Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  This meant that Dellinger had to take the initiative. So one morning he dressed in old clothes and visited the Bowerman pastures, simply stopping and waving and helping Bill move some irrigation pipe. They talked about times past, and Dellinger noted that it had been about forty years since his win in the 1954 NCAA mile that had been the start of some good things. Bill recalled how excited he had been at that and loosened up a little. Dellinger said this was fun, and would Bill mind his stopping by again? Bill said help yourself. There was always work. So Dellinger did visit, several times over a month or two.

  One of those times he told Bill that he had moved his office across the river against his will, that it had been the edict of the new AD. “I hated to go over there, away from the track,” he said. Finally there came a day when Bowerman allowed that Dellinger was dealing with things like scholarship limitations or equal funding for women’s programs that Bowerman had been lucky not to have to face. It was tougher now, he admitted, tougher to field a strong team with walk-ons. But true teaching was still vital, Bill said, and Dellinger was still good at that. Dellinger, as he departed and for the rest of his days, experienced the relief of knowing he had found it in himself to reach out, to be worthy enough to reconcile with Bill.

  In 1991, shortly after Bill turned eighty, Phil Knight commissioned a retrospective of the man whose approval was and had been so essential to so many. He assigned Geoff Hollister (who was becoming guardian of the company’s Prefontaine/Bowerman legacy) to throw a reunion dinner in the new Nike campus gym for the Men of Oregon Bill had coached and their families. This was the occasion when all were photographed with Bill in the corner of a sauna, both his keys and Cheshire-cat grin glinting

  Hollister interviewed dozens of Bill’s champions on video and skillfully cut the results together with iconic photos, Barbara’s hilariously dry memories, and a surging score. Dellinger was powerfully abrupt, stating flatly, “Bill was a genius. He would have been successful in any walk of life. Fortunately for us, he ended up in track and field.” The more clinically a speaker documented the embarrassments he subjected us to, the better Bill liked it. Knight had asked him what he would prefer, knowing that he could give a rebuttal or knowing that he didn’t have to give a speech. Bill said, “No speech.”

  The occasion was a tremendous success. Knight in later years would hope he had done enough for Bill. Even though there would be other events, in that single one, he had. The evening seemed so significant that it gave rise to the first talk of this book. That summer, Bill Landers and I were summoned to the Bowerman deck, plied with lemonade and cookies, and given our own commission from Bill: to tell the story of his life and times and of the athletes he’d been fortunate to teach and learn from. Landers set about interviewing first Bowerman relatives and friends and then Bill and Barbara.

  The transcripts are less an exercise in nostalgia than the thoughts of a problem-solver reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and what was priceless and had to be maintained. Bill stressed that in Eugene the support of the sharpest, most energetic people outside of the university family, the lay community, was crucial. “That filled those stands,” he said. “It was the thing to do, to be connected to the track program. When you let that kind of an organization wither and die, you are going to lose it at the other end, the track end.”

  About a parallel concern he said, “The athletic department now thinks to have a good program you have to spend a lot of money. So they charge more for a track meet and price the little kids out of the market. They also outprice the people who can’t afford to take a bunch of little kids. And the best athletes come from families that don’t have an extra two to four dollars.”

  When Landers asked about the secret for team unity, for the hold he had had on young men, Bowerman’s first thoughts turned to the team’s spring trips. To us sodden, native Oregonians at that time, the very sound of what lay to the south in winter was like a church choir jumping up in your head. Dressed in baggy shorts, an aromatic T-shirt, and a ludicrous hat and/or women’s huge hexagonal sunglasses, Bowerman had marched his teams straight from winter-term finals onto chartered buses and headed south, giving wearying, pun-filled commentary on old Medford haunts and the passing Siskiyous. Once near Mt. Shasta, he ordered the bus off the highway and onto a narrow lane into the woods. When the route became impassable, Bowerman and several athletes jumped out.

  “Where are you going?” asked the driver.

  “Call of nature!”

  The bus couldn’t turn around. It had to back up a half mile, scraping boulders and saplings, the driver muttering, “Did it have to call you so far?”

