The rise of Track Town

TRACK TOWN, USA — Oscar-winning best picture “The French Connection” was playing at the North End Drive In off Highway 99 and “Cabaret,” also a big winner at the Academy Awards earlier that year, was showing at the Fine Arts cinema on Main Street in Springfield.

Or you could have gone down to the old Heilig Theatre at Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street, where the Hult Center now stands, and seen the adult cartoon, “Fritz the Cat,” if your early-’70s self was more into that sort of thing.

But if you were a track and field fan in Eugene 40 years ago today, maybe you were on your way to Hayward Field — listening on your car radio to “I’ll Take You There” by the Staples Singers, or “Song Sung Blue” by Neil Diamond, or maybe the latest news reports on the war in Vietnam or the Watergate break-in of two weeks earlier.

You were going to watch the third day of the 1972 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, to see Dave Wottle, a bucktoothed, bone-white, golf-cap-wearing Bowling Green University runner tie the world record in the 800 meters, two months before he would win the gold medal in Munich, Germany.

To see sprinters Eddie Hart and Ray Robinson both run a world-record-tying 9.9 seconds in the 100 meters, or world-record holder and aspiring actor Bob Seagren clear 16 feet, 9 inches in the pole vault qualifying — one of 21 men to do so that day — before breaking his own world record 24 hours later.

Eugene has been known as Track Town, USA for a long time now, and you can find references to the moniker even before the first time the city held the Olympic Trials from June 29 to July 9, 1972. But if you want to know the roots of why this is the undisputed mecca of track and field in America, well, you can arguably trace it back to those 10 days of competition four decades ago this week.

Legendary University of Oregon track and field coach Bill Bowerman had built the Ducks into a mighty power in the 1960s, as his “Men of Oregon” won outright NCAA team titles in 1962 and 1964, and tied for the titles in 1965 and 1970.

The UO had hosted the men’s NCAA track and field championships in 1962 and 1964, and would do so again in early June of 1972. But the 1972 Olympic Trials would be the first multi-day track and field meet of its kind held at Hayward Field, bringing in what was then an overall Trials’ record attendance of 140,100 fans, an average of 14,000 fans a day. Only two previous multi-day track meets in world history, the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and the 1962 U.S.-U.S.S.R. meet at Stanford University, had attracted more fans.

After hosting the Trials again in 1976 and 1980, Eugene would be passed over for the 1984 Trials, held in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the site of the Summer Olympics that year. The Trials would not return here until 2008. As the 2012 Trials wrap up today, however, Eugene has now hosted a total of five Trials, one more than L.A., more than any other U.S. city, and has made a strong case that it should be the event’s permanent home.

Securing the 1972 Trials was a major coup for Eugene when it was selected by the U.S. Olympic Committee on Oct. 13, 1971, the same day it was announced that Bowerman would be the head coach of the U.S. Olympic track and field team in Munich. Eugene won the bid over L.A. and Seattle, although Seattle had taken itself out of the running after getting the national AAU Championships in June of 1972. Seattle reportedly put its weight behind Eugene to get the bid over L.A., where the Trials had been held in 1952, 1956 and 1964.

“I think this confirms the belief that Eugene is the track and field capital of the nation,” Oregon Track Club board member Bill Rau told The Register-Guard at the time. Rau had flown to New York City with fellow OTC member Bob Newland, who would be the ’72 Trials meet director, to make the pitch to the USOC.

“This is just tremendous,” Rau said. “An awful lot of people put an awful lot of work into this. We’ve been working on getting the Trials for almost three years.”

With its $1.5 million Nike-donated videoboard and other sleek amenities that were part of an $8 million renovation before the 2008 Trials, Hayward Field is the nation’s No. 1 track and field facility, known as the sport’s Carnegie Hall. And with its all-weather urethane track in ’72, then known as Stevenson Track, it wasn’t exactly a bad place to run then, either.

Forty years ago, though, the finish line was actually a line, a string strung across the track that the likes of UO and American distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine and others were known to snag as they crossed it in victory.

And Bowerman admitted in the days after those first Trials that inspectors were so wary of Hayward’s 53-year-old west grandstand that it put Eugene’s bid in jeopardy.

