Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  It would be a year before they could marry. That summer Bill moved to Med-ford, reported to Medford High, taught history, and, at age twenty-four, head-coached his first season of varsity football.

  The departing coach, Darwin “Brute” Burgher, had hardly been forced out. A gentle man, his nickname pure irony, he’d gone 36-5-3 in five seasons and won the 1933 state championship. Burgher would build a dynasty of his own at Boise High in his native Idaho. Bowerman learned that the best Medford players had graduated and those remaining were far from massive. He talked with assistant coach Ed Kirtley—eleven years his senior. They decided to return the offense to Prink Callison’s single wing, which Bill knew well, in the hope of opening up the passing game.

  Bill rented a house with friends Russ Acheson and Otto Frohnmayer, then a young attorney. “We had a bachelor threesome,” Frohnmayer would say, “Bill, Russ, and I, and that’s where I learned to drink Scotch whiskey. Russ was a coach too, came from Bend. Bill was always our practical joker. He’d look at any ordinary slimy thing and think how to get it under your pillow.”

  The 1935 Black Tornado team, as Medford became known, (they were the Tigers when Bill was in school) was often outweighed by fifteen pounds per man. But what they gave away in heft, they took back with a rapidly converging defense, allowing only 20 points all season while scoring 190. Bowerman’s diagnostic gifts were paramount, enabling him to spot opponents’ flaws and teach his players to exploit them. Medford was undefeated at 7-0-l, the only blemish a scoreless tie against the alumni.

  After the season, Hedrick had him in to talk. “We’ve got to have a good football team if we want to win a goddamn school-funding election,” Hedrick said. “And you did that, and I’m proud and I’m grateful. Now it’s high time Medford had a goddamn track around the goddamn football field.” He gave Bill a list of building contractors the schools used. Bill thanked him, tucked it in his briefcase, and said he’d be back after his wedding.

  Bill and Barbara married on June 22, 1936, in the wedding chapel at Forest Lawn in Pasadena. Bill’s white suit was tailored by the Portland shop that made his ROTC uniforms. Barbara carried Cecil Turner pink roses from her family’s gardens, cuttings of which she would plant in the dooryard of her new home. Her train was three times the length of her dress, and for the photographs she had to stand on a platform to let it fall properly. In one picture, Barbara’s expression is both idolatrous and relieved; Bill’s is calmly, not to say smugly, triumphant. But to gaze into Barbara’s eyes, Bill had to be posed on a high box. He seems to be testing a rocket pack, hovering four feet above her billowing train, an image of literal, bounding joy.

  CHAPTER 7

  Medford

  AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FIVE, BOWERMAN HAD UNIFIED THE TWO GREAT PROJECTS of his life, his work and his love. He was full of plans, animated by the freedom to coach as he knew best. Financial survival had given way to professional ambition: He wanted to add a track program and begin to impart Bill Hayward’s bottled-up knowledge.

  After a month’s honeymoon at a borrowed house in California’s San Gabriel Mountains (where Bill studied nearby tracks), the newlyweds drove slowly up the east side of the Sierra. Upon reaching Medford, they unloaded their wedding presents at a little rental house near the school and opened a bill for $125 for life insurance. “How do we pay this?” Barbara gasped. “Why,” Bill said, “we go to the bank and borrow enough to tide us over.”

  Barbara was horrified: “We never borrowed in my family.” So she took over the budget for the rest of their lives, monitoring every penny with unexpected zeal. “He thought I was spoiled, and always had everything,” she would say, her tone allowing for some truth in that, “but a lot were hand-me-down clothes.”

  Bowerman earned a princely $125 per month from Medford High, on which they lived comfortably. They even saved a little—although they sometimes differed on exactly what they were saving for. Bill once spent the fund intended for the births of their sons on a movie camera and projector. “A son is just a son,” he would say, “but a camera can teach someone to high-jump.”

  They spent their honeymoon summer planning how to lay out the running track. Bowerman organized the whole facility down to the landscaping. Then it was right into coaching football, scouting, and managing assistants. In his first two years, he also taught history and coached basketball—a sport he disliked, Barbara would say, “because you couldn’t control it out there.”

