Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  Bill joined the Warner Brothers production, throwing his home open for shooting. The university signed a contract to give the studio exclusive rights to shoot at Hayward Field. But this had little apparent effect on Disney, which plowed ahead with its own project.

  After Bill gave his imprimatur, a host of runners who knew Pre picked the same side. But Geoff Hollister, who had worked with Lutz on the CBS documentary, chose the Disney side.

  I tried to explain to Geoff what Towne had drilled into me—namely, that every studio film starts out with great promises, but then bean-counting studio executives invariably want to cut the budget or compromise in some other way. At that point, you need a club—a Tom Cruise, someone so vital to the studio’s future that it has to honor the original commitments. Hollister, having never experienced this, was unpersuaded. I recall saying, when I realized it was useless, “Well, we competed against each other for years and stayed friends, let’s pledge to do that now.” He so pledged.

  Hollister signed on with the Disney production and tried to maneuver Phil Knight and Nike into backing it. But Knight, with Hollister on one side and Bowerman on the other, said, “I’m Switzerland. I’m neutral.” He wished both sides luck. It is one of my chief regrets that I could not have found some way to prevent competing productions. Had all the athletes and admirers of Bill and Pre been working together, we could have spent more time and energy on art than on venom.

  Disney lawyers immediately wrote to inform me that in speaking to unnamed people about Pre’s life, I was engaging in tortuous contract interference, a felony. Towne’s friend, the über attorney Bert Fields, wrote back demanding to know what I was being accused of so he could defend me. If I was interfering with Disney’s contracts with anyone, he said, then name those people and provide those contracts so he could advise me to stop it.

  The Disney attorneys replied, angrily, but not to the point. They never would, because they couldn’t. The only people I’d spoken to who also had contracts with Disney were Hollister and Pre’s sister Linda, and I’d told both of them that we wouldn’t be talking for a while because of just this legality. Worse than that, Disney attorneys wrote scary letters to the Prefontaine family, saying that any contact with the Warner side would be regarded as a violation of their rights.

  At such times, I would think of Pre himself, and pledge to do the best I could to help Towne evoke him on the screen. But before Towne could begin shooting, he had to be a part of another late-life reconciliation extended by Bill Bowerman. Towne had cast Billy Crudup as Pre and Donald Sutherland as Bill. A nervous Sutherland wanted to meet Bill, and Towne wanted that, too, so a lunch was arranged. Bill and Barbara arrived last to the dining room of Eugene’s Valley River Inn, where we waited at a table overlooking the Willamette. Barbara would say later that Bill had seemed kind of cool that morning, making her apprehensive about whether he had truly put his old fury over Personal Best behind him.

  By this time, Robert Towne had Bill Bowerman deep in his neurons, having imagined how it was for him throughout all the stages of Pre’s development, the horrors of Munich, and Pre’s death. Towne began taking Bowerman and Sutherland through those different scenes almost as if he’d been there himself. Barbara, watching, was astounded to see that Bill had decided that Towne was indeed the man for this job. Bill made no mention of Personal Best. He complimented Towne on doing his homework. And he was all soothing grace and warmth with Sutherland, assuring him he’d do fine.

  Bowerman didn’t ask that a word of the script be changed. He did add one line. Tom Cruise’s partner in producing, Paula Wagner, wanted to meet Bill, so she visited a Tuesday Ad Hoc Group lunch at the Town Club and kidded him, saying he had a helluva nerve wrecking Barbara’s waffle iron to make shoe soles. She would never have let her husband get away with that. “Paula,” Bill replied, “tell your husband there are times when it’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.” So we threw that in the script.

  We would call the film, in homage to Pre’s wild yearnings, Without Limits. Bill did pay a call to the set, one Sunday after church. When the 2,000 Eugene extras in the stands got a glimpse of Bill, they stood in ovation. Bowerman walked along the whole backstretch, waving, glowing in the full and transparent knowledge that he deserved it. He was the only star on the set. Sutherland, affirming this, genuflected. Bill then sat down and was mightily impressed to see Crudup doing tough, 26- and 27-second 200s while reenacting Pre’s finish against Frank Shorter in the 1974 Restoration Meet three-mile.

