Pre: The Story of America's Greatest Running Legend, Steve Prefontaine

by Tom Jordan

  Copyright © 1977, 1994, 1997, 2012 by Tom Jordan

  First edition published in 1977

  Second edition 1997

  E-Book 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Designer: John Herr

  Cover Photographer: Jeff Johnson

  Back Cover Photographer: George Long, courtesy of Bob Bonn

  ISBN-13: 978-0-87596-457-7 (paperback)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-62336-077-1 (electronic book)

  We inspire and enable people to improve their lives and the world around them.

  rodalebooks.com

  Acknowledgments

  Pre is a book really written by dozens of people: those competitors and friends who willingly gave of their time and memories; the newsmen and their publications who kindly allowed me to reprint articles about Steve; the photographers whose superb photos capture the essence of the man. My heartfelt thanks goes to them.

  In particular, I would like to thank Pat Tyson and Paul Geis for their candid observations and comments, and Kenn Hess, who graciously sent his personal files on Pre for my use.To Walt McClure, who provided Steve’s high school career stats that appear in the Appendix, to Bill Dellinger, for his always-honest remembrances, and to Blaine Newnham, then the sports editor of The (Eugene) Register-Guard, who put me in contact with many of Pre’s People through the pages of that fine newspaper. Thanks to Westcom Creative Group, for permission to quote from their compelling documentary, Fire on the Track: The Steve Prefontaine Story.

  Thanks also to the superb staff at Rodale Inc., especially Sara Dunphy, Eugenie Delaney, Andrew Brubaker, and David Umla. In particular, much gratitude goes to John Reeser, who edited the manuscript so adeptly and shepherded this project through so well.

  Finally, my thanks to the late Geoff Hollister for invaluable assistance every step of the way; to Track & Field News, for enabling the story to be told; and to the Prefontaine family—parents Elfriede and Ray and sisters Linda and Neta, who have become a special part of my life.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Not Many Ways to Jump

  2. The Rube

  3. Spirit, Fierce and Driving

  4. The Olympics

  5. Years of Thrilling Madness

  6. Hard Work

  7. End to Innocence

  8. Pre and His People

  9. Europe

  10. The Last Season

  11. Final Lap

  12. Pre’s Legacy

  Appendix

  Preface

  Pre is primarily a chronicle of Steve Prefontaine’s short, yet brilliant, career. Highlighted races are primarily from his track career. The track was his favorite venue, and he did his best running there. Some of his races, like the Olympic Trials and the Games, were well covered at the time by the media; others, like his race against Hailu Ebba in the 1500 meters, are virtually unknown outside of Eugene, Oregon, his adopted hometown. There are cross country races included, because Pre enjoyed the fall program almost as much as he did track. A few significant indoor meets are covered, although Pre took the indoor campaigns less seriously than the other two seasons.

  Photos from these races were taken by both amateur and professional photographers. These remarkable pictures hopefully relate what the text does not about Steve Prefontaine.

  Introduction

  There was something about Steve Prefontaine that demanded attention. As a writer for Track & Field News in the early 1970s, along with just about everyone else in the track world, I was fascinated by the phenomenon known as “Pre.” His was a nature brash, fearless, outspoken, and—in the United States, at least—invincible on the track. To hear him hold forth to the media was to listen to a machine gun locked on automatic fire. To watch him back up his talk on the track was a thrill for his admirers and a frustration to his competitors. Either you were a Pre fan, or you were not. I was a fan.

  My primary goal when I wrote this book in 1977 was to focus on Pre the runner and legend. During the writing, however, I soon found it impossible to speak of his career without including anecdotes about Pre the person. In interviewing Steve’s teammates, competitors, fans, and friends, nearly all had a personal memory that for them typified Pre.

  These memories were given without prodding, sometimes eagerly, as if the grief could be mitigated by the sharing; sometimes in voices choked with emotion, poignantly reminding one that for those close to him, even two years after his death in 1975, it was but a yesterday ago. Indeed, many at the time still spoke of him in the present tense, saying, “Pre runs that third lap hard,” or “Steve likes to wear purple a lot.”

  Nearly everyone described how Steve’s life had affected their own, at times told in terms too deeply personal for print. But other stories are included in the text; for without them, what would emerge is the Steve Prefontaine of the print media, a Pre who did exist, but only as one of the many personae he possessed. The fact of the matter is that each person knew a different Pre, witnessed a different side to this enormously complex individual. There were, to be sure, certain characteristics that recurred in any conversation about Steve with his friends and competitors. He was in constant motion, charged with an unbelievable energy. Yet in quiet moments, he was extremely easy to talk to. Pre would fix you with a steady gaze and give the impression that you were the most important person in his life at that instant, and that the things he was telling you were known by few others. It was an enormously flattering and appealing trait, and contributed greatly to what came to be called his “charisma.”

  At the same time, he was a hard person to know intimately. His pace was so frenetic, his outlook so taken up with the now of life, that his deep friendships outside of family and love relationships were few. And he was a private person, a loner at times, who “didn’t like people butting in on his aloneness,” as one friend put it.

