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

by Tom Jordan

  3

  Spirit, Fierce and Driving

  Of the thousands of people who knew Pre, each has their own sense of what he was “really” like. There was, of course, the public Pre, who by the spring of his junior year was no longer a precocious youngster out of Coos Bay, but a bona fide contender for a medal in the upcoming Olympic Games.

  What attracted the legions of fans, however, was something more than a string of victories on the track. Ralph Mann would become Pre’s friend and European traveling companion in the summers after Munich. He comments on the charisma that surrounded the well-publicized figure of Steve Prefontaine.

  “He had this magnetism that just drew people toward him. He had the personality that people would just take to. It was strange, because many times we discussed it and he said it was just the way he acted, nothing unnatural. He didn’t know what it was, and I couldn’t figure it out just by watching it. . . .”

  Everyone noticed it, including his competitors.

  “I remember it was a cold day,” rival and Oregon teammate Paul Geis says, of the first time he met Pre in June 1972. “The NCAA Championships were at Eugene, and everybody was in the trainer’s tent trying to stay away from the wind and stay warm. He came in, and I remember distinctly that he had a sort of magnetism about him. I can’t really explicitly say what it was—maybe it was because people said to him as he walked by, ‘Go Pre,’ or ‘Go get ’em.’ Maybe it was just his confidence, his sense of calmness.”

  Whatever that quality was, few were immune to it, either by a dismissal of Pre as “cocky” or by an ill-disguised adulation that extended to members of the Oregon team.

  “It was hard for a lot of people to talk to him, because they held him in such awe,” Scott Daggatt, who was to become one of his good friends, recalls. “When you have someone who is kind of a folk hero, you let him do all the talking. It took me a couple of years to get that out of me, to where I could say, ‘Hey, look, I disagree with you.’”

  A Whirlwind of Activity

  The “public” wanted to know more about this outspoken Prefontaine. Ted Brock, writing for Sport magazine, visited with Pre in early 1972.

  “The scenario for the film GO PRE begins at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning in early March. In a soiled sweatsuit and mud-lined shoes, Steve takes an early run of four or five miles (“quality running” at a six-minute-mile pace) along the roads of Eugene’s Glenwood district and into Springfield. Having finished the day’s first workout, he returns to his trailer home on a bank of the Willamette River to shower and uniform himself for the day: Levi jacket, jeans, an old pair of cross country shoes and one of his myriad printed T-shirts bearing the name of some recent track meet. He drives to sociology class in a light blue MGB convertible. This is the only piece of equipment that seems conspicuously out of place, though it’s a cut below the Datsun 240-Z that it replaced—both cars no doubt holdovers from youthful Coos Bay dreams of cruisin’ the main in a clean machine. Baby Blue, festooned with stickers showing ducks running hurdles and jumping through block O’s, waits in a parking place outside the athletic office while Pre walks past, nodding and waving to undergraduates on his way to sociology.

  “‘I hate the image of being a super jock, an untouchable,’ he remarks. ‘When I’m on campus, I’ll walk by a group of people and they’ll whisper “Guess who just walked by.” These are things I know I have to live with, but still they can get me down once in a while. That’s one of the reasons I’m living in the trailer.’

  “Sociology is over, and Pre stops off at the athletic office. As if on cue, his girlfriend Mary [Marckx] appears and the two exchange smiles and a brief greeting. The fairy tale tries to surface again, showing a picture of the wide-eyed 3.0 student-athlete with the pretty blonde beside the sports car. But reality reappears minutes later, following the drive home, in the form of a yellow slip of paper hanging from the screen door of the trailer. The gas bill has arrived. ‘Ed’s Propane. Mr. Prefontaine. $5.44.’ No return address. The car is still running. Pre drives to the office marked ‘River Bank Trailer Park,’ gets out, and walks past the puddles and through the door with the Williams Bread-in-the-blue-gingham-wrapper decal. The manager knows Ed’s address. Other side of town. Maybe there’s time to pick up some food stamps along the way.

