by Kenny Moore
Bill’s savage testing remains the Nike way and helped set a lasting tone. “The intensity of the arguments between divisions today, between, say, Soccer and Running,” Phil Knight would say in 2005, “is no different than back in the ’70s when Johnson got so mad at Woodell over some banking question that he ended up screaming at him, ‘You’re not good for anything but a doorstop!’ Our visiting bankers heard this, saw Woodell in his wheelchair go raging back into his office, and turned white. They were therefore surprised, ten minutes later, when Jeff stuck his head in that office and asked Woodell if he would be over for dinner as usual, and Woodell said sure.”
During the early 1980s, Knight realized that some of Bill’s testiness had to do with his health. About the time of the 1980 Olympic Trials, Bowerman had noticed a number of disquieting signs. He was losing his balance a lot. His ankle had grown so weak it was hard for him to keep his foot steady on the gas pedal. He ignored the ankle because he’d always surged and slowed and surged on the highway (“If you cared about your stomach,” Jim Grelle would recall, “you did not get in a car with Bill behind the wheel.”), and anyway, Bill had learned, his father had driven the same maddening way.
But Bill got worse. “One day in the fall of 1980,” he recalled some time later, “I had a limp when I went out with Bill McHolick. He asked me what I thought was causing it. I told him I was just getting old. He said he knew a lot of old guys, but not a lot who limped.” McHolick inquired further and learned that the limp wasn’t the half of it. Bowerman didn’t have any feeling in his feet and had lost his night vision.
McHolick gave his old friend no choice but to undergo tests. Bill made the rounds of specialists. An oncologist had seen similar symptoms caused by a bone tumor pressing on the nerves, but Bowerman’s bones were clean. “Then we thought something might be wrong with my back,” Bowerman would recall, “so we had that X-rayed. The doctor said I had the back of an eighteen-year-old. An eighteen-year-old what he didn’t know, but there was nothing wrong with my back. So I went to a Eugene neurologist.”
Dr. Raymond Englander tested Bill’s reflexes and thought it might be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. “You can die in six months with ALS,” Bowerman said later, “so I asked him to goose the tests along.” Englander referred him to the University of California Medical School, where Dr. Robert Layser found that it wasn’t ALS and diagnosed him with “toxic polyneuropathy,” meaning something was poisoning his nervous system. But Layser couldn’t determine what it was.
A few weeks later, Bill’s medical advisers in Eugene sent him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Bowerman endured three more days of tests. They allowed the eminent Dr. Peter Dyck to conclude that his neuropathy had two components, one toxic and one hereditary. He had a predisposition to be sensitive to whatever was doing the damage, but Dyck couldn’t pinpoint the toxic agent. “They suggested he research his family history to find out if such a problem ran in the family,” Barbara would say, “but there were few ancestors whom he didn’t know all about, and none had suffered anything like it.”
Bowerman came home and reported all this to McHolick, who had found him a good pair of plastic braces that let him walk with less stumbling. “With every negative for a specific disease,” McHolick said later, “the more it seemed it had to do with his environment.” So McHolick and Bowerman walked through his typical day, noting what he drank, ate, wore, and touched. “It didn’t take long,” said Bill, “to find I’d been sniffing glue.” For twenty-three years, from 1958 to 1981, Bowerman had been laboring in tight, unventilated quarters, assembling his shoes with rubber contact cement. “He didn’t realize,” said his old three-miler Vic Reeve, now an eminent forensic chemist, “that what he was working with, acrylamide glue, before it polymerizes, can enter through the skin and cause nerve damage.”
“I was killing myself with it,” Bowerman would say. “It had two poisons in it [the other was n-hexane in the solvents he employed] and was dissolving the sheaths on my nerves.” When he stopped using it, that wintry day of discovery in 1981, some function began to return. “My eyesight was normal in six months,” he would remember. “I got some regeneration in my skin, but my muscles never really, fully came back.” From then on, he would walk with a pronounced dropped foot, slapping his lead leg down as he had once exaggeratedly done in demonstrating form for his hurdlers.
It was hard to see this without thinking of the price Bill had paid. Bowerman, giver of soft, light shoes to the runners of the world, had in the process rendered himself unable to run in them. He would always be offhand about this—“inventors,” he noted, likening himself to Daedalus, the Greek mythic symbol of human craft, “seem to make the gods nervous”—but the punishment seemed awfully steep for the mundane sin of ignorance.
