Pre: The Story of America's Greatest Running Legend, Steve Prefontaine Page 6

  That night, Pre went out and partied. Liquori was rooming with him at the meet hotel and remembers Steve coming back around 5:00 a.m.

  “He woke me up to ask when I had to get up to catch my plane back East. At about 7:00, I got up and he got up with me and said, ‘I’ll help you carry your bags downstairs.’ Then he went out on a 10-mile run.”

  Shortly after that indoor race, Pre spoke of the added incentive provided by the most special crowd, the one made up of the people of Eugene.

  “This is my last year at Oregon,” he said, “and it means a lot to me. The people have been great to me there, so if I have to run three races to win the Pac-8 team title, I’ll do it. Oh, sure, I’ll probably be tired, but the people shouting will carry me across the finish line.”

  He now began to work on regaining a measure of his Munich fitness. In a low-key all-comers meet in Bakersfield, California, in late March 1973, he ran his first competitive six-mile of the year and set an American record of 27:09.4. It was a harbinger of the great final collegiate season that he was to have.

  The 85 to 90 miles of training per week that Pre had started in November continued until a week before a four-way meet with UCLA, Washington State, and Nebraska at Eugene in mid-April. “The week of the meet was the first time I rested in over four months,” Pre said later in explaining a remarkable double victory.

  With teammates Mark Feig and Scott Daggatt pulling him through a 59.1 first quarter in the mile race, Pre then took charge and ran to victory with laps of 59.9, 59.4, and 58.4.

  “It was very easy,” Pre declared of his 3:56.8. “I wasn’t even pointing for that but just running the way I felt.” An hour later, he returned for the three-mile and shook off his tiredness to record a 13:06.4 win over stubborn John Ngeno of Washington State. It was, at the time, the best one-day double ever, better even than Kip Keino’s 3:53.1/13:31.6 races of 1967.

  Pre now readied himself for the Oregon Twilight meet, an invitational meet for Oregon athletes that served as a prep race for the NCAA Championships. Despite his fabulous performance in the quadrangular meet, Steve was far from satisfied with his fitness. On the day of the Twilight meet mile, he twice told Coach Bill Dellinger that he didn’t want to run because his legs were dead. Dellinger pointed to the 6,500 people in the stands and said, “Look at all those people; they came to see you run.” Pre responded with a 3:55.0. At the time, only two Americans had ever run faster.

  “Before any race, Pre would always say how he didn’t feel good and didn’t want to run,” teammate Steve Bence recollects. “No matter where the race was or how important it was, he was saying, ‘Aw, I wish I wasn’t running; I don’t think I’m going to run well. . . .’ Then he’d go out and run like heck.”

  The self-doubt that plagues most runners—even Steve Prefontaines—quickly disappeared after the challenge had been met and conquered. “I needed that,” grinned Pre after his 3:55.0. “I think if I concentrated on the distance, I could be a pretty good miler. Bill told me I could have run 3:52 under better conditions. I think the world record [3:51.1 at the time] is in reach.”

  The spring of 1973 was Pre’s final year of collegiate track. He had the enviable record of never having lost in a distance race over a mile at his home track. There were some close races and some where Pre almost played with his opponents. During the Pac-8 meet at Eugene that year, he was plagued by sciatica, a painful inflammation of the nerves in the back and in the back of the legs, yet defeated rival Ngeno on tactics as well as on foot racing. “I pulled every trick out of the hat, including making noises so he would think I was hurting more than I really was,” Pre chuckled after that race.

  An hour after winning the mile at a quadrangular meet in April 1973, Pre outlasted stubborn John Ngeno of Washington State in the three-mile for the best one-day double performance in world history. JEFF JOHNSON

  Coach Bill Dellinger and Ngeno congratulate Pre after his incredible double victory. JEFF JOHNSON

  The Search for an Heir-Apparent

  Laughter was not forthcoming on another matter, however. As Pre was graduating that spring, the press had started looking for a worthy successor. Paul Geis seemed the likely candidate.