  “I didn’t know him well,” was a common refrain heard from those who were thought to be his friends in the track community. The very few who did become close to him saw a Steve Prefontaine different from the cocky, self-centered image found in the newspaper and magazine articles of the time. They saw a Pre capable of tears and self-doubt, of euphoria and thoughtfulness. They saw a “rube” from a small town fast maturing into an articulate adult, willing to take on the inequities he saw in the sport. Then, on a warm spring evening in late May, in a matter of minutes, his voice was silenced forever.

  Almost 40 years have passed since Pre’s death. During that time, his story has emerged as an enduring one that still inspires young runners to this day. A documentary on his life, Fire on the Track, was produced with the leadership of Geoff Hollister, and first broadcast in 1995 to a live audience on CBS before the airing of the track meet bearing his name, the Prefontaine Classic. Astonishingly, not one, but two major motion pictures were filmed, “Prefontaine” in 1997 from Hollywood Pictures, and “Without Limits” in 1998 from Warner Brothers. Both received critical acclaim.

  But why all the interest in Pre? Why, after almost four decades, the continued attention on an athlete little known outside of track and field circles during his lifetime? Considering he never set a world record or won an Olympic medal, Pre’s story could well be a mere footnote in the sport’s history books. Some of his greatest races were at yard-distances that are no longer run. Hi
s rematch against Munich 5000- and 10,000-meter gold medalist Lasse Viren of Finland was going to be in the 1976 Games in Montreal. There, without Prefontaine, Viren won two more gold medals. Pre’s opportunity for wealth and transcendent fame could well have come from the Running Boom, which only mushroomed in the late 1970s. In his lifetime, in fact, Pre never ran a serious road race.

  So why all the attention on an athlete who, at age 24, was barely getting started in his running career and in life? The glib answer may be that those most affected by his life and death—his contemporaries—are now in positions to tell the stories they care to have told.

  But a more accurate and compelling reason may be that there has come a realization that Pre’s story is not simply one of a gifted athlete dying young. It is about an individual who in an incredibly short span of time helped instigate the end of amateurism, set the tone for a brash company that became the Nike colossus, and inspired generations of American distance runners by his complete commitment to wringing everything out of what he called “the Gift.” Indeed, perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the life and death of Steve Prefontaine is the number of forces his presence and subsequent absence set in motion.

  And there is, for lack of a better term, the mystical element. It is astonishing the number of coincidences that relate back to Pre’s life and death. Some are of the “how curious” variety, such as the sun always seeming to break through the clouds whenever he first stepped onto the Hayward Field track. Others are more macabre, such as Steve wearing a black singlet in a race for the first time in his career on the night he died, or one of the two torch bearers in the 1976 Montreal Olympics having the name—completely by coincidence—Stephen Prefontaine. Some, when told in the right circumstances, can almost make the neck hairs stand on end.

  Among his many offtrack projects, Pre gave training advice and encouragement to two young women athletes with world-class potential. On May 30, 1976, one year to the day after Pre’s death, Fran Sichting and her husband became the parents of their first child, a baby girl. On May 30, 1986, Mary Slaney and her husband became the parents of their first child, a baby girl. Runners are, by and large, a skeptical lot: It’s hard to fool oneself during hard intervals or in the middle of a 10-mile run. But nearly everyone who knew Pre has a similar mystical story to tell. Just ask them.

  1

  Not Many Ways to Jump

  Nothing hinted at what was to come.

  Steve Roland Prefontaine was born on January 25, 1951, in the midst of the baby boom, in the Oregon coastal town of Coos Bay. He grew up with his parents and two sisters, Neta and Linda, in a snug house on Elrod Street built by his father. Ray Prefontaine had returned from serving with the U.S. Army occupation forces in Germany with his new bride, Elfriede. Both were hardworking, he as a carpenter and welder, she as a seamstress. They were a good fit for Coos Bay, where sloth was, and still is, a four-letter word.

  Growing up, Steve was an active youngster, tearing around the house on his scooter, or after he grew older, setting speed records mowing the lawn. He would race HO-scale cars with his friends on Saturdays and go belly-boarding on Sunset Bay in the summers. His youth might have appeared unremarkable, even idyllic, but he was a product of his town and his time. Olympic marathoner and writer Kenny Moore explains it best:

  “To understand Steve Prefontaine,” he wrote in 1972, “it is necessary to know something about Coos Bay, Oregon. The town and the man find themselves similarly described: blunt, energetic, tough, aggressive. Coos Bay is a mill town, a fishing town, a deepwater port. Longshoremen, fishermen, and loggers are not given to quiet introspection. Coos Bay endures its difficult, elemental life in the woods, on the boats and docks with a vociferous pride. The working men insist on a hardness in their society. Youth must be initiated, must measure up.

  “‘You don’t have many ways to jump,’ says Prefontaine. ‘You can be an athlete. Athletes are very, very big in Coos Bay. You can study, try to be an intellectual, but there aren’t many of those. Or you can go drag the Gut in your lowered Chevy with a switchblade in your pocket.’”