  The Disney movie, called Prefontaine, came out first and proved Cruise prophetic. The budget had been minuscule. The director, Steve James, who had done the magnificent Hoop Dreams (and who shared screenwriting credits on Prefontaine with Eugene Corr), didn’t understand Pre and tried to put him into the mold of what he did know—an athlete using sport to escape a ghetto or a small town.

  The film also defamed the character of Bill Bowerman, creating a fictitious 1972 ultimatum from the USOC (the film called it something else) and portraying Bill as giving up his fight for athletes’ expenses to avoid being removed as Olympic coach. The facts, of course, were that Bill had smiled and turned over the 1972 Trials’ proceeds and refrained from suing the USOC. Had Bill actually been slapped with such an ultimatum, he would have walked to the nearest reporter, announced he’d just been shit-canned, and explained the reasons. Instead, Prefontaine showed him going on being Olympic coach, having knuckled under in a way Bowerman never would have. In trying to add “drama,” the film trashed Bill’s honor.

  In February 1997, Without Limits, the Warner Brothers movie, was edited enough for viewing by a select audience. John Jaqua’s son Jim, who had helped Towne plan the major race sequences, and I showed a working print to Bill and Barbara Bowerman and John and Robin Jaqua, on the Jaqua’s TV. Bill was rapt for two hours. When it was over, no one spoke. Robin Jaqua was quietly weeping. Barbara looked to Bill. Bowerman took a moment to compose himself, nodded, and croaked, “That’s the way it was. The way it was with the Men of Oregon.”

  That, for me, was praise enough.

  In the years since, Without Limits has been immensely rewarding for its makers because of kids’ reactions to it. It has become a relay baton with a message tucked inside, handed from one generation of runners to the next, keeping vivid both the story of Pre and the truths Bowerman held to be vital—namely, that we are all physical entities, that we all have the ability to get better (some of us a lot better), but to do that we have to accept our limits at any given moment and work within them. Great coaches are great because they see and help transcend those limits. If that is not exactly an immortal message, it should be.

  Bill, the mortal Bill, was fading mentally, as were his cronies. Bob Newland had died of liver cancer in 1995. Ray Hendrickson more often lost the thread of his stories. But Bill and the rest of the Ad Hoc Group were so brutal to him when it happened that he’d be buoyed by their savage togetherness. Their motto, voiced by McHolick, was “Hey, Alzheimer’s isn’t so bad. You meet new friends every day.”

  Bill developed a few tricks to ward off concerns about his short-term memory. When he was asked a question and wanted to give his brain time, he’d ask, “Do you need to know by dinner?” He never lost his long-term memory, but it was never that hot in the first place. Even when Bill was just in his fifties, Phil Knight once said, “he was always wrong on his facts and right on his principles.”

  Like one of his heroes, Senator Wayne Morse, Bill had periods late in life when he got too angry and spent too much energy on things that should have been beneath him. Caught in the Olympian dilemma of having tougher standards for self and circle than the wider world can possibly meet, he had to make a shift that every champion eventually faces one way or another. He had to cut the rest of the world some slack.

  Being one whose life had involved bringing health to others, Bill did the healthy thing. He genuinely mellowed. His judgmental, quick-to-sue side showed up less often. His underlyin
g, beatific, joy-in-every-sunrise side outshone it. It helped that he went back to Fossil for some of those sunrises.

  Bill and Barbara never minded the four-and-a-half-hour drive between their two homes because it plunged them back into so many important times. Barbara even conceived the structure of a symphony that would describe the trip.

  “Eugene traffic would be warming up the orchestra,” she would write to me in 2001, “then violins for the sound of the McKenzie as you ascend, a regular beat that is the rows of the first trees, then deep woods, dark and Wagnerian, out of which we get trilling flute glimpses of snowy mountains. Then a quiet period, flat, for the opening of the summits, the sky so big. I love that period of expansiveness. Then a little Indian tom-tom passing the towns of Sisters and Madras, for the different drums of the ponderosa trunks. Finally we settle down in the John Day canyons, the flat buttes, and another river theme closes the passage, something like where we began, but ineffably different.”

