Pre: The Story of America's Greatest Running Legend, Steve Prefontaine Read online

  “I felt like I should have made my sprint earlier,” he said, in what was to become a familiar refrain. As hard as Pre raced, he always thought that he could have gone faster if there had been someone to push him. “They say you get stronger as you get older,” he continued. “If I keep getting this much stronger every year, I don’t know what I’ll be doing. Plus I feel faster and more confident.”

  Pre’s two-mile victory in a dual meet against UCLA in April 1970 came an hour after he tied for first in the mile at the same meet. EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD

  Pre cruised through that first year of track, easily winning the three-mile at each meet through the Pac-8 Championships. By the NCAA Championship meet in June, Steve could hardly have been more confident. He had run a mile 15 days before in 3:57.4, a personal best by three seconds. It was also one of only three races—all miles—that he ever lost in Eugene. Oregon teammate Roscoe Divine edged him out with a 3:56.3. But Pre was satisfied with his personal record. He felt ready for all comers in the three-mile at Des Moines.

  “I think the first time I met him personally was my freshman year,” rival Garry Bjorklund of the University of Minnesota recollects. “He scared the pants off me. Pre was the first person I met where there was so much to bite off, you couldn’t chew.” Bjorklund, too, was a freshman, and his 4:05.1 high school mile time the year before had been the only one in the country better than Pre’s 4:06.0.

  Bjorklund and Villanova’s Dick Buerkle challenged Pre with two laps to go, but he fought them off despite a painful gash on his right foot from an altercation with a diving board bolt three days before. Twelve stitches and 24 hours in ice got him to the starting line; toughness brought him the win in 13:22.0.

  “I haven’t looked at it yet,” he grimaced after the race. “I’m kinda scared to look at it.”

  Despite his injury, Pre had run his last half-mile in 2:00.4, scotching rumors that he had no kick. Indeed, before the AAU meet in Bakersfield, California, a week later, he boasted to opponent Rick Riley of Washington State, “I ran a two-minute half in the NCAA, and nobody—nobody—is going to outsprint me!”

  But on a frantic last lap at the AAU three-mile race, first Frank Shorter, a postcollegian running for the Florida Track Club, then Riley, then Lindgren, and finally Jack Bacheler, also running for the Florida Track Club, cruised by the Oregon freshman. He had run 57.8 for the last lap, but it hadn’t been good enough. He did manage to nose out Bjorklund, however, in a manner Garry recalls with humor.

  “At that time, I still thought of myself to be a bit of a kicker. On the last lap, Pre got a jump on me and I closed again and again, and on the corner, I went to go around him . . . and he went out with me! I lost stride and never caught him to the finish. I had him that day, I think, but when you come from northern Minnesota, you don’t see those tactics very often.”

  The fifth-place finish qualified Pre for his second AAU tour overseas. In the first match against West Germany, Steve first met the runner he perhaps liked least as an opponent—Harald Norpoth.

  For 4750 of the 5000 meters, Prefontaine led, with Norpoth shadowing, and teammate Kenny Moore and Werner Girke of West Germany dropping back. On the last lap, the 26-year-old Norpoth unleashed a potent kick and won going away in 13:34.6.

  Pre was disgusted.

  “I don’t have respect for a runner who’d let a kid do all the work and then go by at the end,” he grumbled. His evaluation was typical. He was the 19-year-old “kid” pitted against “old men.” He had time yet, to grow and mature, to become better. It was an attitude stemming probably from something that Coach McClure had tried to teach him before he left Marshfield High.

  “My one concern was that he understand that his accomplishments as a prep runner were just a beginning, a plateau from which to reach future greater heights. ‘Don’t peak out after high school, or I will have disserved you,’ was my plea. He assumed this responsibility in typical fashion.”

  “Never Give a Inch”

  Back in Eugene, the international veteran tried to make ends meet. The fraternity he had moved into in the fall of his sophomore year went under and was converted to Mama’s, a natural foods eatery. Pre had served as the fraternity’s breakfast cook—up at 6:00 a.m., out for a 30-minute run, then in to cook breakfast before classes.

