Ahead of His Time, and in It for Long Run

Bill Bowerman, coach of the U.S. track and field team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, was renowned for doing things a bit differently than his peers.

He feuded often and openly with U.S. and International Olympic Committee officials. He never recruited and rarely offered full scholarships to his runners at the University of Oregon. Instead, he found them weekend and summer employment in the lumber mills around Eugene.

Bowerman also handcrafted shoes for his runners and, later, co-founded (with Phil Knight) the athletic shoe giant Nike.

“Winning is nice,” Bowerman told writer and Olympic marathon runner Kenny Moore before the 1972 Games, “but you savor that victory for an evening and you wake up the next morning and it’s gone. I believe we compete for every breath we draw, but competing well is just not to be equated with winning.”

Add Bowerman: As the team was set to leave for Munich, a reporter approached the coach in the departure lounge at Kennedy Airport in New York. As Moore recalls, the interview did not go well.

Reporter: “I have to file a story on the team’s departure. So what’s the big news?”

Bowerman: “So far as I know, there is none. We’re all here. We leave from Gate 29.”

Reporter: “Let me ask you about some of the big names. Randy Matson. Al Oerter. Hayes Jones. How is Hayes Jones?”

Bowerman: “Hayes Jones is no longer with us.”

Reporter: “You mean he died?”

Jones retired after the 1964 Games. Matson failed to make the team. Oerter retired in 1969.

Trivia time: Frank Shorter became the first American to win the Olympic marathon in 64 years when he won the gold in Munich. Name the most recent U.S. Olympic marathon champion.

Narrowing the gap: Bob Ryan, columnist for the Boston Globe, believes the days of U.S. basketball dominance are all but over.

“International basketball is coming along far faster than even its staunchest adherents dreamed it could when the Dream Team was foisted on the world a decade ago,” Ryan wrote from the World Championships in Indianapolis.

“That team won its 13 games by an average of 43 points, and if [U.S. Coach Chuck] Daly had been Ming the Merciless it could have been far worse. By the 1996 Olympics the average margin had dropped to 28, and in Sydney two years ago the experience was frightening. The U.S. was very fortunate to defeat Lithuania by two, and the average margin of victory in the final four games was a shade under 10.

“And now the U.S., with a team of very good NBA players, has to huff and puff and puff some more to defeat a Chinese team that is missing its second-best player [Wang Zhi Zhi]? It truly is a whole new basketball world, which is great.”

Trivia answer: Joan Benoit Samuelson won the inaugural women’s marathon in Los Angeles in 1984.

And finally: Abe Lemons, who died Monday at 79, gave one of his last published interviews to Berry Tramel of the Daily Oklahoman earlier this summer and proved he hadn’t lost the sarcastic wit that made him a favorite of writers:

“I got a letter from [Bob] Knight. Hadn’t heard from him in a while. Two months. He’s getting to be too big time, though I don’t see how anybody can get big time living in Lubbock.”