Bill may not have whined about fate mocking him so, but he was not immune to wishing for a different outcome. In 1983, as he watched one of the first masters (forty-and-over age groups) track meets at Hayward Field, a reporter asked him whether masters competition was not just one more self-absorbed, baby boomer phenomenon.
“They’re enjoying it, aren’t they?” Bill snapped. “They’re not hurting anybody. And they’re fit. They’re making their whole life experience more vivid. My regret is I can’t get out there and run with them. I’m jealous of those elder statesmen. God, I envy them.” He remained able to walk the hill to his upper and lower pastures along the McKenzie and hike the five miles of fence line on his and Jon’s Wheeler County properties. He swam when he could, but lived such a busy life that that wasn’t often.
Another loss weighed upon Bowerman at about this time. One of his great champions departed the world in the prime of life. In late 1982, Bill grieved to learn that Harry Jerome had died.
Harry had helped Bill coach the Duck sprinters in the mid-1960s and taken his master’s degree in 1967. He’d retired from racing after the Mexico Olympics and gone to work for Sports Canada, setting up the Premier’s Sport Award program to encourage elementary-school fitness. He was also the Canadian national sprint coach.
Jerome was so esteemed as an African Canadian role model that he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, becoming Sir Harry Jerome. This had tickled Bowerman more than it did Harry. “Harry’s full name was Harry Winston Jerome,” Bill would say. “He was born in 1940, and he told me once that his father so admired Churchill’s magnificent defiance during the London blitz that he’d stuck Winston in his name. How could you not knight a moniker like that?”
On December 7, 1982, Jerome suffered a brain seizure and died on the way to the hospital. He was forty-two. Canada honored him with statues and named Vancouver’s finest track meet in his honor.
This, for Bowerman, was far too evocative of losing Pre. He reported the details of Harry’s passing to the Ad Hoc group at a mournful Tuesday lunch. Bob Newland would always remember Bill saying athletes dying young felt a little like death passing over him in the war.
“I’m steeling myself,” Bill said, “to be the last one to go. I’m doomed to always be giving eulogies for those who should have lived to give mine.” Bill McHolick absorbed that and said, “Okay, I want you to say I was the real inventor of the waffle sole and I died in the throes of sexual congress with three cheerleaders.”
“Only three? Damn it, McHolick, it’s your fault. You’re the one who kept me from a timely passing.”
In fact, there was much to live for. The most gifted female distance runner in American history, Mary Decker, had moved to Eugene from Boulder, Colorado, in 1979 and proceeded to run up a storm. “I came because Pre had always said I should come,” she would say some years later, “and the 1980 Trials would be there, and I had great Nike friends there.”
Mary had missed the 1976 Olympics with the pain-locked shins of compartment syndrome. Surgery in 1977 had freed her calf muscles from their constraining fascia, and she returned to blissful running. “It almost seems like the faster I go the easier it is,” she said after a 4:
17 indoor mile in 1980 in the Houston Astrodome.
After she settled into a house in Eugene, she asked Athletics West administrator and physiologist Dick Brown to coach her. He agreed and soon had Bowerman involved as well. “Bill would come watch my workouts,” Mary would recall, “and tell me I was going out too fast in my races. He was always comforting and warm, and very respectful of my talent. I’d heard he had some male chauvinism in his history, but he wasn’t like that at all with me.” She had heard right, but the chauvinism had evaporated in the face of Doris Brown’s, Francie Larrieu’s, and her own proof that women could run as hard and devotedly as any man. “I enjoy working with them more than men,” Bowerman would say in 1980. “They have fewer bad habits to unlearn.” His wink acknowledged that he was the one undergoing the reeducation.
Dick Brown and Bowerman agreed that there was no need for Decker to risk a lot of mileage or run killing intervals. If she remained consistently healthy, her talent would lift her ever higher. And it did. Over the next decade she spoiled the Hayward crowds with her graceful command of all distances from 800 to 10,000 meters. In 1982, she set six world records, two at the mile and the 2000, 3000, 5000, and 10,000 meters. The last was a 31:35.4 run in flats at an all-comers meet in Eugene. Sports Illustrated put her on the cover, hands on hips, head cocked, as if to say, “Wanna race?”
