Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  “I move my portable galleria every six or seven days. It takes about fifteen minutes and is wonderfully good for our shallow soil. It never fails to bring the nostalgia of boyhood and walking through the chicken yard barefoot. No sensation is more memorable than the flow between the toes.”

  For some time, friends would ask whether he had isolated the toughest gene, the non-carport-crapping one. He would say not quite yet and ask them to walk the edges of the carport and look for droppings that were flat on one side. That would show that some subject was halfway there. Later, Jay Bowerman would say you absolutely could not understand his father’s sense of humor without seeing a video of Al, the black-tailed rooster, to the accompaniment of Misty River bluegrass band, servicing a pair of snow-white Nike Cortezes.

  The following year, Great Britain’s Sebastian Coe broke the 800 (1:42.50), mile (3:49.0), and 1500 (3:32.1) records, becoming the first to own them all. That September, at Geoff Hollister’s urging, Coe cooled out in Eugene. Coe’s intentions were to rest from running and sample Americana. I took him up to the Bowermans’. After Barbara’s lemonade and oatmeal cookies, we all walked through the woods to a hillside pasture in which grazed a few, small, chunky black cattle. “Trying to build a herd of Dexter cows,” Bill said. “It’s an Irish breed. They’re supposed to be small, so they don’t eat much, but they still give you a gallon of milk.” Bill hoped to eventually take his herd through enough generations to name a new breed Bos domesticus oregonensis.

  As they walked, Coe stopped suddenly, his hand on his hip. “Since last winter,” he said, “I’ve had occasional pain that goes from my back down my leg.”

  “It’s certainly not a hamstring pull,” said Bill, “or you wouldn’t have been able to do what you’ve done.” He pressed Coe against a fir, teaching him an abdominal exercise to align the back and pelvis. Coe walked away with pitch on his shirt and an elevated gaze.

  “Pretty good,” said Bill. “Not swaybacked at all.”

  Soon he had Coe describing his training in detail. “My father is my coach,” Sebastian said, “and the basic foundations have been consistent, although the headings have meandered a bit as we’ve experimented. Essentially, it has been one hundred percent quality, not quantity. It is speed endurance—that is, seeing how long you can endure speed. In winters I have very seldom run more than fifty miles per week, less in the spring.”

  “No more than that?” asked Bill, knowing that Coe’s predecessor as mile record holder, New Zealand’s John Walker, coached by Arch Jelley under Arthur Lydiard’s system, did over a hundred in his stamina-building phases. Coe, somehow, had defied middle-distance wisdom that pure speed work was destructive and led to staleness. “How do you stay fresh and strong on so little distance work?” asked Bill.

  “My father,” Coe said, “says that you might not know the accepted lore of athletics, but if you know people and can sense individual needs, it can make all the difference.” At the words individual needs, Bowerman’s closed his eyes. “Hear, hear,” he said.

  “Yet,” continued Coe, “I wouldn’t know why some people can get away with less distance than others. I really haven’t a clue.”

  Bowerman at once subjected Coe to a set of Twenty Questions, honing in on that clue. It soon came out that there was more to Coe’s training than just running. He spent ten or eleven hours every winter week in the Loughborough gym under the eye of George Gandy, a lecturer in biomechanics and coordinator of his training.

  “It has been described as Coe’s commando workout,” said Sebastian. “In the fall, it’s the use of everything you can think of in the gymnasium, lifting heavy weights twice a week, working every part of the body. After Christmas, we concentrate on every muscle from knees to sternum, using box jumping, speed drills, repeatedly mounting a beam, high knee lifts, bounding on grass or a soft-sprung floor.

  “All this was associated two-and-a-half years ago with rapid improvement in my leg speed. It’s simple athleticism really, the coordinated transference of weight and force through the body.”

  Bill concluded that the strength and flexibility Coe brought to the track from such work supported him as well as did the stamina that others gained through long runs. “It was a happy accident that from the first, when I was thirteen, my father felt you ought not smash a kid on the road, so he kept the distance low. As a junior in 1975, I averaged twenty-eight miles per week and ran successfully—third in the European junior 1500—against juniors running eighty or ninety miles.”

