Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  CHAPTER 9

  First Principles

  IN THE MONTHS SOON AFTER HIS RETURN, BILL SAVORED EVERY MOMENT OF peacetime normality. As town and school welcomed back their favorite educator, he was touched to find that the Medford High yearbook had dedicated its past issue to him, its editors writing that his addresses to teams and assemblies “always left us laughing” and praying for his safe return. That winter, he took over as head track coach, resuming the top football job the following year.

  One evening after Jon and Jay were in bed, Bill placed on the kitchen table a battered split of G. H. Mumm champagne and a German pistol. He had promised Bill Hayward a memento and had brought back this gun, but Hayward, realizing how special it was to Bill, had refused to accept it. The champagne was another souvenir, liberated from the wine cellar of an Italian castle. Contemplating it that night, Bill asked Barbara if she wanted to open it.

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t want to drink to something bad that’s over,” said Bill. “I’ve done that enough. I’d rather drink to something good.”

  They put the bottle away, saving it for a special occasion. It would become a kind of metaphor for their lives. “We had, to be sure, numerous special occasions, but none seemed so at the time,” Barbara would say more than a half century later. “It would remain in our closet through the years, the unopened bottle and the gun that Bill Hayward didn’t take.” The best was always yet to come.

  One of the good things that came relatively soon—but not without a certain Bowermanesque flourish—was son Tom. One day in 1946, Bill, Barbara, Jon, and Jay were having a Sunday picnic on the Rogue River. “I was on a sandbar,” Barbara would recall, still shaky about it decades later, “and heard the screams of my child. I looked up and saw four-year-old Jay going past all alone in the canoe.”

  Other people heard the commotion and several dived into the river to swim after him. Then Bill, who’d been hiding in the bottom of the canoe, rose up and got his laugh. The very pregnant Barbara was “not amused.” She went into labor for a grueling day and a half to produce their third son and vowed never to go through it again.

  Bill’s heart-stopping practical jokes aside, Oregon’s rivers and lakes were a favorite venue for outings with the Bowermans’ much-loved neighbors, the Frohnmayers. David Frohnmayer, who was five when Bill came home, would remember “this tall, rangy guy hugging my dad and grabbing us all up and taking us everywhere, on Christmas tree hunts, fishing, everywhere outdoors.” For three glorious summers, the families would camp at Cultus Lake. There were two lakes, really—big Cultus and little Cultus—accessible only by way of a dusty road that went right through a creek. The cars were crawling with kids: four Frohnmayers, three Bowermans. “We camped on a sandy beach,” Dave Frohnmayer would say. “There were no cabins, no motors, just us and the lake and huge silence of the forest.”

  No motors, but they did have rowboats and Bill’s canoe. Otto Frohnmayer would recall one evening when the kids were out on the lake and the wind came up. “We were afraid, with no way to get out there. But Bowerman says, ‘Ah, they’ll take care of themselves.’”

  While the other grownups fretted, Bowerman blew a bugle to call the kids back. “But the wind was against us,” David Frohnmayer would recall, “so it was dark when we made it in.” Facing the glares of the adults, David showed he might have some future in advocacy. “I can only paddle so fast against the wind,” he said. “You just needed to be patient.”

  Bill and Barbara would be as proud of the Frohnmayer brood as they were of their own. Mira, the eldest, and Philip, the youngest, would become professional singers. The middle two—David and John—would follow their dad in earning law degrees and then work for two administrations in Washington, DC. David, who would write speeches for the Nixon administration, would prove an invaluable ally some years later when he served as Oregon Attorney General. John would become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the first Bush administration, a turbulent experience he would describe in his book Leaving Town Alive. The account would offer some insight into the Frohnmayer family ethic of remembering “who you are and what you represent,” an ethic that also requires, as he would write, “the internal gyroscope that ultimately forces you to say, ‘There are some things I will not do.’”