  Amid this impossible schedule, he went undefeated in cross country, including his first of three NCAA cross country titles when he broke the field assembled at Williamsburg, Virginia.

  On the track, he dominated early-season meets, and the collegiate supremacy he had displayed in 1970 continued into 1971. By the Pac-8 meet in Seattle in May, he had a string of 21 straight collegiate meets without a loss. He was the hotshot prodigy, on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a freshman, and his fame still growing as a sophomore. He was called “World” by his teammates, a nickname Mac Wilkins came up with to keep Pre humble. It was short for “World Famous” and Pre disliked the name so intensely that Wilkins was the only one who dared use it to his face with any regularity.

  From the public, there was adulation, which Pre, depending on his mood, either catered to or disdained. On the one hand, Steve proudly clipped all the news stories about himself and pasted them into a scrapbook; but he could also be hard on those he suspected of sycophancy, and he protected his privacy when possible.

  At the Pac-8 meet in Seattle, Washington high school miler Scott Daggatt had his first encounter with Pre. “I saw this guy in dark glasses, and I knew it was Prefontaine. I said, ‘Are you Steve Prefontaine?’ and he said, ‘No.’

  “I go, ‘Are you a distance runner?’ and he says, ‘No.’

  “I said, ‘I really don’t care who I talk to. I just want to know a little about Oregon. My name is Scott Daggatt and I’m thinking of going there.’

  “Then he introduced himself as Steve Prefontaine.”

  By this meet, too, Pre’s reputation for invincibility in stateside distance running was formidable. The fact of his toughness had an effect on other distance runners.

  Don Kardong of Stanford, a talented runner and more mature by three years, writes of what it was like to race the young Prefontaine.

  “A strange camaraderie grew up at the time among those of us who lost continually to Pre. It was like the unity of the townspeople in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion, a feeling grown of inadequacy and envy of a man whose motto, in Kesey’s words, might have been, ‘never give a inch.’ We were united in our belief that no one should have the success coupled with pride that Pre had. We really wanted, I think, to see the big tree fall.

  “The Pac-8 in Seattle opened my eyes. Admittedly, he had already won the mile, but the feeling still seeped into my consciousness. I could run with Pre. I could slipstream him. I might not beat him, but even in losing I was following his path to the top.

  “With about a mile left in the race, Pre passed me. Pride grabbed me, and I took the lead back. I tried to press hard, to be the powerful front-runner. For a lap I seemed to succeed.

  “Suddenly, he sprinted by me, applied pressure, and I broke. Pre went on to win by two seconds, drawing me on to my fastest three-mile ever. Later, in what was at the time an uncharacteristic bit of openness on his part, he told me, ‘I was hurting. If you’d gone hard for a couple of laps, you would have had me.’”

  A Favorite of the Crowd

  A month after the Pac-8 meet, Pre returned to Seattle for the NCAA meet. He easily won the three-mile, saving himself for the AAU the next weekend. “This has to rank way down the list of thrills for me,” he said. “I needed a good workout, and that’s about what I got.”

  The AAU Championships were in Eugene, and a packed house gave Pre a thunderous ovation when he stepped out onto the track. Pre smiled and waved to his people. After some light jogging, he went to the medical tent where trainer Larry Standifer was ready for what was by now pre-race ritual. “After a few minutes of rubdown, he would ask ‘Am I tight?’” Standifer relates. “Of course, my answer would be, no, tha
t he was really nice and loose. I would then ask him what he was going to run the race in. He would give me some mumbo jumbo and then go warm up. After the race got under way, sure enough, his lap times would settle down to whatever he had told me.”

  After a mile in 4:18.3, Pre took the lead and pushed hard, with Shorter, Len Hilton of the University of Houston, and Steve Stageberg of Georgetown behind. With two laps to go, Prefontaine threw in a 63.7 quarter-mile, which dropped everyone but the surprising Stageberg, who was reputed to have one of the best oxygen uptake rates ever tested. This Steve had grown up in Eugene but had left to attend Georgetown.

  “We were both from Oregon, I from Eugene, he from Coos Bay, and yet he was the favorite of the Eugene crowd—I was the outsider,” Stageberg muses.

