by Kenny Moore
“Unlike in Helsinki,” Mary Decker Slaney said with some asperity in 2005, “in Los Angeles I didn’t do what Bill had advised at the Worlds. I listened to Dick Brown.” Brown had told her before the LA final, “If anyone wants to share the pace, let them.”
“I said that,” confirmed Brown years later, “because I didn’t know how she’d feel out there, and she didn’t know either.”
That was not, on the face of it, a dumb idea, being an energy-saving measure. As in the rest of life, however, timing is everything. After Decker Slaney had led for four laps, Budd floated past into the lead. Decker Slaney, heeding Brown’s advice, didn’t react. “I let her by,” recalled Slaney, “and she drifted in without being far enough ahead to do it and we made our contact.”
For five or six strides their legs tangled before Decker Slaney was tripped by Budd’s flying left calf. As Slaney fell, her arm reached forward, and she inadvertently tore the number from Budd’s back. She went headlong into the infield, slamming her right leg down in such a way that tremendous force traveled up the femur and into her hip socket, tearing the gluteal muscles. She could not get up, much less continue.
Medical attendants and Richard Slaney ran across the track to her. The photo of her there, snarling her disbelief and rage, was hideously expressive. She, who had been hurt so often, for whom the sensation of raw exhaustion was a joy compared with the misery of not being able to run, was hurt again, three laps from the end of overcoming all that hurt.
The race was won by Romania’s Maricica Puica in 8:35.96. Budd, the object of cascading boos, faded to seventh. Bowerman, shaken, watched the replays on the stadium’s big screen and said Mary had to be seriously injured. “In retrospect,” Bill said later, “we should have appreciated how little experience Mary had racing in the pack, maneuvering in tight quarters. Her main concern with other runners on the track had been in lapping them. We might have done some drills with her, honed her reflexes a little, so that when Budd started to drift in on her, Mary would have reached over and moved her back out.”
Sheer fitness, not positioning, would be Henry Marsh’s problem in the steeplechase. After his virus he had tried to finesse both workouts and rest and had ended up feeling neither healthy nor in shape. But he was a crisp, efficient hurdler who could lead with either leg, and Bill had sharpened his sense of pace and tactics. “He’d even taught me how to yell at guys to let me through,” recalled Marsh, whose seemingly slow starts often simply meant he was running even pace and then catching the pack when it died.
Before the LA final, the omens were not good. Warming up, Marsh caught a spike on a hurdle, fell, and cut a shin. As the runners went to the line, he was still a little dazed and dropped even farther back than usual in the early running. But his technique was solid and his mind undaunted. With two laps to go he came charging up at the leaders. “With three hundred to go I thought I was going to win it,” Marsh would say. But when Kenya’s (and Washington State’s) Julius Korir surged ahead in the middle of the backstretch, Marsh ran out of gas.
Suddenly he was sharing Pre’s plight in Munich. In trying so hard to win, he had jeopardized his chance at a medal. Korir won in 8:11.80. Brian Diemer, Marsh’s teammate, outkicked him for third, 8:14.06 to 8:14.25.
Bowerman gave him his highest compliment: that he could have done no better. “Bill didn’t let on, then or ever,” said Marsh later, “but I heard he told friends he was disappointed that I couldn’t have had a decent race when I was as fit as I had been. That it didn’t come together in LA frustrated Bill.”
Marsh had no intention of hanging up his spikes any time soon, a desire to keep going that he laid squarely at the feet of his coach. Unlike coaches who push athletes past their limits, Marsh would say, “Bill asked you to leave each workout feeling that you could have done a little more. That way, you felt good, and good about yourself. Bill never burned anyone out. He always put life in perspective, always factored in family and work. His lessons were always about balance and efficiency. So if you were healthy, you wanted to run.”
Strong and desirous in 1985, Marsh improved his American record to 8:09.17. Over his career he would be national steeplechase champion nine times, the last in 1987. For thirteen straight years he ranked in the top ten in the world. He made four Olympic teams, placing sixth in Seoul in 1988. He ran his first sub-4:00 mile at age thirty-one, and did it again at thirty-four.
