There are plenty of films and documentaries about Steve Prefontaine.
I have not watched any of them.
There are also more than a few books on him, and I just read my first, Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend by Tom Jordan.
I must say that being a runner of any classification, and I’m just a casual runner at best, you have to know about Pre. How you come to know about him, whether it’s through coaches or other runners, may be different but everyone knows about him.
He is credited with the running boom of the 1970s. Of course, as a native Oregonian hailing from Coos Bay, Ore., who went to school at the University of Oregon, he was part of Nike during its infancy. Oh, and he was fast – real fast.
All of this I knew, except his place of birth, before I picked up Tom Jordan’s book. The more I read, the further into the book I got, the more I understood why he is the American running figure that he is.
His style was unorthodox. He was going to win from the front. This means he wasn’t content to just sit on the shoulder or behind the pace-setter and hope to outkick the competition for the last lap or a few hundred meters of whatever distance he was racing. He was going to make you earn it. He was going to take the pace to you and if you could hang, good on you.
He was a true original.
While I tend to think we make modern legends out of anything we can, Pre is a Legend with a capital L, and Tom Jordan’s book is exhibit A through Z.
This isn’t a book that’s just a list of names and places and events, though there are a bevy of American and international running stars quoted in this book. There are also plenty of places and events, and there is even an index with all of his career statistics.
What makes this book really shine, however, is the many different vantage points from which we get to view Pre. We get to hear from his coaches and teammates. We get to hear from collegiate and international rivals. And we get to hear from friends, though he seemed never to give too much of himself to any one person. It takes a book like this with all of these different people looking back on this one person, Steve Prefontaine, to even give you an idea of just who Pre was.
I read the second edition of this book, published in 1997, but the first edition was published in 1977, which was only shortly removed from Prefontaine’s tragic car crash that ended his life in 1975. This book is made up of quotes from people who were the closest you could get to him, and his loss was probably still raw when the first edition was put together.
From 1973 to 1975, Pre set American records at every distance from 2km to 10km. But what was amazing to read more than the records and his sheer determination to finish first was just how humble he was.
I know it seems like he was bigger than life, and he probably was, but he also created a running program for local inmates and took time out to talk to kids about running. He was instrumental in the ongoing fight surrounding amateur athletics.
From a 1972 article: “It galls Prefontaine that he has to live the way he lives because of what he is–a long-distance runner. ‘Amateurism is a thing that should have been kicked out in 1920, you know,’ he says. ‘The true amateurs, by the standards that were set up in the 1890s, were elite, who were already well-established and set up in clubs and didn’t need money to compete. The average athlete now is finding it damn hard to make it. I get $101 a month from the university. Room and board. And then there’s going to school, buying books, and everything else. It’s pretty hard to make it.”
And yet he not only found a way to make it, he did so in record-setting fashion. Perhaps I’m ok with the legend as I knew it and as I know it now, or maybe I will finally watch some of the movies and documentaries or read more of those books.
What it all comes down to, is that we should all be more like Pre. He was gutsy, he was no-nonsense, and for all that I can tell, gleamed from what others said about him, he did it all for the right reasons and was always out to make something more of the world.
“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the Gift.” – Pre
Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from PRE.