Bill Bowerman was on the telephone when Geoff Hollister, a former Oregon steeplechaser and longtime Nike track and field promotions man, walked into office of the legendary former Ducks coach and Nike co-founder beneath Hayward Field’s ancient, wooden East Grandstand.

“Well the son-of-a-bitch just walked in,” Bowerman told the caller on the other end of the line before hanging up, Hollister recalled in his memoir “Out of Nowhere: The Inside Story of How Nike Marketed the Culture of Running.”

It was 1979 and Bowerman was livid after being told that Hollister had invited only athletes sponsored by the shoe company to the Nike-Oregon Track Club Marathon in Eugene, annually one of the fastest races in the world.

“Then he tore into me and gave no mercy,” Hollister wrote, recalling the confrontation.

Hollister had been with the company longer than its trademark swoosh, starting before it even adopted the name Nike, hired by Phil Knight over cheeseburgers and milkshakes at a Dairy Queen near the Oregon campus, Hollister getting stuck with the check. As much as anyone, Hollister was responsible for convincing the world’s best athletes, such as Henry Rono, Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe and Carl Lewis, to wear Nike, enabling the company to topple adidas as track’s dominant brand just as the sport turned pro in the 1980s, ending the decades-long sham of “amateurism.”

Hollister was equally comfortable traveling around Oregon selling Nikes to high school kids out of the back of his Volkswagen van or pitching the brand to world record-setting runners over beers in Oslo and Zurich. But Hollister also shared Bowerman’s evangelical zeal for promoting the sport, and like his old coach admired and supported all runners, whether their shoes had swooshes or three stripes on them. The story about Hollister freezing non-Nike runners out of the marathon wasn’t true, and after Bowerman calmed down, Hollister finally convinced him of that.

The incident immediately came to mind when I read this week of Nike and its puppet regime that runs USA Track & Field holding the World Championship spots for six-time U.S. 800-meter champion Nick Symmonds and other American athletes hostage.

Symmonds, who has an endorsement deal with Brooks, and other athletes who qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships later this month in Beijing, recently received letters from USA Track & Field informing them they were required to wear “Nike Team USA apparel” throughout the trip.

“Accordingly, please pack ONLY Team USA, Nike or non-branded apparel …” the letter said.

In some ways the Seattle-based Symmonds appears to gotten off easy compared to women athletes such as Jenny Simpson, the 2011 World 1,500-meter champion, who runs for New Balance. Sports bras are among the Nike apparel items athletes are required to wear during the trip. Athletes must sign a document agreeing to the Nike dress code by Sunday or be left off the team.

That’s right – if you don’t promise to wear the right sports bra, you won’t be allowed to compete in the second-biggest track meet of the four-year period leading up to next summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Once again, USA Track & Field has found a way to upstage the sport just as it steps into the global spotlight.

The latest in a recent series of USATF/Nike controversies had me wondering what Bowerman would think of the Nike/USATF contract demands. What would Hollister think?

(Bowerman died the day before Christmas in 1999. Hollister passed away in 2012 after a long battle with cancer.)

Or what would Pre do?

I believe Steve Prefontaine, the Oregon maverick, the record-shattering distance runner who put Nike on the map and gave the company instant global credibility, would have done what Symmonds has done: refused to sign the agreement.

“It’s important to remember who Pre was and the battles he chose to fight, and the battles he’d be fighting today if he were around,” Symmonds told Competitor magazine for a May cover story entitled “Pre Lives On: Why Steve Prefontaine Still Matters.” “I think he would continue to fight for rights of athletes, I think he would be appalled at the way the IOC treats athletes, and how the IAAF and USAF treat their athletes.”

And time and again it has been Symmonds (and former U.S. 5,000 champion Lauren Fleshman) among this current generation of American athletes who have fought Pre’s battles, and have been on the front lines of the fight for athletes rights. Just as Prefontaine raged against the AAU’s suppressive system, a fight that led to the passage of the Amateur Athletic Act of 1978 three years after his death, Symmonds and Fleshman have been at the forefront of the battle for track athletes to market themselves in the same manner NASCAR drivers, beach volleyball players or members of the PGA Tour have. And each step of the way they have met resistance from the IOC, the IAAF (track’s global governing body), USATF and Nike.

