by Kenny Moore
For one such promotion, after the 1984 Olympics, Nike paid Michael Jordan $500,000 to develop and promote a special line of Air Jordan shoes. Bowerman rolled his eyes. “Bill thought we were overpaying prima donna athletes,” Knight would say twenty years later. “Now Michael Jordan sounds a lot like Bowerman when he rails at how high we have to go to pay the new guys.”
The Air Jordan shoes and campaigns were amazingly successful and brought the company back to preeminence. “After Reebok,” said Knight, “it was the best athletes, best shoes, best ads.” Bill may have grumbled about the need for such ads, but he loved the actual results. The essential Nike phrase “Just do it” had certainly been uttered by Bill to all of us.
Everything Bowerman moaned about to the Nike board, including payments to athletes and, much later, questions when Nike was accused of exploiting cheap foreign labor, were muted compared to his passion for shoes. Two things (besides his postage scale) were usually in his briefcase: a super-light spike and a modestly priced training shoe for beginning high school runners. The latter, of course, would undercut the higher price models that Nike was already selling. Bill became accustomed to no one leaping up and saying, That’s a shoe we have to make.
There were other slights. Bill went to one Nike board meeting to get a grant restored that would have paid for former UCLA coach Jim Bush to coach inner-city athletes in LA. The board said no and Bill was furious. “The next day,” Wade Bell would recall, “Phil announced the address of the new company campus in Beaverton—One Bowerman Drive. Bill came down here and said, ‘You know, they tried to buy me off! They turned me down on Jim’s grant and tried to appease me by naming a street after me.’ I said, ‘Bill, do you know how hard it is to name a street? They had to go to the city of Beaverton and get approval, and go to the post office, etc. Believe me, that decision wasn’t made that morning so they could put you in a better mood.’”
Bill never mentioned it again. By now he knew the difference between the nettlesome and the eternal, and he got a hell of a reminder at the end of January 1987. Barbara would never forget it.
As he was watching a basketball game on TV, eating a bowl of popcorn, Bowerman suddenly cried out, “Call Tom! Take me to the hospital!” Barbara got son Tom from his nearby cottage and they called Bill McHolick. “Bill said that it was like ‘a wire around my chest, cutting into me,’” Barbara would recall. McHolick told them to take Bill to McKenzie Willamette Hospital in Springfield, where McHolick was on the staff. Tom and Barbara did so, Barbara would say, all the while listening to Bowerman giving orders.
At the hospital emergency room, while Barbara filled out papers, the doctors started working on Bill. Soon they told Barbara that he was having an extreme heart attack and they were taking him to Sacred Heart in Eugene. Tom took his mother home and the next morning Bill called her. “His first words were ‘I’m fine. I had great fun watching ’em get all this crud out of me,’” she would say. “He found it so entertaining that they gave him a little mirror so he could watch!”
The cardiac surgeons had run a catheter through his blocked artery and told Barbara that it was amazing, but Bill was clogged with plaque in only one place; he was fine otherwise. With no other problems or risk factors, he was allowed to go back home quickly.
But all were sobered. “I am up, but on restricted duty,” he wrote to Knight on February 4, 1987. They had been trying to decide how much Bill should be paid for his shoe lab work and consulting. “Since my episode of last Tuesday, the general plan seems moot,” wrote Bill. “It is also possible or probable that all parties will be best served by heeding the mortal and immortal messages.” Whatever messages Bill heeded seemed to work. John Jaqua would find him “actually better after that attack than before. He had more color, more energy. I think he’d been plugged for quite a while, because after that catheter, all of a sudden he got a lot more color in his face—and a lot more profanity in his speech, which is a good sign. He was definitely healthier.”
