Jaw-dropping times

Bill Dellinger guided Oregon to NCAA titles in 1971, 1973 and 1974. In the mid-70s he raised the stakes further by recruiting nationally to counter the pipeline of older Kenyan runners at Washington State, attracting schoolboy superstars like Rudy Chapa (Indiana) and Alberto Salazar (Massachusetts) and Manhattan transfer Matt Centrowitz to Eugene. With a core group of runners that won the 1977 NCAA title and finished second to UTEP teams made up of predominantly older African runners in 1978 and 1979, Dellinger put together the greatest squad of North American college runners ever. Five members of the 1977 Oregon squad made Olympic teams and that doesn't include Chapa, an NCAA champion at 5,000 meters and the American recordholder in the 3,000, who was hampered by injury in the Olympic year of 1980. Four of the first seven U.S. men under 13 minutes, 20 seconds for 5,000 were on that 1977 Ducks team.

“It would be hard to argue anything better honestly,” Washington coach Andy Powell said of the Oregon group. “That was next level. I think that has got to be the best” North American group.

That Oregon team had to run jawdropping times just to keep pace with rival Washington State.

In the early 70s, WSU coach John Chaplin opened up a pipeline of Kenyan runners.

“That changed the dynamic a lot,” Riley said. “That changed the whole character of the sport. Henry Rono was from another planet. I mean he did crazy stuff.”

In the space of 80 days in 1978, Rono set world records at 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 meters as well at the 3,000 steeplechase. The previous world recordholder at 10,000 was his teammate and countryman Samson Kimombwa, runner-up to Rono in the 1976 NCAA cross country race. Rono repeated in 1977. Salazar won the 1978 NCAA race and then finished second to Rono in 1979.

It wasn't until Larsen's UCLA squad won the 1980 Pac-10 race led by individual winner Ron Cornell that the individual or team conference champion didn't come from Oregon or Washington State.

“It was a golden age, it truly was,” Riley said.

There would be other golden teams. UCLA head track coach Jim Bush was so upset with the Bruins fifth-place finish in the 1969 Pac-8 meet that he vowed to never recruit another distance runner.

Over time Bush reconsidered but only slightly. Larsen and UCLA defended their conference title with just two scholarships.

Stanford runner Greg Brock recalled a discussion he had with teammate Brook Thomas after the inaugural Pac-8 meet.

“Stanford could be really good in cross country,” Brock recalled Thomas saying. “And it took a guy from the East Coast to figure that out.”

Vin Lannana, a graduate of C.W. Post, coached Stanford to NCAA men's titles in 1996, 2002 and 2003. Lannana and Powell, a middle distance standout at Stanford, guided Oregon to national titles in 2007 and 2008, the latter team featuring two-time Olympic medalist Galen Rupp and future Olympic 1,500 champion Matthew Centrowitz. Colorado won national titles in 2013 and 2014. In the 2014 race, Oregon's Cheserek and Eric Jenkins went 1-2 and six of the top nine finishers were from the Pac-12.

“When you've got six of the top nine,” Powell said. “When you have a good school like Stanford, and Oregon and Colorado that was as dominating as it gets.” kid in the mirror.

“Running was the escape,” Riley said. “That's what filled the hole in Gerry.

“Running was the vehicle for his self esteem and his escape from a terrible home life.”

He would claim to run as much as 50 miles in a day, 200 miles a week. Or was it 300?

“He was just such an interesting guy,” said Kardong, who moved to Spokane after graduating from Stanford. “It was hard to tell when he was being serious and when he was just kind of clowning around because he had that antic way of approaching life. So he would tell stories that couldn't possibly be true. Or he would tell you he had done things, `Well, you didn't do that Gerry.' It was just hard to figure him out. And yet he was such a spectacular runner.

“(People would say) `Oh, yeah, used to see him run by three times a day.' It might have been true. It was a lot. More than anybody else was doing. If Gerry told you he ran X number of miles, I wouldn't believe him.”

No matter how far, how fast he ran Lindgren could not shake his demons.

He spent 10 days in jail in Pierce County, Washington in 1978 for failing to pay child support after losing a 1976 paternity suit filed in Ventura County. In 1980 he vanished, leaving behind a wife, three young children, and a financially troubled running store in Tacoma. He remained under the radar until Moore tracked him down in Hawaii in 1987.

“His friends would basically say Gerry was damaged goods,” Riley said. “But there was never a kinder, more generous guy in the world for someone who had so little.

“I roomed with him my freshman year, I hardly ever saw him. He was very much a loner. A very different personality. I always said his problems later in life you had to separate his running from his personal life. “

Lindgren first emerged on the national scene just days before Christmas 1963. Competing against an allstar high school field In an indoor meet at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, Lindgren, a 17-year-old senior at Spokane's John Rogers High School, shattered the national prep indoor 2-mile record by 21.9 seconds, clocking in at 9 minutes, 00.0 seconds and lapping the entire seven-runner field during 22-lap race including future world mile and 1,500-meter record holder Jim Ryun, who finished 22 seconds behind Lindgren.

A few weeks later Lindgren was back at the Cow Palace to take on Australia's Ron Clarke, a world record-holder at multiple distances, in an open race.

“He was so little he couldn't have looked more than 13 years old,” Clarke said later.

But the kid, all 5-feet-6, 118 pounds, was already world class, pushing Clarke all the way to the finish before finishing second but lowering his own indoor national high school record to 8:40.0, a record that stood stand for 49 years until Cheserek, running for New Jersey's St. Benedict Prep, was clocked in 8:39.15.

That summer Lindgren set a national high school record at 5,000 meters (13:44.0) that stood for 40 years until finally broken by Rupp (13:37.91), then stunned a crowd of 50,519 including U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy at the Coliseum by winning the 10,000 in the U.S.-Soviet Union by nearly a 150 meters in 93-degree heat. It was the first time an American had won the event in the U.S.-Soviet series. Kennedy, it was reported, was moved to tears by Lindgren's victory.

“I still think it's too bad that they didn't do a big documentary or a movie of Lindgren's coming up through high school and winning the Russia-America meet,” Kardog said. “Because that was an unbelievable performance. Just totally out of the blue. It was one of those things that kind of ignited the distance running scene in the United States.”

Lindgren went on to win the Olympic Trials 10,000 on that same Coliseum track.

“He knocked the world on its ear with his indoor times and then when he beat the Russians,” Riley said. “And then there was a thought that he might pick up a medal or even win the Olympics” in Tokyo later that year.

Instead, battling illness and a sprained ankle, Lindgren finished ninth in an Olympic 10,000 won by another American, unknown Billy Mills, in one of the biggest upsets in the Games' history.

“When I was in high school, I wanted to go to Oregon and everybody wanted to go to Oregon,” Lindgren said. “But Bowerman wanted nothing to do with me.”

Bowerman and Washington State coach Jack Moorberry were good friends.

“And there was pretty much a gentlemen's agreement between Jack Moorberry and Bill Bowerman that they kind of left each other's guys alone (in recruiting),” Riley said.

So Lindgren headed 75 miles south on U.S.-195 to Pullman and Washington State. Freshmen were ineligible to compete in college competition under NCAA rules at the time. But the NCAA, engaged in a turf war at the time with the Amateur Athletic Union, then track's national governing body, also prohibited college athletes from competing in the U.S. Championships.

Lindgren, ignoring an NCAA vow to strip him of his college eligibility and dozens of death threats, defied the ban. He lost to Mills in the 1965 U.S. Championships 6-mile by a margin so small that both men were credited with the world record (27:11.6).