  Rich in stalwart friends at home, Bill was also fortunate in his professional friends. Bob Newland, one of his former students, would reappear to be his right-hand man in the collaborative world of Medford high school sports. After the war, Newland returned to take his bachelor’s (and later master’s) in education at Oregon, the first in his family to graduate from college. Hedrick hired him to teach and coach at Medford in 1947, and his blond crew cut and deceptively open face began showing up in team pictures beside Bowerman’s.

  From a longtime Medford family, Newland was steeped in Medford sports since fourth grade. Remembering how crucial an outlet it had been for his own athletic energies, he helped Bowerman introduce age-group track meets to the summer schedule. Saturday mornings, kids from eight to eighteen would vie in two-year age brackets for shiny blue, red, and white ribbons in the 100, 440, 880, mile, high and low hurdles, discus, shot put, long jump, and high jump. Bowerman, Newland, and assistant Tom Ragsdale ran the meets with the emphasis on fun and teaching. The most talented became future Black Tornado stars. The parents whose kids dragged them to rake the long-jump pit became lifelong supporters.

  Newland projected calm and sweet reason. He was a superb organizer with a mind for detail and dissecting a project into its logical steps. But what distinguished that project was his ability to find and put the right people into the places on the team or faculty or, later, Olympic Trials Organizing Committee that made it all hold together—and left those people feeling as if they’d had all the brilliant ideas.

  Underneath all that organization, Newland could be both corny and sharp. Behind his desk was a plaque with the Grantland Rice homily, “For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, He writes—not that you won or lost—But how you played the game.” Just below that was “Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first.”

  Bowerman and Newland would pack a lot into the brief time between Newland’s return to Medford and Bowerman’s moving on. Medford’s 1947 football team was struck with incessant injury, but remained undefeated until the playoffs, when it went down to Ashland, 27-19. In the spring of 1948, Bowerman coached the track team to his eighth Hayward Relays title, although not another state meet win.

  The two men overlapped at Medford for only one year because, up in Eugene, Bill Hayward was on the verge of retirement and who but Bowerman would be his replacement? Newland would take over as Medford head track coach and eventually he would make his way to Eugene as well, where he and Bowerman would quickly renew their collaboration.

  After more than four decades at Oregon, Bill Hayward was weary. Before the war, he had attracted a great sprinter, Mack Robinson (Jackie’s brother), who was second to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympic 200 meters, and two world record holders, George Varoff (indoor pole vault in 1937) and Les Steers (high jump in 1941). But the magnitude of World War II’s departure from Olympic ideals had depressed him. The 1940 Olympics, planned for Tokyo, had been cancelled, and in 1941 he told an interviewer he didn’t believe the Games would ever be resumed. “The Olympics take brotherhood among nations,” he said, “and we don’t have that now.” He began hiring assistants to spread his workload, but university officials made no move to suggest retirement, so he soldiered on, keeping his eye out for talent.

  One of the talents he found for Oregon in 1946 was a young 4:42-miler, Peter Mundle, who attended University High. At Oregon Mundle majored in math and, during his freshman year, was coached by Hayward. He dropped his best time by eighteen seconds, to 4:24. Hayward’s crucial lesson? “Pace yourself! He had me run 65-second 440s,” Mundle would say, “and if I didn’t hit between 64.9 to 65.1, it was ‘Do it again.’” The lesson took:
“From then on, I really had a sense of what different speeds felt like. People would say I was easy to run behind, because I never varied my pace.” Mundle would go on to run under Bowerman, an experience that would have lasting effects on both runner and coach.

  Bowerman, at about this time, began to get feelers from his alma mater about a job. In 1946, football coach Jim Aiken was let go amid scandal and the athletic department was restructured. Oregon’s first professional athletic director, Leo Harris, was hired in 1947. A 1961 profile in Old Oregon, the university alumni magazine, would call him “a person who stirs unwanted emotions in the mildest breast. His friends are ardent, his enemies passionate; his detractors are offensive, his supporters defensive. There are few non-partisans.”