  Bowerman listened with an expression of beatific gratification. He was hearing confirmation of long-cherished beliefs about uniqueness and the need for self-knowledge. “So you’ve developed a methodology,” he said, “that isn’t at all dependent on what others do. That takes a certain sort of man.”

  “Well,” said Coe, slightly embarrassed, “sometimes the difficult thing is to hold back when things are going well, to remember that what you’re doing is, after all, preparation. That’s hard when you’re in a competitive group.”

  “How do you avoid racing when you are in training?”

  “I have always trained alone.”

  “Tell me about your father,” said Bowerman. “He’s an engineer?”

  “Yes. He’s production director of a cutlery firm.”

  “Does he talk to you about body mechanics, balances?”

  “When I was a child, he always spoke of lines and angles and carrying oneself efficiently. You see, the day I started running was the day he started coaching. After that, it was bringing his science to bear, studying everything he could find. He’s gotten rid, he says, of ninety-five percent of what he’s learned. The five percent he’s kept is very specific. He has no other runners. People ask if he will coach them and he says, ‘I don’t know enough about you. I’d have to move in with you.’” Coe grinned. “You don’t know my father, but that usually ends it.”

  “I would very much like to know your father,” said Bowerman gravely, sensing that rarest thing for him, a kindred spirit. “I want you to tell him that he is always welcome here. Always.”

  Also in 1979, Bowerman received a surprise tribute at the annual Nike sales meeting at Sunriver Resort, south of Bend, Oregon. Geoff Hollister and Barbara Bowerman put together what would be the first of a powerful series of videotaped collections of old pictures of Bill, photogenic Bill, in various stages of life and BRS’s history. Hollister scored it to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and everybody cried, including Bill. “You really got me this time, Buck,” he rasped.

  Buck had gotten a lot of people lately and was driving toward a goal—surpassing Adidas. Since 1976, BRS’s sales had doubled every year. In 1979, Adidas’s President Horst Dassler said in an interview that Nike had defeated Adidas in the American running-shoe market. “It’s not only what we didn’t do,” Dassler said, “but what someone else did well. Nike did a better job.” With its 1980 sales at $270 million, Nike became the number-one athletic-shoe company in the United States.

  With no financial clouds over it and many early investors pressing to sell their shares, Knight figured it was time to make BRS a publicly traded corporation. On December 9, 1980, Nike made an initial public stock offering that brought the growing company $28 million in fresh capital. BRS stock opened at $22 a share and stayed there.

  Bowerman’s shares of the company were now worth $9 million. Bill’s clothes, home, and vehicles showed no sign of his new riches. They never would. But he did employ his new liquidity in an old endeavor, confounding people. One cold morning that very week, he appeared at my front door with a briefcase and a printout showing that a thousand dollars invested back in 1966, when I had had my chance, would be $750,000 now. This rendered me speechless.

  “But,” he said, “you must always know that as long as I’m with the company, there will be these for you.” He whipped out a box of Cortezes.

  To explain what it meant to be in good standing in his eyes, a tiger, a Man of Oregon, requires explaining why we were both s
o thrilled by that moment. He was ferociously exultant. He almost skipped up the steps to his car. I felt a sense of rightness that he would do this and I was proud of myself for enjoying Bill’s enjoyment. We’d made our choices and we’d lived with them happily, but wasn’t it a kick to tease the other about what might have been?

  There never would be any unmanly talk about cutting anyone in late because it was too bad everybody couldn’t share in this huge success, or that I somehow deserved riches because long ago he had borrowed my foot. A deal is a deal. He would never mention it again. There was no need. The affirmation warms me still. Everyone must have a story like that. Well, everyone should. Granted, it’s easier to pull it off when both of you know there are more important things than money.

  In early spring of that Olympic year of 1980, steeplechaser Henry Marsh and 5000-meter man Paul Geis had asked Bowerman to take over their training. Both had broken down under the workouts of Harry Johnson at Athletics West. Bowerman gave them counsel for a while but then decided to stop, explaining in a note to Knight, “It was unfair to them as athletes to have different advisors and coaches of Nike pulling at cross-purposes. It was unfair to me to find myself being short-circuited by the AW coach, administrator, physiologist, dietitian, and to some extent the promotion office. It’s unfair to Harry Johnson, who finds his empire out of his control.”

