by Kenny Moore
It was the relief of tearing open the official envelope and seeing 2-S in the little box that moved me to win my first national championship, the 1967 AAU Cross-Country, over 10,000 meters in Chicago’s Washington Park in late November. It was also the first nationals won in Tiger spikes sold by Blue Ribbon Sports. In defeating out-of-shape 1964 Olympians Billy Mills and Ron Larrieu, it was not hard for me to imagine doing the same in the 1968 track Trials and becoming an Olympian myself.
That winter, Jay Bowerman beat me to it. Compared with the ordeal that his older brother Jon had been as an adolescent, Jay was a mellow soul. When he broke a couple of windows in a vacant schoolhouse and was found out, he learned his lesson. “Bill let me know he was not pleased,” Jay would say, “but he finished up the discussion by saying that he’d been a bit of a hell-raiser when he was a kid and thought it was important for me to understand that there was a difference between raising a little hell once in a while and destroying something that might belong to somebody else. And that’s where it ended.”
Graduating from Oregon with a degree in biology in 1966, Jay went straight into the Army. He had been in ROTC and so had a two-year military commitment, but as a science major he was able to get assigned to the chemical corps instead of the infantry. He did basic training at Ft. McClellan in Alabama, then tried out for and made the US Biathlon program (shooting and skiing), which the Army conducted in Alaska.
“I figured that was as far as I could get from Vietnam, honorably.” The Army, as it had Bill twenty-three years before, taught Jay cross-country skiing. “I had been a confident downhill skier and had worked on ski patrol at Willamette Pass,” Jay would recall. “Eight years of year-round training had given me a fitness base. But to compete, I had to master cross-country technique.”
The men’s Winter Olympic biathlon is raced over twenty kilometers. The biathlete carries a rifle over his shoulder and stops four times to calm his pounding chest and shoot. In a month, Jay was the second-best shooter on the team. “Bill had taught me basic marksmanship when I was little,” Jay would say, noting that he had also been “blessed with very good eyesight and steady nerves.”
Aside from mastering cross-country technique, Jay’s main challenge was the US biathlon coach. Sven Johannsen, a Swedish national, seems to have been as relentless as Mihaly Igloi and as controlling as Payton Jordan. As Jay would put it, Johannsen “subscribed to an old-fashioned work ethic that included ideas like ‘train through your injuries and sickness—it makes you stronger.’” Johannsen proposed a summer training run of twenty-five to thirty miles a day for two weeks (with a rest on day eight) that would have crippled the team, but the commanding officer, after a discreet visit from a jaybird, decided they had no funds for it. Jay, having a father/coach who might have come to blows with Johannsen over such madness, was in a bind. “Bill and I did talk once by phone. He gave me good counsel to keep my head, try to keep my training as sensible as I could, and persevere.”
The 1968 US Olympic Biathlon Trials were a series of six races in Wisconsin to qualify six men. Jay had come down with a cold and after five races, his cumulative score put him ninth. “In the final race, I let it all hang out,” he would say. “I went right to the wall, figuring there was nothing to lose now, and I’d be able to go home and recuperate after it was over.” He just squeezed into the final spot.
The team flew to Lillehammer, Norway, for three weeks of training before going on to the Olympics at Grenoble, in the French Alps. Still hacking and coughing “from having run my guts out in zero temperatures,” Jay figured he’d take some time to recover, to be ready for Grenoble. But he got a blistering lecture and edict from Johannsen, who demanded that he ski a time trial to determine the four slots in France or go home. “I was so pissed off I went out and tore through the course and, not surprisingly, had a relapse that carried clear through the Games. I guess I should consider myself lucky not to get anything worse out of it. I did not race in Grenoble.”
Back home in the Bowerman kitchen, this news was received with relative equanimity. “Bill and I were very pleased (I thrilled) about Jay’s simply making the Olympic team,” Barbara would remember. Bill, as contemptuous as he was of Johanssen’s destructiveness, thought it remarkable that Jay had achieved this in a sport he’d taken up only two years earlier. The Bowermans thus began 1968 with a new Olympian in the house, and a cautionary tale of how bad coaching can be.