  Harris, with the gravelly voice and haircut of a drill instructor, would be a huge force for good at Oregon. On his first visit to the campus he’d seen that the 20,000-seat Hayward Field had its limits as a football venue and that something bigger would have to be built. Over the next twenty years, he would campaign to make that happen. But first he wanted to find a head football coach of unquestioned integrity to replace Aiken. One suggested candidate was Bill Bowerman of Medford High.

  Harris checked Bowerman out, invited him to visit, and offered him the position, saying that he needed Bill’s reputation, his ethics, and his ability to connect with the faculty. Bowerman, who liked the blunt Harris immediately, said he was flattered and excused himself to think it over. He walked downstairs in Mac Court, took a seat on one of Bill Hayward’s training tables, and said he’d just been offered what he’d long wanted—a springboard to university coaching.

  His mentor told him, “Bill, college football coaches lead a miserable life.” With that, Bowerman’s direction was essentially sealed. He went back upstairs and declined. But he told Harris that if they ever needed a track coach, he was their man. Later he would explain his decision: “A lot of football players can’t stand being alone out there with no one to hide behind. And track men have a higher general level of intelligence than football players.” Of course there was more to it. Bowerman was rejecting our most military of sports. He wouldn’t reject the team concept, far from it—but his would be a team of irregulars.

  In 1947, Hayward finally formally retired. His assistant, John Warren, served for a year of transition, but Hayward insisted that Leo Harris offer the position to Bowerman. Harris did so, and Bowerman accepted. But Harris, who in every waking moment tried to fortify Duck football, added a condition: Would he also coach the freshmen? Bowerman agreed, the first of a career’s worth of little compromises with Leo Harris that would serve both men and their university well. “I would have done a lot more than that to take Hayward’s place at Oregon,” Bill would say.

  In September 1948, the Bowermans arrived in Eugene. They moved into Quonset-hut faculty housing across Agate Street from the track, met congenial professors, and felt instantly at home. Not long afterward, Bill Hayward died. “It was as if he’d taught until he was completely used up,” Pete Mundle would recall, “then said, ‘Good-bye, world’ and was gone.” In so doing, Hayward made sure that Bowerman would be free of his own long shadow.

  Before the war, that thoughtful teacher Lizzie Bowerman had sent a letter to Hayward. “I have asked my son which of his instructors he considered had done the most for him,” she wrote, “and without a moment’s hesitation he named you. I am sure there are many boys who feel the same as Bill does, and I hope they have told you so. You are a teacher who is a friend and who imparts a spiritual development and inspiration.”

  Bill had done as his mother had hoped. He’d told Hayward what he meant to him several times, in several contexts. So that week, as eulogy followed eulogy and masses of men that Hayward had escorted from boyhood returned to voice their gratitude, Bowerman was content that he had spoken while the man was alive to hear it.

  He took from his scrapbook a photograph of Hayward, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, leaning on a hurdle. He had it framed behind glass, to preserve what Hayward had written on it: “Live each day so you can look a man square in the eye and tell him to go to hell!! ‘Bill’ Hayward.” Then he hung it in a little alcove outside his office door, where he would see it at the beginning and end of the day. And where anyone waiting to speak with him might pause and reconsider.

  When Bowerman took over the Oregon track program, he had only two full scholarships to give each year. He divided them into quarters and eighths, pressed Leo Harris for more, and gradually reached eight or ten. But a track team can have as many as sixty men on it, so he needed to find ways for his athletes to support themselves.

  “One of Leo’s golden rules,” Bowerman would remember, “was No One Will Solicit for Individual Sports. And that was appropriate, a good policy. So I asked him before I went out to beg funds for the department whether I could solicit jobs for the track athletes. He said, Get all the jobs you want.”

  So in about 1952, Bowerman began a town-gown partnership that would become an Oregon sports tradition for the next twenty years. He talked Harold Jones, the owner of some half-dozen mills, into hiring Oregon athletes to work weekend shifts. Jones would supply about a hundred weekend jobs in his various mills and Bowerman would find athletes to work them. “That helped baseball, helped me, helped swimming,” Bowerman would say. “I was the straw boss. The guy slated for each job had to come to my office by Wednesday to check his name off.”