  But Marsh pressed Bowerman to change his mind, indicating that if he did not, Marsh would try to train himself. Geis felt much the same. Convinced that the two runners were ill-served by the Johnson regimen, Bowerman concluded, “I told them I will coach both of them wholly. Anything from Athletics West will be directed to me. Any and all decisions will be made by me regarding these two men. If they are to be screwed up, or can’t make it—the cake is mine. If they succeed as hoped, it will be for the Nike ship I gave my effort, and for my pleasure.”

  Soon it seemed any training was pointless. In January, reacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter had announced that he would require the US Olympic team to boycott the Moscow Olympics unless the Soviets withdrew by February 20. “The ancient Greeks,” Bowerman said, echoing his response to the Munich terror, “believed the Olympic arena so sacred they stopped their wars for them. Now we believe our wars are so sacred we sacrifice Olympics for them.”

  The most immediate blow in Eugene was to Bob Newland, who had been elected head manager of the US track team. Bowerman and Newland had been conferring often on how Newland could anticipate the team’s needs in the Games. Bill was as disappointed as Newland that his old friend wouldn’t be making use of all their planning.

  In March, the White House brought a group of Olympians to Washington, DC, to be told by Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski why the boycott was necessary. A map of the Middle East was on a stand. Brzezinski slapped the end of his pointer on the Strait of Hormuz and said the Soviets in invading Afghanistan had moved a step closer to being able to disrupt the West’s oil shipping. The athletes were part of a considered, realpolitik response, so the Soviet action would not be without cost. “Thanks for checking with us first,” said 1976 400-meter silver medallist Fred Newhouse.

  Afterward, at a disconsolate dinner, pentathlete Jane Frederick asked me to help a movie get made. Eugene had won the Olympic Trials for a third time and they would still be held. Director Robert Towne (author of Chinatown and Shampoo) wanted to shoot scenes during the Trials for Personal Best, a film about four years in the lives of two women pentathletes. Frederick had helped with the screenplay. But, she said, Towne and Warner Brothers had been denied permission by the university and the OTC.

  I looked into it. Bowerman said the movie people had visited in the winter. “They promised to keep their cameras off the field,” Bill said, “and then were overheard saying, ‘We can agree to anything now and then run them on when the time comes.’ We ran them off.” Besides, the university had had problems with the script.

  I called Towne. We’d actually spoken three years before, when I needed advice on coping with a possible TV movie on Pre. The ubiquitous Donna De Varona had brought us together. Towne now said the loose-lipped advance man was no longer with the film. “He didn’t understand how crucial is shooting at the Trials. You can’t go out to a high school track and fake it.”

  Towne’s desire to make it real moved me to read the script. It had some of the corrosive language he was known for, but nothing in it offended my knowledge of my sport. Its threads were many, including a sexual relationship between the two women, but its core seemed part of every athlete’s story: how to summon one’s best, how to deal with the ferociousness of competition with people one respects and loves. Towne asked me to ask the university and the OTC to reconsider. In April, to demonstrate his seriousness, he brought actors Mariel Hemingway and Scott Glenn to Eugene.

  A new university president, William Boyd, had taken over from Robert Clark. Oregon Vice President Curtis Simic had been the one to rule that the script was objectionable. Boyd read it himself and had my toughest lit professor (and turn judge), Edwin Coleman, read it too. Both loved it. In a delicate shift (so as not to obviously overrule the squeamish Simic), Boyd said the university would give permission if shooting was acceptable to the Oregon Track Club, which meant Bill Bowerman.

  I called Bill. He would not agree to hear Towne out. “Ask me anything but that,” he said and hung up. A Barbara Bowerman assertion came to mind: “Only two men can get Bill to pull back and re-think something—Otto Frohnmayer and John Jaqua.” Jaqua read the script and advised Bill to meet with Towne.

  Towne had been in Eugene a week by now and seemed near the end of his rope. Driving up to Bowerman’s hillside, he said, “I don’t know what to say to him. I have no sense of Bill Bowerman besides the amazing respect he commands.” His hands were shaking.

