William Jay "Bill" Bowerman was an American track and field coach and
co-founder of Nike, Inc. Over his career, he trained 31 Olympic athletes,
51 All-Americans, 12 American record-holders, 22 NCAA champions and 16
sub-4 minute milers. During his 24 years as coach at the University of Oregon,
the Ducks track and field team had a winning season every season but one,
attained 4 NCAA titles, and finished in the top 10 in the nation 16 times.
Early life Bill Bowerman was born in Portland,
Oregon. His father was former Governor of Oregon Jay Bowerman; his mother had
grown up in Fossil. The family returned to Fossil after the parents divorced in
1913. Bowerman had an older brother and sister, Dan and Mary Elizabeth "Beth";
and a twin brother, Thomas, who died in an elevator accident when he was 2 years
old. Bowerman attended Medford and Seattle
schools before returning to Medford for high school. He played in the high
school band and for the state champion football team his junior and senior
years. Bowerman first met Barbara Young, the woman he would marry, while a high
school student, in Medford. In 1929, Bowerman attended the
University of Oregon to play football and study journalism. He was a member of
Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. After graduating he taught biology and coached
football at Franklin High School in Portland in 1934. In 1935, Bowerman
moved back to Medford to teach and coach football.
Bowerman married Barbara Young on June 22, 1936. Their first son, Jon, was born
June 22, 1938. William J. Bowerman, Jr. was born November 17, 1942.
= Military career= Bowerman had been in the ROTC and Army
Reserve, and then joined the United States Army as a 2nd Lieutenant in the
days following the Pearl Harbor attack. He was assigned to Fort Lawton in
Washington and served a year there before being assigned to the 86th
Mountain Infantry Regiment at Camp Hale in Leadville, Colorado. Along with the
87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, his regiment would become the 10th Mountain
Division. Bowerman's duty entailed organizing the
troops' supplies and maintaining the mules used to carry the supplies in the
mountains. On December 23, 1944, the division arrived in Naples, Italy and
soon moved north to the mountains of northern Italy. During his tour of duty,
Bowerman was promoted to commander of the 86th Regiment's First Battalion at
the rank of Major. Bowerman negotiated a stand-down of German forces near the
Brenner Pass in the days before the surrender of the German army in all of
Italy. For his service, Bowerman received the Silver Star and four Bronze
Stars. He was honorably discharged in October 1945.
Coaching career After the war, Bowerman returned to his
position at Medford High School. Bowerman's third son, Tom, was born May
20, 1946. The family then moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he became the head
track coach at the University of Oregon on July 1, 1948.
= University of Oregon= Bowerman's "Track Men of Oregon" won 24
NCAA individual titles and four NCAA team crowns, and posted 16 top-10 NCAA
finishes in 24 years as head coach. His teams also boasted 33 Olympians, 38
conference champions and 64 All-Americans. At the dual level, the
Ducks posted a 114–20 record and went undefeated in 10 seasons. In addition,
Bowerman coached the world record setting 4-mile relay team in 1962. This
team consisted of Archie San Romani, Dyrol Burleson, Vic Reeve, and Keith
Forman with a time of 16:08.9. Six years later, another Oregon team of Roscoe
Divine, Wade Bell, Arne Kvalheim and Dave Wilborn improved the record to
16:05.0. Among athletes that Bowerman coached are: Otis Davis, Steve
Prefontaine, Kenny Moore, Bill Dellinger, Mac Wilkins, Jack Hutchins,
Dyrol Burleson, Harry Jerome, Siegmar Ohlemann, Les Tipton, Gerry Moro, Wade
Bell, Dave Edstrom, Roscoe Divine, Matt Centrowitz, Arne Kvalheim, Jim Grelle,
Bruce Mortenson and Phil Knight. In 1972, Bowerman stepped back from
day-to-day coaching activities to conduct fundraising for renovating the
Hayward Field grandstands that would be necessary for the consideration of
hosting the Montreal Olympic Trials. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in
the Oregon Legislative Assembly in 1970 as a Republican, losing by only 1000
votes in a close race. According to the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper,
Bowerman officially retired as the University of Oregon head coach on March
23, 1973 and was succeeded by assistant coach Bill Dellinger.
= United States Olympic Track program= Bowerman created a training program for
adjusting athletes for the high altitude that they would experience at the 1968
Mexico City Olympic Games. This successful program led to his selection
as the 1972 Munich Olympic Track and Field head coaching position. Bowerman
coached members of teams from Norway, Canada, Australia, and the United
States. During the Munich Massacre in the 1972
Munich Olympics, Israeli Olympic racewalker Shaul Ladany escaped the PLO
terrorists, and then awakened Bowerman and alerted the German police. Bowerman
called for the U.S. Marines to come and protect American Jewish Olympians
swimmer Mark Spitz and javelin thrower Bill Schmidt.
Jogging During a trip to New Zealand in 1962,
Bowerman was introduced to the concept of jogging as a fitness routine,
including people of an advanced age, through a jogging club organized by his
friend and coaching colleague Arthur Lydiard. Bowerman brought this concept
back to the United States, and began to write articles and books about jogging.
