Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  On went the tumult. “I have this picture,” Barbara Bowerman would remember, “of Otis jumping up half his height, and the odd memory of someone grabbing me from behind, planting a firm kiss on my cheek, and saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to kiss the wife of a coach whose athlete has just won a gold medal!’ And the kisser, whoever it was, was swept away by the shouting crowd. I never found out who he was.”

  Suddenly, even as the crowd kept roaring, came the command “Fifteen-hundred-meter men, to your marks.” Burleson and Grelle, still in happy shock over Otis’s win, began what would be an epic contest. France’s monkish Michel Bernard took the lead and passed 400 meters in 58.2. When he slowed slightly, reaching 800 in 1:57.8, Australia’s Herb Elliott could contain himself no longer. Falcon-beaked, white uniform stark against his mahogany tan, he flowed past, running 55 pace so smoothly that watchers at first wondered why the world’s best milers were letting him go.

  Grelle knew. “I was turning into a spectator, it was so fast,” he would say. He was in eighth. Burleson was just ahead, in mid-pack, and doing all he could to stay there. Three hundred meters after taking the lead, Elliott had twenty-five yards on Istvan Rozsavolgyi of Hungary and was still pulling away. Bowerman was so riveted by the sight that he had to will himself to look back at his two Oregonians. “Their only real hope was for it to be slow and tactical,” he would remember. “That was how Grelle got through his semi. And Burley could kick with anyone if he could stay close to him. Well, Mr. Elliott removed himself from any chance of that.”

  Herb Elliott was then twenty-two and had never been beaten over a mile in his life. In 1958, he’d had a great year, taking the mile record to 3:54.5 and the 1500 to 3:36.0. In 1959 he’d gotten married, run a few races, barely won, and gone home to prepare for this effort.

  Elliot was coached by a rude visionary named Percy Cerutty, who demanded that his runners become “Stotans,” half Spartan and half stoic. Intervals were but a part of his system. Cerutty added intense weight lifting, killing sand hills, and a philosophy that edged toward the sacrificial. “Thrust against pain,” he told Elliott. “Pain is the purifier. Walk toward suffering. Love suffering. Embrace it.” John Landy had found this a bit much, but Elliott was a perfect vessel.

  America’s first sub-four-minute miler, Don Bowden of Cal, had visited Cerutty’s training camp at Portsea, outside Melbourne. “Cerutty had Elliott doing fartlek, hills, and sand dunes, which gives you the strength to run one fast mile after another,” Bowden would say later. “That’s what I always tell people about the Olympic Games. You have to get through the heats. It’s not the fastest athlete who wins, it’s the strongest. And in 1960, Elliott was the strongest.”

  Bowerman stood and watched that strength carry the runner into the last lap. For an instant it seemed as though Elliott had gone wild too early. Then Elliott looked to his right. Cerutty had fought through guards, cleared a moat and fence, and was madly waving a towel outside the track, their signal that he was running a record pace. Elliott drove on toward his true limits.

  Elliott, the man who gave actual words to the great paradox of arrogance and humility, was enacting it. The arrogance was making his move with 700 to go, impossibly early to start blasting at 55 pace. The humility was now, knowing with every step the suffering to which his move condemned him. For 300 meters he took it, embraced it, held it in, slowing only in the final yards. He finished with his head sagging back and eyes shut, not collapsing but reaching the tape utterly empty. His time was 3:35.6, a world record, the equivalent of a 3:52.6 mile. He felt no joy. “Only relief,” he would say, “blessed relief.”

  Michel Jazy endured, as he would put it, “the tortures of hell,” to finish second, twenty yards back, in a European record 3:38.4. Rozsavolgyi took the bronze in 3:39.2. Burleson, sixth in a US record 3:40.9, had acquitted himself well. Grelle hung on for eighth, at 3:45.0.

  Later in life, Burleson would reveal a melancholy fact: “I don’t remember my victories. Only the losses. The losses I see every step of.” But he would not be haunted by Rome. “I was too young. I’d run as hard as I could. I’d done my best. I’d set an American record. I knew I’d be a lot better. And I’d seen a great run.”