  Bowerman’s subsequent football seasons revealed him to be as humane as Doc Spears was bloodthirsty. This was not lost on a young man—Robert Warren Newland—who would benefit from and complement Bowerman’s gifts perhaps more than anyone else. Bob Newland, said by Hedrick to be the most versatile athlete to come out of Medford High, would follow Bill as Medford track coach, direct three US Olympic Trials, and be the 1976 and 1980 US Olympic track and field team manager. In 1936, Newland was a freshman quarterback and high jumper—and all eyes.

  “In practice, a lot of coaches like to hear the bodies collide,” Newland would remember. “Not Bill. He taught us how to hit, but we really only did it in the games. That way we kept all those fine athletes who like to play football but hate getting beaten up every day.”

  Nor did Bill call the plays from the sideline. “That was the quarterback’s job,” Newland would say. “He always encouraged us to think and react on our own. But man, there was an aura of dead certainty when we talked about game plans. He was such a student of the sport that we were absolutely convinced anything he suggested would go all the way.” The Medford practices, in the golden light of Newland’s memory, were almost seminars, with players putting forward ideas and Bowerman judging their soundness.

  In later years, watching Bowerman watch a football game from the sideline was to know what it had been like in those teaching huddles. He’d observe in silence for a time, then direct your attention to how a guard, say, was lining up slightly differently before different plays, telegraphing whether he would charge ahead to block or pull back to protect the quarterback with subtle shifts in his balance, nothing obvious until you knew what you were seeing.

  Then Bill would bet you quarters on whether a play would be a pass or a run, to be divined from the posture of the poor guard. Then (having taken all your quarters) he’d watch to see whether any opposing players were able to read these blaring signals as well and, if so, would pronounce them “well coached.” Finally, he’d list five things the guard could do to falsely telegraph one play and get the better-coached defenders out of position to defend another, turning the exploited into the exploiters.

  “Football players,” you’d say, “obviously can’t afford to be dumb.”

  “But they are,” he’d say. “A lot are. They don’t realize what their own eyes are telling them.” At such times, he seemed to brim with a cunning spirit—not fiendish, not driven, just the natural habit of a man who couldn’t look at an angleworm on a wet lawn without thinking how to get it in your mouth.

  Thus his high school football teaching stressed clear explanations and the exploration of possibilities. This led to Bill and Barbara’s often being awakened at 4 a.m. by gravel striking their screen door—tossed by assistant Ed Kirtley, who’d been seized with an idea for a new play. (“And in the morning,” Barbara would recall, “on the kitchen floor, there would be all the marks, lines, abscissas from this act of creation.”)

  In the nine seasons Bowerman coached Medford football (six before the war and three after), his teams would win fifty-nine games, lose thirteen, and tie eight. Every year he forged fresh unity. When the Black Tornado traveled to big games, Bowerman took Medford water along so the team wouldn’t have to drink anyone else’s impurities. It was the night before such a crucial game, Bob Newland would remember, that Bowerman imposed an 11 p.m. curfew. But starting quarterback Newland happened to know a lovely young lady in that city and lingered so long with her that he had to sneak back into the hotel.

  As Newland would tell the story, “I got
into the elevator okay, and when the door at our floor opened, I was sure Bill or Ed Kirtley would be there, but the coast was clear. I tiptoed down the hall, eased open the door to my room, and got inside. Sighing with relief, I stripped off my clothes in the dark and lay down on the bed—right on top of Bill Bowerman, who’d been waiting there all the time.” Curfew not being a hanging offense, Newland was allowed to play, and Medford beat Coquille 6-0.

  Barbara didn’t bemoan the hours sports took Bill away, because Medford turned out to have a bracing cultural life. For one thing, Bowerman’s mule skinner of a boss, Ercel Hedrick, was married to a terrific writer. “I dearly loved Helen Hedrick,” Barbara would reminisce. “They lived a block away with four kids. I was awed by them both. She wrote stories about the West for The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. She wrote right there among the clotheslines, laundry, dogs, cats. She was the most intriguing person I’d ever known. When Marian Anderson came to sing, no Medford hotel would house her, so Helen Hedrick took her in.”

