A12
| Tuesday, March 9, 2021
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Rosebud.
The 83-year-old Nike chairman
emeritus still reveres the late Bill
Bowerman, the championship coach
who led Knight, a skinny miler for
the Ducks in the late 1950s, and
later co-founded Nike with him. It
was Bowerman’s experiments with
the family waffle iron that inspired
Nike’s 1970s waffle trainer shoe.
“If there was no Bill Bowerman,
there would have been no me,”
Knight has said.
The reverence for Bowerman
made the overhaul of Hayward
Field particularly fraught. It had
housed countless All-Americans,
fostered the legend of fierce,
floppy-haired runner Steve Prefon-
taine, hosted NCAA championships
and six U.S. Olympic trials.
Knight pushed for a modern,
epic Hayward renovation, as he had
with previous athletic buildings he
funded at Oregon. The final product
includes permanent seating for
12,650 with capability to hold
nearly 25,000, according to the uni-
versity, although Oregon track
meets rarely filled the 10,500 ca-
pacity in the old Hayward.
The renovated facility includes
indoor warm-up and training areas,
a weight room and lounge, a mu-
seum, classroom and lab space for
the department of human physiol-
ogy and a sports clinic. Giant mu-
rals of athletes splash across the
stadium walls. The on-site barber-
shop bursts with Oregon-themed
décor and a foosball table features
twirling Duck-mascot figurines.
Knight is far and away Oregon’s
biggest donor, but the exact
amount he’s given is unknown to
the public. He usually steers his do-
nated construction projects with a
large degree of autonomy and def-
erence from university officials,
then donates the buildings to the
school.
“Private donation records from
donors are not disclosed,” UO’s
Stanton said. He added that the fig-
ures listed for capital gifts of facili-
ties in athletic-department records
are “third-party appraised values
upon the facility’s completion and
gift to the University.”
Other Knight-donated buildings
include an academic center for ath-
letes opened in 2010 and that an
appraiser estimated cost nearly
$42 million. A Knight-funded
145,000-square-foot football com-
plex that opened in 2013 was ap-
praised at $95 million. One of
Knight’s few disclosed donations
was $100 million to help finance
Oregon’s $227 million basketball
arena, opened in 2011.
Disagreements about what Bow-
erman would have wanted, in part,
drove friction about the Hayward
Field renovation. If in 1965 a donor
had offered to expand Hayward
Field and build world-class training
facilities, Bowerman would have
gladly accepted, Knight suggested
to the Register-Guard newspaper of
Eugene, Ore., in June 2018.
Opponents disagreed that Bow-
erman would have embraced the
stadium as it was rebuilt. Former
Oregon runner, two-time Olympic
marathoner and Bowerman biogra-
pher Kenny Moore saw the design
as disloyal to one of Nike’s guiding
principles: “Remember the man”—
that is, Bowerman.
“When I cast my eyes over the
planned transformation of Hayward
Field, all I can see is a perversely
ignorant ‘remembering’ of the man,
the character and wishes of the
man,” Moore wrote in a 2018 letter
to the Eugene City Council.
Reached by email recently, Moore
called his letter a “loving warning”
and said that the “stadium’s cur-
rent horseshoe shape seems to
stiffen
the hated north winds on
the backstretch. I hope that is not
true. No one despised them more
than Bill Bowerman.”
Bowerman would have preserved
the stadium’s historic main seating
area, Moore and others argued. The
fight over that alone was so fierce
that, Knight said in that 2018 inter-
view, “When those bulldozers in
July knock that East Grandstand
down, I am the most reviled man in
Eugene.” Nonetheless, down it
went.
The project even spurred a pub-
lic disagreement between Knight
and Tinker Hatfield, the famed Nike
designer of many of the Air Jordan
shoe models, who was involved
with the Hayward Field project
early on.
Knight, in the recent email to
the Journal, wrote, “Tinker and I
are fine.” In an email to the Jour-
nal, Hatfield concurred.
“I disagree with aspects of the
‘new’ design but overall Phil and
his team have built a beautiful,
modern home not only for Oregon
Track but the entire sport,” Hat-
field wrote. “I certainly hope that
the magic of the old Hayward Field
finds it way back to the new
venue.”
Knight made one adjustment at
the behest of Bowerman’s three
sons, agreeing not to name a torch-
shaped silver tower added to the
stadium after Bowerman. The 10-
story tower depicts Bowerman and
four Oregon athletes.
“There was a strong group of
track boosters who did not like the
new design,” Knight wrote in the
email. “Many of them have come
around, and I would expect more to
be on board when there is an ac-
tual track meet there. I am proud
of the result.”
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