  Potential from an Early Age

  Sports tradition runs deep in Coos Bay to this day. Perhaps because of its isolation, the small town of 15,000 invests much of its interest and enthusiasm in athletics. Football and basketball are especially popular, and the pressure to participate is intense.

  At home football games during the 1950s and 1960s, a seemingly unending stream of 60 to 80 players, dressed in the silver-gray and purple uniforms of the Pirates of Marshfield High, would trot onto the field for pregame warm-ups, with the crowd standing and cheering. The varsity letter, notes a Marshfield grad who lived through the era, was “akin to a badge of manhood.”

  Colliding head-on with this ethic of toughness was an individual with something to prove. Years later, Steve would recall that he had been teased in grade school because of his hyperactivity, and because he was a slow learner. In junior high school, he tried hard to measure up. A 5-foot, 100-pound benchwarmer in the 8th grade, Steve—he wouldn’t be called “Pre” until later—occasionally noticed members of the high school cross country team jogging by the football field on their way to practice.

  “What kind of crazy nut would spend two or three hours a day just running?” was his reaction.

  Pre’s attitude changed that same year, during a three-week conditioning program in his physical education class. The longer the distance run, the closer he was to the leaders. He ran 3:51 for the 1320-yard run and 1:45 for the 660-yard run. “It somehow caught my interest,” he said years later. Here was something he was good at, where determination coupled with talent could bring recognition and reward. Pre had found his sport.

  He turned out for cross country in the fall of 1965 as a freshman at Marshfield High, and went from seventh man to second by season’s end, placing 53rd in the state meet. His first year of track in the spring was less auspicious, with a 5:01 best in the mile.

  “It was at the district cross country meet his sophomore year that his potential to become an outstanding runner showed itself,” Walt McClure, his high school coach, states. “We were against the defending state mile champion and the boy who would become the state high school cross country champion, and there was maybe a quarter mile left to go when this little guy in purple passed them and took a short lead. They just went ‘Who was that?’ They got him in the end, and the same thing happened at the state meet, where he got sixth. Steve was really mad. ‘Let’s run it again!’ he said, and he’d probably have beaten them if they had.”

  A common sight—Steve finishing first with no one in sight. THE WORLD

  Now thoroughly hooked on running, Pre trained hard through the winter season and placed fifth in the Oregon Invitational, a showcase indoor meet for the best runners in the state, his sophomore year. His goals were high for the outdoor track season, but months of frustration ended in his failure to make the state meet two-mile, caused in part perhaps by his strong interest in the performances of the other members of the team.

  “He was always running up and down, shouting encouragement and advice,” McClure recalls. “We finally had to tell him, ‘Look, we’ll do the coaching, you do the running.’”

  Spurred on by his failure, Steve started planning for his junior-year cross country season with the goal of going undefeated. He began to show the singular ability to accept mentally and physically the punishment of training.

  “Pre was the hardest worker in running that I ever had by far,” McClure remembers. “This is the whole thing, his intensity. On his morning runs, I didn’t check on him. I just said if you want to be a good runner, you’ve got to get out there in the mornings.

  “He asked, ‘What should I do?’ and I said you’ve got to be inventive, like sprint between telephone poles or just go out for 20 minutes and see how far you can go. He had a lot of imagination and thought of all sorts of things to do out there. He worked awful hard.”

  The intensity and hard work bro
ught results. Gaps began to show between Pre and the pack, and there were no more incidents like the one during his sophomore year, when in a physical cross country race against Sheldon High School, the tough kid from Coos Bay indelicately took a swing at rival Jon Anderson, the future winner of the 1973 Boston Marathon.

  Pre went undefeated in cross country his junior year, culminating in the state title. Bill Dellinger, University of Oregon assistant cross country and track coach at that time, remembers his first glimpse of Pre at that meet. “I was standing on a hill. I had my binoculars, and I was probably a good half-mile or 700 yards away from the start. And I saw this guy that had the start position, but it was the look in his eyes, from a half-mile distance, the intensity in his face as the gun went off. I thought, ‘That’s got to be Pre.’”

  Outdoors, the 17-year-old prodigy set an all-time Oregon track best in the two-mile with a 9:01.3. He trained everywhere, on the beaches and dunes, and on the golf course where the team did some of its training.

  And at all hours. After being stopped a couple of times by the police inquiring about just exactly what he was doing, Steve was left alone.

  “He was a little bit ahead of his time in Coos Bay,” chuckles McClure. “It was kind of comical to hear some of his comments about being stopped.”

  Besides the four to eight miles a day, Steve’s enormous energy was spread between three part-time jobs: working as a gas jockey in a Phillips 66 station, as a water-safety instructor, and as a policy evaluator for a local insurance company. He also listed his hobbies on a Track & Field News questionnaire as “water skiing, sand buggy riding, stamp collecting, [and] drawing.”

  The overwhelming impression for the residents of Coos Bay, however, was of Prefontaine, the kid who never stopped running.