  In rapid succession, Bill and Barbara had drawn to them almost a salon of kindred spirits. Two houses away were the Frohnmayers—Bill’s bachelor housemate of the past year, Otto, and his wife, MarAbel—who had been married within two weeks of Bill and Barbara. “I don’t think a person has more than half a dozen close friends,” Bowerman would say in his eighties, “and Otto is one of mine. We’ve been through so much that I call him once a month just to bullshit and run things past him. Otto is meticulous about the rules of the game.”

  Born in 1905 in southern Germany, Otto was six months old when his parents brought him to a German colony in Portland. According to Otto’s son David, “My grandparents watched the rise of Bismarck and didn’t want their sons being cannon fodder for Prussian militarism. Dad did smelt fishing to earn his tuition and worked at the Eugene Hotel to put himself through college and law school.”

  Otto Frohnmayer watched Bowerman with fascination. “Once he sets out to do something, he sees it through,” Frohnmayer would say, so when Bill lost a game, “his mind would be on what went wrong.” Otto was also moved by Bowerman’s humaneness: “Bill never played a man who was not in top physical shape. The minute he sensed a man was injured, the man came out. I’ve seen him lose track meets because he didn’t think that one of his runners was in the right physical or mental shape to double back.”

  Admiration ran both ways. “Otto Frohnmayer,” Bowerman would observe, “established himself as the wisest counsel in Medford. I always ran my decisions by him.” One had been the question of medicine. “He should have been a doctor,” Frohnmayer would declare. “I think if it hadn’t been for the fact that Barbara was a Christian Scientist, he might have done it. And he would have been a tremendous doctor. He’d have been one who studied diseases and what causes them and what’s the cure for them because that’s exactly what he’s done in all the other things that he’s been into.”

  It doesn’t seem far-fetched to see, in Bowerman’s eighteen-hour days of coaching and teaching, the sleep-deprived routine of the medical student he might have been at the time. His instincts, always, were to ameliorate. Otto would tell the story of a steep hike into the Seven Lakes area, a trek he wasn’t in shape for: “I was really tired, and then we all drank some particular liquor, I can’t remember what it was. I went to sleep, and when I awoke I got the shakes.” When it got worse, he mentioned it to Bowerman, who diagnosed dehydration. “So he got me a lot of water, and the second night I had a perfect sleep. He was the kind of guy who knew what to do for you. Bill wouldn’t want it to look like he had any real feelings, but he was very deep in lots of ways, very thoughtful.”

  Dave Frohnmayer found his father and Bowerman an unlikely pair: “Bill the raconteur, the athlete, the ecumenical man, interested in music, medicine, science. Dad the complete lawyer, but not an athlete, even though he was six foot three and had great physical strength. He’d always had to work, not do sports. Bill introduced him to the outdoors, to trout fishing. And the musical side of the family was definitely my mom’s.”

  Where the two seemed to match up was in their senses of humor. MarAbel Frohnmayer would remember bridge games in the early years when “these two miserable husbands would pass the cards under the table.” The men would tuck the cards in their socks. “We had a system,” Otto would confess. “I would send him three cards of one suit and he would send me three cards of another. The three-cards-in-the-shoe pass!”

  Son David treasured other memories. “Dad had that great, southern German sense of humor—earthy isn’t a strong enough word—and Bill and he egged each other on.”

  It is delicate work to ease Bowerman’s language onto the page. Most allusions deserve to remain with the cows and the outhouses. But others are literature, such as when he observed with satisfaction to the Oregon Club that “some women are born great, some attain greatness, and others have greatness thrust into them.” He loved multi-entendre, mega-entendre. In team meetings, he liked to use a lurid opening (“I am not a virgin . . . ”), a pregnant pause, and an anticlimactic finish once he had your attention (“. . . at making mistakes. But in this case, Mr. San Romani, I bow to your overwhelming superiority.”).

  In any case, Bowerman practiced an iron double standard, never once swearing in front of Barbara when they were alone. His profanity didn’t arise out of frustration. It was expressive art. It was poetry. One of Dave Frohnmayer’s early memories is of listening, “with hope in my greedy heart,” to his father and Bill on the phone. “Mother had instituted a fine for swearing, so Dad said he’d give us five cents per cuss word when he slipped up. So we couldn’t wait for Bill to call. It was worth forty-five cents!”

