Fourteen years ago something unusual appeared up in the stands at Historic Hayward Field.
A metal silhouette of famous Oregon track and field coach Bill Bowerman was installed anonymously as a tribute to the man who had passed away the previous year. Though it was well received by the public, the silhouette was later taken down and went missing.
One of the men who put in the original piece, David Gwyther, is coming forward for the first time in an effort to bring Bowerman back to Hayward.
Q: Back then, why did you do it?
A: There were things going on in the track program. They had hired a fairly new coach who got reasonably good results, but using methods that were kind of antithetical to the Hayward, Bowerman and Dellinger tradition. His name was Martin Smith. So, I thought this would be a way to disturb his psyche a little bit. This was something I had come up with that I thought people would appreciate on a couple of different levels — the art level and the athletic level.
Q: What was it made of?
A: I got a tracing of a guy who was about the same height as Bowerman, and then the artist traced around that. He cut it out of stainless steel, about an eighth of an inch. We put metal-to-wood glue on the back of it and we figured out what seat he sat in.
Q: So, in the end, the silhouette was both a tribute and a protest. 
A: Yeah it was. Bowerman didn’t see himself as a coach, he saw himself as a developer of human potential. He didn’t like being called coach; no one called him coach. He was very spiritual, but in a very grounded way. He favored “train don’t strain” — incremental improvement over long periods of time. Of course he was co-founder of Nike, but in the grander scheme of things that was never a very large part of his life. He was an innovator in terms of developing rubber asphalt track, big squishy bags that he used in pole vault and high jump and hurdles that rolled forward instead of collapsed. He was always thinking about how to improve things.
Q: What is the plan to bring back the silhouette?
A: What I want to do is find the original one we made, reinstall it and endow that seat for 10 years. I will use the tickets as standing room only. That seat, I don’t even know if it’s a reserved seat, is one of the least used because it’s at the very top and in the middle.
Q: What are the chances of finding the original?
A: I think they are 50/50. I don’t think anyone threw it away because there were enough people that knew about it and would respect it. Also, it didn’t have tremendous value. My guess is either it’s stashed in some storage space forgotten or it’s in someone’s house as a conversation piece.
Q: And if you are unable to find it?
A: Then we will make another one. We want to get it installed by the 24^th of December because that is the fifteenth anniversary of when Bowerman passed away.
Gwyther is offering a $200 reward to anyone who comes forward with the original silhouette. He can be reached at [email protected].
Follow Christopher Keizur on Twitter @chriskeizur