Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  During that 10,000, as he came by on the backstretch, eyes rolled back, mouth agape, moaning, he really seemed to be running into oblivion. Yet when he came past the crowd and it stood up and thundered, he showed that he heard. The rest of us would hear the crowd, be moved to hang on, and try to lift a grateful arm afterward, but Pre always acknowledged his crowd in the moment. He cocked his head then, surged for them then—and they thundered all the more. He won them by stripping himself naked, absolutely unembarrassed at revealing his need and his agony. He ran an American record 27:43.6 that day, only five seconds slower than Viren’s world record in Munich. “I think,” he said later, subdued, “this indicates I’m ready.”

  Jere Van Dyk saw Pre as another Hank Stamper, from Ken Kesey’s 1964 masterpiece, Sometimes a Great Notion. The “notion” in question is the power—and the sanctity—of an inspired individual to stand fast against a community of fearful naysayers. “For there is always a sanctuary more,” Kesey wrote, “a door that can never be forced, whatever the force, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, your name, your innards, even your life, but that last stronghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.”

  That was Prefontaine. He loved rough, lascivious talk (“envision a satyr,” Frank Shorter once said of him), but there was nothing more obscene to Pre than surrender. In June, a few weeks later, Shorter got to see that for himself.

  The second annual Hayward Restoration meet was even more loaded with talent than the first. Rick Wohlhuter from the Chicago Track Club warmed up the crowd with a world record 1:44.1 for 880 yards. Pre had invited Shorter to go for a fast time in the three-mile. Race day was windy, so they agreed to alternate halves until the last two laps, and then it would be every man for himself.

  They broke away with a 4:16.5 mile and dutifully shared the lead through two miles. “Then Frank didn’t hold up his end of the bargain,” Pre would growl later. Instead of giving Pre a break, Shorter stayed tucked behind him, forcing him to fight the wind for most of three laps. With 300 to go, Frank compressed all the energy he’d saved into jumping Pre like he’d never jumped him before. As they hit the turn with 220 to go, Shorter had a yawning fifteen-yard lead. The crowd reacted with disbelief and then uttered something like a roar of absolute refusal. It was so loud that Don Kardong, in third, almost stopped. “It was beyond exciting,” Kardong would say. “It was terrifying.”

  That roar got to Pre.

  “I almost let him win,” he would say later. “I was just thinking it wasn’t that big a deal. Then something inside of me said, ‘Hey wait a minute, I want to beat him,’ and I took off. It was the idea of losing in front of my people.”

  Pre clawed past Frank with forty to go and won in an American record 12:51.4. Shorter ran 12:52.0. “You cheer for that guy,” said Frank, deafened and amazed, “and you get something in return.”

  Prefontaine’s obligation to his fans was such that it could physically injure him. That summer in Europe he set three more American records, then come home to train for six weeks before returning. He was looking two years ahead: Because the Olympics usually were held in late summer, he was attempting to learn how to peak later in the year than he’d been accustomed to doing as a collegiate athlete. “He was in awesome shape,” Dellinger would recall, “maybe the best he’d ever been in.”

  As a final tune-up, “to blow out the carbon,” as he put it, he always liked to run a fast mile. So on Tuesday, September 3, 1974, he scheduled one and let word pass among fans. A thousand showed. I had intended to be one, but when I saw the roiling wall of field-burning smoke and soot that came in from the north, I was sure Pre would bag it. The valley’s rye grass farmers, as was their custom, had torched their fields after the harvest to kill weeds and remove straw. Thousands of acres had gone up just as the wind changed. The day would become known as Black Tuesday, one of the worst of such intrusions into the health of Eugene and Springfield. You could not see the length of Hayward Field. But the fans had come out, and because of them Pre ran anyway, clocked 3:58.3 and finished coughing gobbets of blood. His hacking tore muscle fibers under his rib cage.

  He was lucky that the damage wasn’t worse. Forest-fire crews have been found to have their lung function cut in half from smoke exposure. Pre went to Europe anyway, and in his second race, a two-mile in London against Britain’s Brendan Foster, he couldn’t breathe with two laps to go and had to step into the infield. In all his career, this was the single race he didn’t finish.