This extraordinary longevity Marsh vehemently credits to Bowerman’s influence. At this writing, he still holds the American steeplechase record and has done so for twenty-five years. Is such sustained achievement the equal of a single skyrocketing year or two such as Herb Elliott had? One imagines Bill getting out his scales and weighing the two. One hears him saying, “It’s apples and oranges. It’s greatness vs. joyful sanity.”
One who channeled his competitive fire into other enterprises was Wade Bell. As his Olympic chauffer duties attest, he was becoming Bowerman’s right-hand man. After returning from Mexico City in 1968, he had tried to keep up his running, but hadn’t found the hours. He received no inkling from Bill that he was leaving too soon, so he retired from racing, became an OTC official, and for the next ten years was the starter at the all-comers meets for two days every week in July and August (and renowned for disqualifying a six-year-old who false-started twice in the 220). It was Bell who made arrangements when the Ad Hoc Group members traveled in raucous style to wherever the Pac-10 meet happened to be that year.
Bowerman relied on Bell most when the Nike money began to back up on him. It was as if he had foreseen the need for a trusted financial advisor years before, because Bell had gained his expertise in part due to Bill. “I’d graduated in PE,” Wade would remember in 2005, “but I wanted not to smell jocks all my life, so after the 1968 Olympics, Bill made arrangements for me to live for a year and a half in the Hendricksons’ basement. I got my accounting degree in 1970.” That spring, Bell had his chance to go with BRS when Phil Knight asked him to become the company’s treasurer. “I want to be a CPA first, like you,” Wade said. Bell was certified in 1972, but, because he was so happy with work and family in Eugene, never made it back to Knight.
In 1978, Bell took over as the Bowerman tax accountant, when Bill’s modest income was from book royalties and his retirement pension. When Nike went public in 1980, Bell handled Bowerman’s gifts of stock to each of his three sons. Jon immediately sold his so he could buy the ranch on the John Day. From 1982 to 1995, Bell maintained an office for Bowerman at his own CPA firm, where Bill could make calls and dictate letters. Bell’s stewardship ranged from the protective to the invisible, but was always deft. He even took on some of Bill’s tone of voice, Bill’s style.
Bell may have been Bowerman’s accountant, but it was John Jaqua whom Bill always blamed for advising him not to keep his Nike eggs in one basket, to diversify into other stocks. “He told me later that he thought I probably kept him from being one of the wealthier people in America today,” Jaqua would recall, laughing. “But he didn’t really mind. He was an innovator, not a tycoon. But if he hadn’t diversified, he’d have been twice as wealthy, maybe more. It wouldn’t have shown up in his personal life, but he would have had a little greater room for his charities, which gave him great pleasure. A lot of local institutions would have been greater beneficiaries had he not diversified.”
As it was, the recipients of Bowerman’s largess benefited quite handsomely. Bill’s giving did not begin with his offer to build the track office building at Hayward. It began almost as soon as he sold some Nike stock in 1980. “Bill was intensely loyal to his friends,” Bell explained in 2005. When he was still coaching the varsity and needed to get a student athlete into a class for three hours’ credit and a passing grade, he’d call a friend in the appropriate department and a class would open up. “So later, when Bill had money and the need arose,” Bell would say, “he gave money to all their departments in those guys’ names.”
Bowerman paid, in the name of Geo
rge W. Shipman, for example, to update the University of Oregon Library’s computer system long before Knight gave them such an addition that they named it for him. He gave to the law school in the names of Otto Frohnmayer and Orlando Hollis. He gave to the physics department in the name of Ray Ellickson and to the geology department in the name of Lloyd W. Staples (who set up the Center for Vulcanology). He gave to the school of journalism and communications in the name of his dear friend Glenn Starlin and gave a $50,000 grant (stunning Wade) to the English department. He gave a grant to the Human Performance Center in the name of a professor who died of cancer. Bill also funded a host of presidential scholarships to attract Oregon’s brightest scholars.
