A few minutes before 5 p.m. on an unusually hot August Saturday afternoon, the temperature outside hovering right at 100 degrees, Bill Dellinger settled onto a couch in his Eugene home nestled among towering Oregon fir and pine, the rhododendrons of Hendricks Park, the echo of a crowd’s roar above storied Hayward Field and the epicenter of American track and field.
Dellinger, an Olympic bronze medalist at 5,000 meters who would go onto coach a line of American record-setting runners at the University of Oregon, was joined by a few friends to watch former Ducks NCAA champion Matthew Centrowitz, Jr. in the 2016 Olympic Games 1,500-meter final, a race that to those gathered around the TV had been more than 60 years in the making.
Matthew Centrowitz had practically grown up in the Dellinger home. His father Matt Centrowitz, a native New Yorker, had left Manhattan College after his freshman year, coming to Oregon in 1974, a lost soul in search of a father figure and a coach who would guide him to the Olympic Games.
He found both in Dellinger.
Now Dellinger watched as the younger Centrowitz burst into the front of the Olympic final from the gun, fighting to maintain the lead and his pole position through a slow, tactical, physical race, fighting off defending Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop of Kenya with 200 meters to go and then charging down the homestretch to win the gold medal, the first American to do so in 108 years.
Moments after Centrowitz crossed the finish line in Rio, Dellinger’s phone rang.
It was Matt Centrowitz.
“Gold medal,” the elder Centrowitz jokingly crowed, “lot better than bronze.”
“Yes, it is,” Dellinger said laughing.
Dellinger was not a man given to lengthy speeches. Even in moments of great joy or the darkest tragedy, he kept his emotions to himself, a stoic figure. He was further muted by a stroke in 2000 that made it difficult for him to speak. Even before the stroke, those closest to him studied his body language for clues, his eyes, finding affirmation not in his words but in a wink or nod, a smile or a hand gesture.
It was his eyes on this night that gave him away, tears streaming down his cheeks as he watched Matthew Centrowitz take a victory lap around the Estadio Olimipico.
“There were tears,” recalled Pat Tyson, a former Oregon standout who was present that night. “Bill was very emotional. Not just for Little Matt but for Big Matt too.”
It would have been understandable, certainly justified if pride was among the emotions that unleashed those rare tears.
A through line can be drawn from Dellinger’s emergence in the mid-1950s as the first world class runner trained by legendary Oregon coach Bill Bowerman and the start of the greatest dynasty in American middle and long distance running history, to Steve Prefontaine, through the 70s and 80s when Dellinger-coached athletes set more than two dozen U.S. records all the way to Centrowitz’s Olympic triumph.
It was Dellinger who first lit the torch that Centrowitz carried across the finish line that Saturday in Rio.
“One hundred percent,” Tyson said. “There’s no Matthew Centrowitz, Jr. without Bill. It all starts Bill Dellinger.”
“There’s that UO connection from Dellinger to Centrowitz winning the gold medal,” agreed Dave Wilborn, a former Oregon school record holder in the mile.
On Wednesday, on another warm summer night in the Willamette Valley, on the eve of the U.S. Championships, a marquee event for American track and field and a community that calls itself Tracktown USA, a memorial will be held at Hayward Field for Dellinger who died at 91 in June after a battle with cancer. Hayward Field’s iconic wooden East Grandstand that so often shook as Dellinger and later Prefontaine and other Dellinger-coached stars chased record after record was razed in 2018, replaced by $270 million state of the art stadium. While Hayward 2.0 was largely paid for by Phil Knight, the former Oregon miler who co-founded Nike with Bowerman, the foundation was laid decades earlier by Dellinger.
In winning the 1954 NCAA outdoor mile title, Dellinger launched a stretch where Ducks runners won six of the nine NCAA mile or 1,500 crowns between 1954 and 1962, attracting the likes of Australia’s Jim Bailey, later the first man to break 4 minutes on U.S. soil, and future Olympians and American record-holders Jim Grelle and Dyrol Burleson to Bowerman and Oregon.
“Bill was Bowerman’s first elite runner and he won the NCAA championship as a sophomore,” Tyson said. “That was Bowerman’s first. Everybody needs someone that shows that Bill Bowerman knows what he’s talking about, and Dellinger was that guy. And brought in guys to Oregon like Bailey and Grelle and Keith Foreman and Dyrol Burleson and you go up that through line and all the way to Little Matt.”
Dellinger would find even greater success at longer distances. He won the NCAA 2-mile title in 1956 and later set world records, indoors at 2 (and outdoors) and 3 miles, and competed in three Olympic Games in the 5,000, claiming at 30 the bronze medal at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, leaving some of history’s greatest runner’s —France’s Michel Jazy, later the world record holder in the mile, Australia’s Ron Clarke, owner of 17 world records, Kenya’s Kip Keino — in his wake.
It would be another 60 years before another American male would reach the Olympic medal stand in the event.
As Oregon’s coach, Dellinger led the Ducks to four NCAA cross country championships and the 1984 NCAA track and field title, Oregon scoring a meet record 113 points. He coached at least 21 sub-4 minute milers (Bowerman and Villanova’s Jumbo Elliott, the other college distance coaching giant of the 20th Century, guided 22 men under 4:00 between them), provided the blue print for Prefontaine’s record-shattering career, and later assembled and developed the greatest collection of North American runners the college track has ever seen. Runners trained by Dellinger set American records at the eight distances between 2,000 meters and the marathon, the 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 U.S. standards lowered by multiple Dellinger athletes. At least one Dellinger-coached athlete made every U.S. Olympic team from 1972 to 2000.
“Bill, more than any other coach, laid the foundation for the success of American distance runners,” said Alberto Salazar, who set American records at 5,000, 10,000 and the marathon under Dellinger, and later coached Matthew Centrowitz and Great Britain’s Mo Farah to Olympic gold medals.
“In a way, he was more successful than people realize,” said Roscoe Divine, who as an Oregon senior in 1970 led the world in the mile. “Bowerman was kind of a pioneer, but Bill Dellinger really had more success coaching than Bill Bowerman did, particularly in the 5,000.
“He had phenomenal success at the 5,000.”
Three Dellinger-coached runners held the American record in the event: Prefontaine, who broke the mark five times, Centrowitz and Salazar. For three years in the mid-80s, the three fastest Americans all-time at 5,000 were Salazar (13 minutes, 11.93 seconds), Centrowitz (13:12.91) and Bill McChesney (13:14.80). McChesney’s 1982 clocking stood as the fastest by a U.S.-born collegian for 25 years. Between 1971 and 1983, he won 14 NCAA, U.S. championships or Olympic Trials titles at 3 miles or 5,000 meters (3.1 miles). On a wall in Dellinger’s living room is a photo of the field in the 1980 Olympic Trials 5,000 final running single file around Hayward Field’s north turn. Five of the 12 men in that final trained with Dellinger.