CHAPTER 30
Immortal Messages
MANY OF THE IDEAS THAT UPLIFTED BILL WERE FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE services he attended with Barbara. He listened to the sermons with mellow good humor, but never joined the church, perhaps because of its belief that physical healing comes primarily through the power of God and prayer. “Obviously he believed that when somebody was hurt you have got to go and see a doctor,” Bill’s great friend Bill Landers would say. “You can’t just pray about it. Well, you can pray all you want, but you have got to have the thing attended to.” Landers marveled at how the Bowerman marriage endured “because often in a situation of differing beliefs you get at loggerheads, you get stuck,” he would say. But Barbara didn’t press Bill, an approach consistent with her faith that, as she put it, “life is simply all of us expressing intelligence, expressing truth, expressing love.”
“It would take a very special person to live with Bill Bowerman,” Landers would say. “Barbara was a remarkable woman.”
Who brought with her a remarkable set of values. “My belief in fairy tales is literal, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” Barbara would say. “Every hero goes through hard work and resolving things.” When her sons Tom and Jon looked askance at her relentless positivism, she would tell them, “I am this way because I believed I’m happy. Life became one of depth and satisfaction.” Of her husband she would say, “Bill is that way because he was determined. He just did it. Shoes, whatever. Even when his spikes were falling off Jimmy Puckett in midsprint, he believed he’d get it. It just fascinates me, this stuff, this drive to know and live one’s design. It’s the stuff of creation itself.”
Bill Bowerman was designed, Barbara agreed, to process. The defining act of his life was preparation, not completion. The house was always unfinished, the big meets were always grounding for bigger, the best shoes could always be made better. The champagne for a great occasion stayed in the closet.
There was no grand, final victory. He was moved by the very evanescence of laurels. They were sacred because they withered, because they symbolized the brevity of earthly triumph. “Winning is nice,” he had said in 1972, on the eve of the Munich Games, “but you savor that victory for an evening and you wake up in the morning and it is gone.”
And you are still here and in need of meaning. One post-attack communiqué from his heart advised Bill to spend more time with the family. So, he kicked back and relished the sight of all three sons leading great lives by following age-old Bowerman instincts.
The nearest was the youngest, Tom. He’d graduated from the Oregon School of Architecture in 1969 and shown the wanderlust of a Chambers (and the idealism of his mother) by trying his hand at urban planning in a tough place for it—strife-ridden Ulster, Northern Ireland. “Fortunately, he lived,” Bill would say, “and came to a new appreciation of his own quiet hillside.”
Where, up the road to the Bowerman pond, he assembled a pioneer-style sawmill and cut planks from fallen trees. With these, he built a spare little cottage a little upstream from Bill and Barbara. He found a balance between progressive businesses (managing Eugene rental homes and buildings on the National Historic Register) and causes, such as cofounding the McKenzie River Trust. Eventually Tom would marry Kris Norberg, whom he met when he was hitchhiking up the Oregon coast to see a Seattle girlfriend. Tom never did make it to Seattle. On April 28, 1978, and February 28, 1980, Kris and Tom had sons McKenzie and Will. Bill made baby shoes for the little boys and tried to keep them from the ire of his roosters.
Jay, the middle son, had made a second Olympic biathlon team, for the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, where the team finished sixth in the 4 x 7500-meter relay. Bill had helped him structure his training. “He provided big-picture thoughts about specific races and stages of development and left the individual workouts to me,” Jay would recall in 2004. “It must have worked, as I moved from being a mediocre member of the US biathlon skiers to sweeping the nationals, as well as earning a spot on the US cross-count
ry team.”
As the environmental director for Sunriver, a high-end resort and residential development along the Deschutes River, fifteen miles south of Bend, Jay expanded the community nature center, providing visitors with looks at spectacular Central Oregon birds, amphibians, and reptiles. He was certified by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to keep and retrain injured raptors for release into the wild. This meant exercising hawks, owls, and falcons until they could hunt for themselves.
Bill enjoyed watching Jay training golden eagles over the golf course, which he did with a leather falconer’s glove, keeping them attached, like flapping, disobedient kites, to a reel of fly line. Once, three gentlemen from Ohio were crouched over their putts. A ground squirrel scampered out of its hole near the green. A great shadow soon loomed over them. They looked up and saw the seven-foot wingspread of Jay’s eagle descending at them, talons outstretched. They dove like so many marmots. The bird forgot the squirrel, landed on the green, and advanced toward them, wings out, eyes wild, beak agape. Jay arrived. His father’s son, he regarded the cowering golfers and couldn’t resist. “There’s a reason nobody ever makes an eagle on this hole,” he said.
