Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Read online

  Bill does a victory lap with the team after the 1967 PAC-8 Championships in Eugene. Photo by ROGER JENSEN

  To my three great mentors,

  Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman,

  Sports Illustrated managing editor Gilbert Rogin,

  and Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne,

  whose iron standards infuse these pages

  CONTENTS

  Bill sits in the President’s Box, Hayward Field’s east stands, where he often called team meetings. Photo by BRIAN LANKER

  Acknowledgments

  Men of Oregon

  1. That Wild Yearning

  2. Lizzie and the Governor

  3. Wild Bill Meets a Mule Skinner

  4. Barbara

  5. The University of Oregon

  6. Bill Hayward

  7. Medford

  8. The Tenth Mountain Division

  9. First Principles

  10. A Friend, a Son, a Community

  11. A Dynasty Begins

  PHOTO INSERT I

  12. Rome

  13. Innovation

  14. The 1962 Season

  15. The A AU Dictatorship

  16. Jogging

  17. The Birth of BRS

  18. Tokyo

  19. A Curious Mind

  20. Rites of Passage

  21. Lessons Inserted

  22. Mexico City

  23. Enter, Prefontaine

  PHOTO INSERT II

  24. BRS Becomes Nike

  25. Munich

  26. Transit and Sorrow

  27. Legacy

  28. Rajneeshpuram

  29. Builderman

  30. Immortal Messages

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  ONE OF BILL BOWERMAN’S STERNEST COMMANDMENTS WAS TO GIVE CREDIT where credit is due. If I obeyed completely, this note would take up half the book because writing it required the help of hundreds—a magnificent, trusting relay team—to carry this endeavor to conclusion. The following few are those without whom the book simply would have been impossible:

  Bill Landers, who first gained Bill Bowerman’s permission to proceed on his biography and taped days of memories from Bill and his family, friends, enemies, colleagues, and athletes. Landers’s knowledge of Bowerman’s life and character guided each chapter from an unwieldy mess to a clear stage on an epic journey.

  Heidi Rodale, who was drawn into the Bowerman story when her runner son Alex was inspired by Steve Prefontaine—an abiding personal connection that enabled her to be the best publisher possible.

  The Bowerman family. Bill’s sons Jon, Jay, and Tom patiently answered every question with well-supported history, documents, and lengthy personal accounts. Barbara Bowerman bravely went back through her seventy years with Bill with the zeal of a detective-psychologist. I will always recall her at age ninety, ordering me to stay behind the wheel while she jumped out to swing open every cattle gate crossing on the ranch roads around Fossil, Oregon.

  Jeff Johnson, who gave Nike its name. Jeff willed himself back from a stroke to go over every page for accuracy. “Reading this book,” he reports, “saved my life.” He returned the favor with extraordinary insights into Nike’s formation and growth.

  Contract editor Roberta Conlan, who first met Bill Bowerman in 1968. Bobbie applied her gifted editorial mind with professional rigor, doggedly overseeing my transit from good intentions to credible, weight-bearing sentences.

  James Fox, the spirited head of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon’s Knight Library, and his astute team of curators: Linda Long, Heather Briston, Leslie Larson, Bruce Tabb, Normandy Helmer, Marilyn Reaves, and Melissa Anderson. All were a striking blend of energy and mindfulness as they helped me and assistant Connie Johnston review the huge volume of papers Bowerman assigned to the Library. Among the 35 boxes in the collection, many books and dissertations remain to be written about Bill Bowerman. James Fox and company stand ready to point the way for future authors.

  Faithful friends Jim and Mary Jaqua, Ron and Mary Beth Seiple, Kip Leonard and Jody Miller, Josh and Nancy Reckord. Their leaping into every breech kept the project rolling through torrential rains and mounting, unplanned years.

  Finally, my apologies to dozens of Men of Oregon (Jim Grelle, Dave Steen, Jere Van Dyk, Vic Reeve, Archie San Romani, and Dick Miller spring to mind.) for having to dilute the humor, pace, and detail of their stories by mashing them into the confines of these few pages.