CHAPTER 22
Mexico City
THE CITY THAT WON THE RIGHT TO HOST THE 1968 US OLYMPIC TRACK AND Field training camp and final trials was South Lake Tahoe, California. Its casinos and town were on the lake, at only 6,230 feet, but twenty minutes away at Echo Summit, a Tartan track was being built at exactly the level of Mexico’s Olympic Stadium, 7,347 feet. The area wasn’t bad for long runs, but I’d have had to use trails or brave a busy highway, so Bill supported me in sticking with Los Alamos for three months, anyway.
Bob Williams and I moved to New Mexico from Eugene in March. We roomed for a week or two with families who’d volunteered to house “Olympic hopefuls” and did substitute teaching to earn our keep. In April, we came in from a long run to find our hosts had dropped their martini glasses on the carpet and were staring at the television in dread. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Back in Eugene, the shock was such that Bill let the team vote on whether or not to go to the dual meet that week. “We voted to go,” Mike Deibele would remember, “but it stunned everyone.” It was only the beginning.
Track and field athletes, whether they liked it or not, would be caught up in the harrowing events of 1968. The central conflict over what it means to be American was erupting on more fronts than at any time since the Civil War. In January, the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive had showed that raising US troops to 500,000 had not broken the North Vietnamese strength or will and forced Americans to examine the true character of the war. In March, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not stand for reelection. On April 4, King was assassinated in Memphis. On June 5, after winning the California presidential primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles.
The rest of the year, the nation lived out the stages of its grief. Before there could be acceptance there was anger and denial. On the issues of both civil rights and the war, American ideals were slamming head-on into American reality. Arguments wrecked company picnics, weddings, and graduations. One side wanted to turn the nation from its folly and toward its founding principles of equality. The other side resisted, out of prejudice, out of a belief that anticommunism justified an unconstitutional war, out of a my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism. Each side galled the other by calling itself the true Americans.
All the while, militancy had been rising in the black community. “Nineteen sixty-seven,” San Jose State quarter-miler Lee Evans would recall, “was the first year I was proud of my skin being black. We stopped referring to ourselves as ‘colored’ or ‘Negro.’ You were black or you were not black. An Afro haircut was a statement of black nationalism.”
Evans’s sociology professor, a charismatic discus thrower named Harry Edwards, taught a racial minorities class that grew from 60 to 600 in the 1967–68 school year, forging both tools and will to confront the treatment black athletes received away from the field. In the early fall of 1967, Edwards led a campus protest that threatened to disrupt a football game. “If they won’t rent to us,” he demanded, “why should we play for them?” University President Robert Clark canceled the game, but heeded their concerns and instituted equal-housing guarantees at San Jose State. A furious Governor Ronald Reagan reprimanded Clark for being “coerced” by Edwards.
Buoyed by his success, Edwards went national, calling sixty prominent black athletes, including UCLA’s basketball star Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), to a November 1967 meeting in Los Angeles. There, he tested support for an Olympic boycott to protest racial injustice in America. He found a great deal. The group issued a list of demands to the U
S Olympic Committee, asking, among other things, that apartheid-practicing South Africa, then pressing for Olympic reinstatement, be denied it, that IOC President Avery Brundage resign because of his alleged anti-Negro views, and that a second black coach be added to the 1968 US staff, joining assistant track coach Stan Wright. If not, American black athletes would boycott the Mexico City Olympics. Thus began the Olympic Project for Human Rights.
Brundage, choosing a word that had been used to infantilize black men for centuries, said, “If these boys are serious, they’re making a bad mistake. If they’re not serious and are using the Olympic Games for publicity purposes, we don’t like it.” The head US Olympic track coach was Payton Jordan of Stanford. “There must be some coercion,” Jordan said in disbelief, “to have an individual who worked so long [to qualify for the Olympics] change his mind in the middle of the stream.”
Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics had made a laughingstock of Hitler’s Aryan supremacy theories, sided with the authorities. Always polite and humble, Owens embodied being “a credit to your race.” Because he had preached that enduring racial taunts silently, as Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis had done, eventually would lead to progress, Owens was chosen by the USOC to try to talk some sense into these young firebrands.
It was too late. The new black athlete intended to stand as an equal with whites and point out the ills that needed addressing. Jackie Robinson himself was with them. His brother Mack had been coached at Oregon by Bill Hayward and had finished second to Owens in the Berlin 200 meters. “I say use whatever . . . means to get our rights here in this country,” said Jackie. “When for 300 years Negroes have been denied equal opportunity, some attention must be focused on it.” Track and Field News surveyed black contenders for the team. Nine of twenty-seven said they’d consider boycotting.
Three months before his murder, Martin Luther King Jr. weighed in. “Dr. King told me that this represents a new spirit of concern on the part of successful Negroes for those who remain impoverished,” wrote Reverend Andrew Young, then director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Negro athletes may be treated with adulation during their Olympic careers, but many will face later the same slights experienced by other Negroes. Dr. King knows this is a desperate situation for the Negro athlete, the possibility of giving up a chance at a gold medal, but he feels the cause of the Negro may demand it.” With King expressing sympathy, the boycott idea was something every thoughtful black athlete had to address.
Thus, when members of the USOC Track and Field Committee convened in early spring, they had to decide who would be in charge of coaching this volatile group during the long, hot summer of 1968. That person would have to deal not only with the tensions of ultimate competition but the emotions of men agonizing over whether to sacrifice years of effort to strike a blow for justice. Whoever was in charge would have to deal with Olympic and AAU officials who desperately wanted those men to compete and with a pack of reporters fanning the flames of every grievance.
The committee deliberated and decided that the man in charge would be not Payton Jordan, the elected Olympic coach, but Bill Bowerman. His plan for the athletes to live in trailers beside the new track at Echo Summit was accepted by acclamation. He was ordered to supervise every aspect of the camp that summer between the preliminary Trials in June in LA and the final Trials in September.
B owerman, sobered, went back to Eugene and learned from team doctor Don Slocum that both senior Jere Van Dyk and junior Roscoe Divine had stress fractures. Bowerman redshirted Divine that season to focus his training on the Olympic Trials in September. And he put both of them on a regimen in the pool. “In 1968,” Van Dyk would recall, “like every track season at Oregon except my freshman year, I spent a good part of the spring injured, trying to stay in shape. I got well, ran, got hurt again. Bowerman and I were becoming increasingly frustrated. I saw my Olympic dreams fading, returning, fading.”
Van Dyk tried to live in the Theta Chi house and then in the dorms, where he and Divine shared a room. But both places were too noisy and the whole campus was filled with the emotions of that spring. Finally, he decided to move into a rented house off-campus, where he hoped he could sleep and get well. “Bowerman didn’t like the idea,” Jere would recall. “He thought I wanted to play around, and said I wouldn’t eat right.”
Jere had not given Bill much reason to believe otherwise. Earlier, Bowerman had sent word he wanted Jere to help escort some high school athletes around campus the weekend of the USC meet. “He didn’t tell me directly,” Van Dyk would say, “because he and I were hardly talking.” But Jere, who couldn’t bear the thought of watching the meet without being in it himself, opted to go to the beach with his girlfriend and another couple. “Nothing happened. I was still very much a Plymouth Brethren. But I was ashamed that I didn’t do what Bill had wanted me to do, and I am sure he was angry and he had every right to be.”
Jere sensed exactly how Bowerman would react to his excursion. Sex, per se, was not the defining issue with Bowerman. Bill said repeatedly that it wasn’t the sex act that was the drain on performance; it was the long, sleepless nights consumed in pursuit of it. He once joked to John Jaqua that he was thinking of hiring Jerry Tarr to teach people on the team how to get laid and be home by nine.
In Jere’s case, though, there may have been something even more basic going on that had nothing to do with whether he was playing around. Bowerman had given Jere a job to do and Jere had failed to do it. Assigning mundane, even menial tasks was a test of character that Bill often applied. Failing it might not cause Bill to disappear a team member, but it would lead to a kind of probation.