  Pre shared this trailer in the Glenwood area of Eugene, a few miles from Oregon’s campus, with Pat Tyson from early 1972 to mid-1973. RICH CLARKSON

  “It galls Prefontaine that he has to live the way he lives because of what he is—a long-distance runner. ‘Amateurism is a thing that should have been kicked out in 1920, you know,’ he says. ‘The true amateurs, by the standards that were set up in the 1890s, were the elite, who were already well-established and set up in clubs and didn’t need money to compete. The average athlete now is finding it damn hard to make it. I get $101 a month from the university. Room and board. And then there’s going to school, buying books, and everything else. It’s pretty hard to make it.’”

  Few but Prefontaine could. He was possessed of enormous energy, however, and he managed to make ends meet. His was a level of activity that extended beyond the track and classroom, into every endeavor he undertook. Often, he was over at Roosevelt Junior High School, tutoring kids, telling them of his upbringing and the things they themselves could achieve in life.

  A rare moment of relaxation. This photo was taken for a 1972 article on Pre in LIFE magazine. RICH CLARKSON

  Bill Bowerman, his coach at Oregon, says it this way: “The thing about Pre that set him apart from other athletes at Oregon were the many other things he got involved in. He’d go out and help kids and run with the old joggers and old women. He’d go up and get involved in the program at the State Penitentiary. That was just the kind of guy he was. He was . . . an achiever. Way beyond the ordinary. Anything this guy went into, he was achieving about 200 percent. Tremendous energy.”

  An example of this energy, spontaneously repeated by different members of the Oregon team who knew Pre, is the “locker room” story.

  Always on the go, Steve attends a retirement dinner in June of '72 for his Marshfield High coach, Walt McClure. RICH CLARKSON

  “Pre was not easygoing in any way,” says Paul Geis. “Everything had to be competitive or fast. You could come in from a workout, and have gotten out of your clothes and be already walking to the shower when Pre came in. And yet, by the time you came out of the shower, he would have gotten undressed, have already showered, dressed, and be shaking the water from his hair, anxious to get on the road. He was just always in a rush. It was a phenomenon.”

  In the spring of 1972, Pre began to look for a roommate to share the trailer he’d bought in Glenwood, a light industrial area interspersed with modest homes, situated between Eugene and Springfield. He wanted someone low-key, with whom he could get along. For the next year, through the Olympic Trials, the Games, and the post-Olympic 1973 season, Pat Tyson was that roommate. He provides a personal glimpse into the offtrack world of the Steve Prefontaine of that time.

  “When Steve asked if I wanted to room with him, the first thing I thought was that it was going to be cheap—like $30 a month. I’m a tightwad, so I jumped at it. Here was someone I could train with in the morning, who has good hours, and so on. I knew that sometimes living with someone that well-known can be tough on you, but I thought, ‘Well, this could be interesting.’

  “It was a small place—not much privacy. But he was very kind, considerate. I lived there a year-and-a-half, and we never had a fight, never argued. The phone would ring a lot. I almost felt that I was Prefontaine’s Answering Service, but I didn’t really feel that way.

  “I began to settle down a little bit for the first time, seeing him so hyperactive. I thought my day was filled up, and I saw him doubling that. He’d often do two things at once. Instead of just writing a letter, he’d be writing a letter and eating at the same time.

  “His diet was pretty good really, considering. It seemed like he was dieting a lot—he
had to do that to stay at his 145 pounds because he’d go up over 150 pretty easily. If I fixed anything, he’d eat it. For breakfast, we had pancakes or french toast or something like that. For dinner, we’d make a lot of salads—Pre liked fresh, green, tossed salads. He’d buy meat and would usually end up saying, ‘You can have the meat, and I’ll just have salad.’ He would think he was eating good, but there were a lot of times when he would go out and get junk food or go over to the Paddock Tavern.

  “After a meet, we might go out for dinner and have a couple of beers. Steve wasn’t one to sit back and think. He’d go from table to table and visit. He liked to move about and talk to people.

  “Pre was what you would call a ‘toucher’. He wasn’t scared to come up and look you in the eye and touch you. He was a very warm person. He’d hug you, and in this society the way it is, you don’t hug other males. But Pre was never ashamed to do that, ever.