  —Kenny Moore

  November 15, 2005

  INTRODUCTION

  Men of Oregon

  “A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject, and then ourselves.”

  —ADAM GOPNIK

  IN THE SPRING OF 1964, BILL BOWERMAN GAVE ME HIS SUBJECT AND STOOD back to see if I deserved it. Bowerman, then fifty-three, had coached six sub-four-minute milers at the University of Oregon and had won the 1962 NCAA Track and Field championship on the very field where he now stood, signaling me over. I was twenty, a sophomore two-miler, just finishing my first training run after being out with the flu. He put two fingers to my neck, taking my pulse from my carotid artery.

  “Easy day?” he asked.

  “Easy day. Absolutely.”

  “Twelve miles?” As if he were my physician, he tilted my head back so he could look me in the eye. He was six feet two and over 200 pounds, with a powerful upper body.

  “An easy twelve,” I said.

  We had vexed each other that year. I had never won a race in high school, had never broken 9:15 for two miles, but was determined to run the 100 miles a week his good friend Arthur Lydiard assigned his New Zealand Olympic champions.

  “Are you in this simply to do mindless labor,” he said, “or do you want to improve?”

  “To improve.”

  “You can’t improve if you’re always sick or injured.”

  “I know, but Bill, it was an easy twel . . . ”

  He closed great, calloused hands around my throat. He did not lift me off the ground. He did relieve my feet of much of their burden. He brought my forehead to his. “I’m going to ask you to take part in an experiment,” he said with menacing calm. People five yards away thought we were sharing a tidbit of gossip. “For three weeks, you are not going to run a yard except in my sight. You will do a three-mile jog here every morning, and our regular afternoon workouts. If I or any of my spies sees you trotting another step, you will never run for the University of Oregon again.”

  “Bill . . . ”

  “Are we agreed?”

  “Bill . . .”

  “Agreed?”

  As I was feeling faint, I submitted.

  Some of my afternoons remained exactly the same. I was allowed our regular hard-day sessions of four three-quarter-mile repetitions at a 67-second-per-lap pace, then a five-mile run through the hills and rhododendrons of nearby Hendricks Park and four fast 110-yard strides before showering.

  It was the easy days that were humiliating, reporting to Bowerman morning and evening on the sawdust trail inside the Hayward Field track, having him count my laps, barely feeling warmed up before he called, “Three miles. In. In.”

  I did not suffer this gladly. I was tempted to do secret, defiant runs, but he had enlisted the rest of the team and half the town; every friend was a possible traitor. And the potential cost was too great. No one who knew Bill Bowerman doubted he would back up his ultimatum. No one who knew me doubted that I desperately wanted to be an Oregon runner.

  The mornings were the worst, running through fog that made our hallowed old field pass in and out of time. I saw the great meets of the past few years. Every time I trotted the north turn, I pa
ssed the low chain-link fence where I’d stood as a sixth-grader and watched Oregon’s first sub-4:00 man, Jim Bailey, hurtle by, his spikes making a wonderful gnashing sound on the moist cinders, his expression inward, controlled, alien to the wondering boy. That was where my hunger began. From then on I wanted to run farther, to train more, to consume myself in transforming work, and so, like Bailey, to win.

  I felt Bowerman’s eyes. I should have avoided this ignominy somehow. I was hardly new to his ways. At North Eugene High, I’d been coached by Bob Newland, who had high-jumped and coached with him. Had it not been for Newland, I doubt that I would have survived to have any confrontations with Bowerman. I never won because I was late in maturing, not breaking five minutes for the mile until my junior year, and because teammates Harlan Andrews and Dave Deubner won successive state 880 and mile championships. Newland gently led me to see the merit of honest effort, of a race being a way to measure my hard-earned progress apart from winning, and so I had endured.

  I also knew Bowerman was adamant about enforcing his principles because I was friends with his middle son, Jay. Bill Bowerman knew me as a skinny kid who helped Jay chop Christmas trees from their woods long before I improved enough to get his attention as a runner. That time came in 1962, when I finished fourth in the state meet’s mile in 4:23.2, behind Deubner, who ran 4:11 that year, the best high school time in the nation. Bowerman told Dave, a brain, to go to Stanford because it’d be better preparation for medical school later. He invited me to walk on the team at Oregon and got me a terrifying weekend job in a plywood mill to pay for my dorm and fees.

