by Kenny Moore
Of all the runners Bill advised, Marsh took his precautions against killing yourself in the early laps most seriously. In that steeple final, he laid back so far that Bill rolled his eyes, worried he was being too casual about all the ground he had to make up. But the steeplechase is different. Slamming through the water jump six times and always having to chop your steps to get aligned approaching the barriers reduces almost everyone to a state where a true kick is out of the question physiologically.
But not for a perfectly peaked Henry Marsh, who was always a superb hurdler. He came on with a powerful last lap and set an American record of 8:15.68, winning from Doug Brown (8:20.60) and John Gregorek (8:21.32).
“Thanks, Bill,” Marsh said simply when he reached him.
“It was my pleasure,” said Bill, looking it. “My great pleasure.”
Oregon varsity distance runners were as strong and deep as ever. In the 5000 final, Eugene sophomore Bill McChesney sprinted away from the field with three laps to go. Matt Centrowitz and Dick Buerkle finally caught up and went one-two in 13:30.62 and 13:31.90. But McChesney held third at 13:34.42. That made two Ducks on the team in Pre’s race alone. In the 10,000, Alberto Salazar, who had graduated from Oregon that spring, placed third behind Athletic West’s Craig Virgin (who’d taken Pre’s national record in the 10,000) and Greg Fredericks.
And in the women’s 1500 meters, Oregon sophomore Leann Warren elicited the roar of the meet when she outkicked Francie Larrieu to take third and make the team. Mary Decker won in 4:04.91. Julie Brown was second in 4:07.13 and Warren ran 4:15.16. The number of Ducks on the team made the overarching melancholy of these Trials more personal. These great new talents had no sooner announced themselves than they had reached the end of the line. “All dressed up,” as NBC announcer Charlie Jones put it, “and nowhere to go.”
For months, these events, and my being dragooned into a movie, made great fodder for Bill and the Tuesday Ad Hoc luncheon group. I would be “the thespian” for years.
After shooting in Eugene, Towne continued in LA and San Luis Obispo. Then, in July, the Screen Actors Guild struck all the major studio productions over the issue of Pay-TV and video-cassette residuals. Towne asked for an exception because Personal Best’s athletes, though Guild members, weren’t really actors. Both the Guild and Warner Brothers said no. So Towne refinanced the picture, making it an independent production. He could then agree to meet whatever terms the Guild won from the whole industry and resume.
The $11 million this switch cost came from record producer David Geffen. In case he went over budget, Geffen demanded that Towne put up his house and car and, later, the rights to several future scripts. This all caused big gaps in shooting.
In August, I escaped to reality, the Moscow Olympics. I didn’t know which was sadder, a Trials that went nowhere or a vitiated Games.
Because Geffen repeatedly shut down shooting while he extracted from Towne the rights to more future work, Personal Best wasn’t ready for release until early 1982. Bowerman suggested that a premiere in Eugene would be a great benefit for the Prefontaine Foundation. Towne and Warner Brothers, the distributor, agreed, so we arranged for one on February 17, 1982, at the Oakway Cinema.
By that time I had seen the final cut once and was sure Towne had attained the reality he sought. Especially powerful was Scott Glenn’s portrayal of the caustic, manipulative, hypercompetitive coach, Terry Tingloff, whom the female characters have to learn from and eventually rise above. I had met such coaches and always thanked my lucky stars that they weren’t mine.
Concerns that the lesbian aspect would overwhelm the main themes were unfounded. Towne had written it for its dramatic urgency; the danger, and consequent romance, would be greater. “But it’s a natural thing to explore with athletes,” he said. “Skill and passion are not unrelated. It’s an extension of their being children, of discovering who they are through their bodies, in competition, in love. Anything to do with sex—whether masculine or feminine—is just all on the way to defining what they are about.”
Then he issued a Dante-like curse: “People who can’t think of anything else but whether the person you love is convex or concave should be doomed to not think of anything else, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.”