In 1973, Jay married the inestimable Teresa Chin-Tze Wang of Taiwan, and on September 28, 1974, and June 10, 1976, they produced Jayson and Traycee, who embody the classic Bowerman loves of sport and music. Jayson, who can play and make any stringed instrument, works as a luthier in Bend. Traycee grew up a pianist, took her bachelor’s in biology and wilderness studies at the University of Montana, and serves as wild salmon coordinator for the Oregon Natural Desert Association. Both teach kayaking and have hurled themselves over cataracts that would strike fear into the hearts of most parents. “Proof of hybrid vigor,” their grandfather grinned.
Stock breeding terms tripped lightly from Bill’s tongue. One of his preoccupations and joys was attempting to produce what he hoped to be able to call Bos domesticus oregonensis. The American Cattle Association informed Bill that after five generations he could apply for certification of a new breed. This would let him sell either bulls or semen, a prospect he relished discussing.
“How do I get the semen?” he would ask. “Remember the Ethiopian miler Hailu Ebba? He took animal husbandry at Oregon State. I asked him about taking semen. He said the easiest way was to put female urine on cattle hide, and when the bull is excited, you deftly trick him with a bottle.”
Bill carefully delineated lineages, seeking gentle bulls so he could have one pull a kid’s wagon. In 1994, he delivered his last Round Table paper on the subject. It told of a little bull that he had loaned to his son Jon for two years. The bull was a great lover, and fighter, too. “I guess his size was such that he’d go right under Jon’s bigger bull,” cackled Bill, “and take his legs out from under him. Jon called and said, ‘Take him back. He’s ruining my reputation.’”
Bill’s bovine stories were legion. Wade Bell loved one that Bill told at the Tuesday lunch one day. “This has not been my best morning,” Bill began. “It had been raining, and I opened the gate, went in the pasture, slipped, and fell flat on my back. I was all right, but I was stuck.
“I felt around and realized the only way I was going to get up was to turn over in the muck. I did and got a nice coating of manure, front and back. I got in the Jeep covered like a mud baby, drove up to the house, and was heading for the back door into the kitchen when I thought no, that’s dumb. So I took off all my clothes on the porch and started hosing off. Which is when Barbara drove up and said, ‘I’m not running a nudist colony here!’”
Bill’s day almost always included time with his herd, and thus with the observant Mike Friton, who not only worked with Bill in the shoe lab but also lived in a mobile home on the Bowerman property, taking care of the livestock and doing farm chores. “I knew and worked with Bill for eighteen years,” Friton would remember in 2005. (When Bowerman’s Eugene lab was closed in 1995, upon the death of Bob Newland, Friton moved to the mother ship, the Nike campus in Beaverton.)
Bowerman named many cattle in his herd after members of the Nike board. “He tried to match their personalities,” Friton would remember. “One in particular he named Donahue. He was a feisty little red bull that liked to jump the fences. One day Bill invited the actual board member [and distinguished attorney] Richard Donahue out to the house and introduced him to the little bull Donahue. They both seemed pleased and got along okay.”
Friton and Bill often drove around the property for hours in Bill’s little pickup. “He would reminisce about athletes, the war, and family,” Friton would remember. “A few of those stories he repeated often. Over time, I learned to listen more to the pauses than the words themselves. They would signal the mood of his day, as well as the emotion of reflecting on important moments in his life. When I repeat stories about Bill, it’s difficult to express the full meaning because the words alone do not contain all of the understanding.”
