Looking back at Steve Prefontaine’s legacy 50 years after his death

It’s been 50 years since legendary Oregon track and field athlete Steve Prefontaine died in a car crash on May 30, 1975. He was only 24 years old. At the time, the Coos Bay runner held every U.S. distance record from the two-kilometer race to the 10K and was training for the 1976 Olympics. His athleticism and charisma made him one of the best-known runners to come out of the University of Oregon and helped him land a brand deal as Nike’s first celebrity athlete.

Brendan O’Meara is the author of the new biography “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine.” He joins us to talk about Pre’s impact on the sport and his legacy in the track and field community.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Steve Prefontaine has now been dead for twice as long as he was alive. The legendary Oregon runner died in a car crash 50 years ago today. He was only 24. At the time he died, he held every U.S. middle distance record from the two-kilometer race to the 10K and he was training for his second Olympics. His athleticism and charisma made him one of the best known runners to come out of the University of Oregon and helped him land a deal as Nike’s first celebrity athlete.

Brendan O’Meara joins us now to talk about this. He is the host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast and the author of the new book, “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine.” Brendan, welcome.

Brendan O’Meara: Dave, pleasure to be here.

Miller: Steve Prefontaine has been written about a lot. He’s like a secular athletic saint in the running world. What did you feel was missing in all that? I mean, I guess the short version of that long question is why write a new book about Steve Prefontaine?

O’Meara: Yeah, after 50 years since his passing, it seemed like a pretty good time to reappraise his life and a modern rubric. He seemed picture-perfect for this era. The original subtitle of the book was “The Dawn of the Modern Athlete,” because I saw him as this figure that was casting, who was way ahead of his time. And really when you look back, so much of what he was doing back then, be it pushing up against the power structures of the time, looking at NIL today …

Miller: The“name, image, likeness,” which we can talk about, a way to monetize your athletic prowess as a college student, as a college athlete.

O’Meara: Exactly, and he seemed so modern back then and ahead of his time. He seemed just picture-perfect for today’s athletic moment. And the fact that nowadays, technology being what it is, we have access to so many newspaper archives, I was able to find thousands and thousands of articles and conduct hundreds of interviews to really triangulate and get beyond maybe some of the hero worship and the lionization that has happened in 50 years, and try to ground him in his humanity. I think that was largely missing in the last few decades.

Miller: Who are some of the people that you were most excited to talk about? Newspaper archives, I mean, who knows, they could go away, too. The internet could change. But people are not permanent. And we’re talking about people who knew him 50-plus years ago. Who were you most excited to talk to in person?

O’Meara: It’s pretty easy. My favorite people to talk about were the people who are most connected to him from the Coos Bay days, namely Phil Pursian, who was Steve’s distance coach at Marshfield.

Miller: Prefontaine, his high school. He grew up in Coos Bay.

O’Meara: Correct. Steve grew up in Coos Bay and Phil Pursian was his distance coach there. Walt McClure was the head track and field coach. In a lot of other tellings of Prefontaine’s story, Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger, they get the lion’s share of the credit for the development of this singular athlete. But Walt McClure and Phil Pursian were every bit as foundational and fundamental to his development as a young man, and certainly as an athlete. So to give them more real estate in the book was really satisfying for me.

And then to meet Phil in person, who’s in his 80s, who has a memory like this happened yesterday, so wonderful just to talk to him and hear him … not philosophize, but just we really think back to those days. You can tell Steve still feels very much alive in his memory. So to give him that degree of real estate was really satisfying, as with some other people who have really never been on the record before, who all have their little slice of Steve Prefontaine.

Miller: Well, what stands out to you now about what you heard from them about Steve Priefontaine’s early life, first of all? Then we can get to his early running.

O’Meara: Yeah, his early life, he had a pretty rough early childhood. He was physically abused by his parents, namely his father. His older half-sister Neta Prefontaine, who’s about 10 years older than him, they were subject to some nasty corporal punishment of the time – not to excuse it, but it was kind of the culture of the time. And that definitely … you might be able to connect the dots to some of his signature intensity to some of that, and the fact that some people enter sports as a way to inflict and redirect some of that abuse and that pain.

He was always a bit too small to do that more physically in, say, football, basketball or whatever. But there is an intensity in a way he inflicted pain on the track that I think might be a little too on the nose to connect the dots directly to that; but I think some of that signature intensity stems from some of the early formative moments where he really had to gird himself against domestic uncertainty.

