a couple links pertinent to this thread:
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/08/21/a1.McChesneys.0821.p1.php?section=cityregion
Tried to find the link for the second article but failed...here is the article itseslf:
August 6, 2004
Runners Recall Johnson's Legacy
By Dave Kayfes
For The Register-Guard
For a man who was a high school track head coach for only seven years, retired Nike executive Harry Johnson drew quite a crowd to a reunion of those teams one night last month.
Close to 200 athletes who competed for Johnson at South Eugene in the early 1970s, along with spouses and several guests, filled a banquet room at the Valley River Inn to honor and roast their 66-year-old former coach.
"I still haven't fully recovered," Johnson said by telephone from his home in Seal Rock a week after the event. "Normally, you have one of these things at a funeral."
In a way, it was like a flashback to Track and Field Camelot - that special time in the early 1970s when Eugene was the Track Capital of the World.
A time when Pre filled the bleachers at Hayward Field and the storied facility was the site of three consecutive U.S. Olympic Trials.
A time when Oregon was an NCAA powerhouse and the Axemen ruled the state in a sport almost as popular as football and basketball in Eugene.
"Kids dreamed of being on the South team," recalled Rob Gemmell, class of 1978. "We had two locker rooms - one for football and one for cross country. There were 50 lockers in each, and there was an overflow (of runners) for cross country."
It was a time shortly after Nike started to take wing out of Bill Bowerman's garage and jogging was the craze.
And a time when Harry Johnson was the wizard of championships at South - nine state titles in boys gymnastics, six titles in eight state meets in cross country and seven state titles in seven years in track.
"Some of you may remember how he turned the radio announcer's booth in the main gym into a shoe resoling room to save money," said Steve Dougherty, a 4:20 miler from the class of 1974. "Who can forget him emerging from that room like a chimney sweep, covered from head to toe in shoe dust?"
And who can forget the workouts he wrote for each athlete on an IBM Selectric? Or the film he took of everyone to study form and to use at the season-ending awards banquet?
"I saved my old workout books, and they were smeared with the green stuff we used to rub on our heels so we wouldn't get blisters," said Bob Penny, class of 1976.
Or who could forget the trips to the dunes and the pit marked with red paint "Leave your lunch here," or the campouts and tortuous 14-mile runs uphill near Three Sisters Wilderness?
"He'd wait for us in that shallow pit with that typical smirk," said Scott Slovic, now a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Reno.
Or who could forget the hats, awarded to those who eclipsed 5 minutes in the mile (25 in 1975), or those legendary tales.
"In 1976, four of the top seven runners on the cross country team decided to run from school to the district meet at Lane," Penny said. "We got lost in the woods and showed up 25 minutes before the race."
Three-time state cross country and two-mile champion Bill McChesney, nicknamed Tiger by his middle school PE teacher Jerry Andrews, was known to run to meets instead of going by bus.
A moment of silence for Bill and his older brother, Tom, who died in separate traffic accidents, was observed early in the program. Dirk Lakeman, who took Billy's scholarship offer to Arizona when Billy chose the Ducks, read a poem for Harry in the imagined words of McChesney.
While Johnson has no regrets about his decision to leave South to coach an elite Athletics West team in 1977, his fondest memories as a coach go back to those days at South.
"There are two things," he said of the highlights of the banquet and picnic the next day. "One is the number of guys who wrote. I got so many letters from guys who didn't stand out, guys who realized they were a part of something. They were treated the same. That was a part of the whole deal, not to treat anyone differently. Our team meetings were like entertainment central. It was a big deal for me and what sports in high school should really be about.
"Second, I appreciated all of the comments and things that were said that night. In particular, I think Craig Brigham was dead on when he said what was important was that they really had fun."
Johnson felt especially close to Brigham, a state champion for Johnson in gymnastics and a state record-holder in the pole vault, Johnson's old event in high school.
"He was from a single-parent family and was mature beyond his years," Johnson said of Brigham. "Every day for three years, I'd drive him home and talked about whatever. He had as good a pulse on me as anyone I coached."
Brigham, an orthopedic surgeon who now teaches doctors in Charlotte, N.C., didn't mind sharing.
The last of 13 speakers, 10 of them distance runners, he needled his former teammates for stretching the program beyond three hours and not leaving time for an open microphone.
"Distance runners are incredibly long-winded," he joked.
And they weren't his role models.
"My older brother took me to a gymnastics meet when I was in junior high," he said. "I remember Dan Moninger on rings. ... I was 13, and I decided then that I wanted to be a part of that team."
Once out for gymnastics, a fall sport, Brigham was coaxed into track and the decathlon by his gymnastics coach.
"I sit here three decades later, and reflect back," Brigham said. "Did the participation build character? No. Did it lead to success in life? No. Hard work gives you an advantage, true ... but championships are not the reason we are honoring Harry. It's the giving. He showed us how dedication could be fun."
Brigham wasn't the only athlete for whom Johnson opened his heart and home.
Steve Surface, the 1973 state cross country champion who came up with the idea for the joint reunion, said he lived with the Johnsons his senior year after his parents moved to Portland.
"He instilled in us the 'just do it' attitude before it became a Nike trademark," Surface said. "He taught me to think like a winner."
Johnson coached Athletics West for 2 1/2 years before joining Nike full-time.
"On paper it looked like utopia," Johnson said of the AW job. "But I didn't understand corporate politics or athletes that wouldn't buy into the training system."
He called his 21-year career at Nike "a great experience. I did well and had fun doing it."
His favorite time was his 3 1/4 years as general manager of the Nike-Korea liaison office in Korea, overseeing an operation that produced 80 percent of the company's footwear at the time.
"I really liked the Korean people," he said. "We saw more of Korea than the average Korean."
He also served two years in China, culminating with a tour of Mongolia.
He retired from Nike in 1998 and settled in a home not far from where he was born and where his father took his first coaching job.
He believes that he and his father, Mel, may be the only father-son combination to win state track titles. Mel's Grants Pass team edged Bowerman's Medford team by one point for the title in 1947.
"It's like he's come whole cycle," said his wife, Jody. "He's clerk of the course at Newport track meets and he's involved with the booster club (which built one of the nicest tracks in the state.)"
Can he see himself getting involved in coaching again?
"I've declined on two fronts," he said. "One, I'd be divorced if I did, and, two, I don't think the kids here could deal with me."
Not, at least, in the way the kids at South did 30 years ago in that special time and magical place for track and field.