  Burley had been part of a momentous, front-running race. But, secure in his own finishing speed, he was disinclined to learn from or to emulate Elliott’s tactics. After Elliott retired (a meteor, it was said, who had burned himself out with his intensity), Burleson’s attitude seemed justified. The world’s milers were all mortals compared to Elliott, and well within Burleson’s range. Yet his valuing victory more than records (“I’d rather win in 4:10 than lose in 3:54.”) and not exploring how fast he could cover his distance would leave Burleson vulnerable when he was faced with someone he had to run away from the way Elliott had run away from him.

  Sig Ohlemann’s physical beauty didn’t get him past the semis in the 800, and the heavy favorite going into the final was Belgium’s world record holder, Roger Moens. But as Moens roared off the last turn, he went yards wide to force Jamaica’s George Kerr even wider. This freed a muscular man in the startling black of New Zealand from where he’d been boxed on the rail. Peter Snell saw the opening and lunged for it. At the finish Moens was out in lane three, looking over enraged as Snell, the Games’ biggest surprise, beat him in 1:46.3.

  Word of Snell’s victory spread to the warm-up area. His Kiwi teammate, Murray Halberg, gave a little yip as he put on his spikes for the 5000. Halberg, the opposite of the mesomorphic Snell, had lost much of the use of his left arm as a result of a rugby accident in his youth and carried it tucked to his side as he ran. The British Empire three-mile champion and a 3:57.5 miler, he had a race plan not unlike Elliott’s. “And he executed it beautifully,” an admiring Bill Dellinger, brought low by the flu and forced to watch from the sidelines, would say. Halberg laid off the early pace and struck with three laps to go, blasting away with a 60-second circuit. Although Halberg, too, sagged near the end, he held on to win in 13:43.4.

  Bill Bowerman, who had gone to the warm-up track to be near Otis Davis before the 4 x 400-meter relay, soon noticed that the two New Zealand champions had the same coach. Bowerman went over and offered his hand to Arthur Lydiard, the forty-three-year-old ultramarathoner with whom he’d been corresponding for a while. “What wonderful work,” Bowerman said. “Got anyone else I can bet on?”

  “As a matter of fact I do,” said Lydiard. “Another fellow from my neighborhood named Magee, in the marathon.” A few days later, Barry Magee took the bronze in the twenty-six-mile race in 2:17:18, two minutes behind the world record 2:15:17 of Ethiopia’s barefoot Abebe Bikila.

  Lydiard wasn’t kidding about the neighborhood. Snell, Halberg, and Magee all belonged to the same track club in Auckland, and Lydiard, besides being their coach, was their milkman. “I never before nor afterward saw Bill so awed,” Barbara would say, “as he was by Arthur’s runners taking three medals, two gold. They found themselves immediately and lastingly congenial. Arthur was a great talker, loved to share both his methods and opinions with any interested listener, and Bill always appreciated challenges by worthy opponents.”

  Lydiard’s influence on Bowerman, and ultimately the planet, spread in a widening circle. First, he’d experimented on himself, finding that marathon training not only made him a better marathoner, but also able to withstand speed work as never before. Snell, Halberg, and Magee, despite being a half-miler, a three-miler, and a marathoner, all ran the same hundred miles a week for two or three months to condition themselves for weeks of hill drills and anaerobic “sharpening” work, as Lydiard called it, before presenting themselves at a starting line. Once there, the stamina they had built allowed them to carry their speed farther, no matter what the distance. This regime Dellinger rightly termed revolutionary. Of the two antipodean coaches, Lydiard and Cerutty, Lydiard would find his method the more widely adopted. “Marathon training” would rule like nothing since Zátopek’s intervals.

  But Lydiard
’s influence didn’t stop there. In teaching his neighborhood to run, in telling it to “train, not strain,” as he put it, Lydiard also found that any body, old or young, female or male, post-cardiac or Olympian, once gotten out trotting, would be the better for it. Lydiard would have to take Bowerman into his care before Bill would really believe that. For the time being, the two parted friends, both feeling they’d met a colleague with whom they wanted to keep in close touch.

  Otis Davis concluded the Games by anchoring the US 4 x 400-meter relay. “After Jack Yerman, Earl Young, and Glenn Davis’s legs,” Bowerman would recall, “Germany was still right on the Americans’ butt. Germany being that old seeker after revenge, Karl Kaufmann.”