Nor did the recipient have to be the university itself. “Bill cared about a guy in the math department,” said Wade, “who cared about preserving the Mt. Pisgah natural area, so Bill was happy to help with that. And of course when his old war buddy, Bill Boddington, raised funds for the Tenth Mountain Division’s building of ski huts in the Rockies, Bill said yes in an instant.”
Some people didn’t even have to ask. One was former Oregon president Robert Clark. When Clark wrote an article for the alumni magazine on Bill’s biology professor Ralph Huestis, Bill paid for it to be reprinted, Clark recalled, “in handsome format.” Bill had also liked an essay Clark had written on Thomas Condon, the geologist, collector of fossils from the John Day country, and early Oregon faculty member. Bowerman approached Clark to write a biography of Condon, and when Clark mentioned the price of the traveling he’d have to do, Bill said that that was no problem; the foundation he’d established would underwrite it. “And so I plunged into the work,” Clark would say, “and happily finished while Bill was still living. His foundation subsequently created a lectureship in my honor, administered by the Oregon Humanities Center. I owe much to Bill Bowerman, and his interests were far-ranging.”
When his philanthropy became known, Bill was plagued by requests from needy souls and scammers. “I was a target,” he would recall. “You’ve got to have some kind of system, somebody guarding the gate.” In 1983, he began the Bowerman Foundation and put Orlando Hollis, the forbiddingly austere former dean of the law school, at the head of its board and Bell as its treasurer. He transferred all his stock destined for gifts to the foundation. “He was always thinking the stock would plummet,” Bell would say, “so this was a way to sell and preserve the value until it could be used for the new building that he always wanted to build.” In the meantime, the foundation funded more scholarships.
Bowerman referred all appeals to Bell, who would carry the worthy ones to Bill and the board. Barbara Bowerman is on record that Bell saved “untold millions” by reining in Bill’s first impulses. Bell, for his part, is justly proud of never, on his own, suggesting a single gift that Bill might want to make. Neither did he ever own a share of Nike stock. “I was not going to have a shadow of conflict of interest,” he once said.
The Bowerman team, therefore, was well prepared to reopen negotiations on a new building for the university in 1990, after athletic director Rick Bay departed Oregon for Ohio State. The new AD, Bill Byrne, and the new UO vice president in charge of sports, Dan Williams, were determined to get along with Bowerman. Williams went so far as to interview Roscoe Divine and other Bowerman cronies, asking for tips on managing him. Yet Williams, perhaps because Bowerman learned he was from a small town in Oregon, Astoria, never had a moment of trouble with him.
The tussle over control was finished. The building, all parties agreed, would house track offices. Byrne swore in writing that the coaches could use them. Architects Jack and Jon Stafford came up with a larger, more costly building than the one originally planned, with a wing for what would be the university’s International Institute for Sport and Human Performance, a research and information clearinghouse. The Bowerman Foundation rented the site from the university, put up the building just the way Bill wanted it, and gave it back to the university. It cost $2.2 million.
The two-story gray brick structure was completed in 1991—about eight years after it should have been. The university asked what to name it. As Wade Bell would tell the story, Bill met with the foundation’s board and Orlando Hollis said, “Bill, it’s gotta be the Bowerman building because you built it!” Bill squirmed. He didn’t like publicity because it brought people in need. But this time he couldn’t get out of it. At the building’s dedication, Bill was resplendent in coat and tie, the embodiment of the German meaning of his name—Builderman. He spoke of the power of persistence.
One of Bill’s motives for picking the site at the top of the stretch was to block the northerly tailwind that had kept several sprinters from legal world records in the 100. So now he adopted as his papal seat the balcony just above the sprint starting line. From then on, the Ad Hoc Group would watch the Pre Classic from there, seated, fittingly, in director’s chairs.
But you couldn’t sit there in peace unless you had done your part for the Oregon Bach Festival. This had begun in 1970 with a friendship between Oregon music professor Royce Saltzman and the sublime German organist and conductor Helmuth Rilling, established when Rilling came to Eugene for an informal concert. Rilling returned summer after summer, bringing along ever-finer artists and orchestras, and slowly the festival grew.
