by Kenny Moore
As Bowerman turned his attention to his farm, the needs of his university and community, and those who sought him out for coaching and counseling, he kept a weather eye on the goings-on in the world of sports governance. Progress on that front was heartening in 1976.
All year, the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports held hearings, hired a huge staff to organize information, and studied the American Olympic sports governing bodies. In 1977, the PCOS issued a report outlining legislation to end the NCAA-AAU feud and solve a dozen other systemic problems. The proposed law would dissolve multisport rulers such as the AAU and allow the USOC to decide (using specific criteria protecting athletes’ rights and coaches’ membership) who got to be the recognized national governing body in each sport. In the fall of 1977, the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on the resulting bill, put forward by Iowa’s John Culver and Alaska’s Ted Stevens. After the NCAA’s Walter Byers was mollified that actual guarantees of athletes’ rights wouldn’t be in the law of the land, but rather in the USOC constitution, it passed.
The Amateur Athletic Act of 1978 broke up the AAU and insured that athletes and coaches had the rights that Bowerman and Prefontaine had fought for. The IAAF had to accept the new US national governing body because it was a federal decree (the Soviet ministry of sport, for example, dictated to the IAAF who to accept as its representative). Bowerman was overjoyed that the new US track body was required to admit all the NCAA coaches and give them votes proportionate to their numbers. In addition, twenty percent of every committee’s members had to be athletes.
The new authority took on a name worthy of its drawing together of old foes, The Athletics Congress, or TAC. The AAU-NCAA war was over. There was only one major issue the act could not address, because it took international cooperation—the question of amateurism and Olympic eligibility.
Even before the 1978 law change, Nike was taking steps to do something for postcollegians, who were essentially abandoned by the college-focused American track family. Back in 1972, when Mac Wilkins was an undergraduate, he wrote a paper on amateurism for Bill, carefully examining the pros and cons of the system and coming to the conclusion that “the time has come for track to save itself by throwing off a dead institution”—namely, the Olympic insistence that athletes make no money from their sport. Bowerman had scrawled on the paper “I like your thinking” and advocated establishing “standards of athletic conduct that operate according to principle, not expediency, an elastic system that grows with a changing culture.”
Bowerman might have been writing the prospectus for Nike’s next creation. In November 1977, Nike formed Athletics West, a club designed to provide elite postgrad athletes with the kind of support Eastern Europeans got from their governments. Members would receive coaching, a basic stipend, insurance, travel to big meets, a weight room, an exercise physiologist, and a world-class masseur. Knight declined to name the club for Nike, wishing not to link commercial benefits with the concept.
For head coach, Knight hired a man Bill had recommended to succeed him at Oregon, South Eugene High’s Harry Johnson. Thirteen charter athletes came to Eugene from around the country, and a year later, Athletics West broke ground on its own training center and office building in West Eugene. A newsletter was begun. Pre would have ripped it to shreds, though. Its letterhead had a drawing of the moment on the last backstretch of the Munich 5000 when Gamoudi came muscling past him.
In the coming years, Knight would make a compelling case for how important Bowerman was as the conscience of the company. But as with most consciences, Bill tended to gnaw and nag and gnaw some more. Somehow, the bigger Nike grew, the harder it would be for Bill to fit in.
In 1978, when the shock of losing Prefontaine had ebbed somewhat, Mary Creel returned from Southern California and became Phil Knight’s secretary, reading his mail and briefing him on all things. She would stay for eight years. Part of her job was to help organize board meetings (“and wait on members hand and foot”), so she saw Bowerman often.
“Bill was really nice to me, because we’d had that time in Munich with Steve,” she would say. “But I think he was always uncomfortable coming to Nike. He was less and less happy with the corporation it became.” Creel observed the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Phil had a deep-seated fear of Bill, but at the same time he was essentially Bill’s boss. It seemed to me that Phil’s attitude was ‘I have to tolerate you because I’d be nothing without you, but it’s uncomfortable.’”