  Avenging his previous year’s fifth-place finish, Pre edged out Steve Stageberg of Georgetown by 10 yards, with Frank Shorter of the Florida Track Club trailing, for the 1971 AAU Championship victory in the three-mile at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD

  Down the backstretch of the last lap, as hard as Pre pushed, Stageberg responded, until the last turn, when Pre finally began to pull away to win the three-mile by 10 yards in 12:58.6.

  “Did I look tough?” Pre asked impishly afterward. Then he looked at the crowd and said, “Those people are fantastic. They’re my people, man. How can you lose with 12,000 people behind you?”

  As for Stageberg, he ran 13:00.4. Bowerman came up to him and “mentioned that Steve had a closer call than anyone had expected from me. My reply was, I should have won. I marveled at his outstanding accomplishments, but I never feared him.”

  Steve Prefontaine usually made an impression on those he met. For Blaine Newnham, the sports editor of the Eugene newspaper, The Register-Guard, from 1972–1982, the experience was a vivid one. The site: the 1971 U.S.-U.S.S.R. meet at Berkeley, California, a week after the AAU. Newnham was at the time working for a local paper and was assigned to interview the precocious Oregon star.

  “He was standing on a balcony overlooking a swimming pool at the University of California,” Newnham wrote. “I introduced myself.

  “‘I’m not talking to reporters anymore,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided that I’d better keep my mouth shut around newspaper people.’ I mentioned his race against the Russians. I asked about his strategy and about pace. His eyes twinkled. He leaned back against the edge of the balcony and started talking about Harald Norpoth and Michel Jazy, two of the great European runners. ‘I thought you weren’t going to talk to sports writers anymore?’ I asked.

  “‘You haven’t asked me any stupid questions yet,’ he said.”

  Pre set the first of his many American and collegiate records in that meet, though the race was somewhat atypical of his style. Bill Dellinger, the coach for the U.S. team, advised the two Steves—Prefontaine and Stageberg—to share the pacing chores to shake off the Russians. Pre had the odd numbered laps, Stageberg the even.

  “We were on schedule,” recalls Stageberg, “as I led at the mile in 4:17. I ran another 300 meters in the lead anxiously awaiting Steve’s taking over, but he didn’t and I finally looked back to see what was the problem. ‘Keep the lead,’ said Pre, ‘I can’t take it.’ I realized the burden was all on me at the crucial point of the race, when we were all tired from the AAU meet the prior week. The Russians were still hanging on, and the weather was hot.

  Sportscaster Jack Whitaker interviewed Pre after his record-setting 5000-meter performance in the 1971 U.S.–U.S.S.R. All-Star meet. JEFF KROOT

  “As I recall, Steve finally helped out on the seventh or eighth lap and went on to win in an American 5000-meter record of 13:30.4.”

  From Berkeley, the AAU team, of which Pre was a member, went to Durham, North Carolina, for a match against a team from Africa. There, Prefontaine’s threat came not from Stageberg, who began to lose form, but from Ethiopian Miruts Yifter, a future Olympic gold medalist.

  In sweltering 87-degree heat, Pre led through the first two miles in slow times of 4:25.3 and 9:01.2. Yifter clung to him, until, with 700 yards to go, he started a furious, fabulous kick. Briefly, Steve went with him, then eased off from the sub-60 second pace. Yifter dashed up the home straight, got the gun for the last lap . . . and stopped. Apparently, he had thought the race was over. Pre stepped around him and continued on for a 13:57.6 5000-meter win.

  Yifter was crushed. Yes, he had thought the race was over. Could he have beaten Pre over an extra lap? “Absolutely.”

  Pre was unpersuaded. “When he took off like that, I figured that either he had miscounted the laps or that he was just testing me to see how strong I was. I was prepared to come back at him on the last lap, though. It’s really a tragedy—I feel sorry for him,” Pre concluded.