  Geis had transferred from Rice University, in his home state of Texas, to the University of Oregon after experiencing the running atmosphere in Eugene the year before at the 1972 NCAA Championships. Training with the team and competing for the Oregon Track Club while he sat out his year of ineligibility, Geis began to run very well indeed. Bence, a friend of them both, explains:

  “When Geis first came to Oregon, there was no problem. Paul was a good runner, but no threat to Pre. Perhaps there was some friction as they worked out together.

  “Geis improved rapidly, and there was some resulting competition during practice, which Bill Dellinger discouraged. The press should be blamed for the true rivalry. They called Geis the ‘heir-apparent’ and made many comparisons. This put pressure an Geis to try and run as well as or better than Pre, and Pre must not have liked the idea that there was someone who could step in and fill his shoes. The result was two great Oregon distance runners competing against each other, not with each other.”

  The rivalry surfaced full-blown after the Pac-8 Conference meet. Ten days after beating Ngeno in the three-mile, Pre was running a two-mile in the Oregon Twilight II, his last race as a collegian in front of the home fans. A kind of farewell appearance.

  In his last race as a collegian in front of the home fans, Pre edged Paul Geis by 0.2 second in the two-mile at the Oregon Twilight II meet. JEFF JOHNSON

  Geis returned two days before the meet from California, where he had had his “drawers blown off” in the Vons Classic. He didn’t want to compete in Eugene, but Dellinger told him to run for fun. Geis stuck with Pre the entire way until the last 220 yards and finished only 0.2 second behind Pre’s excellent 8:24.6.

  “It was the best race of my life at the time,” Geis reflects. “There was no pressure, and I just stayed with him until a 220 to go. Afterward, he was really upset with me, just really mad, even though he’d destroyed me in the last 220. He had thought that I was going to share the pace with him, and that caused a lot of problems between us, because I was really hurt. It was my best time, and here was a guy that I wanted to be my friend, and I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing or what. . . .”

  Pre grumbled: “It was apparent I was doing all the work.”

  It was a rivalry that lasted to the end, one in which two proud people had the natural differences between them enlarged by the magnifying glass of the press. It reached its most comical point the next year in a two-mile race at a Hilites meet, similar to the Twilight meet, in Corvallis, Oregon. Dellinger insisted the two work together and not compete at the finish. “Pre and Geis finished hand-in-hand and staring at each other,” Bence laughs. “Not in friendship but in distrust that the other would make a last-second lunge for the tape.”

  A Bid for a Fourth Title

  Pre ran his last track race as an Oregon undergraduate in the 1973 NCAA Championships in the heat and humidity of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of sweating himself dry, but he was eager to win his fourth consecutive outdoor title in the same event, a feat never before accomplished.

  It was a good field, with runners like Irishman John Hartnett of Villanova and Kenyan John Ngeno of Washington State entering the three- instead of the six-mile just to get a shot at Pre.

  In the prelims, Steve ran harder than he had to and lowered the meet record to 13:19.0. That was the day Nick Rose of Great Britain, running for Western Kentucky, first met him.

  “It was a really hot day, and I can remember I was sitting in the shade of the medical tent and Pre came up and started talking, which really freaked me out because I always sort of hero-worshiped him and looked up to him as a great runner. You sort of put these guys up on a pedestal and think they’ll never talk to you. But he really surprised me.”

  The rest day before the fina
ls on June 9 brought a typical whirl of activity. Pre had taken up photography, and as with all things he did, it was no halfhearted enterprise. In a borrowed car, he and Mark Feig drove through the Louisiana countryside, periodically stopping to snap pictures. For three hours, Pre took photos he would later develop in the dark room he had built back in Eugene. The trip outside of Baton Rouge also helped Pre get his mind off the final, for despite easily winning the prelims, he was worried.

  His sciatica was perhaps the only serious running-related injury he ever suffered. When it did flare up, Pre was in big trouble.

  “He was really afraid he was going to lose, because he hadn’t done much training,” Feig relates. “Yet he went out and forced the pace again in that race and ended up breaking the field. He was so tough.”