  “He liked to swim in the summer. We’d go pool-hopping at the various motels. Lay in the sun. We liked to sit back in his convertible—Mary, myself, and Pre— take off someplace down the coast, to Coos Bay or someplace, and Mary and I would sing old songs from the 1950s and 1960s. Pretty soon Pre would get into that, too, and we’d get our own little natural high. . . .”

  “A Race Pre Should Have Lost”

  He did not suffer adversity gladly. Pre’s 1972 track campaign started with a two-mile race in a dual meet against Fresno State, held in Fresno. The wind was terrible, swirling to gusts of 30 mph, and Pre’s plans for a good time went awry. He finished in 8:55.4, and his pique, according to one eyewitness, was something to behold.

  “He started cursing afterward, and swearing that he would never go near that town again, and it was just the worst dump he’d ever run in, as if to say what the hell are the citizens trying to do, bringing the weather in on him when he was going to treat them to a bravura performance. . . .”

  It is likely that Steve felt more kindly toward the citizens of Bakersfield when, a week later, he started his Olympic buildup in earnest there with a 27:22.4 collegiate six-mile record.

  “They’ll hear about this in Europe,” Pre crowed. “They have to be respecting me more now and wondering if I have any weaknesses.”

  In what many Oregon fans consider his best race ever, Pre takes the lead from teammate Rick Ritchie in the 1500-meter race against Oregon State’s Hailu Ebba—the race Pre “should have lost.” Courtesy of RICH CLARKSON

  Pre and Oregon assistant coach Bill Dellinger worked on those weaknesses. The training during that spring put Pre in the best shape of his life, and those who knocked Pre’s supposed lack of a finishing kick were somewhat subdued by a race many longtime Oregon fans think was his best ever.

  It came the week after the Washington State dual meet, in which Pre set an American 5000-meter record in 13:29.6. His fans were still buzzing about that one as they filled the stands at Hayward Field for the meet against Oregon State. The team race was predicted to be a close one, and instrumental for the respective teams were Prefontaine for Oregon and Hailu Ebba for Oregon State. It was unclear exactly which events the two would be competing in. Pre in the 1500 and Ebba in the 800 perhaps.

  But at the line for the start of the 1500 were both Pre and Hailu. The anticipation was intense as the fans got to their feet for the gun.

  Here was Pre, the immovable object, against the faster Ebba, the irresistible force. Oregon’s Rick Ritchie led through the first lap before Pre took off, with Ebba close behind. Through the next two laps, the graceful Ethiopian tracked him, and Pre continued to pour on the pace. “That was a great race,” recalls a teammate, “because it was a race Pre should have lost.”

  On the backstretch, Ebba tried to go by, and Prefontaine dug deeper. The stands were in turmoil, as Pre’s people hysterically urged him on. Around the last bend, Ebba made another bid, and Pre took him out into lane three to keep him from going by. Up the homestretch Ebba broke, and Pre had the race in a personal record 3:39.8. It was a great race, the quintessential Prefontaine race.

  Still the Best

  The goal of beating Prefontaine was a high one, not one that most contemporaries could undertake with a realistic chance of success, given Pre’s consistency and mental toughness. One runner who had the tools was Penn State’s Greg Fredericks, and he felt a special motivation to beat Prefontaine, preferably in Eugene.

  “I’d kinda gotten a bad taste in the NCAA the year before, when it was at Washington,” he says. “I knew at the time that I had a fatigue fracture and hadn’t been training well. [Fredericks took second.] Anyway, Pre’s whole thing after that meet was, well, there really wasn’t anybody in the race; he had trained hard all week, and he had gone out and jogged through it.

  “So I was really gung-ho the whole next year, 1972, trying to get into good enough shape to say, ‘I’m going to stick with the guy and possibly beat him in the end.’”

