Running as a work of art

My neighbor Bill Alvarado lifted Steve Prefontaine’s MG Midget off him the night he crashed on a corner in front of the Alvarados’ house. Bill yelled for someone to come and pull “Pre” from under the wreck.

No one came, so he had to set the MG down. Pre died under the car at age 24, in May, 1975.

At the time Pre held the American record in every running event from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. He had won four consecutive NCAA titles in the 5,000 meters, the first athlete to win so many in a single event.

Pre was a hero to the Alvarados’ three boys, my own son, and all the other Roosevelt Junior High School runners who made him a decorated jock strap as thanks for coaching them. He was a hero to University of Oregon female track athletes because he got their events included in previously all-male meets. And he was a hero to the rest of us because he ran and lived against limits of any kind: physical, personal, or institutional.

He came to the University of Oregon because of its famous coach, Bill Bowerman, the man responsible for Eugene’s reputation as “Track City U.S.A.” Bowerman, widely regarded as the world’s greatest track coach, also introduced Americans to jogging and to running shoes. And he could be irascible. The story about him rigging his mailbox with dynamite in order to thwart the garbage truck driver who kept banging into it is true.

During Bowerman’s 24-year tenure at the University of Oregon, Eugene’s Hayward Field fans got to watch Bill Dellinger, Kenny Moore, Roscoe Devine, Pre, Mary Decker Slaney, Alberto Salazar and many non-Oregon distance runners like Jim Ryun, Frank Shorter, Dave Wottle and the great Kenyan Henry Rono break records.

The crowd screamed for the winners but also for those who broke their personal bests and for the last runners to cross the finish line.

Pre not only ran in many of the most exciting races but, near the end of his short career, he arranged many of the world-class meets that featured them, sometimes in defiance of Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) rules that he said held American athletes back. He ran his last race in one of these events just hours before his fatal wreck.

Pre said, “A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.” Watching his races, Hayward Field fans came to understand this.

Two films have been made about Pre. In Prefontaine (1997) Pre and his teammates are shown training on the public golf course that my family lived next to when the movie was made.

Our street was crammed with movie paraphernalia for at least a week, but we gave up our driveway for what turned out to be a really rotten picture of Pre as a spoiled brat coached by a wonderful man. Bowerman was a lead advisor on the movie.

Without Limits (1998), co-written by two-time Olympian Kenny Moore, is a truer view based on more accurate research. You can believe what’s in this film, about both Pre and Bowerman.

Bowerman did create the first waffle-soled Nikes using his wife Barbara’s waffle iron, severely damaging his health as he breathed the resulting fumes.

Pre, who said he liked to give people something exciting to watch, did steal the show, rather unfairly, from top athletes like the great discus thrower Mac Wilkins, who once made a record-setting throw in the middle of the field, then watched it go largely unnoticed while Pre lapped up attention on the track.

Without Limits goes beyond the story of a single athlete by exploring the politics of the tragic 1972 Munich Olympics and the AAU’s treatment of American athletes.

Similar in breadth and depth is the best track film made so far, Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two 1924 Paris Olympics runners.

Harold Abrahams, an English Jew, won the gold medal in the 100-meter race. Eric Liddell, a Christian Scot, won the 400. Liddell was supposed to compete with Abrahams in the 100 but refused to run on the Sabbath.

Generally sticking to the facts but with some literary license, Chariots explains the greater socio-political context of these men’s lives while focusing on their individual ambitions and representing running not just as athletic prowess but, as Pre said, the creation of art and, even further, the creation of men.

Chariots pictures competitive running as individuals pitting their idiosyncratic athletic, artistic and intellectual abilities against each other and against themselves, striving not only to win the race but also to achieve very personal goals.

And Chariots has the most glorious soundtrack ever. Vangelis Papathanssiou’s music electronically celebrates how it feels to run.