Knight would agree: “It was awkward—a very complicated set of feelings.” In late summer 1978, Bowerman wrote to John Jaqua describing the philosophical divide he felt. He cited a meeting some six years earlier at which he had asked what the company’s objectives were.
“You looked at Buck,” Bill wrote, “and he said, ‘Make money.’ I concur that without it you can’t swim, but I said, ‘Mine continues to be to make the best possible product at a price that will achieve the objective but keep the customer coming back.’ I hear lip service to that, but I observe us not only standing still, but distributing a lot of crap. Obviously there is more confidence in [products developed in] Exeter, Saco, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan than in the input I have made in the past three years. All correctable—but not if Pony, Brooks, Etonic, New Balance Cobra, Famolare, Diadora Autry, and fourteen others cut us up.”
“Bill seemed sad to feel more and more a dinosaur,” Mary Creel would say, “the crazy inventor that everyone tolerated.” Creel would recall Bowerman once showing a design for a workingman’s shoe, to which marketing head Rob Strasser said, “You want to see your garbageman wearing Nikes?”
After such a rejoinder, Bowerman would return to his basement shoe lab, his own lair, where he could be fierce in what he perceived as a running R&D battle between Eugene and Exeter. In the fall of 1978, writer and 2:19 marathoner Tom Derderian, who worked for Jeff Johnson in R&D in Exeter, found himself a pawn in that war. As Derderian would tell the story, Bowerman had invited him to Eugene, ostensibly to show him how research was done there. Instead, Derderian spent a week in Eugene being given only menial tasks by Bill.
Athletes on whom Bill had used such methods to haze them into making some sign of respect for his authority might have guessed what was happening, but Derderian was not interested in such rites of passage. One task was to make waffle molds by hand. “When I questioned what the company would gain by my operating nineteenth-century machinery, he got angry,” Derderian would recall years later. “He said, ‘You don’t want to do things my way, so get out of here before I throw you up the stairs.’ I certainly did not feel physically threatened, but it was clear that he was angry and irrational and had no intention of working with me, so I left. I wasn’t about to have a fistfight with him.” Derderian returned to Exeter and reported that he hadn’t seen any research going on in Eugene. “I told Jeff Johnson that Bowerman’s day had passed.”
Oregon varsity miler Mike Friton would begin working in Bill’s lab a year later and stay on full-time after graduating in 1981. His take on the Derderian situation offers some insight into Bowerman’s methodology.
“In the lab, Bill often tested people before he would work with them,” Friton said in 2005. “The test was usually some form of manual labor. He would get you started and then walk away, letting you finish on your own. If you completed the work and did a good job, you were in. This was simple for someone coming from a working-class family, but for those who did not—or who thought themselves above the work—it could be very difficult, if not impossible. Bill often told the story of an athlete from a wealthy South American family who tried out for the track team. When Bill told him that he was expected to have a part-time job to be on the team, the athlete replied, ‘Work—work is for fools.’ Every time Bill told that story he would laugh so hard it would nearly bring him to tears.”
Friton didn’t witness the tossing of Derderian, but he heard about it from the tosser. “I recall some of Bill’s side of the story,” he said. “Bi
ll was expecting Tom days before he showed up. As a result, he thought Tom was more interested in his social agenda than in working with him. Then, when Bill tried putting him to work, he failed the test that would have gotten him through the door.”
In late October Derderian wrote Bowerman a letter. Bill never answered it, but he filed it with his favorite patent documents and sole designs. “Dear Mr. Bowerman,” Derderian began. “A week ago I left you; you were in a rage, one which shocked me and left me with no rebuttal. Perhaps you have recovered from your anger with me; I recover more slowly. I am Armenian and for us, forgiveness often takes generations.” He went on to describe his view of the abortive week and why he had been frustrated (“I needed to know your plan, what you were doing and why, so I could insure that production procedures would remain on design to produce a shoe that would function according to your researched theory and consequent prototypes.”).