  1972 NCAA Championships, Eugene, Oregon: Once again, Pre beat Greg Fredericks of Penn State in the 5000 for his third consecutive championship. DON CHADEZ

  “So, it was in Eugene, Pre had won, the fans were going crazy as usual, and he came over to me and asked me to take a jog lap with him. He said it was a heckuva race, despite the fact that I’d lost. This was a different side of Pre from what I had known before.” —Greg Fredericks DON CHADEZ

  All races were in meters at the 1972 NCAA Championships because of the Olympic year. As a result, the three-mile was changed to the 5000 meters. The race was fast from the start as Pre took the lead after the half-mile and clicked off 4:21.8 and 4:25.6 mile splits. He and Fredericks were 30 yards ahead of the field and pulling away. Pre pushed and came up with a third mile in 4:16.9, which finally opened a 15-yard gap on Fredericks.

  “The difference at the end was just a couple of seconds worth,” Fredericks muses. “I think I had a mental lapse with a half-mile to go. He got out on me and you get to a point where you notice, all of a sudden, that he’s gotten away, and you have a complete letdown.”

  Pre broke the tape in 13:31.4 for his third consecutive NCAA title in the same event. With the end of the college track season, Pre could now focus entirely on winning an Olympic medal.

  With two laps to go, Pre and Young have the race to themselves. With just over a lap to go, Pre took off on his way to an American record. DON CHADEZ

  4

  The Olympics

  “At some time on Thursday, July 6, it began to take shape as America’s greatest distance race of all time.” So wrote Cordner Nelson, co-founder of Track & Field News, of the feeling that pervaded Eugene before the finals of the 5000 meters in the 1972 U. S. Olympic Trials. The race had all of the elements: Pre in front of his home crowd; George Young, former world-record holder in the two-mile, opting to test Pre for the first time; and the presence of some fine distance men, including Tracy Smith, Gerry Lindgren, and Greg Fredericks.

  The match between the 34-year-old Young and the 21-year-old Prefontaine caused much excitement in particular.

  “There was some sort of an effort on the part of the media to build up a ‘grudge’ race between the two of us,” Young recalls. “It never developed because of the mutual respect we had for each other.”

  Nevertheless, there was the feeling that if Pre was going to suffer his first defeat at his distance in Eugene, George Young would be the man to do it—he had experience, speed, and extraordinary toughness. Pre-like toughness.

  On Sunday, July 9, 12 men toed the line for the start. The weather was warm but not stifling. Gerry Lindgren led past the 880-yard mark in 2:09.6, before drifting back through the pack. Pre took over and averaged around 66 seconds for a quarter-mile lap through 1½ miles. Then Pre ran laps of 64.7 and 65.1, stringing out the pack. Only Young moved with him quickly and was close with 3½ laps to go. Nelson calls the race:

  “Now Pre began the task of breaking Young, one of the gutsiest runners in track history. Pre ran a lap in 63.4, which dropped Hilton 25 yards behind, but the veteran Y
oung held on grimly. With the crowd roaring, Prefontaine began a remarkable drive. A lap in 61.5 weakened Young and left Hilton 75 yards back, but Pre was only beginning. He increased the pace and opened an eight-yard lead with a lap to go. Young had to surrender, and Pre completed the lap in 58.7. With Young beaten, Pre slowed in the homestretch. Then he thought better of it and picked up for a respectable finish in 13:22.8, a time bettered only by Clarke (twice) and Dave Bedford’s 13:22.2.”

  Marty Liquori was there at the finish. “The thing I remember about it was that coming off the last turn, Pre was completely dead—just wobbling up the straightaway. He hit the inside rail and almost stumbled, and the fans were loving it, because he was completely spent when he hit the line.”

  For Bill Dellinger, the memory is of the crowd when Pre made his break from Young. “I remember standing in the middle of the field and yelling at Pre as loud as I could and not being able to hear my own voice. It had become a deafening noise so that you couldn’t even hear yourself.”

  Later, as Pre signed autographs for the multitudes, he explained to Blaine Newnham what it meant to run in front of his people.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, I love every one of them. I’ve thought about the Olympic Games every day of my life since 1968, but there is a breaking point in each race when you wonder if all the sacrifice is really worth it. You think ‘why should I do this? I don’t have to run this hard.’ But that’s when I think about them. They keep me going.”