  When Bill’s sister Beth needed an assisted-living facility, Bill bought an interest in airy, new Haven House in downtown Fossil. However, Beth soon aged right past being able to live there, so they found a nursing home in Madras for her. Bill and Barbara took the rooms in the Haven House facility themselves and rented out their home near Jon’s property. They still commuted occasionally to Eugene, but in 1998 Tom needed to remodel the McKenzie View Drive kitchen, so they stayed in Fossil until he was done. They were so content they never moved back.

  Bill had always joked to his teams that Fossil’s population was a constant 527. When you said come on, it had to fluctuate a little, he’d say, “Nope. Nope. Every time a baby’s born, a man leaves town.” Now the green sign read “Pop. 430,” but with the addition of the Bowermans, the town gave the impression of more.

  Bill and Barbara would have been heroes to Fossil if they had simply returned there to live. But after their leadership in the Rajneeshpuram war, they were accorded mythic standing. Bill met all attempts to deify him with leveling humor.

  Bill’s company was still pleased to make use of him. For years, Nike had had a list of eleven rules. Number eleven was simply, “Remember the man.” Steve Bence, who had been on the team with Prefontaine and has since become a key Nike manager, believes that the company is “exceptionally good for a large corporation in taking inspiration from one of its founding members” and credits Phil Knight with keeping Bowerman’s spirit alive. The Nike running group created a line of shoes called the Bowerman series, a collection of shoes focused on performance. Bowerman’s Cortez is still in the line and selling strongly around the world.

  People who got their start in Bill’s Eugene lab—Mike Friton, Ellen Schmidt Devlin, soccer player Don Remlinger, and pole-vaulter Tinker Hatfield—would move into influential positions at Nike and carry on his message. Many of Nike’s overseas offices would have a conference room called the Bowerman Room, with his image and quotes on the wall. As Bence would say, “We hold up Bowerman as an example of an innovator, visionary, mentor, and teacher.”

  So at selected times, vanloads of new Nike employees were driven out to take his hand and know that Bill was real. He was usually memorable, too. Jeff Johnson recalled Geoff Hollister taking the Nike running development group to meet with Bill and filming him answering their questions. Bill said at one point, “By using these methods the Men of Oregon won two NCAA titles.”

  Hollister said, “Bill, it was actually four.”

  Bill fixed him with a look of suspicion that turned to joy. “The hell you say.”

  In June 1999, Bowerman stepped down as a member of the Nike Board of Directors. Over thirty-one years he had made countless attempts at this. Now, with sales creeping toward six billion dollars a year, Buck had finally permitted it. “Free at last,” Bill said. “What’s next?”

  Six months later, Bill helped Barbara get their Christmas cards out on time. He lingered over a note to Otto and MarAbel Frohnmayer, because Otto was gravely ill with pancreatic cancer. “My dad got the last note Bill ever wrote,” Dave Frohnmayer would recall. “We, the family, were all there in Medford that night, Christmas Eve. Barbara had written a lovely letter and there was a short, cogent note from Bill. I read it to Dad and he nodded and understood. Bill died that night and Dad died five weeks later.”

  Bill died beneath Barbara’s favorite photo of him, taken at their wedding. It hung beside the photo he most loved of her, taken that same June day in 1936. She was standing on a pedestal, to display the great train of her dress. On his wedding day Bill was at parade rest, his shoulders back, his hands behind him. His face was calm, with a knowing, almost smug look of victory. One imagines the same look on the face of the departed, at eighty-eight, lying comfortably on the red and blue flowered bedspread, when Barbara came out of the shower and found him gone. “Oh, it’s just like you,” she said, “to go on ahead, and with absolutely no warning!”

  He had pulled it off. Just when many had begun to worry about his taking longer and longer walks in the magnificent corridors of his mind, Bill managed a perfect ending to his life. Barbara sat with him and took his hand and thought back on the seventy years she’d been beside him, his loving girlfriend, wife, planner, organizer. With her energy and buoyant intuition, she had taken every pressure from him that she could, as they had for each other from the beginning, in their first dance. And never, she realized, in all that time, did these two piercingly intelligent beings completely fathom each other’s mystery.