As it happens in the movie, Chris Cahill (Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (Donnelly) break off their affair. Cahill takes up with a skinny swimmer named Denny. When Chris asks him how he feels about her having had a female lover, Denny comes up with a line that for me was an anthem of ho-hum acceptance. “I think,” he says mildly, “we both like great-looking girls.”
During the Eugene screening I sat with Bill and Barbara Bowerman. He laughed at that line and a lot of others. Both of them kept elbowing me during my scenes, one of which, famously, was nude in the bathroom. At the end there was Hayward Field-grade applause.
When I came back Sunday night, my father met my plane with the Register-Guard of the 19th, two days after the screening. The headline was “He Calls It Personal Worst.” The subhead was “Fuming ex-U of O coach wants his name stricken from closing credits.” Bill was quoted as saying the film was a discredit to sports in general and a sorry presentation of track and field.
Reporter Fred Crafts went on:
Bowerman was among about 150 people who attended a special Northwest premier of the movie Wednesday night. Afterward, Bowerman congratulated co-star Kenny Moore, one of his former U of O runners and told Moore he was “great.” But when a reporter asked him Wednesday night for a review of the movie, Bowerman was visibly uncomfortable. He said he liked some of the action sequences, but added that some of the scenes “just didn’t seem real.” Bowerman skipped a post-screening reception. Instead he went home and fumed about the movie. On Thursday morning, he sought out a reporter to reveal his true reactions.
Bowerman, one of the most respected coaches in track history, was angriest over the portrait of the women’s track coach as a boozing, swearing, lusting, shouting, hard-nosed jerk. “I don’t know a coach that acts like that, andI know a lot of them,” he said. Bowerman said he felt the motion picture could “harm track” by giving young viewers an erroneous impression of training rules. “Maybe I’m just old and very naïve,” he said with a sigh. Bowerman lamented that he saw “no humor in the whole thing. There’s a lot of humor in sports.” When reminded that the audience laughed in several places, Bowerman retorted, “I think they laughed because they didn’t know what else to do.”
What the hell had happened? Only years later would I be able to marshal this guess. In the night after the screening, the Bowerman mind, whose usual fare was the Muppets and classical music, had slammed headlong into the very reality he denied was there. His outrage focused on the scheming coach played so well by Scott Glenn. Had I known anything about Bowerman’s inner coils and conflicts on women, on masculinity and femininity, anything about the lingering residue of his mother’s telling him to beware of all men and his resultant putting women on pedestals, I might have understood. He had put those two young women athletes on his pedestal and by God he was going to defend them against that coach. Towne couldn’t have concocted a more perfect anti-Bowerman if he’d tried.
Bill did ask Towne to take his name off the movie, but he did it calmly, not with a trumpet blast. Towne sorrowfully did as asked. I went up to see Bill. We had lemonade and looked at the river and talked about it in a roundabout way. There was no need to confront him because his manner was absolutely unchanged toward me. In all the years afterward, he never held it against me.
In spite of the breakthrough heralded by passage of the Amateur Athletic Act of 1978, one bastion of Brundage-era aristocracy was still standing: amateurism. Now that the Moscow boycott had taught American runners that Olympic dreams are iffy at best and subject to the most ignorant interference, the time was ripe to rebel.
Marathoner Don Kardong and race director Chuck Galford had an idea. They called around to all the best distance runners, men and women, a
nd said, Why don’t we go all the way? Why don’t we start a runner’s union and call it the Association of Road Racing Athletes? Why don’t we then start a professional road racing tour at different cities around the country and award prize money right out in the open? And if The Athletics Congress kicks us out and we lose our Olympic eligibility, tough, we didn’t get to go to the last Olympics anyway. Besides, we’ll have our own professional circuit. We’ll make an honest living at our booming sport, and we’re sure to attract others.
Phil Knight was gung ho to help. His company had ridden the running boom to power and he wanted to use that power to push for reform. A showdown race was picked—the June 28, 1981, Cascade Run-Off 15K in Portland. Nike put up $50,000 for prizes and promised $100,000 for the Nike marathon in Eugene in the fall.