Of the angry confrontation, Derderian wrote, “At thirty years old I am not your superior, not even your equal, but I am not a college freshman to be taken mockingly to the showers and pissed on.” Then he offered a truce: “A working relationship is still possible and I welcome that. . . . I stand ready to aid your efforts in any way. A phone call to me will speed delivery of any equipment and materials I can provide.”
Although Bill didn’t write back, he must have mentioned the letter to someone. When word reached Woodell, he fired Derderian, who promptly got a job with another shoe company. “Later I learned that many such encounters between Exeter people and Bowerman followed,” Derderian would say, “and that it had not been Bowerman’s order or suggestion to fire me.”
Eventually Derderian went back to Nike—at three times his old salary. “So I figure that disagreeing with Bowerman ultimately was a good career move. I’d like to think that he kept the letter out of admiration for a guy who stood up to him, or out of guilt, but I don’t know.” (Personally, I think it was Tom speaking so darkly of taking generations to forgive. Bill was going to give him time.)
Phil Knight always knew it was going to be tough. “To this day,” he would say years later, “I’m not sure I didn’t start this company to please Bill Bowerman. Old teammates have said to me, ‘You did it to spend a lifetime with him, not just four years.’ And I can’t disagree. But then they say, ‘Bill must make it seem like two lifetimes.’ And I can’t disagree with that either. Bill basically just railed at us all the time as a company. We made the worst shoes, except for all the others. Barbara once said, ‘I don’t know how you put up with him.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how you do.’”
Barbara later came across sheaves of old letters, which she divided into two stacks. “One was of my pleas and complaints to Bill in the late ’70s and early ’80s,” she would recall. “The other was letters from Bill to Buck—complaining strongly that no one in Beaverton was paying any attention to the excellent advice and shoes he was sending from his basement lab in Eugene. It made me laugh to think that while I was nagging Bill he was nagging Phil and both men were ignoring the nags, with good reason. Both the naggers were well supplied, maybe oversupplied, with everything their hearts desired—yes, even attention and appreciation.” Barbara would remember that Bill often remarked, “I have everything I want. Why would I want more?” Since she felt the same, she was moved to wonder at their seeming discontent. “My explanation for those testy notes is that we were pretty normal human beings,” she would conclude, “able to find or make up a few trials to fuss about even while we were fully enjoying our ‘happily ever after’ life on our land in Oregon. I’d like our children to know we were not always crotchety.”
Witnesses to Bill’s daily life in the late 1970s insist that he never let concern over Nike’s direction or R&D head-butting interfere with his radiating contentment. Such irritants were nothing compared with the joys of his burgeoning farm. The sheep were fine lawn mowers and provided wool for Barbara’s spinning and knitting. He observed the problems and rewards of the Jaquas’ Hereford cattle operation and wondered if he might do better. He raised chickens. He tried to keep a goat, but refused to have any animal smarter than he was on the property, and after it learned to climb trees to outwit him, he served it at a faculty barbecue, calling it venison until it was eaten.
Bowerman spoke and wrote about all this in a tone derived less from Thomas Jefferson than Will Rogers. In 1978, a couple of days before he would receive Derderian so roughly in Eugene, he rose and delivered his greatest Round Table paper, entitled “Gallus Gallus.”
“This is not a report for feminists,” he began, “Rather, it is research and flight of the imagination concerning men and cocks . . . or roosters. . . . It is my purpose to raise large chickens that lay lots of eggs and do not crap in the carport. . . .
“In keeping book on chickens and isolation of the genes for: one, big birds; two, lots of eggs; three, the mess in the carport, it is necessary to isolate individuals or pairs. But how do you tell who lays and what?
According to Page Smith in a book named The Chicken, if you look at a chicken’s vent and it is a dull saffron, the hen is probably not laying. However, if it is roseate red, it is likely a laying hen. I tried this several times. I picked up each hen, turned her tail back and looked. Almost without exception, the vent would wink at me. Not just once but several times.