A year later, she entered both the 1500 and 3000 in the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki, events that were dominated by the Soviets, including Moscow Olympic 1500-meter champion and world record holder Tatyana Kazankina. Decker’s race plans were suggested by Bill. Mary had little experience running in tight packs because no wing of women could ever keep up with her. She had always ranged out ahead, going as hard as she felt capable.
But she was not going to break contact with the Russians in the Helsinki 3000. So Mary would run from the front, where she was comfortable, but not really try to break away. As Pre had in Munich, she would gradually increase the pace late, in her case over the last 600 meters, to sap the kick of all who stayed with her.
In the early laps, Decker looked strong, but Kazankina looked stronger and stalked her all the way. Into the homestretch, Kazankina tore by Decker to a half-yard lead. This elicited a competitive fury Decker had never revealed. She dug down, fought back past Kazankina, and won the world championship in 8:34.62.
It didn’t seem that a race could possibly be more dramatic, but the 1500 was. Mary had to be fatigued, and the Soviets now knew how good she was and would use team tactics against her. Bowerman, recalling Grelle and Prefontaine’s experiences with rough European tactics, had suggested that Mary should run the 1500 just as she had in the 3000, up front, out of the range of Soviet elbows and spikes. But this promised to be harder, because the faster pace of the metric mile would give those drafting on her a bigger advantage. It was a plan that trusted Decker to know and run within her limits.
So Mary led the 1500 final at a pace that felt fast but not sacrificially so, to preserve her finish. Behind her ran a fresh Zamira Zaitseva, whom all the Russians in the race were working to help win.
Late in the last turn, Zaitseva blasted into the lead. This time Mary’s form didn’t change. She simply ran tall and sustained her speed. Zaitseva was tightening. Decker came even with ten meters to go. Zaitseva hurled herself at the line, falling, but Decker had won, 4:00.90 to 4:01.19.
Mary was the runner of the meet, and SI Sportsperson of the Year. More important to Decker, her Helsinki double made her the favorite for the 1984 Olympics, to be held in her native LA. “It just couldn’t get more perfect,” she said that winter, in no small part because earlier that year she had met British discus-thrower Richard Slaney. They would marry in 1985.
The best venue for selecting an Olympic team is the track where the Games will be held, so Los Angeles was naturally awarded the 1984 Trials. It would be the first time in twelve years that Eugene didn’t stage them. They were barely missed. In June, the NCAA meet returned to Eugene, and the Oregon men, under Bill Dellinger and led by 800- and 1500-meter champion Joachim Cruz, won the team title, Dellinger’s first.
That night, 200 of Bowerman’s former athletes gathered at the Valley River Inn Ballroom for a tribute to Bill and Barbara organized by Wade Bell, Bob Newland, Bill McHolick, Ray Hendrickson, and Geoff Hollister. All received a striking photo by Brian Lanker of Bill in a green cowboy hat and work overalls, his arms crossed over a mossy fence rail. The program had perhaps too many references to his proclivities in the shower, but there were other gems.
“My memory,” said adhesives company president Bob Craig, “includes Bill Bowerman shooting me in the leg with his starter’s pistol, which required a tetanus shot at the infirmary.”
“Mine,” added 4:01 miler Bob Rhen, “was when Bill couldn’t remember my name but, wanting to call encouragement in a race, yelled, ‘Go, Burns!,’ the name of the town I was from.”
“For me,” said 26-foot long-jumper, Dr. Tom Smith, “it was the look on Bowerman’s face when I spent my dorm money on a new Mustang.”
Most poignant at the ensuing dance was the sight of Jerry Tarr and his daughter Sheila, who that afternoon had won the women’s heptathlon for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Bowerman’s role in his men’s lives was the topic of much conversation. Some verged on the academic. University of Oregon political science professor Art Hanhardt, who’d had many Men of Oregon in his classes, announced that in his professional opinion, the varsity and Oregon Track Club “cohort” of Jere Van Dyk, Roscoe Divine, Bill Norris, Arne Kvalheim, Mike Deibele, Damien Koch, Dave Wilborn, Mike Manley, Jon Anderson, and me “had kept in touch more closely and been intertwined in each others’ lives more than any combat-bonded group I have ever studied.” This was greeted with the cry that wounds from Bowerman surely qualified as battle inflicted.