  Davis took the baton, accelerated in a cinder spray, and hit the backstretch a couple of yards clear. Then he floated. Kaufmann saw that, drove hard with his arms, caught Davis, and went wide. He had fallen for a trap. Otis hit the gas, held him wide around the turn, and ran away from Kaufmann in the stretch. The Americans set a world record of 3:02.2.

  Otis’s reaction to his wins and records (after his jumping for glory) was a quietly abashed disbelief. But this gave way to an enduring sense of rightness. “I leaned a lot on my faith,” Davis said in later years. “It had carried me to the miraculous. I came to feel I was destined to do what I did.”

  To the Ducks who had not medaled in Rome—among them Canada’s young Harry Jerome, who had been kept from the 100-meter final by a hamstring cramp—Bowerman delivered part two of his standard speech about success and failure. They already knew the first part. We usually heard it on the team bus before a meet. It began, “When the ancient Greeks went out to battle, their mothers told them, ‘You come back carrying your shields in triumph, or you come back being carried upon them.’” (It was a parable that often garnered puzzled looks. “Damn hard, those Greek mothers,” hurdler Mel Renfro once said.)

  So Bowerman would add, “Some of you are going to do better out there today than you think. Some of you are going to do worse. But no one is going to be borne home a corpse. So afterward, we will be able to talk about what happened, and why, and take some direction from it.” And so, on the bus or plane home, after some had done better and some worse, Bowerman would sit with us in ones and twos and talk about the whys of our mistakes, the nuts and bolts of botched relay passes or getting boxed in, but also the whys of our wins, how we had nailed good javelin form or kept our trailing leg in tight over the hurdles. In Rome, though, he said, “Soak this in, breathe it in, sip the wine, take home a pocketful of cinders. You’re Olympians and you live to fight again.”

  After watching Rome’s bittersweet closing ceremonies, the athletes mingling and dancing without regard to nation, Bill and Barbara headed north, spending a couple of days driving through Northern Italy, visiting places Bill had been during the war. “He felt great affection for what he always called the paisanos,” she would say. “He knew they had suffered terribly from the impositions of three different armies occupying their homelands. He felt good that he had intentionally let all the Tenth’s mules loose as some small reparation for what our troops had done. He seemed to enjoy stopping on hillsides, just looking down on tidy farmlands, watching children playing and people going about their business.” After the destruction wreaked here by steel and explosives, the man who loved being on hay crew smiled to see that life had returned to its organic basics—the figs and prosciutto, the Valpolicella and cheese and pesto.

  They went on up to Germany to see the Munsingers, who lived about twenty minutes along the autobahn from Munich. Heinz Munsinger had been liaison to the Austrian Army when Bill had gone to the German headquarters with translator Julius Keller. “Keller translated my advice that Munsinger ought to go back and make the Austrians surrender or a lot of people were going to be killed,” Bill would say. “Munsinger did go back and there was no more resistance.” They got to know one another some in the chaotic weeks right after the surrender, but would not see each other again until 1960.

  However, they had kept in touch. After Bowerman had returned to Medford, he found postwar American track shoes were, as he elegantly put it, “Crap. Crap. Crap. Crappy, hard leather, crappy ten ounces per shoe.” The racing spikes of Germany’s Adidas were far superior, but punitively priced. Munsinger had repaid Bill for his kindness during the war by becoming his importer, sending Adidas in the sizes Bill ordered and negotiating a discount for them. When Adidas finally balked at that, Munsinger helped get Bowerman the right to distribute Adidas in the United States. But that didn’t last long. Bill didn’t want to sell shoes. He wanted to train runners.

  So, in Bavaria in 1960, they talked of shoes and the future. Bill told Munsinger that Adidas were so expensive he’d been forced to take up cobbling. He showed him a pair of spikes he’d made for Burleson, and Munsinger was impressed. As the two veterans looked out over the Black Forest toward the Austrian Alps and lifted their steins to old times and better ones to come, what was more natural than the thought of a German Olympics someday? “Wouldn’t that be grand?” said Munsinger. “To prove to the world we have come full circle from savagery.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Innovation

  THREE YEARS BEFORE BOWERMAN SHOWED MUNSINGER THOSE RACING SPIKES, when his trickle of discounted Adidas imports was drying up, he’d found himself in the campus shoe shop, picking up some reheeled pumps for Barbara. After he paid, he stood there going over the shoes’ every crevice and seam until the elderly repairman asked if something was wrong. “Nothing’s wrong. They’re fine,” Bowerman said, and then stepped back and took in the shop, the worn, incoming shoes, the neat bags of repaired ones, the mallets and punches, the sheets of fragrant, fresh leather. He observed until the proprietor’s mood worsened.