He also created a jogging program in Eugene that became a national model for
fitness programs. A Jogger’s Manual, a three-page guide, was published shortly
after Bowerman returned from New Zealand. In 1966, along with
cardiologist W.E. Harris, Bowerman published a 90-page book titled Jogging.
The book sold over a million copies and was credited with igniting the jogging
phenomenon in the United States. The new crop of older athletic people
contributed to the evolution of the sport of track and field to create a new
division for these masters athletes. Due to the popularity of Jogging, Harris and
Bowerman published a 127-page book in 1967.
Athletics West is an American running team formed by Bill Bowerman, Phil
Knight and Geoff Hollister in 1977. At the time, America had no definitive
running program for young athletes to continue competing outside of college.
The formation and success of Athletics West, together with the success and
popularity of American runners like Craig Virgin, Steve Prefontaine, Frank
Shorter and Bill Rodgers helped inspire the 1970s running boom.
Nike According to Otis Davis, a student
athlete whom Bowerman coached at the University of Oregon, who later went on
to win two gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics, Bowerman made the first
pair of Nike shoes for him, contradicting a claim that they were
made for Phil Knight. Says Davis, "I told Tom Brokaw that I was the first. I
don't care what all the billionaires say. Bill Bowerman made the first pair
of shoes for me. People don't believe me. In fact, I didn't like the way they
felt on my feet. There was no support and they were too tight. But I saw
Bowerman make them from the waffle iron, and they were mine."
In 1964, Bowerman entered into a handshake agreement with Phil Knight,
who had been a miler under him in the 1950s, to start an athletic footwear
distribution company called Blue Ribbon Sports, later known as Nike, Inc..
Knight managed the business end of the partnership, while Bowerman experimented
with improvements in athletic footwear design. Bowerman and Knight initially
began importing the Onitsuka Tiger running shoes from Japan to sell in the
States. Bowerman's design ideas led to the
creation of a running shoe in 1966 that would ultimately be named "Nike Cortez"
in 1968, which quickly became a top-seller and remains one of Nike's
most iconic footwear designs. Bowerman designed several Nike shoes, but is best
known for ruining his wife's waffle iron in 1970 or 1971, experimenting with the
idea of using waffle-ironed rubber to create a new sole for footwear that
would grip but be lightweight. Bowerman's design inspiration led to the
introduction of the so-called "Moon Shoe" in 1972, so named because the
waffle tread was said to resemble the footprints left by astronauts on the
moon. Further refinement resulted in the "Waffle Trainer" in 1974, which helped
fuel the explosive growth of Blue Ribbon Sports/Nike. While Bowerman was
experimenting with shoe design, he worked in a small, unventilated space,
using glue and solvents with toxic components that caused him severe nerve
damage. The nerve damage to his lower legs left him with significant mobility
problems; as Kenny Moore notes in his book Bowerman and the Men of Oregon,
Bowerman had rendered himself unable to run in the shoes that he had given the
world. Bowerman was obsessed with shaving
weight off his athletes' running shoes. He believed that custom-made shoes would
weigh less on the feet of his runners and cut down on blisters, as well as
reduce the overall drag on their energy for every ounce he could remove from the
shoe. By his estimation, removing one ounce from a shoe, based on a six-foot
gait for a runner, would translate in a reduction of 55 pounds of lift over a
one-mile span. Legacy
Bowerman is a legacy of the National Distance Running Hall of Fame, the USA
National Track and Field Hall of Fame, the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, and
Oregon’s Athletic Hall of Fame. His statue, holding a stopwatch, graces the
northwest corner of Hayward Field, home of the Prefontaine Classic at the
University of Oregon. A biographical film, Without Limits, about the
relationship between record-breaking distance runner Steve Prefontaine and
his coach Bill Bowerman was made in 1998, and Bill Bowerman was played by
Donald Sutherland. The headquarters for Nike is located on Bowerman Drive in
homage to the company's co-founder. Also in his honor, the company created the
"Bowerman Series" of performance running shoes, designed to provide
longer-lasting, more training-focused products to compete with such running
brands as Asics and Saucony. In 2009, the U.S. Track & Field and
Cross Country Coaches Association created The Bowerman, an award that is
given to the most outstanding collegiate male and female track & field athlete in
a given calendar year. Inaugural winners of the award were Oregon's Galen Rupp
and Colorado's Jenny Barringer. The Bowerman trophy was designed by Tinker
Hatfield, a Nike employee and former Oregon student-athlete coached by
Bowerman. Death
Bowerman died in his sleep at his home in Fossil, Oregon at the age of 88 on
Christmas Eve, 1999. He was cremated and his ashes were given to family or
friend. See also
List of teachers portrayed in films Without Limits
References Sources
Moore, Kenny. Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale.
ISBN 978-1-59486-190-1. Bowerman, William J. High-performance
training for track and field. Champaign, Ill.: Leisure Press. ISBN 0-88011-390-1.
Freeman, William H.. A biographical study of William Jay Bowerman.
Greenberg, Keith. Bill Bowerman & Phil Knight: Building the Nike Empire.
Blackbirch Press. ISBN 978-1-56711-085-2.
External links Guide to the Bill Bowerman Papers at the
University of Oregon National Distance Running Hall of Fame
Induction