“I don’t think we know what his legacy is,” Divine said of Dellinger, “because I think people are just starting to realize how good he was.”
Indeed, Dellinger might be the most underrated personality in American track and field history, a figure whose sport, university and hometown repeatedly failed —or refused — to truly recognize or appreciate his success and influence.
This is in part because of Dellinger’s laid-back, low-key personality.
“He’s never chased the spotlight,” Wendy Ray, the longtime Hayward Field PA announcer, said in a 1998 interview with the Orange County Register.
But mainly Dellinger was never able to escape the shadow of Bowerman, a larger than life figure who was one of the most dominant personalities in American track and the state of Oregon, and especially in Eugene, for much of the second half of the last century; a giant whose mystique has been created and protected by Hollywood, by Bowerman loyalists and history often at Dellinger’s expense.
Nowhere is the discrepancy between myth and reality greater than in regard to how Dellinger’s and Bowerman’s influence on and relationship with Prefontaine have been portrayed on the silver screen and printed page.
“Bowerman never coached Pre,” said Divine, who was a senior at Oregon during Prefontaine’s freshman year. “Dellinger coached Pre and they were really close. I’ll bet you Bill Bowerman never wrote a workout for Steve Prefontaine.
“Pre’s coach was Dellinger and nobody ever talks about that. They always say Bill Bowerman and Steve Prefontaine.”
It is a narrative that was reinforced by a pair of Hollywood movies on the runner, 1997’s “Prefontaine” and “Without Limits,” the Tom Cruise-produced, Robert Towne-directed film released a year later. The screenplay for “Without Limits” was written by Towne, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter for “Chinatown,” and Kenny Moore, a two-time Olympian who ran for Bowerman at Oregon and later was a long-time senior staff writer at Sports Illustrated. Bowerman was a consultant on the film. Both films revolve around the relationship between Prefontaine, the running rebel, track’s record-breaking angry young man, and Bowerman, the guru-like figure who guides Pre through life and his pursuit of Olympic gold.
“Those (films) were about Bill Bowerman, so they negated Bill (Dellinger),” Tyson said, “made it look like Bowerman coached Pre, which we know is not correct.
“He didn’t, hundred percent didn’t. I’m a witness.”
Both films not only marginalized Dellinger, but reduced him to a cartoon-like figure. Prefontaine was played Oscar winning actor Jared Leto in the 1997 film, and by Billy Crudup, an Emmy winner, in “Without Limits.” Donald Sutherland received a Golden Globe nomination for playing a sage Bowerman in “Without Limits.”
Dellinger got Al Bundy.
“I remember when those movies came out, I go up to Bill (Dellinger), ‘Bill, have you seen the movies?’” recalled Art Boileau, a member of Oregon’s 1977 national championship cross country team. “And he just looked at me, ‘No, I haven’t.’
“In one of movies, the guy that plays Bill is Ed O’Neill, the guy from “Married … With Children,” and he made him look like an idiot. I’m like, ‘This guy’s a three-time Olympian, an Olympic medalist, you know?’”
Dellinger, Tyson recalled, “said at the end of the day they were both inaccurate. They both didn’t tell the story.”
Dellinger and Bowerman would have, at times, an uneasy relationship in the years after Bowerman abruptly retired as Oregon coach in 1973, decades marked by spats, respect, misunderstandings and disagreements about the direction of a program they both loved deeply.
“He always gave credit to Bowerman,” Centrowitz said of Dellinger, “which is kind of ironic because (Bowerman) never gave him any credit.”
Perhaps no competition better defines Dellinger, the coach, the man, his coaching philosophy, his willingness to loosen the reins on his athletes and the revisionist history about Dellinger and Bowerman than the 1971 NCAA Cross Country Championships in Knoxville.
Under Bowerman, cross country had never been a point of emphasis at Oregon. That changed with the arrival of Dellinger and then Prefontaine. While Bowerman was listed as head coach, Dellinger was clearly in charge of the Ducks through fall seasons.
Prefontaine, then a sophomore, won the 1970 NCAA race and thought he had led the Ducks to their first team title as well. “We had the (first place) trophy with us on the plane home,” said Tyson, now a successful coach at Gonzaga. But after a protest, a controversial review of the finish resulted in Villanova being awarded a belated victory.
“To this day, to this day, everybody would say Oregon got robbed,” Tyson said.
Prefontaine repeated in 1971 in a race he almost didn’t run. After Oregon finished second to WSU in the Pac-8 race, Ducks athletic director Norv Ritchey decided to only send Prefontaine, not the team, to the NCAA meet in Knoxville. Dellinger and Prefontaine pushed back.
“Pre said if the team isn’t going, I’m not going,” Tyson recalled.
Ritchey gave in and Oregon won its first national cross country title.
Bowerman, still dismissive of cross country, didn’t make the trip to Tennessee. Yet in his biography of Bowerman, Moore writes that with the Ducks victory at the 1973 NCAA meet, “Oregon won Bill Dellinger’s first national title.”
That 1971 team was a model that Dellinger would continue to use to build national championship squads, combining star power in Prefontaine or later Salazar and Rudy Chapa and walk-ons, usually from small Oregon towns. Half of the six Duck who competed in Knoxville were walk-ons, including Tyson out of Tacoma’s Lincoln High School.
After the race, a beaming Dellinger gave Tyson a hard time about getting outkicked by Villanova’s Marty Liquori, then the world’s premier miler.
“‘How come Marty Liquori beat you?’” Tyson remembered Dellinger saying. “He was just joking. That was Bill’s way of just being so thrilled.”
A few hours later, Tyson and Prefontaine were on their way back from a local mini-market having purchased a six-pack of Colt 45 malt liquors and a bunch of cigars when they encountered Dellinger in the lobby of their hotel.
“I was the guy carrying the bag,” Tyson said. “Bill came up and looked at me. ‘What do you have in that bag?’ He looks in there. Takes a can out. Takes a cigar out and he gave us this (faux) scolding look with his finger, ‘You guys be good tonight’ and went up to his room. We went up to ours. The next morning, we got up at 5 to do a 10-mile run. Went to bed at one. Couldn’t sleep. We were national champions.”
A week after their victory, the university took a photo of the new NCAA champions.
“It wasn’t a big deal and then we started winning trophies and it was a big deal,” Tyson said. “Bowerman actually popped in the photo of the NCAA championship team.
“So the athletic director doesn’t want to send you. Bowerman was not a fan of cross country, but when we brought the trophy home, he became a fan. Funny how that works,” Tyson continued laughing. “Bowerman didn’t go to Knoxville. He just joined in the party.”
And there would be plenty to celebrate.
THE WILD MAN OF THE BEACH
Dellinger came from pioneer stock. The Swackers, his mother’s side of the family, arrived in southern Oregon via wagon train in the 1850s.
“He was definitely an Oregonian and proud of it,” said Joe Dellinger, Bill’s son. “He never lost that pioneer heritage. If he didn’t coach or run he would be a hunter or trapper.”
Instead, Dellinger would follow a lifelong pursuit similar to his grandfather’s. Dick Swacker was born in Foots Creek, Oregon in 1877 and for years operated a gold mine near Grants Pass. His grandson would also spend a lifetime mining for precious medals not in the streams and hills of southern Oregon but around ovals the worldwide.
Dellinger, by his own admission, was hanging out with a rough crowd as a Grants Pass ninth-grader when his running ability caught the attention of the school’s track coach during a P.E. class mile run.
“He was way, way ahead of the other kids,” said Fred Dellinger, Bill’s younger brother. “I don’t think he had a clue what his ability was back then.”
A year later, the Dellinger family moved to Springfield, just east of Eugene. The family lived not far from the Kesey family who owned a local dairy company. Ken Kesey, later the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” was a year behind Dellinger at Springfield High School. Kesey years later recalled watching from the warmth of a school bus Dellinger running each morning.
“Running to school instead of riding, rain or shine, the very sort of nut you’d expect to win the state cross country title,” Kesey told Moore.
“Yeah, Kesey called Bill a nut,” Tyson chuckled recently. “You know what Bill called Kesey? ‘Artsy, fartsy.’”
After winning state titles on the track as well, Dellinger enrolled at Oregon, just a few miles away, in the fall of 1952. Bowerman, a former Duck quarter-miler and football player, was in his fifth season as Oregon’s head track coach and was fine-tuning an innovative training program that would become known as the Bowerman system in which runners alternated hard and easy days of training and emphasized interval training where athletes transitioned from running at date pace, the pace they were capable of running their primary event in at that time, to goal pace, the pace they hoped to achieve for that same distance by the end of the season.
The system’s first major success came three weeks after Roger Bannister broke the 4:00 barrier in the mile. Dellinger, an Oregon sophomore, blew past favored Louis Olive of Army to win the NCAA mile title in 4:13.8.
“Years later, knowing what it would lead to, Bowerman would term Dellinger’s mile triumph ‘my greatest and most satisfying experience,’” Moore wrote in “Bowerman And The Men of Oregon.”
The following year Dellinger finished second to Bailey, recruited to Oregon by Bowerman when he competed for Australia at the British Empire Games in Vancouver the summer of 1954. Dellinger and Bailey were part of a special mile at the Los Angeles Coliseum in May 1956 and what was billed as preview of the Olympic Games 1,500 showdown that fall between Australia’s John Landy, the second man under 4:00, and Ron Delany of Villanova and Ireland. Bailey upset the form charts, running 3:58.6, the first sub 4:00 mile on U.S. soil, finishing a tenth ahead of Landy. Dellinger was fourth in 4:08.8. Dellinger would go on to win the NCAA 5,000 title that year and set an American record (14:26.0) at the Olympic Trials.
Oregon’s distance running dynasty had taken root.
The 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne would be an eye-opener for Dellinger and Bowerman.
“When I arrived at Melbourne, Australia, for the Olympic Games, I was shocked to discover the extensive training employed by runners from the rest of the world,” Dellinger wrote in “Winning Running,” his 1978 coaching book. “Mine had consisted of cross country running in the fall, an occasional run during the winter months, a lot of handball and other recreational types of sports. I did not begin a structured training program until early March. I found that my competitors in Melbourne not only trained year-round, but were training twice a day. No wonder my time of 14:26 was almost a full minute behind the then world record of 13:35! That was a time I felt was impossible to run. I also discovered that at 21, I was the youngest of the runners in the 5,000 final. Vladimir Kuts (of the Soviet Union), the winner was 27!”
Dellinger, overcome by the heat, did not finish the Olympic final. The trip, however, was hardly a waste, Dellinger sharing with Bowerman the lessons he learned in Melbourne, Bowerman then incorporating that information into his still-evolving methods. It was a practice Dellinger and later Grelle and Burleson would continue with Bowerman upon returning from international competition throughout their careers. Later Prefontaine, Centrowitz, and Salazar and Chapa would repeat the practice with Dellinger.
Convinced he was years from his prime and at a time when track and field athletes were prohibited by the International Olympic Committee and the sport’s global governing body from being professional, Dellinger enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a way to continue training for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.
In 1957, he was stationed at a remote radar station on the northern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
“The middle of nowhere,” Divine said, “the northern part of nowhere.”
“The closest track was 90 miles away, so I just ran up and down the beach,” Dellinger recalled in a 1998 interview with the Orange County Register. “I had a count system. Every time my right foot hit I counted. When I got to 10 I stuck my thumb out.
“Then when I got to 10 again the next finger. I figured 12 fingers was close to a 440.”
The local Makah Indians named him the “Wild Man of the Beach” and made him an honorary member of their tribe. There was, it turned out, a method to Dellinger’s madness. From 1956 to 1959, he set two world records and six American records. In August 1958, in the U.S. vs. Hungary meet in Budapest, Dellinger set the American 1,500 record, running 3:41.5, equivalent to a 3:57.6 mile. At the time, Derek Ibbotson of Great Britain’s mile world record was 3:57.2, with the U.S. record at 3:58.7.
Dellinger arrived in Rome among the favorites for a medal in the Olympic 5,000 only to come down with dysentery, his weight dropping to 128 from 140 in a week. He didn’t make the final. A few weeks later, his strength back, Dellinger tied Rome 5,000 winner Murray Halberg of New Zealand in a London two-mile race.
He returned to Oregon, retired from running, and took a job teaching and coaching at Thurston High School in Springfield. He stayed fit running his high school runners and in September 1963 decided to make a comeback.
“I felt I’d failed at the Olympic level,” Dellinger said. “So I decided to make one more effort.”
The 1964 Olympic 5,000 final featured one of the greatest distance fields ever assembled. Of the 11 men who lined up in the rain on a muddy cinder track October 18, six were either former, current or future world record-holders, combining for nearly 30 world indoor and outdoor records during their careers.
Trying to shake the men with big finishing kicks, France’s Jazy, Bob Schul of the U.S. and West German Harold Norpoth, Australia’s Clarke threw a series of surges at his rivals almost from the beginning, running 200 meters in 4:00 mile pace, then backing off, then surging again. Dellinger let Clarke and those brave — or foolish — enough to chase him go. With three laps, 1,200 meters to go, Dellinger was back in the hunt in a nine-man pack still led by Clarke with Jazy on his shoulder. A lap later, Dellinger was in eighth, but with 600 to go, he charged into the lead and broke the race wide open. He and Jazy were shoulder to shoulder in the lead at the bell. With 300 remaining, Dellinger had slipped to fourth. He was fifth with 200 to go before blasting off with 180 left. He charged through the crowd down a puddle-strewn home stretch with the race’s fastest final 100, outleaning Jazy at the finish line for the bronze, both men timed in 13:49.8, two tenths behind Norpoth, a second behind Schul’s gold medal clocking.
“At first I was really disappointed,” he said in his 1998 interview. “I thought I should have won, I guess I still do. But you know now I’m kind of proud of that Olympic medal.”
In the ensuing years, the significance of Dellinger’s performance in Tokyo, his effort that day and as a harbinger of another epic Olympic 5,000 final driven by another Oregonian, only grew.
“Have you ever watched the (Tokyo) 5,000?” Boileau asked. “It’s almost a carbon copy of what Pre did eight years later, from Tokyo to Munich.”
A SENSE OF SOMETHING HOLY AND SOMETHING TRAGIC
When Dellinger was hired in 1968 as Bowerman’s first full-time assistant, his top priority was recruiting a gifted, cocky runner out Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, a fishing and lumber town on the southern Oregon coast: Steve Roland Prefontaine.
One of the tenets of the mythology surrounding Bowerman and Prefontaine is that Pre, frustrated by a perceived lack of interest from the Ducks, chose Oregon only after Bowerman belatedly reached out to him, a narrative perpetuated in part by Prefontaine.
“Then I got a handwritten note,” Prefontaine said. “I could barely read it. It said if I came to Oregon, he’d make me into the best distance runner ever. That was all I needed to hear.”
In fact, Dellinger had been writing and calling Prefontaine on an almost weekly basis for months. In a handwritten note dated July 31, 1968, addressed to “Dear Mr. Dellinger,” Prefontaine responded to the Oregon assistant coach’s invitation to attend a final pre-Olympic Trials high-performance meet at Hayward Field that August.
“I’m all ready except for finding out what time I need to be there for the track meet,” Prefontaine wrote. “I don’t know what kind of fishing gear to bring along or sleeping things.”
Dellinger had selected Tyson to show Prefontaine around that weekend. The pair sat in Hayward’s president box, swept up in the pandemonium as hometown favorite Moore upset Washington State’s Gerry Lindgren, a world record holder and then winner of a record 10 NCAA titles, by two feet in the 10,000.
“That’s when Bill and Pre clicked, that weekend,” said Tyson, later Prefontaine’s roommate. “They clicked right away.
“It was an amazing bond. I was thinking about what would Pre be like without Dellinger? What would Dellinger be like without Pre? Who could have coached Pre the way Bill did? I don’t think too many people could have done it any better. You think about it, Bill gets the bronze in Tokyo and eight years later Pre was in the hunt to get a gold coming around that last corner (of the 1972 Olympic 5,000 final). There was so much confidence and trust. There was never one moment where Pre ever questioned Dellinger’s anything. So the bond was beautiful. There was never any drama.”
At least not between Dellinger and Prefontaine.
After a Saturday practice in the fall of 1969, an agitated Bowerman stormed into the team’s locker room in McArthur Court, the school’s ancient basketball arena. On each locker an athlete’s name was written on white medical tape.
“Bill we need to clean up the locker room and get rid of the hamburgers,” Bowerman said to Dellinger, referring to walk-ons.
“So he came over and ripped my name off, which meant I’m out of there,” Tyson said. “And then Dellinger said ‘I agree we need to clean it up more,’ so he went over to a guy who was one of (Bowerman’s) favorite recruits.”
Dellinger then ripped the tape off the locker of Mike McClendon, a filet mignon prospect out of Texas, who had been struggling in workouts.
Bowerman, steaming, froze. And glared.
“Bill Dellinger said that was the one time in all of his career at Oregon where he thought he was going to get fired,” Tyson said. “Because Bowerman, you could see fire in his eyes, steam coming out of his ears and jugular vein popping out, and (Dellinger) just knew he was on a death sentence, but somehow it cooled off. I got my spot, McClendon got his spot. That’s one of the reasons I’m so loyal to Bill Dellinger. He stood up for me and I always stand up for him. For 57 years.”
That fall Prefontaine, still only 18, would finish colliding shoulder to shoulder in a virtual dead-heat with Lindgren at the inaugural Pac-8 Conference Cross Country Championships, the greatest cross country race ever run on U.S. soil.
Prefontaine, Lindgren and the greatest U.S. cross country race ever
But it was during the following spring where Prefontaine would emerge as American track’s last rock star, a personality who attracted a cult like following, Pre’s People, an unlikely collection of loggers and lumber mill workers, professors and college students who put down their picket signs to cram into Hayward Field on Saturday afternoons, stomping rhythmically, chanting “Pre! Pre! Pre!” with his every footstep.
“Watching him run was a unique feeling I’ve never experienced anywhere else in sports,” said former San Francisco 49ers coach George Seifert, an Oregon assistant football coach in the early ’70s. “It was an electric feeling – the screaming and hysteria was like this big old envelope that engulfed all of us. It was so emotional I’d have tears in my eyes. It was a great natural high that you don’t forget and you can’t duplicate chemically.”
Prefontaine’s appeal was that he was both a working-class hero and the ultimate anti-authority figure, a unifying force at one of the most divided periods in the nation’s history. The guy working the green chain on the graveyard shift appreciated Pre’s work ethic, the code by which he ran. “A lot of people run a race to see who’s the fastest,” he said. “I run to see who has the most guts.” The kids appreciated his open defiance of authority, in Prefontaine’s case the organizations that governed track and field and other Olympic sports, the good old boys club determined to dictate to deny athletes the chance to make a living in the sport while they stayed in five-star hotels and were chauffeured in limos at international competitions.
“A lot of us thought there was going to be a complete change in consciousness in the nation, an overall increase in mercy and patience and humor. All you had to do was spread the word around and it was all going to be OK,” Kesey told this reporter in 1995. “You really felt of him as an ally. I think everybody that was sort of a revolutionary recognized from the look in his eye, he’s more than a runner.”
Before he had even completed his freshman track season, Prefontaine was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, then the ultimate confirmation of athletic star status.
“THE FRESHMAN AND THE GREAT GURU,” read the magazine’s headline. “Only 19 but blessed with speed, stamina and a canny coach, Steve Prefontaine may turn out to be the best ever.”
Dellinger had been a celebrity in 50s and 60s, as evidenced by the photos of him posing with movie stars and entertainers in his scrapbooks. When the Olympic team was invited to Yankee Stadium, only Dellinger got to hang out with Mickey Mantle in the dugout. Dellinger would remain a lifelong Yankees fan.
But Dellinger recognized as early as anyone that Prefontaine’s fame transcended the sport. Pre was a cultural phenomenon.
“That man has something no runner in my time had,” Dellinger later told Moore, then writing for Sports Illustrated. “We used to warm up out of sight behind the stands, and we would never have considered taking a victory lap. But Pre … he’s almost like a movie star in his relationship with the crowd. He thrives on it.”
The 1970 SI article by Pat Putnam captured Pre mania in its infancy. The “great guru,” “the canny coach” was Bowerman in a narrative that ignored Dellinger’s role in developing Prefontaine and that would be repeated for decades. Dellinger wasn’t the only one minimized in the piece. Putnam’s trip to Eugene coincided with Prefontaine’s bid at the Oregon Twilight meet to break 4:00 in the mile for the first time. Pre ran 3:57.4 but was no match over the final 200 for Divine, who won going away in a world-leading 3:56.3.
While Prefontaine’s death in May 1975 would lead to decades of unanswered questions, so too would Divine and those who saw him run be haunted by questions of “what if?”
In a fairer world, Divine would have joined Prefontaine in Munich for the 1972 Olympic Games, where what became a tactical 1,500 final was tailor-made for Divine’s long finishing kick. Instead the Twilight mile against Prefontaine was the last major race for Divine, his career shortened by an Achilles tendon injury, the first signs of which he felt on that night’s victory lap around Hayward Field with Pre.
While there was a trust and comfort between Prefontaine and Dellinger, the runner held Bowerman, like so many in the sport, in the state, in awe.
“I’ll never forget the first time I met him,” Prefontaine told SI’s Putnam. “I felt like I was talking to God. I still do.”
But it was Dellinger who was doing the lord’s work with Prefontaine on a daily basis.
Fifteen days after the Twilight mile, Prefontaine, overcoming a bloody gash from an encounter with an uncovered bolt on the pool deck of the team’s hotel, won the first of his four NCAA 3 mile/5,000-meter titles. He would win the first of his three NCAA cross country crowns the following fall and then claim his first American record in July 1971, winning the U.S.-Soviet Union meet 5,000 in Berkeley, then lowering the standard at the 1972 Olympic Trials to 13:22.8, a mark that at the time had been bested by only two other men.
It was Dellinger who trained Prefontaine to be ready to run the final mile of the Olympic final in 4:00. In a training session shortly before the Games, Prefontaine, running by himself, cranked out a 3:59 mile.
Pre was ready.
Then the Olympic Games were changed forever. On September 5, 1972, terrorists from Black September, a Palestinian militant organization, snuck into the Olympic Village and murdered two members of the Israeli team and took 11 other team members, coaches and officials hostage. Those 11 were later killed in a botched rescue attempt at a Munich airport. The Games were postponed for a day in the wake of the massacre
“If they loaded us all into a plane right now to take us home,” Prefontaine said. “I’d go.”
Instead, Dellinger jumped a fence at the village and drove Prefontaine to nearby Austria for the day, refocusing him on the competition.
Great Britain’s David Bedford had been expected to push the early pace of the Olympic 5,000 final just as Clarke did eight years earlier in Tokyo. The surges, however, never came as the field crawled through two miles in 8:56.4. Prefontaine, then 21 and the youngest runner in the race by two years, cut the 67-second a lap pace to 62.5, then 61.2 and 60.3, dropping all but Finland’s Lasse Viren and Mohamed Gamoudi of Tunisia at the bell. With 300 meters remaining, Prefontaine charged for the lead but was cut off by Gamoudi. With 200 meters left Prefontaine pulled wide and was again cut off and lost momentum. Spent, he faded down the home stretch, staggering across the finish line fourth.
“He was just a kid and he could have easily won a medal, if he had run for second or third,” said Geoff Hollister, a close friend of Prefontaine’s and an influential Nike employee. “But that wasn’t Pre, that wasn’t who he was.”
Prefontaine and Dellinger returned to Eugene to prepare for Pre’s senior season at Oregon and another shot at Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976. Then in March 1973, Bowerman retired. Dellinger was promoted to head coach. Serving as U.S. Olympic team head coach in Munich had taken a lot out of Bowerman. “He told me one time it was the worst experience he ever had,” Tyson said.
Bowerman also said at the time he couldn’t coach both the Ducks and lead a fundraising campaign for the renovation of Hayward Field and do justice to either one.
The two men clashed almost immediately after Dellinger decided to hire an assistant coach who had gotten on Bowerman’s bad side years earlier. Bowerman demanded Dellinger not hire the coach. Dellinger stood his ground.
Prefontaine won his fourth NCAA 3-mile crown that June, the first athlete to win a national championship in the same event all four years. But the criticism of Dellinger persisted. When only one Oregon athlete scored at the 1974 NCAA track meet held in the heat of Austin, some Bowerman loyalists wanted Dellinger out, a view Bowerman didn’t discourage.
“Everyone in Eugene had an opinion,” said Centrowitz, who transferred to Oregon from Manhattan in 1974. “The day I arrived in Eugene, I heard the criticism of Bill before I even got to the airport parking lot. “
“Following Bill Bowerman was the same as following John Wooden at UCLA, I mean just as hard,” former UCLA track coach Jim Bush told the Register in 1998. “Bowerman was just like Wooden, larger than life, a giant. “
And in this case, the giant wasn’t really ready to go, Centrowitz said.
“Basically Bowerman retired a little too early and I think that basically Bowerman wanted back in, I think so,” Centrowitz said. “He caught his breath and at 62 he was in too good of health, too much fire in Bowerman. Bill wasn’t doing it the way he did it and basically the bottom line was a lot of people wanted him out of there and basically I told him about it and he said don’t worry about it. I can clearly remember what he said because he said, ‘The best thing you can do for the University of Oregon and me is to make that Olympic team.’ He turned a negative into a positive in my head and that’s the way Bill was.”
And there was still plenty to feel positive about.
By the spring of 1975, Prefontaine owned all seven American records from 2,000 to 10,000 meters.
“There was a sense of something holy going on,” Kesey said, “and something tragic about Prefontaine.”
On May 29, he finished just off his American record in the 5,000 in handily defeating Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter at Hayward Field. At a post-meet party later that night at Hollister’s home, he talked about his and Dellinger’s plan to break the world record at 10,000 meters in June in Helsinki. Moments after dropping Shorter off at Moore’s house, Prefontaine was killed in an automobile accident not far from the home Dellinger would eventually buy.
“It took me a while to get over that,” Dellinger said in 1998. “I still think about him.”
But Dellinger kept those thoughts to himself.
“We rarely talked about it,” Tyson said. “That’s just how boys are.”
Prefontaine and Dellinger, Matt Centrowitz said, “were like big brother, little brother more than what my relationship with Bill was.
“Ours was like father and son.”
THE NEXT PURPOSE
For all his knowledge of the sport, his training expertise and his willingness to adapt, the key to Dellinger’s coaching success was his loyalty and connection with his athletes. It didn’t matter if you were a high school superstar or a walk-on, Dellinger gave you a chance and respect.
“He just said, you know, if you want to try and you’re willing to show up, I’m going to let you try to make the team,” Chapa said. “And that’s how he treated people.”
“He had such a special relationship with his runners,” Joe Dellinger said. “Something only elite runners can understand, that bond. Running is probably one of the hardest sports that there is, especially at that level. So they shared that. Kind of like combat veterans. They shared that something that no one else can understand. That deep understanding of each other and what it takes to make it.”
With none of the athletes he coached, however, did Dellinger have a deeper understanding than with Matt Centrowitz.
“Bill changed Big Matt forever,” Tyson said. “He found the father he never had.”
Centrowitz grew up in a broken home in the Bronx. His father Sid was a professional gambler, the only Jew allowed to run a card game in Little Italy. Centrowitz’s parents broke up and when he was 12. Centrowitz chose to live with their mother.
“Instead of taking this like a man, my father cut us off,” Centrowitz wrote in his autobiography, “Like Father Like Son,” the title quoting the tattoo Matthew Centrowitz had inscribed across his chest after his Olympic victory. “He decided he wanted nothing to do with us. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘You’ll never amount to anything without me.’
“That’s about the worst you could ever say to a 12-year-old. I didn’t see him at all for the next seven years.”
By his own admission, Centrowtiz “was on my way to being a low-level hoodlum, but plenty of guys around me were already hardened criminals.”
After spending Thanksgiving weekend in a juvenile detention center for having marijuana in his school locker as a ninth grader, Centrowitz discovered he had a talent for running.
As a senior at Power Memorial, (also Kareen Abdul-Jabbar’s alma mater), Centrowitz was the nation’s top prep miler in 1973. But he was still searching as a freshman at Manhattan when he was introduced to Dellinger and Prefontaine at a Spokane restaurant later that fall at the NCAA Cross Country Championships in November 1973.
“My father was absent when I was growing up,” Centrowitz said. “So Bill took the time and energy because number one, I was hungry for a father figure in my life. Bill was that guy. He was 39 years old, a three-time Olympian, had a master’s degree and was a very successful track coach, runner-athlete and teacher and I looked up to him for a number of reasons.
“Gave up a full scholarship at Manhattan to walk on at Oregon. I thought that much of Bill and his program and the university that I wanted to be a part of that. He realized that I stuck my neck out and I was very hungry to improve, probably more than the average kid. I grew up in the Bronx, which is a lot different than growing up in Oregon, so I had some maturity and I had some experience. I had been on the (U.S.) junior team the year before. I traveled around the world. Was the No. 1 miler in the country but I was broken down my freshman year. So I was very receptive to getting better and I was hungry to improve. That was the only goal I had. I wasn’t there to make the honor roll. I was there to break four minutes in the mile and hopefully run the Olympic Trials.”
Centrowitz indeed made the 1976 Olympic team in the 1,500, running 3:36.7 at the Olympic Trials, setting a Pac-8 conference record that stood for eight years.
Yet if Centrowitz needed Dellinger, then the relationship between the coach and the brash New Yorker also filled a void in Dellinger’s life after Prefontaine’s death.
“The guy who got the best out of Dellinger was Centrowitz,” Divine said. “He loved Centrowitz.”
“When Pre died, he realized he had a job to do with me,” Centrowitz said. “That’s one of the reasons he came out of his (depression). He didn’t know if he wanted to coach anymore. He gave me his best. He saw a need in me and I put everything on the line for him. He found the next purpose.”
Dellinger’s relationship with Centrowitz, however, only fueled the criticism of the coach. There was an element among his critics who looked down at Dellinger, the kid who grew up in working-class Springfield across the tracks from the university town. Bowerman socialized with college presidents and U.S. senators. Dellinger hung out at Tommy’s, a tavern in Eugene’s Glenwood or the Prairie Schooner off Highway 99 out by the Eugene airport. He shot pool and played darts and video poker.
“You didn’t play pool with Bill,” Boileau said. “If Bill asked you to play him in pool, it was like, ‘I’ll just give you my $5 now.’”
“Bill liked to have a good time,” Tyson said. “I think his personal life was not one that they agreed with. The blue collar Bill Dellinger. He wasn’t the country club guy. I think people will say we didn’t appreciate what we had because that was a pretty cool generation during Dellinger’s era.”
The criticism of Dellinger only intensified when Centrowitz started showing up at bars with his coach.
“He made suggestions not to do certain things and a lot of times I didn’t listen, and I’m glad I didn’t listen because I got more out of those times with Bill as a young man trying to be a big man than I did winning another medal or winning another dual meet,” Centrowitz said. “That’s the way I looked at it and I told him that many times. And I was grateful to him for that, despite what other people thought or what they thought was right. Bill always lived his life the way he thought was right and I lived my life the way I thought was right, and you’re not going to get everybody’s approval. So it was a valuable lesson we all learned.”
One of those lessons was don’t bet with Dellinger.
“He’d put on maybe five pounds, I saw him on the scale and I said, ‘Look you want to run together?’ We can do this because he always ran after practice,” Centrowitz said. “So he gets all pissed off. We’re at a bar having a beer, talking. And I thought I said it delicately, but it didn’t come over well because he’s got a lot of pride. And he says, ‘When you’re 40 years old, like I am, you’ll be weighing over 200 pounds.’ So I said, ‘No way, I’m not going to weigh over 200 pounds.’ So he pulls out a coaster. We bet $100. And when I turned 40, he pulled out that coaster.
“Eighteen years later, I handed him $100. If you know Bill, he loses things left and right, but he held onto that (expletive) coaster for 18 years.”
JUST BE WHO YOU ARE
While giving a video crew from the website Runnerspace.com a tour of his home in 2009, Dellinger was asked to point out some of his favorites among the photos that lined the home’s walls. Dellinger pointed to a photo of him reaching out to hug Chapa and Salazar in the middle of their victory lap after Chapa broke Prefontaine’s American record in the 3,000 at the Oregon Twilight meet in May 1979.
Recently, when Chapa was asked about his favorite memory of Dellinger, he also chose the photo.
“And it’s not so much a memory as it is an image that is locked in my mind and my heart,” he said.
In 1976, Dellinger pulled off a recruiting coup as impactful as securing Prefontaine, signing Chapa out of Hammond, Indiana, south of Chicago, and Salazar out of Wayland, Massachusetts.
“And it was just a funny visit,” Chapa said, referring to Dellinger’s home visit. “Because he came out, and I remember two things about that visit. The first one was that he brought out this little chart, and he goes, ‘Hey, you know, I know you’ve been told how much it rains in Oregon, and I just want to show you that it rains in Chicago just as much, and it was like within an inch. And I laugh about it, because he didn’t tell me that it just rained like almost every day for six months. But more importantly, the other thing I remembered was that even though I only took three (recruiting) visits, there were a lot of people that coaches had called and talked to me. But the one thing about Bill Dellinger that stuck with me was that he never said one single bad thing about any other program. And most other coaches, they’d always kind of badmouth or were critical about other places. Bill Dellinger never said one negative thing about any other program. And when he left, that was one thing that I came away with, just that he was interested in selling what they did and what made Oregon special, and spent no time whatsoever talking about another program or badmouthing anybody. And that meant a lot to me”
Chapa, as a Hammond senior, set the national high school record for 10,000 meters (28:32.7) at the 1976 Drake Relays, a mark that remains unbroken today, nearly a half-century later. He was ninth overall, the third American as an Oregon freshman at the 1976 NCAA cross country meet. But he and Dellinger disagreed about what Chapa should run at the 1977 NCAA track championships. Chapa wanted to run the 5,000. Dellinger insisted he run the 10,000.
“And I ended up bombing out,” Chapa said. “I got lapped, and it was like the first time home. And very embarrassing. And the other guy who bombed the Nationals was Matt Centrowitz, who a year before had made the Olympic team. And I’ll never forget Dellinger coming into our room and talking to us, and when he said a few things to Matt, he said, “and you quit, and you can never quit in a race.’ And it was the first time anyone other than family, my parents had ever criticized me. And it cut really deep. I thought it was really unfair. I didn’t think I quit. And I was so upset at that conversation that I decided I wasn’t going to come back. I was prepared to go to Indiana, and I was just gonna study, trying to get into med school.”
Chapa’s high school coach learned about his plans and called Dellinger.
“And Dellinger called me,” Chapa said. “I don’t remember this conversation, but I ended up deciding to come back to Oregon.
“You know what happened? He was critical of me two times my entire time at Oregon. And you know that, because I wasn’t coming back, and I used to work in the steel mills in the summer for three years, it was hard to run, and since I wasn’t coming back, I didn’t run much that summer, going into my sophomore year, and then I didn’t run a good race at nationals in cross country. We won, but when we left the course, we thought we finished second, and it wasn’t until, like, think later in the day that we were declared champs. But I’ll never forget we were driving back from the course thinking we had finished second, and he looked back at me and he says, ‘Hey, I hope next summer you decide to run.’ That was a killer.”
The Oregon team that edged UTEP for the 1977 NCAA cross country title was simply the greatest collection of North American distance running talent in college history. Salazar, Centrowitz, McChesney and Don Clary made U.S. Olympic teams. Boileau ran in two Olympic Games for Canada and finished second in the Boston Marathon.
But Dellinger would say the most talented athlete he ever coached was Chapa.
Rededicating himself that winter, Chapa won the NCAA 5,000 in June 1978 before a raucous, packed-to-the-rafters Hayward Field, lapping some of the nation’s top runners in the process.
“My relationship with (Dellinger) just became very strong,” Chapa said. “And I don’t remember him ever saying something like, ‘Hey, you’re really coming along.’”
But after a workout that spring, Dellinger spotted Chapa in the hallway in McArthur Court and asked Chapa to meet him in the coaches’ locker area. Dellinger pulled out Prefontaine’s Oregon sweatshirt.
“And he goes, ‘I want you to have this. You should have it,’” Chapa said. “And the fact that he decided to let me have it was really meaningful.”
In the spring of 1979, Chapa broke Prefontaine’s school record in the 5,000, becoming the first American collegian to break 13:20. and then claimed Pre’s U.S. 3,000 record. Chapa’s success led to the media and fans and the burden of being labeled “the next Pre.”
“I remember Dellinger being very protective with me,” Chapa said. “Somebody had asked Dellinger that question, ‘Is Rudy the next Pre?’ And Bill was like, ‘No, Rudy has no interest in being the next Pre. He just wants to be him.’ And Dellinger never, ever compared me to Prefontaine, nor made me feel like that’s something, a burden that I should carry, and I always respected that, because that was his attitude, just be who you are.”
Salazar under Dellinger’s tutelage would follow Chapa’s NCAA 5,000 title by winning the NCAA cross country title that fall, then go on to win three New York City Marathons and in 1982 break the American records at 5,000 and 10,000 and in a 10-day period, coming within steps of beating Henry Rono, the owner of four world records, in a 10,000 in Eugene and one of the greatest races Hayward Field has ever seen and then outlast Dick Beardsley in an epic Boston Marathon.
Chapa, like Divine a decade earlier, would see his career cut short by injury.
Salazar and Chapa arrived in Eugene in the midst of the criticism of Dellinger by Bowerman loyalists.
“We were sensitive to it, because we were living it,” Chapa said. “When I got there, it was very clear that there was this chasm that existed between Bowerman and everybody loyal to Bowerman and Dellinger. And we just were going to be loyal to our coach. And I don’t ever remember Dellinger ever saying anything negative about a lot of those people that were clearly trying to make life difficult for them? Yeah, and we were sensitive to the rumors, because there were plenty of rumors, and we were going to be loyal to Bill.
“The one thing I do remember my freshman year was having a discussion with Alberto, and he was a lot more versed in Oregon track history than I was, and because Dellinger was taking some heat at the time from the people that were loyal to Bowerman, (Salazar said) Bill was Pre’s coach. And everyone you know tried to say it was Bowerman, but Dellinger was Pre’s coach, and the reason why he was so good and why Pre trusted him is because there wasn’t a thing that Pre was going to go through in life as a runner, that Dellinger hadn’t gone through, and that established this level of trust.”
Joaquin Cruz swept the 1,500 and 800 titles to lead Oregon to the 1984 NCAA track title. Cruz went on to win the 800 at the Los Angeles Olympics.
But Dellinger’s continued success did not satisfy his critics, especially after he signed a lucrative deal with adidas. Dellinger, in the late 1970s, had developed a nylon web design to disperse shock in running shoes. Because he wasn’t on speaking terms with Bowerman, he pitched his idea to Knight, a former Oregon teammate. The Nike CEO turned him down.
Adidas, however, signed Dellinger to a lucrative contract worth more than double his Oregon salary. Not only was adidas’ Oregon model the German company’s top-selling running shoe, adidas uniformed the Ducks and even paid to have “adidas” stripped across the Hayward Field scoreboard. Bowerman loyalists and Nike officials were furious.
“He offered it to Nike before he offered it to adidas,” Divine said. “They had nothing to squawk about.”
“The one thing that I don’t think has ever come out,” Chapa said, “I can say with 100% certainty, and I wore adidas when I won nationals in Eugene, not one time during my entire career at Oregon did he ever say anything about wearing adidas products. He didn’t get in the way of the adidas rep at the time, but he let any shoe rep talk to the athletes. But he never, ever pushed adidas. Never said, I think you should wear this brand. Never were those words said, and that’s again, a testament to who he was. And anyone who’s thought that because he developed a relationship with adidas, that he was maybe partial towards adidas when it came to the athletes. That is absolutely not true. Never.”
