by Kenny Moore
Wilborn was one of two genuine milers Bill had attracted in two successive years—Wilborn in 1964 and Divine in 1965. Divine had blossomed first. Now, Wilborn was about to catch up. Dave had run 4:11.2 at Albany High, taking Burley’s state record and dispelling the myth that Bowerman never lifted a finger to recruit. “He came up to Albany a couple times,” Dave would say. “He sent letters too. He recruited!”
Wilborn had as much stamina as we, his elders, had ever seen in someone who was seventeen. In September 1964, before school started, he, Bob Williams, and I drove up to the Northwest AAU Marathon in Olympia, Washington. I won in 2:38 on a hot day. Williams had to stop after twenty-one miles due to blisters. Wilborn, despite it being ten miles farther than he’d ever run, set a national high school record of 2:48.
At five foot seven and 132 pounds, with a capacious chest and powerful upper body, Wilborn was driven both to attain great strength of will and to goad others to challenge it. Once he announced to a crowded dorm dining room, “From this moment on, drunk or sober, awake or asleep, until I say different, I will always be able to break two minutes for the half mile!”
This was greeted with jeers of disbelief but no outright dares. A month later, after his declaration seemed forgotten, after he’d run three hours out to Bowerman’s and over Mt. Baldy, the crest of the Coburg Hills, and back to campus, after he’d wolfed down two pizzas and drained three pitchers at Pietro’s, Divine and three-miler Damien Koch appeared in front of Dave’s woozy, reeling face and said but one word: “Now.”
“Oh, you fuckers! You fuckers!”
They drove him to the track. Dave put on his spikes, trotted around for thirty seconds patting his distended belly, and went to the line. He ran 1:54.5. “Don’t play poker with me!” he yelled. “Not on this! I don’t bluff on this!” He didn’t even give them the satisfaction of throwing up.
Wilborn’s constant trumpeting of his ability (guaranteeing the incessant threat of having to perform) surely had to do with his own deep doubts about his consistency. It didn’t take a deductive leap to see this. It just took a mediocre interval workout. Dave got more and more depressed as a poor run or race wore on. He once smashed his stopwatch on the track a few yards after concluding a mile in California that was ten seconds slower than his target. Teammates had to pull him away because he was scaring the officials. “I’ve always been great at throwing fits,” he would say.
Bowerman, in the fullness of time, addressed this. “After a bad dual meet,” Wilborn would recall, “I was all hang-headed, and he put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Dave, if this is the worst thing that ever happens to you, I envy you. You’re going to have a great life.’ God, I needed that. That was a great lesson. Of course it took some time before I came around. I liked to roll in it for a while.”
Sports psychologists drone on about mentorship and strategies for overcoming established patterns of failure. And Bowerman was adept at getting field-event people to visualize specific keys to their technique in competition. He never seemed to do that with runners, yet he took callow youth and made men who could run as hard as it is given to men to run. What made him, with his great silences and intermittent consoling, a superior mentor, a better guide to distance’s extremity?
The answer lies in the nature of that extremity. In every honest race, there is what you swear is a turning point. In memory it’s linked with an overwhelming roar because it tends to happen as the crowd comes up and calls. Take it from a marathoner, though, the roar happens out on the unwatched road as well. It happens when all your ambition and prerace blood oaths scream at you to hold on against the pain. And the pain shouts them all down.
I feel a traitor to Bill and my brethren allowing the word pain to crawl out on the page. I want to brush it off. It’s not the pain of a burning stovetop. It feels like weakness. It feels like weight that can’t be borne, panic that can’t be controlled. At that moment, two paths open. You can press on and do well. Or you can back off, regroup, and try to catch up. If you fail at the second, the temptation is to finish humiliated, like a POW broken by torture.
Bowerman (without ever pronouncing the word pain) taught that you redefine yourself a little with every honest, killing effort. You might not win, but you will have been brave. If you can admit that to yourself, bravery is a hell of a thing to build on.
