In Search of the Truth About Prefontaine

Steve Prefontaine’s rebirth on film comes as twins this year as he lends his name and nickname to a pair of movies. “Prefontaine” from Disney’s Hollywood Pictures is now playing, with “Pre” from Warner Bros. due out in the fall.

All this for an athlete from the minor sport of distance running who never won an Olympic medal, which usually is a runner’s only ticket to recognition in this country. He set several American records on the track but wasn’t even the most successful American distance runner of his time. Frank Shorter, the Munich Olympic marathon gold medalist, was.

At the time of Prefontaine’s death, in a 1975 auto accident at age 24, Shorter told of running near his Colorado home with Prefontaine. Someone shouted, “Hey, isn’t that Steve Prefontaine?” Shorter recognized then, “Even at home where I’m not known, he is.”

Even then, runners admired Prefontaine because he wasn’t like most runners. He wasn’t as tall or as skinny, it’s true, but mostly he wasn’t as diplomatic and self-effacing.

Prefontaine played to the crowds and the media, and could speak as tough as he ran. He has been called the “James Dean of track,” but a better label might be Muhammad Ali in spikes.

Like Ali, Prefontaine made bold predictions about how well he would do battle. Like Ali, Prefontaine acted out against officials who stood for what he opposed.

Then suddenly Prefontaine died with so much left undone, both on the track and in challenging officialdom. His fans didn’t want to let him go, and they haven’t. But it will take more than runners with long memories and strong loyalties to turn the two movies into box-office successes.

The first film off the starting line, “Prefontaine,” does reasonably well at re-creating the look of the runner and his times. Where “Prefontaine” stumbled was in its trifling with facts and characterizations.

Jared Leto, who plays the title character, not only looks like Prefontaine but also acts like him. His staged runs blend as well as the viewer could hope with footage of Prefontaine’s real runs from the 1970s.

But the script that Leto and his fellow actors must follow doesn’t do the real Prefontaine justice. Playing fast and loose with certain facts dishonors the blunt honesty that his fans found so appealing in him.

Most of the errors only a student of running history would notice: Prefontaine leading in the last lap of the 1972 Olympic 5,000 meters when in fact he wasn’t out front that late in the race, or the alleged ducking of Prefontaine by Munich gold medalist Lasse Viren when in fact they raced twice after those Games, each beating the other once.

Three more problems are more substantial:

* The film deals squeamishly with the ATU, disclaiming it as a fictional organization. This is clearly the AAU--Amateur Athletic Union--with which Prefontaine battled openly.

* Before his last race, Prefontaine rips off the “swoosh” from a new pair of shoes. He worked for Nike by then and would never have removed this already widely known logo.

* The filmmakers chose to ignore the possible role of alcohol in the fatal crash by putting a cola-looking drink in his hand at a party. (In fairness, he was twice shown intoxicated earlier in the movie.) The official police report from that night listed his blood alcohol at .16, well above the legal limit.

Beyond these factual matters, though, the main flaw in this film was the pseudo-documentary treatment of the subject. The result, perhaps inevitably, is that the characters come across as exaggerated caricatures.

Prefontaine himself wasn’t entirely the angry, abrasive young man that Leto portrayed. A humorless egotist wouldn’t have been so well loved.

Coach Bill Bowerman wasn’t only the profane curmudgeon that R. Lee Ermey played. Bowerman was one of the few coaches (along with his assistant Bill Dellinger) wise enough to keep the driven Prefontaine from training and racing himself into the ground.

The weakness of “Prefontaine,” the movie, isn’t with the performers or the script so much as the docudrama vehicle. This story has already been told, shorter and better, in the wonderfully crafted 1995 documentary “Fire on the Track.”

(A chopped-up version ran on CBS-TV. See the original, available on video from Westcom Creative Group, [800] 771-2060.)

After you’ve seen the real Prefontaine, Bowerman and many others, and heard the narration of novelist Ken Kesey in “Fire,” the stand-ins become also-rans. Co-authoring that script was Kenny Moore, Prefontaine’s Olympic teammate as well as a writer of great skill and sensitivity. Moore also scripted “Pre,” the Warner movie. One hopes he’ll give deeper and truer answers to the question “Who was Steve Prefontaine?” than the film now playing.