Even without Van Dyk and Divine in that spring of 1968, Bill was as deep in middle-distance men as he’d ever been. Wilborn, Kvalheim, and two Canadians, Terry Dooley and Norm Trerise, were all running near four minutes. But when Gerry Lindgren came to town for the Washington State dual-meet two-mile, Bowerman felt only one of them might be ready to stay with him. “I wasn’t really trained for the longer races,” Arne Kvalheim would recall, “but Bowerman needed someone to run them, and since I was the slowest over 200 meters of the milers at Oregon, and the oldest, he chose me to face Gerry in the two-mile.”
The match was a heralded one. “It was the Oslo Arrow against the Spokane Sparrow!” Roscoe Divine would remember. Bill had told Kvalheim to stay away from Gerry, to let him lead by ten to fifteen meters to keep him from varying the pace. “I did this and beat him over the last lap,” Arne would recall matter-of-factly. That lap occupied but 55 seconds and let Kvalheim set a new collegiate record of 8:33.2. “Gerry was the best NCAA long-distance runner in history until Pre came along,” Kvalheim would say. “In all his years in college, I believe my two-mile was the only race in which he was ever beaten.”
Van Dyk, inspired by Arne’s win, tried to replicate his own swift return from injury the year before. Seeing Van Dyk’s stress fracture finally healing, Bowerman entered him in the Pac-8 meet at Berkeley. “I took aspirin, warmed up, ran, and the pain was too great,” Jere would remember. “I didn’t make the finals. Bill told others—he never told me—that I was kicked off the team.” Jere took this hard. “I was out in the cold,” he would remember more than thirty-five years later, “banished, an ancient form of punishment, from my tribe, my family, the only place where I was happy.”
But Jere had misunderstood. He had not been banished. Bill’s message, via the team captains, had been only that Jere wouldn’t be going with Oregon to the NCAA championships. It had been a judgment of Jere’s racing fitness, not his soul. Believing otherwise, Jere took his degree, went home, and thought about what to do.
Up in Los Alamos my training had gone well, and in late May I came back to Eugene to confer with my professors. Bowerman grabbed me to be cannon fodder in a Twilight Meet four-mile-relay record attempt. He felt a varsity team of Terry Dooley, Norm Trerise, Arne Kvalheim, and Dave Wilborn could threaten the 16:08.9 record set by the g
reat 1962 team. He planned to run them against an Oregon Track Club crew of Wade Bell, a year out of school, Roscoe Divine (recovered from his stress fracture), Tom Morrow, and me.
Bill put the best OTC men first and instructed them to lead so the varsity guys could draft along. He put Morrow and me on the last legs to serve, if the varsity fell behind, as easy targets for Arne and Dave to catch. I thought this was great because I harbored secret ambitions. My best was 4:04.4 from two years before, but my Los Alamos workouts showed I could do around 4:00.
Roscoe led off our OTC effort with 4:03.2. Wade followed with 4:01 and put our team sixty yards—eight or nine seconds—up on the varsity. Near the end of Wade’s mile, Bill realized that even if Arne and Dave concluded with sub-4:00s, the varsity wouldn’t get the record of the 1962 team.
Bill wanted to keep the record try alive, but thought that Morrow and I surely couldn’t run the 4:01s that would take. But his two varsity studs, Arne and Dave, could. So Bill stepped onto the track, nudged Morrow aside, grabbed Kvalheim, and said, “We’re switching teams. Take the baton from Wade.” The incoming Bell was surprised to hand off to a member of the opposing team, but he did it.
Morrow and I were outraged at being made to go from the winning team to the losing one by executive order, but Tom couldn’t complain for long because he had to take the stick from Trerise. I, on the other hand, had four minutes to fume before Morrow gave it to me. I got next to Bill’s ear and informed him that a record set by switching teams in midstream was a travesty and would never be accepted. All Bill said was, “When you get the baton, you’re going to be way back. So don’t run.”