“We were within an ace of being told that we couldn’t put any people in there,” he told then-Register-Guard sports editor and columnist Blaine Newnham. “They wanted to condemn the place.”

The dilapidated west grandstand, built in 1919 and five years older than Hayward’s east grandstand, which still stands today after significant remodeling, would be demolished in 1973 to make way for the new west grandstand, built in 1975.

Something else that was a first in ’72 was the women’s track and field Trials being conducted in unison with the men’s.

But in a sign of the times (the Trials began that year just six days after President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX, the federal law that mandated equal opportunities for women in education, including athletics), scant media coverage was given to the women. You won’t find a single photograph of the female athletes in The Register-Guard’s coverage of the ’72 Trials, despite a story that ran in the July 9, 1972, sports section telling of three women setting American records the day before: Patty Johnson in the 100-meter hurdles, Francie Larrieu in the 1,500 meters and Kathy Hammond in the 400 meters.

Despite what were then record crowds, John Gillespie, the former South Eugene High School head track coach and UO assistant who grew up in Eugene, remembers the ’72 Trials not being as crowded as this year’s Trials, which are averaging more than 20,000 fans a day.

There seemed to be more space back then, and longer gaps between events, remembered Gillespie, now 66 and an assistant track coach to his son, K.C. Gillespie, at Thurston High School.

“You could also park next to Hayward back then,” said John Gillespie, who was involved in one of the more colorful moments at the ’72 Trials. After all, he was the one who came up with the concept for the “Stop Pre” T-shirts, the same ones you can buy in Duck Stores today.

Gillespie, fresh out of the U.S. Army, where he competed as a track athlete after doing the same at the Oregon College of Education in Monmouth (now Western Oregon University), initially wanted to print “New York Jerk” on the T-shirts, a joke on his friends from Track & Field News who were in town for the Trials. They had been going around Hayward Field nitpicking things like the steeplechase being a 1/2-inch too high, and the field event markings being yellow instead of white, Gillespie said.

But somehow the magazine guys convinced Gillespie, and his brother Tom Gillespie, into making the “Stop Pre” shirts, a twist on the green-and-yellow “Go Pre” T-shirts UO track fans of the day wore.

It all turned into quite the scene when one of Pre’s competitors in the 5,000 meters, Gerry Lindgren, on the final day of competition, July 9, 1972, wore one of the shirts in pre-race warm-ups.

But after Pre won the 5,000 in front of 16,800 screaming Hayward faithful, in an American record time of 13:22.8, to make his first and only Olympic team three years before his death in a car crash near Hendricks Park, Pre himself jovially donned one of the shirts during his victory lap.

“And he asked for five more to take to Europe,” Gillespie recalled.

Pre was one of five Oregon Track Club members to make the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that competed in Munich during the Games marred on Sept. 5, 1972, when Palestinian gunmen took several Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, eventually killing 11 of them.

Joining Prefontaine were steeplechasers Mike Manley and Siuslaw High and UO graduate Steve Savage; North Eugene High and UO graduate Kenny Moore, who crossed the finish line together with eventual gold-medal winner Frank Shorter in the marathon in one of the Trials’ more memorable moments; and another North Eugene High graduate, Jon Anderson, son of then-Eugene Mayor Les Anderson, who thrilled the crowd on a 94-degree day on July 2, 1972, by coming from behind to finish third in the 10,000 meters and make the team.

“The clapping and the noise kind of followed me around the track,” recalled Anderson, today the president and publisher of Eugene-based Random Lengths, a wood products trade publication.

“And there was kind of an eruption of noise. It’s made for a lot of talk and a lot of reminiscing,” said Anderson, who considers that day one of the two biggest highlights of his running career, the other being his win in the 1973 Boston Marathon.

As Newnham wrote in the July 10, 1972, Register-Guard: “Eugene had done itself proud. It had shown the world 95-degree weather, beautiful 75-degree evenings which warmly wooed world records, and it showed a little of its more publicized self, that light rain which fell on the last Saturday.

“It had also shown an unwavering interest for track and field. Those who couldn’t get tickets for the final day were among the 5,100 who stuffed Howe Field to watch the hammer throw final. With a new stadium, this meet could just be the beginning for Eugene, which has already been asked to apply for the 1976 Olympic Trials.”