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Seen from the world of today's track and field, Bill Bowerman appears larger than life. As a coach at the University of Oregon, he is associated with names like Henry Marsh, Mac Wilkins, Steve Prefontaine, Harry Jerome, Bill Dellinger, and Otis Davis. He was the head track coach of the U.S. Olympic team in 1972, holding the team together through the hostage crisis there. He played a role in shaking the sport of track and field loose from the AAU and their perpetual power struggles with the NCAA. By carefully studying advances made by colleagues around the world, like his longtime friend Arthur Lydiard, he popularized many of the advances made in the science of training for his sport. He is credited, due to his massively popular book Jogging, with bringing the popular running boom to the United States. And his experiments in better footwear for his athletes, combined with the entreprenurial spirit of one of those athletes, led to the creation of Nike, Inc.
The common thread running through all these stories is the athletes, who he named in his traditional fall season-opening speech as "Men of Oregon." Author Kenny Moore was one of these athletes, a national champion at several distances and a two-time Olympic marathoner who finished fourth in the 1972 Munich Games. Moore tells Bowerman's story from inside and out, working from the extensive primary materials collected by Bowerman's wife, Barbara, as well as his own interviews with dozens of the Men of Oregon. Bowerman's story is theirs, and in Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, Moore gives Davis, Jerome, Dyrol Burleson, and Jim Grelle, among others, their due.
As such, the book spans a wider chunk of history than most track books. Bowerman's stories overlap those told in books by (or about) Peter Snell, George Young, Prefontaine, and Bob Schul, but told from this different perspective, new details are revealed and depth added to the characters.
Moore clearly holds respect passing into adulation for his former coach, but he is not afraid to show the jams Bowerman's strong personality led him into. For example, Moore tells of the split between Bowerman and his protege and Oregon successor, Bill Dellinger, which began immediately after Prefontaine's death and lasted nearly a decade. He details the story of Jere Van Dyk, a talented miler who never really connected with Bowerman despite years of effort. He also shows Bowerman's less-well-known triumphs, particularly his role in the 1968 Olympic team's discussions about civil rights and a potential boycott of African-American athletes, a movement which eventually involved Tommie Smith and John Carlos' protest on the Mexico City medal stand.
Moore's perspective as an insider is sometimes comic, as when he tells regularly of the people (including himself) who declined Bowerman's offers to invest in Blue Ribbon Sports, the new company launched by former miler Phil "Buck" Knight. When the company went public as Nike, Moore writes:
[Bowerman] appeared at my front door with a briefcase and a printout showing that $1,000 invested back in 1966, when I had had my chance, would be worth $750,000 now. This rendered me speechless.
"But," he said, "you must always know that as long as I'm with the company, there will be these for you." He whipped out a box of Cortezes.
The Cortez was based on training shoes Bowerman had designed to allow Moore to train without stress fractures, and the author found Bowerman's gesture quite revealing: "We'd made our choices and we'd lived with them happily, but wasn't it a kick to tease the other about what might have been?"
Perhaps, late in the book, there is too much of what might have been about Bowerman's life—the lost potential of Prefontaine, the rift with Dellinger, and Bowerman's ongoing frustration with the massive marketing machine Nike had become. But in the end, it's clear that Bowerman's life was unquestionably a story, and Moore the one to tell it.
Moore, Kenny. Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. Rodale, Inc. 2006.
Posted by Parker Morse at 2:21 p.m. | Tags: Book Reviews
jamison commented, on July 20, 2008 at 5:22 p.m.:
What did Bowerman have to do with Henry Marsh?