  The following February, Prefontaine, Bowerman, Savage, Manley, and I all drove up to the state capitol in Salem and testified before the Oregon State Senate. An earlier legislature had enacted a ban on field burning that was to take effect in six months. The seed farmers were lobbying for the ban to be repealed. We urged that the senators enforce it. Pre, being the star, and having the bloodiest tale to tell, was praised effusively by the chairman for doing his civic duty.

  Pre said, “Never mind that, sir. I want you to promise me right now in this hearing that you won’t cave to pressure from the farmers. Promise me that we’ll always be able to breathe clean air in Eugene.”

  “Thank you, Steve. Thank you.”

  “Sir, I ask for your word. Your word you’ll vote to keep the ban.”

  “Plenty of time for that, Mr. Prefontaine. Again, I commend you . . .”

  “I have been up here before,” Pre cut in, “to talk to the prison running club we’ve got going, and I gotta say you get a lot straighter answers from prisoners than from you politicians!”

  Pre was right. The ban would be overturned.

  Prefontaine was essentially apolitical, but he was passionate about his sport. He cared about local politics only when it affected air quality, and about air quality only because it affected his training. “He was a good guy in most ways,” Mary Creel would say many years later, “but he was the center of his universe and you pretty much had to hop on as he went by.”

  No one understood that better than Creel herself. But once she hopped on, he wouldn’t let her off. Prefontaine had always gone out with other girls because Mary wouldn’t sleep with him unless and until they were married, and he was not candid about this with Mary. He wanted it both ways. When Mary discovered that he had dated Oregon coed and runner Nancy Alleman, with whom he was obviously quite close, Pre minimized the relationship. He repeatedly said that he wanted to settle down with Mary, that Mary knew him better than anyone and let him get away with less than anyone. She was a moral standard and a true trusted equal, who loved him for himself and not for his renown.

  But Mary was not necessarily going to wait around. When she graduated, she got a job offer in Los Angeles. Pre asked her not to go, saying he needed her nearby. He wanted to marry her eventually, when he was fully ready, but first he had to sow his wild oats. She told him he’d better hope she didn’t have three kids by then, accepted the job, and began packing.

  Pre did not take her departure mildly. His last words to her were “I’ll never let you go!” Mary was furious at his impossible neediness.

  Early in 1975, Prefontaine was offered $200,000, the largest contract in the short history of the International Track Association, the professional track circuit that began in 1973 and disbanded before the Montreal Olympics. Pre had little of the traditional distance man’s feeling for austerity. “I like to be able to go out to dinner once in a while,” he’d say. “I like to drive my MGB up the McKenzie on a weekday afternoon. I like to be able to pay my bills on time.”

  Still, he turned the contract down. Until the Europeans were well and truly thrashed, he said, “What would I do with all that money?” He had abstained, of course, for one reason—to keep his eligibility to take on Viren in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

  In January 1975, all the best American distance runners were invited to go through sophisticated physiological and psychological testing at the Aerobic Center i
n Dallas. We came away knowing some Prefontaine specifics. He had the highest maximum volume of oxygen consumption ever recorded in a runner, 84.4 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per minute. He also had an exchange with psychologist Bill Morgan of Wisconsin that came as close as we ever heard him to putting his motives into words.

  “World-class runners have a psychology similar to world-class wrestlers or oarsmen,” Morgan explained. “All are lower than the general population in neuroticism, depression, anxiety. This suggests that one prerequisite for success is a psychological profile characterized by stability. Runners are stable to the point of being aloof, even defiant.”

  Prefontaine gave Morgan a taste of that defiance. Asked for short answers to three simple questions (how he began running, why he continued, what he thought about in races), Pre got impatient with the seeming shallowness of the interview. He delivered a lecture on what running was for him. “A race,” he said, “is a work of art that people can look at and be affected by in as many ways as they are capable of understanding.”