  My early experience with him actually led some on the team to hope I’d be some kind of liaison to Bowerman, because everyone found him inscrutable. No such luck. Even when he went out of his way to be welcoming, as at the annual team picnic at his house in September, it wasn’t safe to relax.

  For freshman runners new to the team, the intimidation started with his hillside view, which spread to the snowy Cascades. Below, the McKenzie River carried fishermen in double-ended boats through spangled light. Beyond lay a soft-edged shire, stretching past farms to the mill town of Springfield and the university in Eugene. We were greeted by the platinum-haired, unexpectedly beautiful Barbara Bowerman, who guided us to tubs of corn, roasts of beef, wheels of pie. The sight closed our throats because standing behind them, magnanimously pouring cider, was our new coach.

  Bowerman, inhaling the land, seemed in leathery profile to have been through some mythic struggle. He spit when someone called him coach because the football coach he most hated had demanded it. “Just call me Bill,” he said, but few would, or could, at first.

  We gathered in the living room. The house had no trophies, simply varnished fir beams, high windows, and a tall rock fireplace Bowerman had built himself. There was a woodstove in the kitchen, beside Barbara’s spinning wheel, and a wire cage under the deck where Jay kept rattlesnakes for milking.

  Bowerman stood. The river and mountain, behind him now, were filtered through Barbara’s bonsai and sprays of orchids. This accorded with why we were here. We were to be cultivated, refined. Bowerman was about to ask us to put aside the things of a child. Not by accident did he begin, “Men of Oregon...

  “Take a primitive organism,” he continued, his voice oil and sweet reason, “any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That’s all training is. Stress. Recover. Improve. You’d think any damn fool could do it, even. . .”

  He turned, squinted, went far away somewhere and turned back. “But you don’t. You work too hard and rest too little and get hurt. You yield to the temptations of a liberal education and burn your candle at both ends and get mono. Every angelic, lying face I see here is poised to screw up, to overtrain, to fall in love, to flunk out, to play the guitar until three in the morning in the Pioneer Cemetery. . .”

  There were hoots. Senior Archie San Romani reddened.

  “We have no hard and fast training rules,” Bowerman went on. “The vicissitudes of life usually teach an intelligent person what he can handle. It does help to have someone wise in the ways of candles to steady you as you grope toward the light. That would be me.

  “But I regret to inform you,” he added, his tone not the least regretful, “you cannot just tell somebody what’s good for him. He won’t listen. He will not listen. First . . . first you have to get his attention.”

  A few upperclassmen nodded. Bowerman didn’t have a central organizing principle. He had this, a central organizing parable.

  “Farmer can’t get his mule to plow,” he said. “Can’t even get him to eat or drink. Finally calls in a mule skinner. Guy comes out, doesn’t even look at the mule. Goes in the barn, gets a two-by-four and hits the mule as hard as he can between the ears. Mule goes to his knees. Mule skinner hits him again, between the eyes.

  “Farmer drags him off. ‘That’s supposed to get him to plow? That’s supposed to get him to drink?’

  “‘I can see you don’t know a damn thing about mules,’ says the skinner. ‘First you have to get their attention.’”

  In the hush that followed, Bowerman’s grin was not far from fiendish. This was his allegory, his rationale, his fair warning. He was our mule skinner, and all he would do to us—including booting us from the team to make a point—constituted the two-by-four he would use to crack open our mulish skulls, so that lessons might be inserted.

  At the time, of course, I didn’t know the details. Leaving that first meeting, I felt only baffled disquiet. Even men who had trained under him for years were edgy. “Bowerman,” said Keith Forman, a 3:58.3 miler and a keen psych major, “is ruled by a need to unsettle, to disturb. The man lives to get to you.”