  “I don’t want to demean your artistry,” Bowerman said finally, “but how hard is it to make a pair of shoes? I mean really?”

  “You cannot make your own shoes!” erupted the repairman. “Trust me. You cannot make shoes without a factory.”

  “Let us stipulate that you are absolutely right. Of course I can’t make shoes. But if you were going to make a shoe, and you had the right equipment, how would you go about it?”

  Bowerman said later it was wonderful to watch the man morph into “a grouchy professor of cobbling science 101.”

  “First,” the repairman said, “I’d make a mold, called a last. Make it the size and shape of my foot. Then I’d cut pieces of leather and sew them together over the mold, making an upper. I now have the top half of a shoe. Toe in front, heel in back, tongue covering the arch of the foot, holes for the laces to hold in the sides. Then, zoop, zoop, I sew a sole over the whole bottom, add a heel, and I got a shoe.”

  “Sew or glue?” asked Bowerman.

  “You can glue. Sewing lasts.”

  “Okay,” said Bowerman. “Now how would you get spikes sticking out of it?”

  “Spikes?”

  Bowerman happened to have with him an Adidas sprint shoe. From the sole beneath its toe box sprang four glinting daggers. The repairman turned the shoe every which way, running his fingers inside, savoring the intelligence that had produced it. He put it down and stood back.

  “You, sir,” he said, “are on your own.”

  Bowerman went home, turned on the band saw in his garage, and cut open that shoe and dozens of others, learning their anatomy. The essence of a racing shoe, he realized, was its spike plate, the steel or dense plastic part embedded under the forefoot, into which spikes were screwed or welded. Merrily reverse engineering, he bought an array of lasts and leathers, cannibalized a few spike plates and set about assembling custom-made uppers for them.

  His workshop at home began to resemble the cobbler’s shop. It wasn’t long before he could make decent-looking shoes using rubber contact cement instead of needle and thread. “I wasn’t after a shoe that went a hundred miles,” he would say. However, one of his hopes was quickly dashed. “I wanted the shoes as light as if I drove nails through your bare
feet,” he would recall with some relish. “But I discovered that a runner exerts so much leverage that spikes would just bend or tear off unless the shoe gripped them like iron. That’s why all the spike plates were in one solid piece.”

  Spike plates ultimately would constitute most of the weight of Bowerman-made shoes, because he was soon working with very wispy materials. He obsessed about weight for a simple, mathematical reason: If a miler has an average two-yard stride, he takes 880 steps in his race. Save an ounce from his shoe and you save him 880 ounces—fifty-five pounds of hard labor. At the time, American shoes weighed from seven to ten ounces—half a pound on average. Even the lightest Adidas weighed five ounces. “I beat that by two ounces pretty quick,” Bill would crow.

  In his first trials, split calfskin worked best, but he tried anything that caught his eye. The material had to be light and strong, but not too flexible or, when real running force was applied, it would come off, as he would so delicately put it, “like a new lamb through the placenta.”

  It was Bowerman’s recollection that the first Oregon runner for whom he made a pair of spikes was Phil Knight in 1958. “They were a white, rubber-coated fabric, the kind you’d use for a tablecloth you could sponge off,” he would say thirty years later. “Buck Knight put them on one evening at the practice track and jogged around, and I didn’t know whether he was going to laugh or cry at these things. Buck tended to keep his own counsel.” Just then Otis Davis happened by and did a double take when he saw the shoes Buck had on. Somehow he got the shoes away from Buck, put them on, and ran off into the night. “All you could see of the thief was these white, white, shoes, taking long, long steps,” Bowerman would remember. “You could hear him yelling that he liked them and he’d keep them and be grateful forever.”