  The job roster—a sheet of yellow legal pad taped on the wall behind Bowerman’s desk—listed the name of the mill and the athlete’s shift assignment. “Day” ran from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., “Swing” from 4 p.m. to midnight, and “Graveyard” from midnight to 8 a.m. In those days, the mills ran almost nonstop, three shifts around the clock. In the early 1960s, the starting wage was $2.40 an hour. (Jones sold his operation to Georgia Pacific in 1965, but that would have no effect on Bowerman’s relations with the foremen who accepted athletes on the dryers, conveyors, and putty-patching lines.)

  The mills, which made interior plywood paneling, offered two shocks to the collegiate soul. One was how hard the work was. Deafening machines seized green, Douglas fir logs, blasted their bark off with jets of water, cut them into twenty-foot lengths, fitted them onto a huge lathe that “unpeeled” them into a river of veneer flowing away down a conveyor belt. Other blades chopped the wet veneer into four-by-eight-foot sheets that were dried in a block-long dryer that ran all day every day except one shift—Sunday graveyard—when some pitiful organism had to blast out the splinters and sawdust that had caked up the bottom and become a fire hazard. The cleaner had to lie on his back to drive a six-foot steel nozzle ahead, forcing the dust and debris in front of him out the far side. The steel rollers a foot above his nose were a steam-heated 300 degrees. Even with goggles and three bandannas around his face, the cleaner always went home with a neck full of splinters.

  The other shock was how hard the men were. Many had come west from Arkansas during the Depression. Some were fatherly, cheered us from our east stands during meets, and said that the mill was no life to aspire to and our education was the way out. And some were rabid white supremacists, so cynical they were toxic to stand within ten feet of.

  The bleakest conceivable introduction to the real world, the mill must have compromised the athletes’ training to a degree. Certainly most of Bill’s men, once bloodied by the mills, wanted no part of them. But the jobs offered much-needed assistance and, in return, taught a greater set of lessons. Among them were those of the marathon, of not giving up, of finding out what others could endure and then, once a little calloused in both mind and body, whether one could measure up.

  The mill jobs also taught stewardship. When Bowerman spoke of the mill, he made it clear that if anyone screwed up, he was screwing up for everyone—for the team, for the entire arrangement between university and mill owners. Anyone who was too sick to work had to get his own replacement. The shifts had to be covered. If the assignment was to be the night watchman on a hol
iday, when the conveyors were stopped and the mill empty, carrying a heavy, leather-covered clock (into which every hour the watchman stuck metal keys hanging at different places around the mill, so it would record on a paper strip inside that he’d made his rounds), that watchman did his duty until he was relieved.

  I was one of Bill’s athletes who drew that graveyard watchman job on Christmas Eve my senior year. I’d done a long run that day, and so had been tired to start the shift, but I’d made it through, and as soon as my relief came I could head for home. But no one came. Who my replacement was or what happened to him I have suppressed. I was alone with a multimillion-dollar mill spread over a dozen blocks hissing and rumbling in my incompetent care. I called every athlete I could think of who worked the mills. No luck. I called my house to say I wasn’t coming home Christmas morning. I did not call Bill Bowerman. I just kept doing my rounds, drinking coffee, trotting outside in the frost, doing wind sprints, slapping my face, imagining races to summon the emotion to keep going.

  My father showed up at noon with turkey and stuffing in tinfoil. He said I had to be making a killing on double overtime. I was beyond caring. At four in the afternoon, someone arrived for the swing shift and I went home. Double overtime was about $5 an hour, so on my sixteen-hour Christmas I made $80 before taxes. This was when tuition was $110 a quarter and room and board in the dorms $235.

  Even as he looked for ways to help his athletes pay for college—and learn the tough lessons of hard work and responsibility in the process—Bowerman was furthering his own education. As homage to the breadth of Bill Hayward’s knowledge, he set out to learn one discipline he hadn’t mastered, distance running. And Pete Mundle would be his guinea pig. In truth, all who ran for Bowerman would carry that baton, but Mundle was the leadoff.