Into the frying pan for Tyson
If not tragic enough for the Greeks, the ongoing track tempest at the University of Oregon has enough thinly drawn characters and red herrings for a made-for-TV movie. There is, in no particular order, the self-important moneybags, the coach who is either pure evil or painfully misunderstood, the bumbling athletic director and the Jimmy Chitwood-esque star runner, waiting for everything to be just-so.
And now, driving square into the middle of it: Mr. Chips.
Pat Tyson packed up his stuff Friday night, motored to Richland with the Mead High School track team on Saturday and, at meet’s end, pointed his car toward Eugene and collegiate chaos.
“I’m going to play sad music all the way to the Willamette Valley,” he said.
Out of proper respect for what he’s leaving behind, he means – and not simply the 12 state championships and scads of other trophies. Those were merely a finish line reached first.
On his last morning of work at Mead, Tyson showed up for his zero-hour running class at 6:30, walked into the gym and discovered 65 friends ready to go on a goodbye jog. Among them: Jeanne Helfer, who now coaches basketball a few miles away; Cash Stone, the boiled-owl wrestling coach himself, and Chris Lewis, Tyson’s first state champion. Also, Ferris cross country coach Mike Hadway came down from the hill with four or five of his runners, a gesture of true regard.
Later in the day, a thousand students and teachers would squeeze into Mead’s mall for a Tyson tribute, replete with hugs and sniffles.
“Not my style,” he admitted. “I’m an out-the-back-door kind of guy. But this is Mead – it’s a great place to be a student, a musician, an athlete, to be a great citizen. Everybody gets to chase their dreams and I’m going to chase mine.
“I just hope when I come crawling back, the welcome home party will be just as wonderful.”
Well, it’s possible – both the party and the crawling back.
Tyson is taking what for now will be a leave of absence from Mead to be an unpaid, volunteer assistant coach at his alma mater, which just last week forced a resignation out of head track coach Martin Smith, whose successful tenure had somehow turned into a festering sore.
Smith had reshaped an Oregon program which, by its own standards, had slipped into mediocrity, and in 2003 won the Ducks’ first Pacific-10 Conference title in a decade. Just a few weeks ago, they were sixth in the NCAA Indoor – their best-ever finish in that meet. But those achievements had come at the expense of Oregon’s distance running tradition, though Smith himself coached those runners; pole vaulters and sprinters and decathletes were scoring the points.
From the perspective of a Duck raised on the legends of Bill Bowerman and Steve Prefontaine, this is akin to having Renee Fleming sing La Traviata but bringing in Ashlee Simpson to screech Act I to a close.
The direction of the program was enough to discourage a group of track alums – known as the Lame Ducks and led by none other than Phil Knight, the filthy-rich shoemaker – into corking their jug of contributions a year ago. In the meantime, much of the state’s home-grown distance talent was saying no thanks to Oregon – in particular Portland prodigy Galen Rupp, who is mentored by another ex-Duck great, Alberto Salazar, with his own pointed ideas on Smith’s approach.
On the surface, it appeared athletic director Bill Moos was having his chain yanked by the dreaded influential alumni in the most obvious and despicable way, to say nothing of being held hostage by a high school runner. Now there is the sinister scent of something else, alluded to but not detailed by both Moos and Knight as they both publicly insisted that King Nike did not demand Smith’s head. Knight went so far as to tell the Eugene Register-Guard that Moos’ “mismanagement” exacerbated an already bad situation.
This is what Tyson – with no paycheck and no promise beyond this temporary gig coaching the distance runners – wades into. He must coach Smith’s athletes, make the peace and prove himself a little in the process, even if Oregon decides to hire some other distance guru to succeed Smith.
And, of course, he’s perfect for it.
He is, after all, a Duck distance runner himself – Prefontaine’s old trailer-mate in what he called “the golden age.” He is exactly what all the alienated alums want – that bridge to the past – while at the same time being, as the Spokesman-Review’s Mike Vlahovich called him, a virtual “Pied Piper” for distance runners, and not just those in Spokane.
And thus a bridge to the future.
No wonder the e-mails started pouring in late last week. Kenny Moore, the Olympic marathoner and former Sports Illustrated writer, checked in to say, “I feel a lot of things about this, but right now relief dominates – relief and rightness.” Former discus world record holder Mac Wilkens, another teammate, had advice, encouragement and an earthier perspective: “Just relax and be yourself. You know what to do. You are the expert. You saw Pre naked. That’s why they wanted you.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
“I like fixing things and the fine art of teaching,” Tyson said. “It’s a dysfunctional situation, but I don’t mind dysfunction. I love trying to create something meaningful.”
He actually thought he might get the chance before it reached the dysfunctional stage. When Bill Dellinger retired in 1998, assistant coach John Gillespie campaigned for the job – and told Tyson he’d be hired to coach the distance runners. Moos instead chose the autocratic Smith, who had considerable success at Wisconsin.
“When it didn’t happen,” Tyson admitted, “I was hurt.”
Now he inherits some hurt, no matter what sort of relationship Smith had with his distance runners, but Tyson’s inspirational nature will dissolve that soon enough. A bigger issue for both Oregon and Tyson is the long term, even though he has no guarantee of being on the staff beyond June.
Smith’s cadre numbers just 10, a by-product of spending his scholarship money in other events and his own style and preference. If the Ducks have been missing out on the Rupps of the world, they also seemed to have eschewed many of the walk-ons and good soldiers who inevitably blossomed in the hothouse of Hayward Field.
“Martin didn’t connect,” Tyson acknowledged. “You’ve got to go to the high school clinics, to the banquet in Junction City, to the camps in the summer. There isn’t a high school runner in the state who doesn’t want to run for Oregon. Rupp’s mother has an autographed picture of Prefontaine that she just gave to Galen this year – that’s his idol. He wants to wear an Oregon jersey. You can get all those kids.”
One he’s not going to get, however, is Mead standout Laef Barnes, who had to make his college decision while the Oregon issue was still in flux – and so accepted a full ride to UCLA instead.
On his last day at Mead, Pat Tyson was handing out uniforms to a hundred Panther track athletes – from Barnes to promising freshmen like Kelly Lynch – in his classroom. There were posters of runners on the wall, of course, but also of the Beatles and, inexplicably, a Schwarzenegger campaign poster snagged on some California road trip. On a table near the door was a row of cereal boxes for his breakfast club, which will now dine without him, and with what was what once track’s proudest distance tradition soon to be in his charge, he was pep-talking a freshman with the modest goal of breaking 100 feet in the discus this year.
Fact is, Pat Tyson has enough heart, soul and energy for both Mead and Oregon, but can only be in one place at a time.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m brave enough now at my age, 54, to do it, even with the risks. Does that make sense? In my 30s, there’s probably no way I would have done that.
“I have a chance to do something for my alma mater. There are enough people still alive who don’t want to lose what was there completely – they’ve lost some of it, a lot of it. But it was something special and for it to totally go down doesn’t have to happen.
“If I don’t do it now, I’m doomed.”