  “The human race,” Bowerman informed the passengers, “possesses a superabundance of surliness.”

  He had contacts with generals, who got the team into the plush, whitewashed adobe barracks and Bachelor Officers’ Quarters of Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. The essential thing, said Bowerman, was that we all lived as one, spending time together apart from workouts. It was necessary to do this because there is no more bizarre assemblage of human designs than a track team. On the spring trip, we learned to interact across the body type and personality divides, ectomorphic runners conversing with mesomorphic throwers, easygoing vaulters with prideful sprinters. Bill yelped in agreement on hearing Dr. George Sheehan’s immortal definition of a runner as “a small-boned loner, built for flight and fantasy,” but immediately added, “I guess that leaves out Pre.”

  Nike was hardly the only institution wanting to honor Bill in these years. He graciously turned most down, and kindled the kitchen stove with the parchment and gold leaf. But in April 1993 (after making sure he could bring along Dr. Chris Christensen), he accepted a trip to the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. This was due not to any high regard for the relays—Duck teams had almost never run there—but because his old pal and Jogging book coauthor, Jim Shea, was vice president of nearby Temple University and hosted the visit.

  “When Bill and Chris arrived the first day,” Shea would remember in 2005, “the weather was cold and wet, and Franklin Field near empty. There was a gathering that night in the Penn Athletics building. The meet director, Jim Tuppeny, welcomed a list of guests, and when he got to Bill he said what good fortune it was to have him there, and would Bill please say a few words? That startled our Bill, because the request came out of the blue. No one had mentioned that possibility to him, though, as guest of honor, he probably could have expected it. So Bill took him literally. He said a few words, very few. As a matter of fact, he mumbled. There was a pause, the pregnant variety. All waited. Eventually it was evident nothing more was coming. If some of the Bowerman wisdom was dispensed that evening, everyone missed it.”

  Shea knew Bill so well that he could speculate on the reasons for this uncharacteristic refusal to switch into gracious recipient mode. “He was wary of this crowd,” Shea would say, “with some longstanding reservations.”

  Bowerman had long regarded Eastern track as wrong in wasting time on winter indoor racing when athletes should be building their strength for the real track season. He may have accepted the invitation purely out of respect for the presence of a few coaches he valued as colleagues. But once there he likely resented spending time with officials who, as Shea would put it, “had been kissing cousins” to the detested Avery Brundage, the man who for so long had defined “amateurism” to exclude so many.

  Fortunately, the last day of the great relay carnival was sunny and packed with 50,000 spectators. Bill stood in the infield, leaning on his cane, and observed the logistics of managing thousands of athletes. And at last he relaxed and began to appreciate what an institution the Penn Relays is and how good it is for track and field. He turned to Shea and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?”

  Out on the infield, he made a friend. One of the patrons and competitors at the Penn Relays over the years has been comedian Bill Cosby. He was quick to take Bill’s hand and say how much he admired him. Cosby had attended Temple on a track schola
rship and had competed for decades in masters races at 200 and 400 meters. One Cosby routine on an early comedy album was about the onset of death in the last yards of a 440. And twenty years earlier, Cosby had come to Eugene for a Mac Court performance. His grave opening words were “Nothing I can say or do in the next two hours . . . can possibly be more thrilling than what that gentleman with the moustache in the front row did in the Twilight Meet an hour ago—3:55 flat in a cold wind!” The crowd rose in ovation for both a thunderstruck Steve Prefontaine and for Cosby’s tribal understanding.

  So on Franklin’s infield, those two old quartermilers, Bowerman and Cosby, had plenty to talk about. “They spoke quietly on a bench,” Shea would recall, “deep in discussion, oblivious of the 50,000.” But both were natural clowns, too. Soon they were mugging for Shea’s camera and accusing each other of stealing each other’s name. “I had it first,” said Bowerman.

  “But my mother gave it to me,” pleaded Cosby.

  “My grandmother gave it to me,” said Bowerman. “Let me tell you about my grandmother. Ever hear of the Oregon Trail . . . ?”

  Even so, Shea couldn’t get Bill to stay an extra day in the East. “He took the last plane in and the first one out,” Shea said. “Didn’t linger. Home to Oregon and comfort.”

