When Otis Davis visited his alma mater, the University of Oregon, over the weekend, the place he best recognized was his old dormitory.
Davis was a small-forward-sized guard on the basketball team in 1958, when he peered out of a third-floor window and saw two men doing laps at Hayward Field.
“To me, they looked slow. But they were distance runners, and they were running on pace,” Davis, 88, said by phone Saturday morning. “I said, I could beat those guys. That’s when I went to see Coach Bowerman.”
Davis, who served four years in the U.