On the glory days of a fading basketball rivalry

Longtime Northwest sportswriter Bud Withers shares a few of his memories as the Ducks and Beavers prepare to dance for the final times.

Dick Harter (Courtesy UO)

Bud Withers laughs and tells me, unless I’ve heard it already, that this one is pretty unbelievable. 

It was 1974, Withers was a sportswriter for the Register-Guard, UO and OSU were closing out the Civil War series in Corvallis and the Beavers were handing it to the Ducks. The game was so in the bag by late in the second half that OSU’s athletic director brought out the Chancellor’s Trophy — awarded to the team who won the season series that year — and handed it to cheerleader Rick Coutin to parade around the gym as seconds ticked down. And while Withers didn’t have the best view of what came next, he says he certainly saw all the events that led to one of the most unexpected collisions in this rivalry’s history.

Coutin’s route took him up the sideline and passed a kneeling Oregon coach Dick Harter. 

“There were 10,000 people there and the next thing you know he’s flying ass-over-tea kettle,” Withers says, “because Harter tripped him.” 

Withers is telling me this story, in part, because I asked him how he got started writing his book Mad Hoops, a story about Harter’s 1970s Oregon basketball teams, the ones known as the Kamikaze Kids.

It wasn’t too complicated, Withers says.

He was in Corvallis a few years ago having breakfast with some friends and talk centered around college basketball, as it usually does. The Coutin story was told. More stories followed. Soon, Withers started to think there might be something there for a book.

He self-published in 2020 and it’s a great piece for anyone feeling a little stale about this weekend’s Oregon/Oregon State game. The Ducks have lost five of their last eight games. The Beavers have lost five in a row. And with them playing each other for the final two times as conference foes here in the coming weeks, I wanted to chat with someone who could offer a different perspective on this game than my own. Because while this game feels like it has little oomph, that’s largely been the case throughout my entire time on this beat.

And I know that wasn’t always the case.

Withers tells me about how Oregon State felt slighted by Sports Illustrated for putting Oregon on a 1974 cover after the Ducks and Beavers downed Bill Walton and UCLA. He tells me about the homey smell of McArthur Court, those practices with the Ducks diving all over the floor and the battles Harter and Beavers’ coach Ralph Miller would have throughout the best decade this rivalry saw.

One time, during a particularly one-sided Beavers win in 1972, another OSU cheerleader took to the PA microphone with a minute still remaining in the game and bellowed, “Let’s give credit where credit is due: Oregon will be the first team in Pacific-8 history not to win a single game.”

“Now when they play each other it’s just another game on the schedule it seems to most people,” Wither says, “but, God, when Oregon State played Oregon in the 70s with Harter and Miller on the benches, the intensity was unbelievable. Every game was a war.

“Football for both schools then was terrible. You would frequently hear after the second or third game of the football season people would say, When does basketball season start? These guys, Harter and Miller were both outsiders. Harter had come from Penn and Miller came from Iowa. Both had been crazy successful at those two programs and the two had gotten there within a year of each other. So they were kind of viewed through the same lens. It wasn’t like one guy had a five or six year head start. You could measure how each one was doing against the other, and Oregon played this crazy, physical style — diving on the floor, wrestling for position, holding guys, grabing guys — they were the most hated program on the West Coast. So you had that element and it just evolved into a bunch of very classic games.”

Withers’ career took him from the RG in Eugene to the Seattle Times, where he continued to write about college basketball and college football until retiring in 2015. He says he doesn’t golf much. He doesn’t fish much, either. He enjoys writing and he still enjoys watching college basketball. The NBA never drew him in. March Madness, even in this Things used to be better back in the day era of sports, is still his holy grail.

And as the Ducks and Beavers tip-off this weekend at Gill, Withers says his mind will be there too, lingering 50 years in the past.

“It was something else,” he says.

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor