1973 Indoor Track Season

1000 yards Indoor Race (this in Seattle), left-to-right,
Hailu Ebba (OSU), Dale Scott (WSU), Greg Gibson (UW), Steve Bence, Art Sandison

I had a great indoor season, even if it was short: only eight days. I placed second at the Portland Invitational meet in a 1,000-yard race that I should have won. On the 165-yard plywood track, with less than two laps to go, I let Washington’s Greg Gibson and Oregon State’s Clay Lowery pass me. It was a tactical blunder. I wasn’t tired at the end, I just wasn’t sure of the pace for a distance that I’d only run once before, and didn’t push the pace at a critical moment when I had the lead.

With the steeply banked corners that kill momentum, it had been almost impossible for me to pass that late in the race. I got beyond Lowery, but not Gibson, finishing in 2:10.7, a tenth of a second behind the Husky. It was a UO indoor school record.

I found Bowerman to get his permission to run in another indoor meet.

“Bill,” I said, perhaps a bit brashly, “I’d like to run in Louisville.”

“Maybe, if you can run a 2:08 in Seattle. You shouldn’t have let Gibson pass you.”

“I know. It was my lack of indoor experience.”

“No,” Bowerman said, “It was your lack of your indoor intelligence.”

Someone walked by and said, “Nice race, Steve!”

“It was a stupid race,” Bowerman snapped, his eyes fixed, like lazer beams, on the guy who’d given me the compliment. “He looked for his girlfriend in the stands, trying to look good, and didn’t pay attention to what he was doing.”

I didn’t have a girlfriend in the stands, but I understood his message: don’t let my mind drift in the middle of a race. Bowerman was like Oregon’s weather: calm and mild most of the time, with an occasional storm that could knock down trees.

Seven days later I won in Seattle, in 2:10.2, breaking my own UO record for 1,000 yards.

Bowerman didn’t send me to Louisville. Instead, he retired. I hadn’t seen it coming; nobody had. I later assumed that he planned 1972 to be his last track season but because of all that was going on that year—the NCAA Championships and Olympic Trials in Eugene, and his being the head track and field coach for the Olympics—he decided to wait to announce his retirement until just before the 1973 outdoor season.