Kenneth ("Kenny") Moore was born in Eugene, Oregon and is an American
athlete and journalist. A 1966 graduate of the University of Oregon, he earned a
degree in philosophy and in 1972 an M.F.A degree in creative writing. Moore
emerged as one of track and field coach Bill Bowerman's finest distance
runners. After college, Moore ran in the Olympic marathon at both Mexico City and Munich, finishing fourth in 1972.  

After his track career, Moore became a journalist and screenwriter. He had a twenty-five year career covering athletics for Sports Illustrated.

Moore was also one of the athletes who pushed for the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. He wrote the screenplay for the 1998 biopic “Without Limits”, a film
about former Oregon Ducks standout Steve Prefontaine. Kenny Moore currently
lives in Eugene, Oregon, and Hawaii. He has published a book about his former coach entitled Bowerman and the Men of Oregon.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award
June 13, 2009-Kenny Moore Address

"Thank you Dave, thank you Dan, thank you the Alumni of my beloved Oregon for placing me in this company. There can be no higher honor, because this means you feel I’ve been true to Bill Bowerman’s charge, that I’ve been a tenacious carrier of the lessons we pass down the generations."

"Evelyn Waugh said we writers are basically the last of the guys running around carrying notes stuck in cleft sticks."

"I was impossibly lucky to be given my sticks, my baton, by this University, our greatest institution of learning. Oregon’s stories are both of the practical and of the perfect. I absorbed everything here from the beauty of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill to the genius of the establishment clause of the first amendment, separating church and state."

"In anything I’ve written, it’s just not my voice echoing through the lines. It’s my teachers.’ So this is an unexpected chance to name the great interdisciplinary choir I hear when I write:"

• Il mio professore Emmanuel Hatzantonis taught me to think in Italian in three months, and gave me the Renaissance by arguing about Dante and his times.
• Robert Paul drew me into Philosophy, the power of logic and the British Empiricists.
• English Professor Ed Coleman kept me from offending with stereotypes, and as a turn judge once DQ’ed me from a 4:03 mile. I couldn’t have understood or written about Tommie Smith and John Carlos without him.
• Richard Lyons, my MFA advisor, taught me structure, structure, structure.
• And poet Ralph Saulisbury shocked and shamed me into putting as much discipline into my writing as I did my running."

"This is for them all, and for Bowerman, and for teaching, for bearing the immortal lessons onward."

"Onward, Thank you."

» Learn more about the Distinguished Alumnus Award