  Bowerman met us coolly. He placed us in soft chairs and took a hard, straight one for himself. I gave a little summation, concluding that the decision was now up to him. He turned to Towne.

  Towne hesitated, seeming lost, wild-eyed. “I looked at Bowerman,” he would say later, “and suddenly I knew that here was that rare man who isn’t controlled by bureaucratic fears or others’ opinions. I understood that if he decided I was one percent more right than wrong, he would support me.”

  Towne traced the origins of the project, from meeting Jane Frederick in the UCLA weight room in 1976 to coming to know and be affected by the world of female track athletes. He had written the screenplay with the help of Frederick, javelin bronze medallist Kate Schmidt, and Olympic 100-meter hurdler Patrice Donnelly. He was determined to approach the highest level of reality. He would use world-class athletes in all but two roles. Hemingway, who’d grown up a skier in Idaho, had been training for the pentathlon events of hurdles, shot put, high jump, long jump, and 800 meters for eighteen months.

  Bowerman sat impassive, unreadable. Towne churned on, saying that he wanted to do a movie that showed track and field as it had never been shown before and that it was absurd to think of doing it anywhere but in Eugene and at the Trials. “They say I’m crazy in the industry for using real athletes, but I can’t understand Eugene’s not wanting me to give my best shot at showing something that Eugene loves as much as I do . . . ”

  Bowerman held up his hand. “You stay off my track,” he said, in a tone I knew. “You stay off my infield. And I don’t care if you photograph each other buggering yourselves under the stands.” It didn’t sink in. Even in the car, Towne said, “You really think it’s all right now?”

  Of course it was. The Oregon Athletic Department even ended up as the agency supplying thousands of extras for the crowd scenes.

  I took Towne and Hemingway to the plane. As soon as I got home, the phone was ringing. It was Towne in LA saying, “You know that goof of a swimmer, Denny, who comes in near the end? Mariel and I want you to read for that part.”

  Once in a lifetime, everyone should have a phone call like that as a test of cardi
ac fitness. “But I’ve never . . . I’m shy. I get embarrassed. I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to talk.”

  “You’re an athlete,” he said. “And the character is easily embarrassed.” Writhe though I might, authenticity was his hook. If I wanted to help make the film be true, he insisted, I wouldn’t resist his judgment in what he knew best.

  I made no promises. In May, Towne came up with Patrice Donnelly and had me read through Denny’s scenes. “You’re in trouble now,” he said.

  All that could save me was if I photographed too old. Denny was supposed to be in his mid-20s. I was 36. So I had to take a screen test. I flew to LA and reported to Towne’s office in the Burbank Studios. “I give you my word that playing Denny will not be contrary to your own character,” he said. “Tomorrow you and Mariel will simply do the weight-lifting scene, which is an echo of how I met Jane. It will be my job to spur you, or soften you, or maybe infuriate you, so that what the camera sees is real. But I won’t violate you.”

  A couple of days later, the printed takes were ready. The whole crew trooped up some stairs to projection room six. I was calm, equally able to accept any verdict. “Stop grinding your teeth,” said Donnelly.

  My first impression as the images lit the screen was that there had been a cruel trick. The jolt was like first hearing your voice played back on a tape recorder as a child, but more potent. The close-ups were excruciating, my eyes seeming on the verge of rolling out of my head. My slow pace of talking seemed a speech impediment. There was laughter. In the last takes I just concentrated on watching Hemingway.

  The lights came up and people crowded around. Towne shoved them aside and hugged me hard, saying there was no going back now, that he’d just learned a lot about how to use Hemingway and me. I walked out in a kind of icy, consternated disbelief. Discovered.

  Towne’s cinematographers shot 105,000 feet of film during the Olympic Trials, almost all of the pentathlon as it proceeded. Jodi Anderson won it with 4,697 points and was hired to join the cast. Scott Glenn, a ropy, hard-muscled man, had come to acting late after a hitch in the Marines. A mountain climber and martial arts student, he asked systematic questions. By the end of the Trials, he really could have been the acerbic, intimidating track coach he played in the film. He and I sat with Bowerman during the steeplechase final, because this was the race for which Bill had been coaching Henry Marsh.