The occasion was the first real consideration by his athletes of Bowerman’s place in history. The world of track and field had weighed in years before. The US Track and Field Hall of Fame had first selected him for induction in 1978, two years after admitting Pre, but Bill refused to accept the honor until they first enshrined Bill Hayward, who had of course coached many more Olympic teams than Bill’s one. For reasons known only to the Hall of Fame officials, they have yet to induct Hayward, but they inducted Bowerman anyway, in 1981.
Down the years, as was only natural for people he treated so differently, his men developed diverse views on Bowerman’s stature. Arne Kvalheim, for example, felt that the American college system—geared for team scores in dual meets and national championships—had worked against Bill’s developing truly great athletes, in contrast to the likes of Herb Elliott’s Percy Cerutty or Jim Ryun’s Bob Timmons, whom Kvalheim characterized as “great coaches for one extremely gifted athlete.” Kvalheim considered Bowerman to have been too conservative to produce greatness.
“Bill’s strength and his weakness,” Kvalheim would say, “was that he didn’t let the really gifted athletes work up to their potential, for fear of overtraining. Hence, after Otis Davis he never coached another world record holder or Olympic champion. An incredible number of University of Oregon athletes developed to be good, solid runners, but none of us achieved anything truly great, Pre included.”
But Bowerman continued to believe that the thing to do was seek an optimum load for each individual. He continued to practice a moderate approach, and often found that less work brought more benefit.
Once, back in 1970, after miler Mike McClendon kept getting hurt under then-assistant Dellinger’s workouts, Bill offered to take him over and got him down to 4:00.3 on fewer than thirty miles per week. Bill said he was as proud of that mile PR as any he’d ever contributed to.
Steeplechaser Henry Marsh, the only runner Bill was still coaching regularly, was both example and exponent of moderate training. After setting his American record in 1980, Marsh had moved back to Utah for his third year of law school, but faithfully called Bill every Sunday night to repo
rt on his workouts and receive a new week’s worth. This regimen had resulted in Marsh’s ranking number one in the world in 1981 and 1982, but he’d suffered weird mishaps in big races. In the 1981 World Cup, he won but was disqualified for being pushed into the infield before the last water jump and having to run around it. In the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki, as he was charging past the leader, he fell over the last hurdle and placed eighth. He was wild, therefore, to redeem himself in the 1984 Olympics.
“Bill and I were meticulous in planning that whole year,” Marsh recalled some twenty years later. After winning the Trials in LA Marsh was elated. “And the next day my son was born,” he would say. “I was ecstatic, but it was too much. I didn’t sleep. I just broke down. I got a virus that dogged me all the way to the Olympics.” Still, his training did not seem to have been totally compromised. If he had a good day, he could be a contender.
To be there for Marsh and to see Decker’s finest hour, Bill and Barbara went to their first Olympics since Munich. They flew to LA and rented a car, thinking they knew the city well enough after years of visits. But a few days later, Wade Bell got a call in his Eugene office. “Wade,” Bill said, “you’re an Olympian. You shouldn’t miss these Olympics.” Bell said they’d be nice to see, but he had too much business to attend to. Bowerman finally admitted they’d been buffaloed by what seemed a dozen new freeways and said that Wade really ought to come drive them around. Bell flew down and took the wheel. They gloried in seeing Duck Joachim Cruz, running for his native Brazil, beat Sebastian Coe to win the 800 in an Olympic record 1:43.0.
But the fortunes of Bowerman-guided entrants weren’t happy. The women’s 3000-meter final, of course, was darkly historic. It was the first meeting between Decker and young, barefoot South African Zola Budd, running for Britain. Mary’s race plan was similar to what had worked in Helsinki, a building acceleration over the last 600 meters. But her preparations were far from ideal. She had concluded the Olympic Trials with a painful Achilles tendon. Dr. Stan James had injected it and ordered her off it for a month. She trained by running in the Easter Seals Pool until eight days before the first round of the 3,000 in the Olympics. She qualified strongly. But her instructions for the final were a little different.