  Over Hills and in Arenas

  Cross country was an enjoyable sport for Pre, one he liked in college as much as track, according to Bill Dellinger. He liked to get out on the varying terrain and show the longer distance men that he could be tough over six miles, too. After his freshman year, Steve never lost a cross country race, and in truth, was extended by the competition only in the bigger meets. One of those was at the NCAA Cross Country Championships at Knoxville, Tennessee, in the fall of 1971, his junior year. Pre had easily won the Pac-8 meet at UCLA, but Oregon as a team had taken second. The school was willing to send him but not the team. Pre would have none of it. He stated that he would not defend his NCAA title unless the entire team was sent.

  It was, and it won.

  Prefontaine had high goals for others as well as himself. Here he shows his vexation at learning his team has been beaten by Washington State in the 1971 Pac-8 cross country meet, despite his course-record win. CHIP GANE

  At Knoxville, Pre again faced Garry Bjorklund, who had missed the previous NCAA cross country meet because of appendicitis.

  “It was a beastly hilly course,” says Bjorklund with relish. “We started up a big hill and came crashing down. We went through the mile in 4:24. There was still a group at three miles, so I took off and just started running as hard as I could. At four miles, I started to hurt pretty bad. Pre started to chip at me a little bit. At the top of a big hill, he sneaked away and got about 30 yards ahead. I closed and I closed, but couldn’t catch him.”

  Steeplechaser Doug Brown of the University of Tennessee was also in the race and remembers the Prefontaine-Bjorklund struggle with some awe. “Near the end of the course it looped around, so you could see the guys ahead of you. The look on Pre’s face—he was hurting so bad. He was like a strong bull, like a boxer on the cross country course. Pre just refused to accept the fact that somebody was going to be better than him in the United States.”

  1971 NCAA Cross Country Championships, Knoxville, Tennessee: Garry Bjorklund of Minnesota tried to keep the lead, but Pre won his second cross country championship. BILL CROWELL

  A brief two month respite following cross country merged into the different world of indoor racing. In numbers, the races were few during his career, but in excitement, the close confines of arenas packed with partisan crowds made them some of the most memorable of Steve Prefontaine’s career.

  At the beginning of 1972, the Olympic year, he raced in the Los Angeles Times Indoor meet hoping to meet George Young, the 34-year-old former world-record holder at two miles.

  “Goldarn,” Pre said when told that Young was bypassing the race. “I wanted to run against Young more than anybody in the field. I wanted to test the veteran out,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I almost said the old man, but I don’t want to make him mad and give him something to use against me when we race. Besides, he’s not really old. And I like him a lot. He’s super intelligent. And very good looking. And has a great family. And I hope he remembers all these nice things I’m saying when we do race.”

  Instead, Pre was up against Kerry O’Brien of Australia, the indoor two-mile world-record holder, and Emiel Puttemans, considered a threat at the coming Olympic Games. Pre ran away with the race in 8:26
.6, with Puttemans a half-lap behind.

  “He sure is a speedy little bug,” O’Brien conceded. “I just wish I could have met that little bug last year.”

  “And I wish he’d stop calling me a little bug,” Pre responded. “But wasn’t that a super race?”

  As Pre entered the outdoor season leading up to the Olympic Trials and Games, his confidence was at an all-time high. He had not lost a race at any distance over a mile in a year-and-a-half. He held American and collegiate records in the 5000 meters and had won the gold medal in the 1971 Pan Am Games in Cali, Colombia. His effect upon the fans at Hayward Field was by this time palpable.

  Geoff Hollister, a former Oregon runner who had entered the Navy before Pre’s arrival on campus, remembers the atmosphere upon his return to Eugene. “Warming up at Hayward Field felt different now. The minute Pre hit the field for his jog, there was an undercurrent of enthusiasm in the crowd. It surfaced in slight cheers as he raced down the stretch. You could feel the electricity.”

  Hollister was testing an experimental racing flat with a rubber sole developed by Bill Bowerman called the “Waffle.” Someone suggested Pre try out a pair. “We both stood up,” Hollister remembers, “and Pre looked me right in the eye. ‘No, when you’re gonna run the last lap in 57, you’ve gotta have spikes on your feet!’

  “The more I thought about it, the more I liked what I had just heard. The guy told me exactly what was on his mind. It is part of track history now, but Pre went out and ran even 60s and finished with a 57 for just under 3:57 for the mile.”