Among the things that Friton and Bowerman had in common was childhood trauma, which Friton believes was “instrumental” in developing Bill’s creative approach to the world. “I had the experience of a broken family and witnessing traumatic events,” Friton would say. “Bill’s defining moments may have been the loss of his twin brother and the breakup of the family. We both had to learn to cope at an early age with tremendous amounts of loss and fear.” Friton believes they survived by “relying heavily on our internal creative instincts.” Friton also thinks that Bill’s years in the military reinforced the process: “I could hear that in many of his stories about the war.”
The result, in Bill’s Nike lab, was a rousing sort of liberty that also harks back to Barbara’s belief that Bill was motivated more by the journey than the destination. “There were no limits or final answers in our endeavor to find a better way of doing things,” Friton would say. “I thought a lot about this over the years and discussed it with Bob Newland and Bill. It was a boundless creative response.”
Their great, onrushing inquiry wasn’t totally anarchic, however, permeated as it was with Bill’s sense of rightness. “Character was everything,” Friton would say. “Bill insisted that those around him respect certain principles in life, or as he would say, ‘Have character.’ A great deal of the conflict between Bill and others at Nike was based on his view that they did not value some of these principles.”
One of the key principles—and certainly what got Tom Derderian off on the wrong foot—was that Bowerman’s time was not to be wasted. “When you set a time to do something with Bill you were expected to be on time or better yet show up early,” Friton would remember. “I occasionally did workouts with a few of Bill’s club runners, postgraduates from all over the country who came to Eugene hoping to be coached by Bill. The first thing they had to learn was to show up on time. If they were a minute late they could find themselves invisible to Bill for that day. They could be right in front of Bill asking him questions but he would act as if they were not there. The only thing he might say was to show up on time at the next workout. I have seen this reaction bring tears to the toughest of these runners.”
Bill Landers agreed about Bill’s priorities. “There was a moral compass that shaped Bill’s whole life,” Landers recalled in 2005. “His mission was to find innovative ways to improve the lives of us fellow voyagers. You see it in his early interest in medicine, his heroism as a warrior, his unflagging curiosity about what makes the human body behave the way it does. And all of this came from the deep moral center of his being. It led to the strong judgmental facet of his personality. He once told me, ‘I have neither the time nor patience to waste on trash.’ And if you were marked trash it was all over. But if you were not, your sins were forgiven. I think it was this core moral force that attracted people to him because in its most pure form, as his was, it is a rare commodity. People wanted to be judged worthy by him. I know I did, and I suspect you did too. And Phil Knight? Oh, yeah.”
Another who could never shake that need was Bill Dellinge
r. By the early 1990s, Bowerman had grown further at odds with Dellinger over several issues. One was the latter’s tie to Adidas. But the most emotional was that when the university constructed palatial new athletic department buildings next to Autzen Stadium, Dellinger moved his office there from the trackside Bowerman Building. “The Bowerman Building was Bill’s outreach to Dellinger,” Barbara would say. “Bill was heartbroken when he moved across the river.”
Bowerman also had let it be known that he felt Dellinger was getting lazy. His proof was that in major cross-country and distance races, the Oregon lemon and green was being blotted out by red and cardinal hordes of splendid Arkansas and Stanford runners coached by John McDonnell and Vin Lananna. Bowerman got on Dellinger about all the high school talent going elsewhere. Dellinger replied that he had only twelve scholarships for track and field, or three or four per year. Once they were awarded, Dellinger saw little point in constantly calling recruits if he couldn’t offer them aid.
Bowerman disagreed and found support from a number of former Oregon athletes. Half-miler Steve Bence said it best: “Stanford and Arkansas had the same limitations as Oregon, yet they were attracting winning athletes. A ton of good kids wanted to go to Oregon at their own expense, or try to find other ways of funding, just to be a part of the heritage. All they needed was a phone call to say that they were welcome.” But Dellinger resented anyone telling him how to recruit, especially Bill, who had hated it himself.
Still, their estrangement gnawed at him. Dellinger owed the fact and shape of his life to Bill’s lessons. The very thing he had insisted upon when Pre died—the need to give credit where credit is due—would give Dellinger’s conscience no rest. Bowerman meant so much to him that Dellinger refused to be written off as obsolete or lazy.