Nike has a complicated relationship with American track and field. The company is the best thing to happen to the U.S. sport in the last 40 years, and too often also the worst.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Beaverton, Nike’s world headquarters, has saved what’s left of American track. The company underwrites no less than three elite distance running enclaves: the Nike Oregon Project and Bowerman TC, who share the Nike World Campus, and the Eugene-based Oregon Track Club. The Oregon Project, led by former New York and Boston marathons champion Alberto Salazar, has produced Olympic 10,000 silver medalist Galen Rupp (and 2012 Olympic 10,000 and 5,000 champion Mo Farah).

Bowerman star Evan Jager threatens in Beijing to become the first non-Kenyan born runner to win the men’s 3,000 steeplechase at a World Championships or Olympic Games since 1987. Symmonds, like Fleshman, trained under Mark Rowland for several years at OTC, finishing fifth in the 2012 Olympic 800 final and securing a World Championship silver medal a year later. Nike also funds the Prefontaine Classic, which is consistently among the best meets in the world. Nike’s checkbook and Vin Lanana’s tireless salesmanship landed the 2016 World Indoor Championships for Portland and the 2021 outdoor Worlds for Eugene.

But Nike all too often also undermines American track. The company recently signed Justin Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic 100 champion, helping make the unrepentant, twice-banned drug cheat the face of U.S. track and field. Allegations of unethical, if not illegal, doping practices within the Oregon Project have also raised questions about Nike’s role in enabling top athletes to use banned performance-enhancing methods. This week Victor Conte, the drug guru at the center of the BALCO investigation, said a U.S. Anti Doping Agency probe into the Oregon Project also needs to focus on Nike’s involvement with other athletes, including 2000 Olympic champion Maurice Greene and his coach, John Smith.

Then there’s Nike the bully. Too often, the company thinks it’s the Kremlin and the rest of the sport is Hungary or Czechoslovakia. In recent years there have been allegations of Nike and USATF officials getting Nike athletes into the Olympics Trials even though the athletes didn’t meet the qualifying standards, and allegations of Nike and USATF officials bullying meet officials into making rulings in favor of Nike athletes at the expense of athletes from other shoe companies. And of course there’s the dress code. Symmonds said he was told by USATF officials to remove the Brooks gear he was wearing while having coffee in a hotel during the 2014 World Indoor Championships in Poland.

Nike dropped Symmonds shortly after he won the silver at the 2013 Worlds. Many in the sport believe the move was the result of Symmonds arguing that U.S. athletes should be able to wear the logos of more than one sponsor on their uniforms.

“This was my home,” Symmonds told me after winning his sixth U.S. title in June in Eugene. “I own four businesses here. I own two houses. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in Eugene. But I’m a professional athlete and I need to go where the team needs me, and Nike I guess didn’t feel like they needed me anymore.”

If Nike feels like it owns the sport it’s because, in a large sense, it does. Last year Nike and USATF signed a sponsorship deal that reportedly pays the federation $20 million annually. The deal starts in 2018 and runs through 2040. At first glance the deal looks a major coup for USATF, but several longtime USATF volunteers, most notably David Greifinger, the former counsel to the group’s board, maintain in the long run it’s a bad deal for the federation. Neither the USATF athletes advisory committee or a track athlete’s union was consulted with about the deal.

This much is clear now: USATF has not only sold out to Nike, but sold the souls of generations of American athletes as well.

That track’s governing body has sold out its athletes is nothing new. It’s what Bowerman and Hollister and Prefontaine and countless others fought against for decades. Nike used to be on the right side of those fights, the rebel company that shook the powers that be to their rotten core. Nike still likes to quote Bowerman and Prefontaine, although the quotes are more of a way to sell shoes and T-shirts than words to live by for a company that long ago lost its way. A few years ago a Nike ad campaign asked “Where is the next Pre?”

Where?

In Seattle, making a stand.

Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com