Remarkably, this was all moving too fast for William J. Bowerman. “I may not agree with the rule,” he said, “but I’ll sure as hell try to live up to it as long as it’s on the books. In offering prize money, Nike is endangering amateur track as well as Eugene’s chances of hosting championship meets. Knight must have gotten bad advice on this one.”
Knight knew exactly what he had done, because he knew how serious the runners were. In the days before the Cascade Run-Off, the nation’s finest flocked to Portland. The 100-strong Association of Road Racing Athletes (ARRA) competitors’ meeting roared when Bill Rodgers urged unity. New Zealand’s Anne Audain, the women’s record holder in the 3000 meters, found an analogy for taking prize money. “Hey, come on,” she said. “It’s like losing your virginity. You’re a little misty for a while, but then you realize, wow, there’s a whole new world out there!”
Kardong and his ARRA members were tough union men and women, perfectly ready to strike this blow and take the consequences. It was their fire Frank Shorter pointed to when he went to reason with TAC executive director Ollan Cassell two days before the race. Frank said that TAC and the IAAF were going to have zero control after this, that the pro league would succeed and every good American would be in the ARRA and not in TAC. If TAC and the IAAF didn’t want to be obsolete tomorrow, Frank said, they would have to accept a deal where the runners got money but were not banned as pros. The mechanism, Shorter said, was the trust fund. Prize money should go through a trust fund that TAC could monitor and say the athletes were being paid for “training expenses.”
Only a combination of Rodgers’s and Kardong’s ardor and Shorter’s cool could have gotten Cassell to accept that deal. TAC gave in and the trust fund system was set up that week. It wasn’t immediately acknowledged, but that was the end of amateurism in US track and field. The ARRA established a successful pro tour of races and no one was ever thrown out again for taking money earned in competition. It was, as Bowerman had hoped in his note on Wilkins’s paper ten years before, a most flexible solution.
With all these noble acts, maybe it was inevitable that Bowerman would be caught up in the petty and personal. In 1981, a new Oregon athletic director had taken over. He was a youngish wrestling coach named Rick Bay who’d been an assistant director of the University of Michigan Alumni Association. First impressions were positive. Coming from a nonrevenue Olympic sport, it seemed he’d surely mesh well with Bill Dellinger and the track community.
It turned out otherwise. One of Bay’s first directives was to assign coaches to different offices. In Dellinger’s case, this meant leaving the windowed cubicle that Hayward and Bowerman had hallowed for fifty years and setting up camp half in a hallway, half in a glorified closet behind the sports information director’s mimeograph machines. Dellinger tried it for a while and voiced his chagrin over his sudden loss of privacy.
In January 1982, he received this memo from Bay:
Pursuant to our conversation earlier today, I want to reaffirm my distress and disapproval of your continuing poor attitude regarding my decision to relocate your office and your all too frequent statements that I do not have any concern about Oregon’s track and field program.
While I recognize you are not happy with your new office space, I made the decision to improve the office situation for the entire department. In any case, my decision is irrevocable, I expect you to respect it and do not want to hear any more about it from you personally or secondhand. . . .
In the final analysis, if you truly believe that I have no regard for your program and if you are unhappy with conditions as they now exist in the athletic department, I recommend you look for employment elsewhere. . . . I have no desire to have people on my staff who are unhappy and who reflect a negative attitude. . . .
While I consider track and field an extremely important part of our program, it along with every other sport must be considered in proper perspective. And while I expect you to be most concerned and protective of your sport, I do not think it appropriate you do so so selfishly that your thinking excludes all the other sports. If you cannot see that we are a team trying to accomplish something together, then I recommend you find a club job where coaching track and field is your only consideration.
In short, if you wish to continue in your present role at the University of Oregon, I expect to see a vastly improved attitude on your part immediately.
Soon after, Dellinger, at the Original House of Pancakes, laid a copy of that memo before Bowerman, whose eyes widened. “Wow,” he whistled. “I count twice he says look for another job and once he might fire you anyway.” Bowerman thanked him for sharing the memo with him and wished him good luck with this new boss.