Saltzman was one of the professors who’d taken Bill’s trackmen into classes when needed and he knew that Bowerman and the conductor would have a lot in common. The three of them sat on Bowerman’s deck above the river. “It was wonderful for me,” Saltzman would recall, “to hear Bill recount the whole Munich experience for Helmuth Rilling, whose childhood was in the war and whose first suit was out of an American CARE package.”
The festival always needed money, long before Bill had any to spare, so Bowerman and Bill McHolick took Saltzman fund-raising. It was like nothing he’d ever done.
They’d simply charge into the offices of CEOs and bank presidents whom Bowerman knew and Bill would browbeat them into giving money. “Goddamn it, you’re going to buy respectability,” Bowerman said to one, who willingly forked over $500 once Saltzman had explained that musicians for the Bach Festival were as world-class as Bowerman and Burley. Another man anted up after Bill told him, as Saltzman would remember it, that “if he didn’t do right by us, we were going to stand there and piss on his new leather chair.”
But when Nike exploded, Bowerman gave more than he cadged or shamed or squeezed. He sat with Saltzman and Rilling and asked what they needed the most. Rilling said the funds to attract the finest artists. Bill said, Great, “but don’t endow anything. I want you to use my money.” In 1994, he set up a grant that paid $75,000 a year for ten years. “And in those ten years,” Saltzman would say, “the festival reached an extraordinary level of recognition around the country and world.”
Bowerman’s giving inspired others to follow suit. One of Bowerman’s old teammates and friends, who had invested early in BRS and made a fortune, wanted to recognize Bill with a gift to the university. The George Scharf family gave a million dollars in stock to the University of Oregon—a third of it for scholarships, a third for the library, and a third for the Bach festival. One night when Rilling was conducting, Saltzman would recall, “we recognized Bill and Barbara and the Scharfs. Oregon president Paul Olum thanked the donors and gave maestro Rilling a box of Nikes to show where the money came from. Helmuth came out wearing them for the second half of the concert and said, ‘The tempo’s going to be faster now!’”
As a patron of the arts, Bill looked to aid individuals as well as choral festivals. He once called Saltzman and said, like a coach asking about a recruit, “Heard a student of yours named Sheryl Aydelott in church. What’s she going to do with that voice?” Saltzman found out that Aydelott wanted to study voice in New York. Bill said he would pay for two years of study but didn’t want her to know, Saltzman would remember. “So we put it under the name of the MarAbel Frohnmayer Scholarship.”
At this writing, Aydelott happily
remains in New York, her life transformed. But it would be a decade before she knew the truth. “MarAbel was so embarrassed to get these emotional thank-you letters from her,” Barbara Bowerman would recall. “She felt so silly writing back. How could she ever say something sincere? Otto roared at the whole thing.” Saltzman finally told Aydelott a few years ago, but not before she had come out and sung in two Bach festivals. “Oh, those two scoundrels!” she laughed in 2005, meaning Saltzman and Bowerman. “That grant had a huge impact on my life.”
Amidst all his philanthropy, it may seem extraordinary that Bowerman would worry about Nike stock taking a dive. However, his fears were not entirely unjustified. In 1982, the company had been slow to respond to the aerobics boom and was thus passed by Reebok as the nation’s largest shoe purveyor. This seemed fundamentally wrong to those who shared the Bowerman feeling for form and function.
“We used to say if we had the best athletes in the best shoes, we couldn’t lose,” Phil Knight would say. “But guess what? Reebok went by us with what we thought were terrible shoes. They were so soft they ripped apart. We asked women why they wore them. They said they were comfortable. We asked what they did when they ripped. Oh, buy another pair.” The day it was announced that Reebok’s sales had overtaken Nike’s, Knight closeted himself in his office, faced the wall, and sat there, weak and sick and devastated for hours.
Mark Parker—“whose strength was design and appearance,” said Knight—led the company back, not by asking consumer focus groups what was best but by finding it out in the lab and then telling people. In advertising.