I stopped this practice because, as Knight Duncan once remarked of an English laird, ‘There is nothing queer about Chumly.’ I did not want the reputation of being ‘queer with chickens.’
“So how do you tell who lays and who goes into the pot? I found another authority. Ulisse Aldrovandi of Verona found in his research that when the hen is held in one hand, if two fingers can be laid at the vent, the hen is a layer. If, however, there is room for only one finger, the prospect is for the pot.
“I tried this method. I picked up a nice hen, presented her backside, and laid my index and third finger in the pelvic crease. The hen got an alarmed expression, squawked, and took flight. After more trials, I learned the Aldrovandi method simply causes the hens’ eyes to bug out and they continue to look with some suspicion on the examiner thereafter.
“I isolated a single hen in her apartment for four days. My grandmother said that a hen with a rich, red, full comb is a layer. My testing by the solitary confinement method has proved without a doubt that my grandmother knew more than either Page Smith or Aldrovandi . . . ”
For fifteen pages, Bill lavished such style on his methods of selecting eggs for incubation and qualities of breeding stock. “Starting with Rhode Island Reds, a banty for setting and white leghorns, what did I get? The hybrid vigor I am seeking. A rooster which weighs eight pounds. White with a mantle of red. He seems to have received, like Elisha, a double portion of the spirit. Released from a pen, I have seen him service a flock of pullets on the hillside in less time than it takes an Oregon runner to cover a mile.”
Bill covered the world records for egg laying and his adoption of a brooder that could accommodate fifty chicks, and revealed that his fascination with genetics went back to his biology professor, Ralph Huestis. “Many people inquire about the apparent superiority of black athletes over whites and whether this has to do with something like a longer Achilles tendon,” Bill wrote. “Ralph would reply, ‘Not to speak specifically about the tendon or physical characteristics of the races, but this may be evidence of hybrid vigor.’” He included a page of Mendelian hereditary probabilities, explaining why it takes five generations for a trait to breed true.
He dilated upon his methods for controlled experiments, keeping the birds in different portable cottages, which he called galleria from Columella. He gathered eggs daily, weighing, measuring, dating, and recording them. He found that Pliny the Elder had preceded him in finding that long eggs hatched into a hen and round ones into a rooster. “There is a modern study going on today in Sweden on the production of square eggs. The theory being that a dozen square eggs would pack into a smaller space. I join the hens in being unalterabl
y opposed. Certainly a scientific study would be required to produce not only hens with square vents but also cocks with square . . . no the idea is preposterous!”
He addressed the issue of predators, which included the fox, the opossum, “and even my four-year old grandson,” who, Bill said, “has been thoroughly trounced twice by the red rooster!
“About a year ago, I was losing one chicken each night to something large enough to mash down the chicken country condominiums which were designed after a great horned owl settled in on silent wings and took the head off a Jersey Giant pullet. I have made numerous nocturnal defense sallies, armed with buckshot. Only twice have I had the wily rascal in my beam. Finally, in midsummer, the distress calls awakened me. Grabbing my arms I hurried to the defense. I caught the eyes in the flashlight but before I could get the shotgun into position they were gone. I walked around the house, scanned a maple tree, then the lawn. Two coals of fire appeared. Slowly I raised the gun and let fly. The recoil raised the gun and the light. I said to myself, That so-and-so won’t go far!
“Then, from Lady Barbara’s flower planting around the edge of the lawn I heard a hissing. ‘Snakes,’ I thought. But the light beam revealed a fountain. I had blown a hole in the plastic pipe two inches below the ground. ‘Blaspheme and Fire!’ I raged.
“I shut off the main line and went to bed.”
He ended with a coda of surpassing sweetness.
“Some of the good things that come of researching with chickens include night hunting, coon fried chicken, cockfights, and some of the richest fertilizer known to horticulture.