Dellinger used some of the money to buy the home in Hendricks Park in 1984. During the NCAAs or U.S. Championships, the Prefontaine Classic and later the Olympic Trials, the Dellinger house would be the hottest ticket in town, coaches, former Ducks, world record holders heading up the hill after a day at the track.
“He was always having something at his house,” Divine said. “People were always welcome there.”
“They might as well put a revolving door in, because everybody wanted to be there,” Chapa said. “And if you were from Oregon and were lucky enough to have been part of the Oregon track program, it was home. And it was home because it was him and who he was as a person.”
Oregon continued to win Pac-10 titles in the 80s and 90s, but eventually Dellinger was worn down by scholarship reductions, the non-coaching duties of the job and the criticism. He retired in 1998, named Pac-10 coach of the year in his final season. His friends said he was finally forced out.
“It almost felt like he got kicked out of town, that Eugene couldn’t appreciate him,” Tyson said. “Didn’t give him respect.”
If he felt any bitterness, Dellinger didn’t share it.
At Oregon’s final home meet that May, Dellinger took a lap of honor at Hayward Field, former and current athletes lined the track, applauding. Fans climbed out of the stands to shake his hand. When he entered the home stretch, Bowerman, wearing a green cowboy hat, stood waiting for him at the finish line. Behind Dellinger, the Men of Oregon had joined in the run. Olympians and American record holders still chasing the Wild Man of the Beach.
“I haven’t worked a day in my life,” he said, “because I love what I’m doing.
“It’s been quite a run for me. And I’ve loved every step of the way. “
Oregon wouldn’t win another conference title in cross country until 2006, an NCAA crown until 2007. The Ducks didn’t win an NCAA track championship until 2014.
CLOSURE
Dellinger suffered a stroke in 2000 while visiting Fred Dwyer, an old friend and Centrowitz’s coach at Manhattan, in New Jersey. The stroke left him partially paralyzed, especially on his right side, and made it difficult for him to speak. But the stroke also once again revealed Dellinger’s competitive nature.
“That’s a really good way of looking at it. It was a natural thing,” Tyson said. “It certainly was his DNA. A survivor. He had the stroke in 2000. He lived for 25 years not being able to be who he was. It’s one thing to live the latter part of your years, be able to speak to people, walk pretty good. But he lost his ability to talk, he lost his ability to run, exercise, he could barely walk. Remember, he had five (running) principles, that principle of adaptation was part of who he was. Adapt our training. Bill had to adapt.
“He had a hard time going to the parties because he’d want to talk and get frustrated and we’d leave the parties early.”
But he still entertained. … And he still coached, guiding Nick Rogers to a spot on the 2000 U.S. Olympic team at, what else, the 5,000.
“Nick would be doing a workout and Bill would be out there reading splits,” Tyson said. “He was out there in his element, coaching. He never gave up.”
“If he didn’t have the stroke,” Joe Dellinger said, “he probably would have done that well into his 80s.”
While the stroke often took his voice, Dellinger found comfort in knowing that in the end, there had been nothing left unsaid between he and Bowerman.
Tyson was visiting Dellinger in November 1999.
“Bill said we’re going to go over to Bill Bowerman’s,” Tyson recalled.
Bowerman was feeding cattle when Dellinger and Tyson pulled up to the family’s spread on the hillside overlooking the McKenzie River.
“Bowerman had this old pickup truck, Toyota, moss growing on it,” Tyson said.
Dellinger had come bearing gifts, a 1904 University of Oregon annual that featured the Ducks’ first Hall of Fame track coach, Bill Hayward, Bowerman’s mentor.
The book was a peace offering of sorts, and over lunch, the two men talked about old times and old wounds.
“A lot of it was Bowerman really saying I’m sorry if there was any misunderstanding of anything and I’m sorry. They talked about Oregon track and field, the rule book, (cuts in) scholarships.
“Bowerman said I’m glad I’m not there, and that was their closure. But it was very, very pleasant and very, very positive and to this day, until Bill died, there was never any animosity. There was respect.”
When he wasn’t coaching Gonzaga, Tyson was usually with Dellinger in Hawaii or going to Yankees games on the East Coast. One of Tyson’s favorite photos is of him and Dellinger and a 20-year-old Matthew Centrowitz at a Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park in 2011. Mainly Tyson helped Dellinger host the never ending line of athletes, coaches, reporters, friends, their children who continued to make their way up to Hendricks Park to go through Dellinger’s scrapbooks, share a laugh and a joke, a beer or a drink, retell old stories that never got old, to trace the photos, posters and mementos across the house’s wood paneled walls, the triumphs of Pre, Chapa and Salazar, Centrowitz and Centrowitz, Bowerman, all of them tied together by one common thread, one through line leading back to Dellinger.
In quieter moments, when the crowds had left, Dellinger would point to one of the many photos of Prefontaine and ask Tyson, “What do you think Pre would be doing today if he were alive?”
“And I’d say, ‘Bill, he’d be bald. And I hope he would be fit and he would probably be very, very wealthy and he would probably have three wives, and a bunch of kids and he would also make sure Oregon was in good shape and he’d make sure the state of Oregon was in good shape.’
“And he would shake his head. It would be like a son dying and we didn’t talk much about it, but he would always ask, ‘What would Pre be doing today?’ I would say, ‘And he’d be very successful and he’d be best friends with Bill.’”
In late May, Dellinger began having health issues. He was placed into hospice care in late June. In his final days, he watched his beloved Yankees surrounded by family and friends and listened to a playlist that could have come from the jukebox of an Oregon tavern or pool hall in the 50s, 60s and 70s: Merle Haggard, Roy Orbison, and George Jones.
Who’s gonna give their heart and soul to get to me and you?
Lord, I wonder, who’s gonna fill their shoes?
Dellinger died on June 27.
“Bill crossed the finish line this morning,” Tyson texted a group of Dellinger friends.
On another hot August Saturday afternoon last summer, the decades echoing up from Hayward Field and across his walls, Dellinger settled in to watch the Olympic Games 5,000 final with his grandson Jack.
The later stages of the race must have looked familiar to Dellinger. Grant Fisher, the bronze medalist in the 10,000 earlier in the Games, was eighth at the bell, ninth with 300 to go, seventh heading into the final 200. Then just as Dellinger had 60 years earlier in Tokyo, Fisher charged through traffic down the final homestretch, securing the bronze medal in the final steps.
Ten years earlier, Fisher, then a rising mile star as a Michigan prep, stood on the track on the Nike campus on a street named Bowerman Drive outside Portland, ready to start a workout conducted by Salazar.
Fisher was among a select group of the nation’s top high school runners invited to the Nike Elite camp. In a chair on the track’s outside lanes sat Dellinger, invited by Salazar. The workout, Salazar told Fisher and the other rising stars had been an Oregon staple, developed by Dellinger decades earlier. Then Salazar turned to introduce his old coach to Fisher and the others, to the future he made possible.
“It,” Salazar said, “all started with him.”