round, surprise testing, any sufficiently organized country would be able to get away with this.

  The US men fared a little better in Montreal, but nothing like in years past. Cuba’s great stallion, Alberto Juantorena, took the 400 in 44.26 from Fred Newhouse’s 44.40 and won the 800 in a world record 1:43.50. Bruce Jenner was magnificent in winning the decathlon with a record 8,618 points, as was Edwin Moses in the 400 hurdles, with a world record 47.64.

  Matt Centrowitz had developed an Achilles problem, finished eighth in the 1500-meter prelims, and watched the final from the stands. “When I saw the people who got the medals [great kickers John Walker of New Zealand in 3:39.17, Ivo Van Damme of Belgium in 3:39.27, and Paul-Heinz Wellmann of West Germany in 3:39.33],” he would say, “the next day I became a 5000-meter runner.” Centrowitz would go on to win four US national championships in the 5000 and take nine seconds from Pre’s best time, with 13:12.91.

  Paul Geis was the only US runner to make the 5000 final. He vowed to stay with the leaders as long as humanly possible. With two laps to go, he was right there with Lasse Viren, who’d again won the 10,000 and was going for his second double. Viren ran the last 800 in well under two minutes, held off Kiwi Dick Quax, and won in 13:24.76. Geis was twelfth.

  Mac Wilkins stepped into the Montreal discus ring wearing a mountain man’s mass of hair and beard. More scathing than Bowerman or Pre in blasting the USOC, he had allowed himself to be quoted saying that the USOC’s support of American postgraduate athletes was so abysmal that he hoped a nation that did support its older athletes, East Germany, would win all the medals. Some of this was heartfelt, but some had to do with trying to unnerve the United States’ other great thrower, John Powell, with whom he was far from cordial. Wilkins’s best friend among the throwers was East Germany’s Wolfgang Schmidt. They were an ironic pair, each appreciating what the other had more than the other did himself. Schmidt was always in trouble with the East German authorities for his freethinking ways and would eventually, with Wilkins’s help, defect.

  In the qualifying round, on his first throw, in still air, with what Schmidt said was the technically best throw he ever saw in his life, Wilkins set an Olympic record of 224 feet. In the final (when prelim marks don’t carry over), with one throw to go, Wilkins led with 221 feet 5 inches. Powell stood second with 215 feet 7 inches and Schmidt third with 213 feet 9 inches. Responding to the ultimate pressure, Schmidt uncorked a throw of 217 feet 3 inches to grab the silver from Powell. Wilkins ran over and gave him a big bear hug.

  “That was one of the rare times you saw sport cut across nationalism,” US shot-putter Maren Seidler would say. “That was the Olympic ideal, right there. And what happened? Both guys got shafted for it.” Schmidt’s travel was restricted. Wilkins, blasted by super-patriots for being happy that his countryman had been beaten, would have one-tenth the endorsement offers of Bruce Jenner.

  Speaking of product placement, Frank Shorter set out to wear Nikes in the Olympic marathon, lacing on a pair of racing flats that Geoff Hollister and Dennis Vixie had customized for him out of three pairs of production models. While warming up, he looked down and saw the uppers separating from the midsole. “I had no other Nikes with me except clunky training shoes,” he would recall years later. “Bruce McDonald, the walking coach, just happened to be watching the warm-up field. He also happened to be staying in the same room in the Village. He ran to the Village, which was only a half-mile away, got my old Tigers, ran back, and threw them over the fence.” Shorter got to the starting line fifteen seconds before the gun went off.

  (Years later Frank would remember that day. “If I had known about Kitami’s ploy back when Onitsuka tried to take a controlling interest in Blue Ribbon Sports, I would not have worn Tigers in Montreal,” he would declare. “I would have had Nike backups.” But old shoe dog Jeff Johnson demurred. “If those shoes were ‘cannibalized,’ in the sense that Dennis Vixie was cutting and pasting material together, it definitely was better for Frank to run in production shoes, and hang brand loyalty.”)

  Once past his shoe scare Shorter was ready, I believed, to
take a minute and a half from the 2:08:33 world record of Australia’s Derek Clayton. But Frank, always supremely lean, was at his best in the heat. That day Montreal provided a chilly, misting rain. He never felt loose. Even so, when he surged ahead after fifteen miles, atop Mont Royal, only one man went with him, a former East German steeplechaser named Waldemar Cierpinski. Frank ran the next, downhill two miles about as fast as he could go, but the other man flew out to a 100-yard lead. On the level again, with six miles to go, Shorter forced himself back up to within fifty meters of Cierpinski. “Then,” Frank would say, “he turned around, looked at me, and ran away.”

  Cierpinski won in 2:09:55. Shorter held second in 2:10:46. Karel Lismont of Belgium (who’d won the silver in 1972) took the bronze by three seconds from a charging Don Kardong, 2:11:13 to 2:11:16. Bill Rodgers, running with a foot injury, was fortieth in 2:25:14. I had talked tactics with Kardong earlier and seconded his plan to start sensibly and run people down late. “You advise yourself and you get fourth,” he said afterward. “You advise me and I get fourth. I’m getting a new adviser.”

  (Twenty years later, Shorter and Kardong would take grim satisfaction when Dr. Werner W. Franke of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg began uncovering documents kept by the East German physicians and coaches who’d conducted the country’s doping program. The documents showed that Cierpinski was on androgenic steroids in 1976. “I mean, I always knew,” Shorter would say, “and now I knew for sure.”)

  For the first time in twenty years, Bowerman was not present at the Olympics. In what seems almost an act of renunciation, he stayed home from Montreal and was a classically frustrated TV watcher, not seeing much of the track meet. From now on, the Games would no longer dictate his life and calendar as they had since 1956, his first Games as a coach. This caused Barbara to speculate about fulfillment. “I always thought his secret ambition was to equal or surpass Lydiard’s three medallists in one Olympics,” she would say, wondering if Bill had any regrets that Otis Davis was the only one of his athletes to win a gold medal during his active coaching career. “If he felt any regrets, I think he would have shaken them off. He lived what he preached to you boys (excuse me, you Men of Oregon!): If at the end of a race you know yourself that you have done your best, you’re a winner.”