Miller: How did those high school coaches affect him?

O’Meara: Well, they were fundamental. They recognized eventually that they had a talent who was a bit different than anyone else who had come before. And McClure, having been a disciple of Bill Bowerman, he ran under him at the U of O, he was just like … They get Bowerman on the phone and they go to Eugene, they meet up with him, like, we got somebody here, we need a little help drawing up workouts to try to push this kid to his limits. So they went and they got basically the playbook of the hard/easy thing that Bowerman would do, like hard days and easy days, and goal pace and date pace, this kind of thing.

And looking at Phil Pursian’s distance logs, of which he still has them to this day, you can see the transformation of how they drew workouts for Steve but also the rest of the team.

Miller: And how different they are?

O’Meara: Yeah, they’re much more regimented. They’re on this graph and they’re like, “On this date, you should be able to maybe surpass your goal pace. And once you hit goal pace or goal time, that is now your new date pace for that day. Then you can start to graduate from there.”

They protected Steve against himself as best they could. They were really trying to keep him bridled sometimes, like, don’t train too hard. But there was no one to push him and he would run these clandestine workouts in the mornings. He would run harder than he was supposed to and they were just like, don’t do that. We don’t want to get sick, we don’t want you to get hurt. But he would do it anyway and they could only control him so much.

Miller: What happened when he got to the U of O?

O’Meara: He gets to U of O – I don’t talk about his freshman cross-country season at all, it was in the initial draft – but he gets there, I think he wins Northern division, then he finishes second in Pac-8’s and then third in nationals. Then he would go on to never lose another collegiate race after that, going forward. But he really starts to emerge on the scene in the track season and he’s going to the front, he’s winning these races. And eventually, he gets on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1970. It’s hard to describe how important a moment that is to be on such a mainstream publication of a cover of that nature at that time.

I guess maybe if an Instagram post or tweet went viral to 4 million people, I don’t know, that might be the equivalent, because that vaulted him into the mainstream in a way that very few track and field athletes ever did at the time. So by the time he gets to U of O, he is embracing and becoming a full-fledged star.

Miller: Why? And it’s worth saying at this point, even by the time he died, he had not won an Olympic medal. He never set a world record. In my mind, those are the standard prerequisites for a track and field athlete to become anything close to widely well-known or a household name. He didn’t, and yet he attained a very high level of fame. Why?

O’Meara: He had such a preternatural ability to bond with his fans. Even in his first summer abroad … He graduates from Marshfield and he goes to Europe because he performed well in the AU championships in Miami, and miraculously finishes fourth in the 5000m. He’d never raced that distance, but somehow gritted it out and it earned him a capacity to travel abroad. So he’s writing these dispatches back to the Coos Bay World. It’s basically like keeping his Instagram followers up on …

Miller: For the local newspaper – typing them up, mailing them and they’re printed in his hometown.

O’Meara: He’s printed in his hometown paper. So he was doing that. He’s a prolific letter writer and a postcard writer. And he was always keeping in touch with people, keeping them abreast of what he was doing, really enrolling them in his journey. So anytime that he was winning a race, it felt like everybody was winning a race. The way he ran, he was such a showman, in an era where certainly middle-distance runners never did that. They would run to win the race, and then it was just shake hands and move on with your day.

Miller: Maybe sprinters would be brash, but not distance runners.

O’Meara: Not distance runners, no. They were far more milquetoast. I think of Jim Ryun, no shade to him, he was the world record holder for the mile, but he was just a very demure person and was definitely far from this iconoclastic charismatic figure. He was just very fast and fleet of foot. But then along comes someone like Steve Prefontaine, who just had it baked into him, this ability to connect to people. He made everyone … if he were sitting here, he would make us feel like the most important people in the world. He had that magnetism in a way to make you feel like, “oh, I’m the only person that matters.” And he just had that capacity to do that with everybody.

Miller: The new book “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine” – that title has a couple different meanings, but one of them is just literal. Can you describe his racing style?

O’Meara: Yeah, like taking a page out of … let’s see, what was his name … Ron Clarke. Australia’s Ron Clarke and Gerry Lindgren of the time, a Pacific Northwest runner. These were runners who sought anathema to sit and kick. They would go to the front and then challenge everybody to catch them. And this, from an early age, just really appealed to Steve. He would never just sit off someone’s shoulder. He would run to the front, almost run as fast as he can, and then just dare you to keep up with him. And it had a psychological effect. Whether he knew it or not, he was on the vanguard of how we might get into athletes’ heads. He was gonna go to the front. It would mess with your strategy, like to what extent do I want to keep up with him? Is he gonna fade? And that would get in people’s heads. So yeah, he pushed the pace and dared everybody to come get him.