  As Bowerman aged and the number of high school tracks he’d donated edged toward fifty, he sometimes seemed to be stepping back and making sure all was going to be right with his world. In 1994, one event set his mind wholly at ease on at least one front: David Frohnmayer (who’d lost a run for governor and become dean of Oregon’s Law School) was made president of the University of Oregon. From that moment on, Bill had no further problems with his alma mater. In an era when the legislature was shrinking support for higher education, two de facto sons of Bill Bowerman, Dave Frohnmayer and Phil Knight, teamed up to strengthen the institution they all cherished.

  Within a few years, Knight had given $50 million to the university—$30 million for academics and $20 million for athletics. In 1996, in his biggest one-year injection, he gave $15 million to endow faculty chairs and $10 million to help fund the William W. Knight Law Center, a beautiful new building across Agate from Hayward Field. John Jaqua threw in more than a million to complete and stock the law library. In 1998, the Nissho Iwai American Corporation, Knight’s visionary trading company and bank loan guarantor (which had already helped finance the library’s $27.4 million expansion) also chipped in.

  Bowerman was secure in the knowledge that he’d instilled some of this generosity in Knight and others whose source was Nike’s success. He didn’t take it as a moral affront when a new athletic director, Bill Moos, arrived in 1995 and went on a building tear. Moos used Knight’s gifts as the backbone of a campaign to up the wattage of Oregon’s sports facilities. Knight was far from the only donor, but his pledges to match others’ gifts amplified their effect.

  Bill sighed a little, seeing fortunes expended to help win the favor of fickle eighteen-year-olds from afar (“I think if I were going to war,” he said, “I’d rather go with the home folks than with mercenaries.”), but he really took issue with bigness only if it brought compromise. He was far more peeved by his company making many of its performance shoes with a lot of weighty bells and whistles. He understood the economics of that, but never stopped working on a light racing spike. Once, when showing me a pair, he winked and said, “I’m being patient. I’m going to be ready with this if the market ever sours so much the company has to go back to its roots.”

  “His frustrations grew and occasionally flared up through the years,” said Nike president Mark Parker in 2005, “when he didn’t see the Nike machine snatch up and duplicate his creations with his fervor. But those crude, handcrafted prototypes that Bill always pulled out of that well-worn briefcase had far more impact on the broader Nike product line than he ever realized.”

  They certainly influenced the narrowest of lines—a shoe for a single competitor. In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Bill’s rationale for those old prototypes was tested on the feet of Michael Johnson. In the 200-meter final, Johnson bent into the blocks wearing a pair of golden handmade spikes from Nike.

  Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks led early, but Johnson caught him at 80 meters and lifted into a gear neither he nor anyone else had ever attained. In the stretch, his effort was engraved on his face. Johnson hit the line and looked left at the infield clock. It read 19.32. He had broken his world record by .34 of a second.

  Johnson’s time was one that statisticians had projected would not be possible until a couple of decades into the next century. Fredericks ran 19.68, the third-fastest time in history, yet was beaten by four meters, the largest winning margin in an Olympic 200 since Jesse Owens defeated Mack Robinson 20.7 to 21.1 in 1936. In 2004, USA Track and Field voted Johnson’s 200-meter record the top performance of the previous twenty-five years.

  “One of the greatest sources of inspiration for Michael Johnson’s world-record-setting golden spikes,” Mark Parker would say, “was a pair of handmade shoes Bill made for Kenny Moore thirty years before and kept in the Nike archives.”

  Michael Johnson’s shoes were Bill’s last technical hurrah, proving that his high-performance ideas—founded on sheer physics—were still current because they are eternal. Bill was also tickled to see that the running form of Johnson, whose erect torso put off many coaches, was an echo of Bill’s greatest long sprinter, Otis Davis.

  With those riveting shoes, Johnson and Nike had burned a place in our collective imagination. In similar fashion, in that summer of 1996, a pair of Hollywood studios were setting out to plumb the essence of Bill and his meaning to his athletes.

