Foot Note

Move over, Michael Jordan. Step aside, Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Nike has found someone new to sport its shoes: Ventura Councilman Gary Tuttle.

Click on your television this summer and you are likely to catch a glimpse of Tuttle--arms pumping, cheeks puffed out--sprinting barefoot down a sandy beach to the soulful chords of a Gaelic folk song.

But don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize the wiry youth in the Humboldt sweatshirt striding across the screen for two seconds in Nike’s newest 30-second ad.

The film clip was taken a long time ago.

“I was 30 years younger and 15 pounds lighter,” Tuttle said Tuesday. “But that’s me.”

The new Nike advertisement is a snippet from a 1969 student documentary made more than a quarter century ago by a member of the Humboldt State University cross-country team, the Harriers.

Cinematography major Dean Munroe, a member of the Harriers, made the black-and-white film chronicling a season of the team for his master’s thesis.

The 17-minute documentary went on to win an honorable mention from the American Film Institute, Munroe said.

But then it languished, largely forgotten.

Only a few bootleg copies remained, treasured and replayed by the handful of men who once sprinted barefoot down the beaches of Northern California together to train.

Years later, when 1965 Buena High School graduate Vince Engel began doing ads for Nike, he remembered that film.

“It was such a neat, neat movie,” said Engel, who now works at the advertising agency of Wieden and Kennedy in Portland, Ore. “It’s a very innocent, honest look at running . . . not overly dramatized or too Hollywood.”

Engel, also a former Harrier, showed it to the running people at Nike and they loved it.

“They were just like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s it,’ ” Engel said.

So Nike used it.

The ad shows grainy shots of breaking waves, interspersed with shots of the barefoot runners sprinting through the sand and surf. “Why do I run?” asks the ad philosophically. “Why do I breathe?”

There’s a face. Some feet. Some waves.

Then there’s Tuttle, blowing air out in a dramatic exhalation you can almost feel.

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Engel said at the end of that practice, almost 30 years ago, Tuttle predicted that Munroe would use his melodramatic breathing in his film.

“He said, ‘While I was running I was puffing my cheeks out,’ ” Engel recalled. “And we thought he was silly, and he said, ‘You just watch, they love stuff like that in film, they’ll pick it.’ ”

Indeed, Tuttle’s puffy cheeks made the film. And editor Kim Becca of the Film Corps in San Francisco, who helped make the ad, also liked it.

“I don’t think you’ll find too many runners actually puffing their cheeks out like that when they run,” Engel said. “But it looks dramatic.”

Eighteen-year-old Kristie Tuttle was lounging at home watching “General Hospital” on Monday afternoon when she saw the ad for the first time.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my dad,’ ” Kristie said. She said she jumped up and called her father at his running store, Inside Track.

Kristie has seen the movie hundreds of times, because her father and his partner, Bill Scobey, use the film to inspire participants at their running camp. “But this is the first time I saw it on TV,” she said.

Councilman Jim Friedman, who stumbled across the ad Saturday, remembered it because it struck him as so bizarre.

“I remembered it because it was a running shoe ad, and none of the people in the ad were wearing shoes,” Friedman said, still slightly puzzled. “He’s in an ad for shoes with no shoes, and he sells shoes, so I don’t see how this is going to help him.”

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It won’t help him financially.

And Tuttle says he has no allegiance to Nike, which has been criticized for its labor practices in developing countries.

“Nike produces a good shoe,” he said. “My No. 1 selling shoe, however, is New Balance, which is made in America.”

But Tuttle loves the film--and the ad.

On Tuesday, he played a video of the ad on a VCR in his store. “That’s me!” he said, as he flashed onto the screen--and was gone. “Maybe I should get a loop and run it continuously here.”

“I’ve had a lot of moments of glory,” said Tuttle, who placed second in the Boston Marathon in 1985. “But this is another 15 seconds.”

Engel said he expects the ad to run through mid-August.