Miller: I was intrigued to learn that you don’t really call him “Pre” in the book. I mean, a pervasive nickname on t-shirts at the time, and still, people who never met him, who were born 30 years after he died, call him “Pre.” But you don’t. Why not?

O’Meara: The north star of this whole project, I had this quote from the biographer Jonathan Eig, who was the Pulitzer Prize winner of the Martin Luther King biography – taped it under my monitor. In talking about King, he said we had turned him into a national monument and a national holiday. We lost sight of his humanity and I sought to write a more intimate book.

So I was always looking to do that, to get to the man behind the myth, behind the giant image on the tower at Hayward Field, or any poster or mouse pad quote …

Miller: The big, beautiful murals in Coos Bay.

O’Meara: Exactly. So you get a sense that he’s been deified and lionized, and we lost sight of his humanity. So in a way, the project was – and I would pitch this to people who might otherwise think I was getting into hero worship – I was like, no, I actually wanna take “Pre” and make him Steve again. So it was a very conscientious effort to never call him “Pre” in the prose. Other people did, but I never referred to him as that.

Miller: What’s an example of one of the details that you ended up learning, through interviews or through documentary research, that really crystallizes that for you, that lets you see him, yourself, in a different way: more as a human, less as a myth?

O’Meara: In 1974, what really stuck out to me, there was just a very serendipitous find in the research. That’s just, you gotta leave yourself open to that degree of discovery and serendipity. I was in the Daily Emerald archives, the U of O newspaper, and at the bottom of an article, like in the last two graphs, there was the name of three young women that he coached: Deborah Roth, Maryl Barker and Caroline Walker. I only spoke with Maryl and Deborah. I couldn’t track down Caroline.

But here was the most famous track and field athlete of his day, gearing up for the Olympics, doesn’t have much by way of spare time and yet he carved out time to draw up workouts for them to get them on an equal playing field as the men. He would train them at Hayward Field. He’d drop workouts, he’d watch them. And he would follow up with them. Maryl Barker, she still has the workouts he drew up for her. He took that time out of his day to help lift others up. And to me, I think that we’ve lost a lot of that, because he’s got this brash image. We lose sight that he was a tender and thoughtful person as well.

Miller: This reminds me of a voicemail that came in today. I wanna run it by you. Let’s have a listen to it.

Voicemail: Dave, hey, this is Randy Miller calling. I’ve got a Prefontaine story that most people don’t know. It happened when he was taking a social science class at the U of O and the professor asked him to do some kind of an outlier project. He’d grown up with a lot of people who ended up in the correction system, so he decided to go up to the state penitentiary and just sort of explore it a little bit. When he was there, he found out that an awful lot of the inmates had been prior runners, so he wondered why they weren’t out there running. And they said they’re not permitted.

So he took upon himself to get a program going where they could start running out in the yard. And as they did, their attitudes changed, their outlook changed, their behavior changed. And others in the penitentiary observed that and it brought more people into the program. It’s been greatly successful for the spirit of those runners. And then several years ago, they opened it up to outside runners. Ever since, I’ve been going up there and running with the inmates.

Once a year, they have 5k, 10k and half-marathons in the yard. I took Governor Kitzhaber with me one time. We had a delightful time together. And it’s just been so enlightening and aspirational to see what can happen in a program that has helped them with their own personal lives.”

Miller: How does this story fit into the way you’ve come to understand Steve Prefontaine?

O’Meara: Well, I don’t have many regrets with researching this book, but I tried to track down people who might be able to speak more to that penitentiary program just to round that out. I couldn’t find anyone so I basically had to omit it. It does speak to this, like before the Olympics, he was almost selfishly driven. And post-Olympics, he becomes more humble. He’s starting to see him in the bigger picture of things and how he can leverage his celebrity to lift people up. And I think that’s a perfect example.

Miller: Those Olympics … well, let’s talk about leading up to them. How important were the 1972 Munich Olympics to Steve Prefontaine?

O’Meara: I think there was an early quote in the paper or something. It might have been from ‘75 that flashed back, or it might have been earlier. But he had always had the Olympics on his mind, ever since he was maybe a sophomore or junior in high school. So he would always have that on his calendar, to get there.