  And so we freshmen found. That first fall, Bowerman’s urges seemed to war with each other. His own competitiveness was barely containable, but anyone racing in cross-country practice found himself working out alone. He affected countrified ways (“You run like a turkey in a plowed field.”) but just as often quoted scripture, the classics, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. He was a difficult, dignified professor of kinesiology but cracked up at jokes that began “Two guys were peeing off a bridge . . . ” He raised funds for the Bach Festival, but when a trucker kept flattening his mailbox, he booby-trapped it to puncture the guy’s tires. For twenty-five years, Oregon freshmen asked each other the same thing: Was Bowerman here to teach us to overcome a cold, hard world? Or was he one of its coldest, hardest terrors?

  In theory, as a coach, he should have been as interested in motivating the lazy as in mellowing the mad, but he wasn’t. He regarded that most frustrating athlete, the gifted but casual, as beyond real help. He would juggle their roommates to give them an example of ambition but took no further steps to inspire. He never gave a pep talk. “I’m sorry I can’t make them switch brains,” he said. “But I can’t.”

  That left him free to be absorbed by the eager. He examined and reexamined what we ate. What we wore. What we did (and with whom we did it). He rethought our gifts, our goals, and the blind spots that kept us from reaching them. He took a personal interest not only in our roommates but also in our classes, our jobs, our diet, even our women. Most of us he pushed toward restraint. That would be hopeless with Dave Wilborn, so he pushed him toward marrying. Dave went from 4:20 in April to 3:56.2 in June.

  And yet, no matter how he permeated our lives, he always kept a kind of officer-and-troops distance, never trading intimacy for intimacy. The better you knew him, the less you could let down your guard. He confounded friend and foe alike because he was completely unreadable.

  Bowerman thought of himself as an educator. He scorned recruiting and almost never gave full scholarships. “Anyone can be taught,” he said, “those who don’t expect a handout best of all. I’d sure rather be teaching than blowing smoke up some spoiled brat’s ass.”

  He loved language a
nd loved it if you loved it, too. When he forced those easy days on me, I called him a tyrant and he would never let me forget that. Once when I was too weak to trim some ripple soles he’d glued to my shoes, he took the shears and felt my hands and called them “philosopher’s hands.” And later he came into the sauna and put a big claw on my tender thigh and grinned that fiendish grin and said, “Now, Kenny, this is a horny hand. Feel a truly horny hand.” I decline to call that “mentoring.”

  He didn’t believe that a paternal concern for our feelings was his job. Athletes who’d depended on father-figure high school coaches were always in for a shock. When we were new, he’d assign a track workout and time us civilly enough yet ignore us otherwise. Was our form correct? His only answer was to stonily lift his gaze to the swallows in their flight above Hayward Field.

  “He speaks to us as does God,” said my roommate, Bruce Mortenson. “Intermittently.”

  Disdainful of the leaden weight and nonexistent cushioning of running shoes in the 1950s, he had taken up cobbling and made us three-ounce spikes that lasted one race. We had no inkling that these were the beginnings of Nike’s vast success, but we knew we had better shoes than anyone else. When Bowerman satisfied his academic curiosity about whether middle-aged professors and townspeople might be trained to actually trot a few miles, we had no idea jogging was about to inspire a sea change in American habits and health. But we knew there was only one man who could make both the professors and the mill foremen get out and run. Bowerman held our town together.

  His training system rested on the deceptively simple truth that all runners are different. He might forget our names (he was famous for long and sometimes futile pauses when introducing even seniors at the Monday Oregon Club lunches), but he never forgot who strengthened more after intervals and who after long runs, nor whether we showed up fresh and ready for more work the next day or stiff and sour. In the 1950s he’d learned to tailor the nature and intensity of workouts—and especially recoveries—to individual needs and had been rewarded with Bailey’s 3:58.6 mile in 1956, the first sub-4:00 on US soil. A steady green line of national champions and Olympians followed, from Otis Davis, the 1960 Olympic 400-meter champion, through Bill Dellinger, the bronze medalist in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics 5000 meters, to Steve Prefontaine, holder of all seven American distance records, from 2000 to 10,000 meters, at the time of his death in 1975. In the sprints, jumps, and throws, Bowerman was just as good. He coached NCAA champions in fifteen of college track’s seventeen individual events.