  After an 8:50.2 two-mile, Prefontaine crossed the finish line in 13:05.3 for a five-second victory over Ted Castaneda from the University of Colorado. “It was a matter of trying to catch a locomotive,” Ted recalls.

  Pre was equally impressed. “It’s great to go out like this, to know that I’ve done something that nobody else has ever done gives me a warm feeling. Now I intend to spend the summer in Europe and show I’m better than the fourth-fastest in the world.”

  Steve Prefontaine had two distinctly different effects on his competitors. Some he intimidated into running worse than they otherwise might have; to others he posed a challenge they worked hard to match. At the AAU Championships the week after Baton Rouge, one runner made that leap of faith in his own ability and pushed Pre to a new U.S. three-mile record.

  Dick Buerkle was three years out of Villanova University. He was talented and tough, but not thought to be in Pre’s class. Through miles of 4:23.1 and 4:21.0, Buerkle dogged his opponent’s tracks. Only in the last half-mile was Pre able to crack him.

  “I was ready then,” Buerkle states quietly. “I was really pushing from the mile on, running just about as hard as I could. When he took off with a half-mile to go, I just knew I couldn’t hang in there any longer.”

  Pre won in 12:53.4, better than his American-record 5000 pace of the year before in the Olympic Trials. Buerkle broke 13 minutes by two-tenths.

  “I didn’t even think about running that fast,” Buerkle admits. “I just said, ‘I’m going to stay with this guy; I’m going to try and kick his butt.’ I was out to knock him off then.

  “I don’t think that I was ever really afraid of Pre. I think I always felt that I could beat him. He was just one of those cocky kind of guys, dynamic kind of guys that you try to shoot at. He would stand up there and say ‘come on and get me,’ a king of the hill. I always wanted to get him. I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but I knew I was going to keep working until I beat him. When I got that close at Bakersfield, I knew I just had to work a little harder and learn a little more. I felt that I was ready for him.”

  Buerkle would have to wait. Since the fall of 1969, no American had beaten Pre at any distance over a mile indoors or out. And none of the mile losses were runaways. Sometimes Pre invited people to test his mortality. One such race was the Hayward Restoration meet on the weekend following the AAU.

  The University of Oregon was rebuilding the West grandstands at Hayward Field, and one method the athletic department used to raise money was by holding invitationals with Pre as the main attraction. He was selfless in offering his presence to help the fundraising and energetic in attracting top talent to run against him and to draw the Pre-hungry fans. For this race, he invited Dave Wottle, the Olympic 800-meter champion of the year before, to race at one mile.

  “He said, ‘why don’t you come up to Eugene before we go over to Scandinavia, and we’ll run a mile together and we’ll try for the world record,’” Wottle recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll lead you on the way, and you’ll get a great time.’”

  With just five days’ notice, a crowd of 12,000 showed up to watch. Pre took over after the half and led through the 1320 in 2:56.0, with Wottle on his shoulder. With a little more than 220 to go, Wottle drove past and opened a 10-yard lead, which he held to the tape. Pre, who afterward complained that he had wanted to explode on the last lap but couldn’t for some reason, nevertheless ran a lifetime best of 3:54.6, second to Wottle’s 3:53.3.

  Bill Bowerman, Pre’s coach at Oregon, was one of the thousands who came away that evening with an even greater respect for the abilities of Steve Prefontaine.

  “What the hell? Here’s a guy that was going out of his depth, but he ran a great race. If Wottle had layed five yards off the pace, he’d have gotten whipped! Pre thrived on competition. That was one of the great things about the guy. To whip him, you almost had to be out of his class at the distance you were going to run. It never bothered him.”

  On Pre: Mary Slaney

  The first time I met Steve was in Europe in 1973. He was a member of the senior [U.S.] team, and it was my first international trip. Everybody was friendly to me, I was like the little sister to all these “older” people—they weren’t really old, but you know.