  In the spring of 1937, Medford High fielded a track and field team for the first time in fifteen years. Bowerman told boosters that he believed track to be “a developer of football and basketball stamina and speed,” but of course he loved it for its own sake. In search of jumpers or sprinters, he gave tests to PE classes and junior high schools and soon had a winning squad. When a junior high principal didn’t feel PE and sports was top priority, Bill told Hedrick, “This violates your golden rule on how never to lose a school bond levy.” The man got the message.

  In his eight track seasons at Medford, Bowerman would win three state championships and eight Hayward Relays team titles. But track is a sport—and a story—of individuals.

  In 1938, Bill heard that up little Wagner Creek, living with his grandparents, was “an orphan so hungry he ran down a jackrabbit to see if he was fat enough to eat.” Bowerman drove up and talked the grandparents into letting Ray Johnson enroll at Medford. “Okay,” they said, “but he can’t drive our car any farther than Talent.”

  So Johnson began getting up at four in the morning, taking their car to tiny Talent and hitching a ride on to Medford before school. He walked and jogged the whole twelve miles many times. Johnson was indeed fast in the short sprints, but—it taking one to know one—Bowerman made him a quarter-miler. Johnson responded with times of 50.8 seconds as a sophomore, 49.5 as a junior, and 47.8 as a senior in 1941. That would be the fastest high school 440 run in the United States during the decade of the 1940s. Johnson also starred on the football team in 1938 and ’39, but Bill kicked him off during his senior year so he wouldn’t hurt himself and lose a sure track scholarship. Johnson ran well at the University of Southern California and said of Bowerman in 1985, “I respect and love that man. You may quote me.”

  Another boy weathered a slightly different experience with Bowerman—one that may have taught Bill something, too. Al Gould, who would go on to a sports writing career, moved up from Ashland after eighth grade and, as he remembered it later, regarded Medford as “comparable only to an unescorted visit to hell.” Meeting Bob Newland eased the transition. “He and I spent much time together, including mowing the lawn of one William J. Bowerman, for which we split a small fee.”

  Bob Newland’s father, Bill Newland, was brewmaster at the local brewery and an ingenious problem
solver. He had built two hurdles in the Newlands’ backyard. Gould described them as being “on rockers, with webbing across the top, as opposed to the unforgiving wood of hurdles of that day.” Gould and Bob Newland developed credible form by practicing over them. “But when we got to high school, Bowerman was our PE instructor. In the gym he placed two of the monstrous standard hurdles and demonstrated the correct form. Trust me, you don’t want to drop your trailing leg too soon, not if you want to dance at the prom that evening.”

  In the act of proving to Bowerman that he could hurdle, Gould tore open his trailing knee. “I stopped the tiny flow of blood and retired to the dressing room. Bill came by, looked at the knee, patted me on the shoulder, and said, ‘We’ll have to work on that form a little.’ I grunted and never approached a hurdle again in anger or in peace.”

  Gould wanted to escape to baseball, but Medford had no team. As the sports editor of the Medford Hi-Times he campaigned for the return of baseball to the school. Bowerman, who wanted no siphoning of talent in the spring, was opposed. Gould enlisted the aid of the sports editor of the Mail Tribune (the paper that had essentially driven Lizzie and Dan Bowerman’s paper bankrupt), whose father had played two seasons for the Philadelphia Phillies. Finally Bowerman gave in and baseball returned in the spring of 1940. Thirty years later, Bowerman would recognize Al Gould in a hotel and call out, “There’s the guy who tried to scuttle my track program at Medford High!”

  With all of Bill’s coaching and teaching, Barbara got to see more of her man in the winter than any other time of year—after football, before track. It was then that they found their way back to their special place. The Bowermans would go up to Crater Lake with a carload of food and, thanks to a friend who was a ranger there, have the whole park to themselves. “We stayed at Annie Springs,” Barbara would recall, “and the ski from the lake rim to Annie Springs was six miles of powder. That was how Bill first got into mountain skiing.”