A Final Drive To The Finish

For three laps of the 5,000, Shorter and Prefontaine ran behind Paul Geis, who earlier had won the two-mile; Shorter led at the mile in 4:17. Prefontaine took over the lead at six laps, Shorter floating at his shoulder, the rest of the field far back. Shorter looked tight, apprehensive. At 2� miles, Prefontaine shot ahead and churned successive laps of 63, 64 and 63 seconds, running away with the race, running through the rising shouts of his people, his head cocked to the right, his brow tightly knitted. This was where he lived, and those long searing drives never failed to be compelling. Into the last straightaway he closed his eyes and swung out from the curb slightly; he ran 50 yards with his eyes shut, squeezing away the suffering. He finished in 13:23.8, only 1.6 seconds slower than his best, and as he touched the tape he glanced back at his distant rivals. Soon the crowd was flowing out around him, small boys waving programs, beaming matrons, girls in halter tops.

That evening there was a party at the home of Geoff Hollister, Prefontaine's associate in an athletic shoe company. All the Finnish athletes were there, along with many of the families who had housed them. Prefontaine's parents and his high school coach were there. As the beer flowed and sandwiches circulated, there was much talk of Pre going to Helsinki, of his hospitality being returned, and much discussion of the AAU rule. Jon Anderson tried calmly to analyze the difficulty of explaining to the layman why athletes become so enraged at the AAU. "There is such a gulf between us and all those thousands of people who would give their right arms to wear " USA" on their chest...."

Prefontaine broke in. "Where is the talent that I competed with when I started in 1969?" he cried, seizing on the first injustice that came to mind. "The shortage is of guys who are out of school and can still figure ways to train and find competition. I'm 24 years old and Frank is 27, and we're veterans. That's the shame. That's what's wrong with the American system."

I found myself with Raymond Prefontaine, who seemed daunted by his son's ferocity. We talked instead about the Dungeness crabbing in Coos Bay, he carefully explaining where good catches were being made. Steve leaned near and confided to me that he had never been crabbing. "I've never been fishing, either," he added, "but for God's sake don't tell anybody that."

Poor revelers, my wife and I left the party at 11. Frank Shorter, who was staying with us, said Prefontaine would drive him home later, and he did at about 12:30. They sat in Prefontaine's MG on the road above our house and confirmed a date for the three of us to run an easy 10 miles in the morning. Shorter, an attorney now, promised to brief Prefontaine on the legal challenges that might be brought against the AAU's restrictions on free international racing. "Yeah, well, let's go over that tomorrow, when our heads are clear," said Prefontaine and he drove off down the hill.

In the morning the phone rang, waking me, and I learned he was dead. I told Frank. At eight o'clock, the day was still, full of sun and birdsong. From the radio we learned that the accident had happened only a few hundred yards from our house, and we knew Frank had been the last to see him. After a few minutes we walked down a path through a neighbor's yard to the road below. The ashes of flares were scattered in the road. On one side, beneath an outcropping of black basalt, there was broken glass and twisted metal strewn among the poison oak. There was blood on the street, a street he had run at least three times a week for six years.

We saw the accident report, which said he was dead at the scene, his chest and stomach crushed under the weight of the overturned car. His blood alcohol content had been found to be .16 percent, a level presumed to significantly impair driving. We always knew that the important thing about his life, that which let him perform as he did, was his prodigious honesty. Because he had never been hypocritical about his use of alchohol, the manner of his death could not diminish that honesty.

Later, after we had spoken to the news people, Frank and I ran. I believe it was a sort of observation of ritual, something that had to be done. We could not have run a step anywhere that Prefontaine had not run. As it happened, we ran softly through the woods skirting Eugene, looking up at the rugged ground under the Bonneville power lines where he did winter training. After we finished a five-mile loop, we kept on, crossing the river over a footbridge where I had once seen Prefontaine crouched behind a tripod and movie camera, waving at a tired runner to sprint toward him out of the cottonwoods, yelling, "Do I have to do everything myself?"

We avoided the road of the accident, coming up the hill to my house another way, a hard climb, feeling the effort, accepting it as the only link left with what Prefontaine had felt and accepted better than any of us.