You didn’t have to do it every time. If he thought you hadn’t been particularly noble in a race, he would sit on that information. At the semiannual goal-setting talks, he’d ask if you really desired a future, a career he could help to frame. And if you did, if he had your considered word on that, he might say fine, we can work on a few things, and maybe the next time you meet a Morgan Groth, you’ll be a little better prepared to go out with 60s and make it hot for him. A little better prepared. Not a weak-willed coward every time it starts to hurt. A little better prepared. It made the fault, if there was one, the fault of one runner in one race, but he wasn’t always going to be you. It made things reparable.
And we needed that because, as Dave would put it, “It isn’t just ‘classic Wilborn’ to say ‘I should have gone harder.’ It’s classic distance runner.”
The truth, however, is that—as physiologists monitoring oxygen consumption, heart rate, and blood lactates have established—after that certain point, if you have fallen off the pace, you really cannot sustain your chosen speed any longer, no matter what you will. Bill retired before those studies came out, but he didn’t need them. He knew we all had to be kept from trying to go harder and harder until we ran ourselves into sickness or tendon tears. He also knew that we wouldn’t toughen miraculously from one race to the next. His working assumption was that we could be a little better prepared. Bill succeeded so often because he didn’t drive us. He let us drive ourselves.
“I don’t believe in chewing on athletes,” he once said. “People are out there to do their best. If you growl at them and they’re not tigers, they’ll collapse. Or they’ll try to make like a tiger. But the tigers are tigers. All you have to do is cool them down a little bit so they don’t make some dumb mistake like running the first quarter of a mile in fifty-five seconds.”
There are certain words that I always hear in Bowerman’s voice. He taught them to us, maybe one per team meeting, dwelling and returning until we ran to the dictionary: “Jejune.” “Germane.” “Vicissitudes.” His view was that intelligent men will be taught more by the vicissitudes of life than by a host of artificial training rules.
Not that he wouldn’t give the vicissitudes a shove if he needed to make his point. He’d get quarter-miler Gordy Payne up at 6 a.m. after he’d come in at 5 from the San Francisco fleshpots and take him for a bracing run around Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County, where we were staying on our spring trip, order him through endless 220s in the afternoon workout, and then throw him off the team when he bullheadedly went into the city all night again.
Watching, knowing this would arise in a team meeting, we would remind ourselves of Bill’s long- and short-term temperaments. Once his mind was made up, that was it, but it didn’t congeal instantly. He could say or do something unwarranted, cool off, reflect, and reverse himself. Team captains occasionally won leniency and a second or third chance for miscreants such as Payne if Bill remained in reflective mode. He could conclude, as he said then, that “the man was simply one hell of a competitor. Trouble was, he was competing against me,” and give him another chance.
In treating us all differently, according to our needs as he saw them, Bill opened himself up to charges of being arbitrary. “I don’t remember Burley ever getting in trouble much with Bill,” Archie San Romani would recall. “Bill kind of gave him a long leash.” True, but Bill once yanked on it ingeniously. In 1961, Burleson wanted to get married. Bill tried to talk him out of it, and when that didn’t work, he engineered an informative evening. He asked Assistant Coach Jack Burg, who had two infants, to invite Burley over for dinner. When Burley got there, Burg (at Bowerman’s b
ehest) called to say that he was delayed, but he’d be there soon. Burley had to help Burg’s wife, Kay, take care of two screaming babies. Bill cackled later to Jim Shea that Burley had developed different views about having a family while still in college.
So Bowerman was virtually unpredictable. We never had postmortems. He pondered how he felt, made his ruling, and sometimes, as Bob Woodell would say of his senior year, “we had a better track team of guys who’d been kicked off than ones still running.”
Some of that was because the boot, or the threat of it, could be a teaching aid. Bill’s ultimatum to force me to do easy days was such a case, as was his kicking 1967 Pac-8 steeplechase champion Bob Williams off the team for sweeping out his church. “If he’d just sat there and prayed,” Bowerman would say a few years later, “I’d have encouraged him. But he was into too many draining extracurricular things.” As soon as Williams convinced Bill that he’d accepted a life limited to running and school, Bowerman welcomed him back.
The problem came when Bill’s judgment had hardened. Then there was no recourse. “He ‘disappeared’ guys,” Grelle would say. “When he lost hope, you were gone for good.”