  As the six weeks of the tour progressed, I did all these workouts and these races, and I did okay, winning all of the races but one. Pre felt I was very talented, but that because of all the workouts I was doing and all the racing, and the pressure on someone that young (I turned 15 on the trip), I think he was just very concerned about “burnout”—that was the term he used.

  We got back in late August, and in September, he started calling me, just to check up on me. I don’t know why he took such an interest, I really don’t. We became friends. He would call once a week, and the first Nike shoes I ever got were from Pre. He sent me a box of all these prototype shoes.

  He was trying to get my mother to move the family to Eugene [from Southern California], and he talked to me and my mom about having Bill Bowerman coach me. It came to the point where he said that if Bowerman doesn’t coach you, or you don’t want Bowerman to coach you, then I would like to coach you. The family didn’t move; that whole year wasn’t a good year. He still called every week, and I wrote letters to him.

  You never know what path he would have taken. He was such a dynamic personality. You don’t know where he would have plugged himself into the sport right now, and how different our sport would be if he were still here. He had a way of getting people to take notice—not necessarily listen—but to take notice.

  I think I was fortunate to have gotten to know him that well in that short of a time. For the life of me, I don’t know why he took such an interest in me. And I don’t really know why I came here to Eugene, and why this place means so much, why Hayward Field is the way it is, because it is definitely different than any other place.

  I just wish that I had more time to know him than I did.

  Mary Slaney is the only distance runner in history, male or female, to hold more American records than Steve Prefontaine.

  Summer in Europe

  Three days after racing Wottle, Pre ran a 3:43.1 1500-meter in Helsinki, Finland. And one week after his Eugene race, he ran one of the most astonishing two-day doubles ever, in the World Games, again in Helsinki.

  Ben Jipcho from Kenya had just raced to a new world record in the 3000-meter steeplechase in 8:14.0, and the spectators jammed into the Olympic Stadium were excited for more. The next race was the 5000, and Pre towed the field through the first 2000 meters, with Viren and Puttemans, two of his Olympic rivals, especially close. The crowd of 26,000 set up the rhythmic clapping and chanting that makes the adrenaline surge. Pre responded with 800 meters to go and started a long drive, but Puttemans, the world-record holder, had too much left and finished the last 200 in 26.0. Pre was second in a new American record of 13:22.4. Viren faded to fifth.

  “I didn’t realize the race was that fast,” Pre said. “When he passed me, I let him go because I thought his kick would be too much. Had I known that the race was going to be this fast, I might have tried harder and I think I could have put up a much better fight. Now I want to stay in Finland and get int
o shape for some serious races.”

  Whether it was the call of competition or of the necessary dollar from the meet promoter, Steve raced again the next day in the 1500. Wottle was in the race, as well as future world-record holder Filbert Bayi of Tanzania, and 10 other world-class middle-distance men. Jipcho was there, like Pre, coming back from a tough race the day before.

  Bayi made no contest of it, sprinting lap splits of 53.6, 58.0, and 60.6. But behind him came the fastest mass finish in history. Pre was 11th, second to last, his worst finish in any track race save one. But his time was 3:38.1, an Oregon school record and equal to a 3:55.5 mile. He had come back after his fastest 5000 ever to run faster than any of Oregon’s many mile stars had ever run for 1500 meters.

  Prefontaine then ran three quick, uninspired races in succession at non-AAU tour meets, most likely for financial reasons. Meet promoters routinely—and illegally—made “under-the-table” payments to stars like Prefontaine. These stars put people in the seats and always provided a good show. Sometimes the payment would be made in the form of a round-trip air ticket sent by each European meet, with the unused tickets cashed in by the athlete for a refund. Sometimes the payment would be made directly to the athlete by the promoter after the meet was over, always in U.S. dollars. A long line of tired athletes waiting outside the promoter’s hotel room at midnight was a common sight. Everyone involved found it a demeaning exercise and damning proof of the hypocrisy of the amateur system.

  Pre lost two 1500s, but won the 5000 at a meet in Oulu, Finland. Compared to his pre-Olympic tours, the act of winning did not seem to be as important as before. He was “putting in his time,” as he phrased it, gaining international experience for future years.