And then talk about the stars aligning – he’s going to U of O, the trials are at Hayward. Bill Bowerman is named the coach. Here is this guy, he beats George Young, sets an American record and qualifies for the team. But he was really feeling the pressure of that. When he won that race, he was like, wow, there’s a gunnysack off my shoulders. And the fact that he gave voice to the pressure he felt, that dated back all the way to his high school days. He felt the weight of those people that he felt that he would let down if he didn’t win.

And similarly, he took that into the Olympics and he was training really well. But then the terrorist attacks happened and it shook him up. It took him out of his game mentally, to the point where his head wasn’t in it 100% and he didn’t want to be there. If they said, put me on a plane and go home, I would have gone home.

Miller: He was open about that even before the race, he was clear that he didn’t want to do it?

O’Meara: I think it was more afterwards when he was metabolizing and trying to make sense of it.

Miller: Metabolizing coming in fourth, which, is it just the worst possible outcome for somebody like Steve Prefontaine?

O’Meara: Yeah, it’s wild. It’s one of those things where … and he put a really good spin on it pretty shortly after. It was just like, do I think I’m fourth best in the world? No, but I was fourth best that day.

And I think about the past Olympics where Jakob Ingebrigtsen, in the 1500m goes to the front, dares everyone to come get ‘em, and he loses. Cole Hocker, the U of O alum, comes up and wins. Would anyone think that Cole Hocker is better than Jakob Ingebrigtsen? No, but on that day he was.

But getting back to the ‘72 games, Steve thought that those attacks … he said it took him a full year to get over it. He told a reporter, he said, “that took me a whole year.” And I think that speaks to just how greatly it might have affected his performance. He was still 0.8 seconds away from a medal.

Miller: How much do you think it affected him in the years that followed? Did it change his relationship to running?

O’Meara: I think losing on that stage and the feeling that it let people down, he kind of went into a funk when he lost that race. And I think that really reoriented his compass. So it’s like, OK, my brashness only took me so far. The way he was posturing was just like, yeah, I’m gonna run a sub-four minute mile and no one else is gonna be able to do that. Well, there were five other runners in the race who were capable of it.

And he was humbled. I think he was much more self-deprecating sometimes, maybe on the record or was seen in some interviews. He had a way of being able to poke fun at himself, which is pretty funny. And I think it humbled him and then it was like, OK, now I’m not gonna be maybe as chest-thumpy. And then he was lifting other people up at the same time with his activism in the sport and pushing up against the amateur establishment. So, I think it definitely altered him, it matured him.

Miller: You obviously spent a lot of time with Prefontaine’s life and talking to people who knew him intimately. How did his death impact you as you were reporting about it, writing about it?

O’Meara: It was just very sad. And I don’t compare any sadness I feel to the people who knew him most intimately, but when you spend so much time immersed in someone’s life, and newspaper archives and speaking to people who still remember him so vibrantly … He came to life to me in a way that was almost like he was right beside me for three years as I was reporting and writing this book. I would get access to an archive, start in the mid-‘60s, when he starts getting into print. And coming along I’m like, oh wow, he’s so great. He’s such a great copy. And then I would forget that he’s gonna die on May 30, 1975. And then I’m starting to get into ‘75. I’m like, “oh no, he’s only got five more months.” And as I’m going through there, and then of course, finally he does die in these archives, I’m like, “oh man.” I just was really just deflated.

And then I might get access to another archive and he comes back to life again. Then ‘75 comes around and I’m like, “oh damn, he’s gonna die on me again.” And the same thing would happen through the writing. It was very moving. I felt like I was losing a friend over and over again. Like I said, I don’t compare myself to anybody else, but it was sad. I felt very connected to him for three years.

Miller: Just briefly, what did you hear from his friends or acquaintances about the possible lives he may have led if he hadn’t died so young? We have, sadly, a minute left.

O’Meara: I think what sticks out to me is, Pat Tyson, his best friend and roommate from the trailer in Glenwood, he just thinks he would be the greatest diplomat for track and field. He wouldn’t stand for the over-corporatization of it. He would want to make sure that kids are getting into Hayward Field for free – that way, the athletes can connect to the fans the way he once did. And that’s how you breed generations of people who might talk about an athlete 50 years later.

Miller: Brendan O’Meara, thanks very much.

O’Meara: This was great, Dave. Thank you so much.

Miller: Brendan O’Meara is the host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. He’s also the author of the new book “The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine.” That’s the legendary Oregon runner who died 50 years ago today.

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