  Within a month of Johnson’s historic race, shooting began on two feature films depicting the Bowerman-Prefontaine relationship. The need to preserve Pre’s memory was dragging Bill back into a world for which he had only expressed contempt after Personal Best.

  In the early 1990s, an independent documentary producer named Jon Lutz had moved to Eugene. He kept hearing about the power Pre’s story had over people and decided he wanted to tell it. Geoff Hollister and I talked with him, judged him a decent guy, and acted as references so he could buy the film rights from Ray and Elfriede Prefontaine.

  When Lutz had purchased both documentary and feature film rights, he brought in director Erich Lyttle, who listened to our stories of Pre and explained the needs of a documentary script. I wrote one, which loosely guided Lyttle and Hollister in filming interviews with many who knew Pre, including Bill. When it was edited, Ken Kesey narrated and Fire on the Track premiered on CBS right before the 1993 Pre Classic.

  So far so good. But then things got thorny. Lutz next approached Hollywood studios about doing a major dramatic feature about Pre. He found interest from Disney. At about this time, Personal Best director Robert Towne, who had since worked with Tom Cruise, had Cruise over for lunch one day and happened to show him seven minutes of Pre running in Fire on the Track. Cruise was soon wild to develop a project about him. He seemed to connect with Pre’s vulnerabilities as much as his mastery.

  Towne said I was the one to write it, and he’d direct. So I took some months away from Sports Illustrated, put aside the Bowerman biography, moved to Towne’s house in Pacific Palisades, and set to work. In the spring of 1995 we had the first draft of a script.

  Throughout all of this, Towne and I had been keeping Jon Lutz, the owner of the family’s film rights, aware of Cruise’s interest. Towne also pointed out to Lutz that his and Tom’s existing contractual arrangements made it better for them to do the film at Warner Brothers. Accordingly, when my script was deemed solid, Warner Brothers offered Lutz a comfortable executive producing deal, in return for the Prefontaine family’s film rights.

  But Lutz had kept up his talks with Disney, which made a similar executive producing offer. Lutz now had to choose between two deals. Financially, they were about equal. But one was at Disney, with no director or star committed to it, and one at Warner Brothers w
ith a superstar, Tom Cruise, emotionally attached and an Oscar winner, Robert Towne, set to direct. Lutz, who had no experience in big-budget feature film, chose Disney.

  Cruise was astounded and furious. He predicted that Disney would make grand promises but greatly compromise its support in the end. He still wanted to make a Warner Brothers film, but would the studio finance it, now that it was known that Disney was making one too? The studio would and did. There were now dueling Prefontaine movies.

  Warner Brothers was able to finesse the question of the family’s rights because Pre was a public figure and had had many friends who could contribute recollections and anecdotes. The meat of his story could easily be told without his parents’ private memories.

  But now there occurred a parallel to the making of Personal Best fifteen years before. The Oregon Track Club and the University of Oregon, led by Dave Frohnmayer, were fiercely protective of Pre’s legacy. Neither would consider permitting filming on campus or joining either warring studio’s side until they knew the wishes of one man. Wade Bell summed it up in one sentence: “The script has to be acceptable to Bill.”

  One Friday in March 1995, I dropped a copy off with Barbara in the Bowerman kitchen. All that weekend, I heard nothing. Towne began to call me every hour from LA asking for news. Finally, on Sunday, I could stand it no longer and drove up. The Bowerman house was deserted. I thought they must still be in church. But then I heard an impossible sound, an infuriating sound in their protected woods: a chain saw. I thought, I’ll be the hero. I’ll run up the hill and sneak up behind whomever is stealing Bowerman virgin timber and catch them in the act.

  I did it carefully and well, finally creeping down a slope above the whine, through greening underbrush, closer and closer, until I could see a bunch of shaggy-coated people around a windblown, uprooted old tree, cutting the precious burl out of where the roots met the trunk. It was Jay, his son Jayson, and Bill and Barbara. I moaned like a spirit of the woods and ran toward them. They saw me and whooped. I dropped down into the foxholelike crater the root ball had left. Bill came across it and hugged me hard. Barbara hugged me harder. The script was wonderful, they said, a triumph.