When Dellinger had gone, Bowerman sat back and pondered. From that moment on, he would never be able to place any trust in Rick Bay. This was an offense not only to Dellinger and Bowerman but also to Bill Hayward. It could not cut any deeper.
In making this cut, Bay unknowingly elicited a classic Bowerman reaction. Bill occasionally said that the ideal thing, if you could, was to oversolve a problem. He had solved the problem of rotten shoes by starting his own shoe company. Now, he thought, Fine: If this AD won’t give Dellinger a decent place to work, I’ll give the university a whole new building.
Bowerman placed $350,000 of Nike stock in trust with the Prefontaine Foundation as a financing pledge. The rest of that winter, he and architect Jack Stafford sketched a two-story building that would go at the north end of the track, at the top of the homestretch. The plan called for locker space, weight rooms, a sauna, and a hall of honor to display the trophies and photos of past champions. Particularly spacious were the offices for the men’s and women’s track coaches.
When Bowerman and Stafford presented the concept to Bay, he thanked them cordially, looked at the drawings, and said it was against his philosophy to allow his track coaches to have offices apart from the department. Bill, remarkably, held his tongue. In their second meeting, Bay suggested that 400 square feet become the Athletic Department’s laundry room.
Bowerman came away convinced that Bay was intent on frustrating the purpose of his gift. He realized that his Nike money was casting him in a role he had often lamented—a fat cat alumnus trying to call all the shots. He knew, therefore, to be subtle. He and attorney William Wheatley, a member of John Jaqua’s firm, drafted a proposed contract that stated that the facility would cost the university nothing, that its primary use would be for track and field, and that other uses were fine if final approval lay not with Bay but with the university president, now the eminent mathematician Paul Olum. Bay resisted this, saying that limiting his control of the building in any way would be “illegal and immoral.”
While Bowerman considered his next move, Dellinger complicated things by joining forces with the Adidas company. A few years before, he’d come up with an idea for absorbing shock in road shoes. He’d taken it to Nike, but they were working on what would become the first air-cushioned shoes, such as the Pegasus, and passed on developing the design. Adidas, however, smarting at being outstripped by Knight and wanting to invade his home turf, snapped it up.
In 1982, full-page ads appeared in the running trades show
ing a smiling Dellinger holding the “Oregon web” shoe. The text read, “Bill Dellinger has discovered a new use for Newton’s Third Law of Motion.” Arrows showed how the polyamide netting that went around and through the midsole “acts like a torsion bar” to absorb and redirect up to ten percent of impact shock.
Dellinger had signed a contract with Adidas as far back as 1977 and had been perfectly open about it with Bowerman. The elder Bill congratulated the younger on his royalty rate. Now, Adidas offered the university another $350,000 on top of Bill’s money to complete the new building in style. Bowerman hailed the offer, saying the more the merrier. But Bay, apparently still unwilling to accept any constraints on its use, held back from blessing the terms of the gift.
The new building brought Dellinger and Bowerman together only briefly. Dellinger’s Adidas shoe might not have bothered Bowerman, but Phil Knight was definitely bothered—because Adidas was sponsoring the team in other ways: With Bay’s approval, Dellinger had switched the Oregon men’s team from Nike to Adidas warm-up sweats.
Dellinger had essentially decided that Bay was his boss and he had to live with him. Bowerman had not. In November 1982, after no further response from Bay, Bowerman suspended the offer of the new building. Adidas later withdrew its offer as well.
CHAPTER 28
Rajneeshpuram
IN 1979, BILL’S ELDEST SON, JON, BOUGHT A 2,000-ACRE RANCH ALONG THE John Day River near Clarno, twenty-five miles from Fossil. The land is meadow along the river, where the cows have gentle hills to wend and bunchgrass to chew. The first time Bill and Barbara visited, Jon’s fields were yellow with sunflowers. Bill loved to sit and let the changing light lead his eye across the immensity, playing over rimrock, sage, juniper, and dusty roads, scanning, checking, moving on.