Bowerman was, of course, a creature of discipline himself. His debt to the intervention of Ercel Hedrick always seemed fresh in his mind. So the respect he developed over the years for coaches Len Casanova, John Robinson, Bill Walsh, and John Wooden (and they for him) arose because they all lived for the rite of passage. All of them hugged or whipped lumps of raging, yearning, acting-out clay and rechanneled it, got it past all the juices of desire and sorrow and fear and lust, all the drunk-on-dopamine excesses of young men fighting themselves to be themselves.
Steeplechaser John Woodward, class of ’69, would say, “We had what would now be considered a sociopath for a coach.” Woodward knew Bill loved to bewilder, and when he was a freshman, he tried to be wary. “But during cross-country, a bunch of us went in the sauna, and after a minute Bill came in. He’d just gone out to cool off in the shower and had left his towel, which happened to be by me. He picked it up, and underneath was his big, heavy set of brass keys. They had been sitting in there for fifteen minutes and were now the same hundred and eighty degrees as the air.” The quick intakes of breath around him told Woodward something was up. “But I was trapped at the end of the bench. Bowerman grabbed the keys and pressed them onto the top of my thigh.” John struggled, but was easily held by the great burning hand. He and others Bowerman caught this way swear that Bill’s expression at the moment of branding was never malicious or cruel. It was a gleeful, almost beatific face we all saw before he lifted his hand and shouldered out the door.
“What the hell was that?” Woodward asked his whooping fellow runners. “Welcome to the team!” they said. “Welcome to the team!” The red welt lasted for days, but left no scar.
Bowerman imprinted so many thighs over the years that when, in 1991, Phil Knight held a tribute dinner for Bill, he invited all the past Men of Oregon to Nike’s Beaverton campus gym, built half a cedar-planked sauna, and hung Bill’s keys and towel in view. One by one, we sat and were photographed with Bill there, and he signed the pictures later. I look at mine as I type. His grip on my opposite arm pulls me toward him irresistibly. His grin is as exalted as it had been years before, when it had been my leg beneath those fiery keys.
Even Woodward agreed that Bowerman was hardly a sociopath. His laying on of keys was an initiation rite, not unlike the ritual circumcision some African tribes use to make men out of boys. It gave Bowerman the authority of a tribal elder. And he used it to keep us—tigers or not—whole. “I always respected him,” said Wilborn, “even at the times I didn’t like him.”
This is from the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, a cross-country runner himself:
The old man was kneeling in front of me. . . . Without a word, he took my foreskin, pulled it forward, and then, in a single motion, brought down his assegai [a spear]. I felt as if fire was shooting through my veins. . . . I called out, “I am a man!” A boy may cry. A man hides his pain. I had taken the essential step in the life of every Xhosa man. Now I might marry, set up my own home, and plow my own field. Now I could be admitted into the councils of my community.
I would have loved to read that passage to Bowerman in the sauna. The next day he would have brought in a rusty spear.
CHAPTER 21
Lessons Inserted
AS INDELIBLE AS BOWERMAN’S BRAND OF TACTILE ADVICE WAS IN MEMORY, it often took a while to register elsewhere. Some time might elapse before Bill observed anyone actually heeding it. By 1967, however, Bill’s teaching was fully informing Neal Steinhauer. In January, Bill took Neal to the San Francisco Examiner Indoor Meet in the drafty Cow Palace. The meet promoters had built up the shot put, touting the prospect of seeing Randy Matson break Gary Gubner’s indoor world record of 64 feet 111⁄4 inches. About Steinhauer Matson was unconcerned; Neal had never beaten him in three years of trying. “Indoor meets always gave a TV set for the winner and a transistor radio for second,” Neal would recall. “Matson was not a funny man, but he tried once. The last time he beat me, he said, ‘Gol’ dern, Neal, I have never gotten a transistor radio.’”
Steinhauer, first in the throwing order, rushed his technique and threw 59 feet. “Then there was a trumpet fanfare and the lights dimmed, and spotlights spun around and they stopped all the other events for Matson’s first throw. He did a 63.” Bill called Steinhauer over. “Neal, you’ve got this,” he said. “You’re just too anxious. Just slow down, let it come.”
On his second throw, Neal would say, “I was blurry-eyed the adrenalin was so strong. I pushed off, got my lead leg across well, turned well, waited, waited, and let it come.”