  That was, of course, the credo of the front-runner, who has failed if he hasn’t consumed himself completely. “He was trying,” concluded Morgan, “for something that only the participants might be able to understand.”

  After Dallas, what might be called Pre’s paradox was conspicuous. The man with by far the most powerful cardiovascular engine also had a history of saying he had little physical talent. The man with the ideal, seventy-seven percent slow-twitch muscle fibers and a heart that hit 210 beats a minute also had a habit of dismissing the importance of all that in effective racing.

  During the first long talk he’d ever had with Mary Creel in 1971, he told her that talent was a myth. Ten guys on the team had more talent in their little finger, he said, but he beat them because he could withstand more discomfort. He seemed very much in earnest, seeming to believe that the limits of one’s inherent physiology could be overcome by sheer will power.

  I believe he was indulging in a natural kind of wish fulfillment for a front-runner, whose sense of sacrifice is such that he needs to believe not only that he is better than the field, but also that he can endure better than the field. Feeling talented doesn’t help when the going gets hard, but feeling tough does. If running is largely an act of will and his will is superior, it matters little what kind of engine he has.

  But of course the engine does matter. A runner needs a certain basic speed, adaptability to training, and mitochondrial blessings to run well. That Pre was so eager to ignore physiological reality is interesting. Consistently denying one’s ability or merit often suggests some degree of self-loathing. I’m not prepared to refute that possibility about Prefontaine, but if he had such feelings (and he was famous for having nervous doubts right before races) they were manageable. When faced with those lofty max VO2 numbers in Dallas, he grudgingly admitted he was gifted.

  Ultimately Pre came to accept that running is a balance of physical ability and mental desire. He even adopted the test of talent into his own pursuit of records. “I’d like to come back someday when I’m really in good shape,” he said, “and put that oxygen uptake mark way out there.”

  First he embarked on a quest that enlisted both Bowerman’s sympathy and counsel. Pre felt he owed a huge cultural debt to Scandinavia. For five years, he’d toured the tracks of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, seeing how every little town had a meet of its own. When he bought a house on McKinley Street, the first thing he did was build a sauna. He’d brought back plans for European fitness trails, or parcours, to put in Eugene parks.

  Pre had felt so welcome and understood in the smallest Finnish villages that he conceived a way of repaying its athletes. He’d invite a group of the best to Oregon and have them compete not just in Eugene but all over, from Coos Bay to Madras (which had the closest decent track to Fossil). He’d also get Lasse Viren over to his turf during his usual peak season of May.

  Bowerman thought it was a great idea. The AAU track and field administrator, Ollan Cassell, who’d known Pre since 1969, advised him that it needed to be a sanctioned meet or tour and that the US governing body didn’t give that right to athletes, only to established meet directors. He should go through the Oregon Track Club, which was putting on the national AAU meet that June.

  Instead, Prefontaine adopted the Bowerman view that sometimes it’s better to apologize later than ask permission first. He filed all the proper paperwork with the AAU, but before they could deny anything, he sent invitations to ten stellar Finns, including Viren. They accepted. Pre, using a network of high school coaches and tracks he’d developed through Nike, set up five meets all over the state. Presented with this fait accompli—and Pre’s popularity—Cassell had no choice but to grant the AAU sanction.

  Before the Finns arrived, Pre ran a solid 28:09.4 in the April Twilight Meet 10,000 and bragged about his strength. Viren immediately cabled that he was hurt and couldn’t come. “Losing him makes everything I’ve done worthless,” said Pre. “But I understand. There were meets in Europe when I didn’t show up to run against him.”

  “I told him that sounding off about how strong he was had been a mistake,” Bowerman would recall later, “that if he wanted to get those runners over here to his lair, he had to be more sly. But that was hard for him. He didn’t look beyond races. Hell, he didn’t look beyond laps.”

  Prefontaine had wildly overstated what losing Viren meant. It had little effect on another aim. Creel would remember that Pre wanted not just to compete with the Europeans on his own turf, but also to show them what America really was. “All they ever see of the United States is Los Angeles or New York,” he said “The big, crowded, hurrying cities. Those places aren’t the real America. These guys are going to find out how beautiful the United States is.”