  Bill was interred not far from the westward-facing slope where J. W. Chambers, as Bill had written, “sleeps in the warmth of the western setting sun.” Barbara, who took his death in stride, wished no public memorial service.

  In the months and years after Bill died, Barbara slowly went through chests of documents and photos in their McKenzie View homestead. She found the gun and the champagne from the war. “It will stay unopened, “ she said of the Mumm. “It seems sacrilegious otherwise. If we two didn’t find an occasion, no force on earth should open it now.”

  Barbara also found a letter Bill had begun to Knight but never sent. Before they’d moved to Fossil for good, Bill had jotted some thoughts on a legal pad, roughing out a first draft, but didn’t have Barbara type it out, meaning to polish it later. “He had to have written it in the last few minutes we were here,” Barbara would recall. “But then in the rush of packing it got left behind.”

  Barbara was struck by its formality. “Usually he’d knock out his notes himself because all he’d say was, ‘Buck, you knothead, I won’t work with that new bleep you have in charge of communications.’ But this was different. This was calm and considered.”

  It read:

  The Waffle Farm

  Dear Buck,

  I want to tell my “Partner in Sports” how much I admire your leadership and the crew or team you have assembled and direct.

  The road has had some sharp curves. Yes, and some major obstacles to get around or over.

  I have never availed myself of the opportunity to express my admiration for your leadership and accomplishments in the growth, from small Blue Ribbon to International Nike Inc.

  Your leadership has been phenomenal. Barb joins me in appreciation and admiration.

  He had left it unsigned. A few days later, Barbara delivered the entire legal pad to Knight. “Am I going to cry?” he asked her. She nodded, so he took it away to read alone. “That resides in a sacred drawer,” he would say later, knowing at last that Bill Bowerman had judged him worthy.

  INDEX

  Index

  AAC, 336–37

  AAU. See Amateur Athletic Union

  Abrahams, Harold, 52

  Acheson, Russ, 59

  Adidas, 122–23, 125, 183, 261, 281, 315, 357, 367–68, 403

  Aerobics (Cooper), 155

  Aiken, Jim, 85

  Air Jordan shoe, 397

  Alcindor, Lew, 216

  Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 353

  Alleman, Nancy, 322

  Allen, Dale, 332
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  Alltucker, John, 257, 274

  Altitude studies on running, 209–12

  Alton Baker Park (Oregon), 335–36

  Alvarado, Bill, 332–33

  Alvarado, Karen, 332–33

  Amateur Athletic Act (1978), 348, 364

  Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)

  “amateurism” rules and, 140–42, 364–66

  Bowerman and, 142–45

  breakup of, 348

  dominance of, 140–45

  meet (1975), 340

  National Collegiate Athletic Association and, 192–94, 337

  Nationals

  1958, 109

  1959, 113

  1966, 262

  1967, 207–8, 212

  1969, 236

  1970, 244, 246

  1971, 255

  1973, 312

  Shorter and, 336

  Spearow and, 53

  Amateurism rulings, 140–42, 364–66

  American Cattle Association, 401

  Amundson, John, 309–10

  Anderson, Jodi, 361

  Anderson, Jon, 276, 287, 293, 326, 335, 388

  Anderson, Les, 274, 276, 338

  Andrews, Harlan, 2

  Anti-doping issues, 282, 345–47

  Apartheid, 216, 285

  Archer, Woody, 32

  Army track team, 244–46, 307

  ARRA, 365–66

  Arzhanov, Yevgeny, 287

  Ashford, Evelyn, 341

  Association of Road Racing Athletes (ARRA), 365–66

  Athletics West, 348–49, 358, 380, 386

  Atiyeh, Vic, 375

  Audain, Anne, 365

  Autzen Stadium, 234

  Aydelott, Sheryl, 396

  Bacheler, Carol, 283

  Bacheler, Jack, 236, 246, 276–77, 299, 303

  Bailey, James J. (Jim), 5–7, 96–97, 105–6, 108