The shot cracked down 66 feet 101⁄2 inches away, a new indoor world record by almost two feet. The crowd exploded, but Matson had four throws remaining. Casual no longer, he grimly pressed too hard and didn’t come back. Steinhauer thought, I finally won a TV set! Matson didn’t stick around for his radio.
The record paid off in a dozen invitations. “Bill picked three indoor meets and we finally bonded on one of those trips,” Neal would say. “I remember the exact moment. At the Mason Dixon Games in Louisville, we were in the Brown Hotel, sixteen floors, two elevators jammed with Army guys, and we stepped in there and this elevator took off like a rocket. Bill’s legs buckled and he went straight to the floor in a squat. It was so crowded he couldn’t get up, and we both started laughing. And at the top it stopped so fast it brought him to his feet! We came out of there hysterical. Things were always fine with us after that.”
Perhaps the most elusive psyche for Bowerman to grasp was that of Jere Van Dyk. Their beginning was promising enough. From Hudson’s Bay High in Vancouver, Washington, Van Dyk had 47-second quarter-mile speed, but he looked able to train to stretch it as far as the half-mile, maybe farther. When Jere was considering coming to Oregon, Bowerman told the young runner’s father that Jere was so talented “I can make your son an Olympic champion.”
But along with being talented, Van Dyk was boyishly beautiful. His sweetly wicked grin seemed ready for anything; his wink signified knowledge of all the sexy secrets. This was a hard impression for Bowerman to get past.
If Bowerman—or any of us—had only known how little we knew.
Van Dyk had been raised an evangelical Christian in a small Plymouth Brethren assembly in Portland. In 1956, when Jere was eleven, a young man named Jim Elliott, who had grown up among them, was one of five young missionaries killed by the members of the Auca tribe in Ecuador. Jere would forever remember the Life magazine photo of their bodies “lying in a stream, with long spears in their backs.” The tragedy spurred many in Jere’s community to become missionaries, the highest calling in their faith.
For the Plymouth Brethren, if one side of the coin was ministry out in the world, the other side was avoidance of all things worldly. “I was taught as a Plymouth Brethren to shun the world,” Jere would say, quoting 2 Corinthians
. “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.” But as a high school senior preparing to choose a college, he was yearning to sample all that the world had to offer. “I definitely wanted to go to Oregon,” he would say, “at least in part because it had a reputation as a party school. I didn’t do those things, or live like that as a boy.”
On the weekend that Van Dyk came to visit the Duck campus, he had a strange portent that he might not be suited to life as Bill urged it. When Jere arrived to meet Bowerman at his office, Bill was not there yet. Sitting behind Bill’s desk was a half-miler named Ray Van Asten. “Whatever you do,” Van Asten said, “don’t come here. Don’t go to Oregon. You’ll hate it. You’ll be making a big mistake.” Van Asten, in his mid-twenties and a transfer student from Mt. San Antonio Junior College, had found Bill to be oppressively meddling. “I felt kinship with him,” Jere would say, “because of his name and the race he ran. I thought he was an oracle.” Jere chose Oregon anyway. He would spend his years there pushed and pulled by warring desires.
Van Dyk had a full ride, so he didn’t have to work, and his father could afford for him to have a car on campus. These factors no doubt contributed to Bowerman’s conviction that Jere lived the party life on campus. At one team meeting, Bill told his assembled athletes, “You can either run and study or run and play around, but you can’t do all three. You have to choose.” It was an admonition many of us had heard before, but it jolted Jere to the core. “I thought he was looking right at me,” Van Dyk would say. “The truth was, now that I was out in the world, I wanted to go to the Olympics, the ultimate athletic brotherhood. I wanted to study, and I wanted to meet women, sure. But oh, that I were the playboy he thought I was.”
In 1966, when Jere and long jumper Tom Smith of Springfield were sophomores, they didn’t qualify for their finals at the Pac-8 meet at Stanford. Bill then saw them coming back to the team’s motel at 4 a.m. Four hours later, he woke them, but he didn’t blast them equally. He blasted Jere for “corrupting” Tom. “Tom, Tom,” Bill said, “don’t let Jere drag you down.”