  Pre had been impressed by the beauty of Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and France, Creel would say, “but when he compared them to Oregon, he felt they couldn’t hold a candle to ‘our mountains, our rivers, our ocean.’ He wanted the Finns, especially, to know how paradisiacal it is here. He also wanted them to know that there were people in places other than Finland who appreciated the sport.”

  The monthlong tour was an artistic success. The Finns who did come were treated to the homestyle hospitality that they had provided themselves. Pre even broke the American record for 2000 meters with 5:01.4 in the Coos Bay meet.

  But every stop lost money. If he were not to be personally bankrupted by his hands-across-the-seas gesture, he needed to attract at least 5,000 people to the last meet in Eugene, on May 29, 1975. Who would give him a 5000-meter duel worth watching? Pre naturally thought of the man who had come so close a year before, Frank Shorter. In March, at Frank’s invitation, Pre had trained with him in Colorado and New Mexico. But Frank had had his wisdom teeth out and had overtrained and been ill. Out of friendship, he came when Pre called. Bobbie and I put him up at our house near Hendricks Park.

  Seven thousand people filed in to see their clash, so as they went to the start, Prefontaine knew he was financially solvent. Paul Geis took the first three laps; Shorter led at the mile in 4:17. Prefontaine took over the lead after six laps. At two miles, Pre shot ahead and churned successive laps of 63, 64, and 63, running away with the race, running through the rising shouts of his people, his head cocked to the right, brow knitted tight. This was where he lived, and those long, searing drives never failed to be compelling. He ran the last fifty yards with his eyes shut, squeezing away the suffering. He finished in 13:23.8, only 1.6 seconds slower than his best. Soon the crowd was flowing around him, small boys waving programs, beaming matrons, girls in halter tops.

  That night there was a party at Geoff Hollister’s house. All the Finnish athletes were there, along with many of the families who had housed them. Prefontaine’s parents were there, along with his Marshfield coach, Walt McClure. As the beer flowed and the sandwiches circulated, there was talk of Pre’s going to Helsinki and his hospitality being returned. A new AAU rule that if
a runner did not race in the nationals he’d be unable to race in Europe during certain “moratorium” periods drew Pre’s scorn about the harm the national body was doing American track. “Where is the talent that I competed against in 1969?” he asked. “The shortage is of guys who are out of school and can still figure ways to train and find competition. I’m twenty-four years old and Frank is twenty-seven, and we’re veterans. That’s the shame. That’s what’s wrong with the American system.”

  Ray Prefontaine seemed daunted by his son’s ferocity. Having heard much of this before, we talked of where the best Dungeness crabs were being caught in Coos Bay. Steve leaned near and whispered to me that he’d never been crabbing. “I’ve never been fishing either, but for God’s sake, don’t tell anybody that.”

  Bobbie and I left the party at 11:00. Frank wanted to stay longer, so Pre said he’d drive him home, and he did at about 12:30. They sat in Pre’s car in our driveway and made a date for the three of us to run an easy ten in the morning. Shorter, by then an attorney, promised to brief Pre on legal challenges that might be brought against the AAU’s restrictions on international racing.

  “Yeah, well, let’s go over that tomorrow, when our heads are clear,” said Prefontaine, and he drove off down the hill. Frank walked into the house, slipped into bed, and slept soundly.

  At 7 a.m. on May 30, we awoke to the shock of our lives, that Prefontaine had been killed in a one-car accident on Skyline Drive, no more than a minute after dropping Frank off. We walked down through neighbors’ yards to the scene. The car had been removed by then, but there was broken glass on the street. We saw the accident report and learned he’d struck a natural outcropping of black basalt. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. The car had flipped over, coming to rest on that great chest. He had not broken a bone. The weight of his beloved butterscotch MGB had simply pressed the life out of him. If anyone had found Pre then, in the first five minutes, he or she might have saved him with a two-by-four and a brick.