By George P. Edmonston Jr.

What a special weekend it was for OSU men's basketball.

On Sunday, February 9th, more than 90 former Beaver players descended on the Oregon State campus to enjoy homecoming activities celebrating both their respective teams and their collective role as architects of the eighth-winningest program in NCAA history.

All the championships, the All-Americans, the Olympic gold medalists, the No. 1-ranking in 1981, the great upsets and the near misses, the spirit of all this success was in great abundance beginning with the homecoming banquet Saturday night. Fans attending the Stanford game on the 9th had a chance to meet many of the great players responsible for firmly entrenching OSU as one of the nation's storied basketball schools.

Four players, in particular, deserved special attention on this special weekend. All are in their 90s, or close to it, and the deeds they turned in on the hardwoods of the West Coast during the early years of the Depression, when the game was played with a center jump after each basket, still reverberate across the years. All-American and team captain Ed Lewis of Salem headed a list of returning alumni that included forwards Merle "Humpty" Taylor of Albany and Clarence "Jiggs" James of Tillamook. Reserve center Fred Hill of Walla Walla, Wash., could not make the trip.

They're what's left of one of the most revered squads in OSU history, historic for what could have happened that didn't, historic because their surprise performance in 1933 set the tone not only for seven decades of basketball success, but for all the wonderful moments, players and teams this homecoming celebration honored.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of coach Amory T. "Slats" Gill's '33 squad and their place in the record books is easy to explain: They were the first OSU team in any sport to win a championship. Earlier years had produced players with impressive individual credentials and even a few Olympic medal winners, but no group of Beaver athletes in a given season had ever won a major trophy.

Oregon State College's 1922 basketball squad had ventured the closest. Led by All-American Marshall Hjelte, on a team that included Slats himself, the Beavers finished 21-2 overall, 10-2 in what was then known as the Pacific Coast Conference. But Idaho was declared champion with a 7-0 record.

In 1925, after the PCC had been divided into Northern and Southern Divisions, Oregon State and Oregon ended the season in a tie for the Northern crown, with OSC winning an exciting three-game tie-breaker series to earn the right to play USC for the title. But USC won two of three and that was that.

As the 1932-33 season approached, the experts had Gill's Orangemen picked to continue their mediocre ways. His 1929-30 club had finished in next to last place with a break-even 8-8 conference record. In 1930-31, Oregon State did slightly better for a third-place PCC finish. Another third-place was OSC's reward in '31-'32. By 1933, Hec Edmunson's Washington Huskies had won five PCC crowns in a row. They were the odds-on favorites to repeat.

Tough times

Coach Gill photo from the '30 Beaver.

During the 36 years he would coach Beaver basketball, Slats Gill would look back on the early 1930s as among the most difficult seasons of his career. During the '29-'30 campaign a stay in the hospital after a sudden illness forced him to miss the first six games of conference play, four of which were lost. With a veteran team returning the next year, plus the arrival of an amazing sophomore center named Ed Lewis, the Beavers were expected to be a conference terror. But food poisoning on a trip south to California, combined with a season-ending knee injury to Lewis, left OSC with no better than 9-7 in PCC play.

Could things get worse for the boys from Corvallis?

Absolutely.

The 1931-32 season would be Slats Gill's worst nightmare. It began when Forrest "Skeet" O'Connell shattered his ankle in practice. Then Lewis broke his hand in a game against San Francisco. As the Northern Division got under way, veteran Jerry Thomas had to be hospitalized and missed four critical games. Returning to the lineup, Lewis gamely played with a special protective cast on his hand. Adversities aside, Gill had his guys on top of the division with a 4-1 record.

Their success would not last. Two heartbreaking losses followed and then lightening hit the team again. Lewis hurt his shoulder, thus limiting his playing time. Now Slats was forced to add a football player and the catcher from the baseball team to shore up his bench. On a trip to Washington and Idaho, Lewis reinjured his shoulder and couldn't play at all. Everett Davis, a reserve, had to leave the Idaho series with a broken ankle. Against the Vandals, a minor riot ended the first game, while in the second, the lights went out in the gym delaying the contest for a full thirty minutes.

What else could go wrong?

Plenty. On the trip home, their train missed its connection and the team ended up snowbound. Back on campus, Carl Lenchitsky took sick and missed the last five games of the season.

Coaching change?

Unknown to his players, fans and family, Gill was also battling a Portland group that wanted his job. Bad luck with injuries, and the perception that Gill's growing list of missed opportunities was not just coincidence, were more than some alumni could take.

Ed Lewis sketch from the '33 Beaver.

Ed Lewis, whose No. 25 jersey was retired by OSU in 1999 and who has often been described as the "Pete Maravich" of his generation, remembers the incident, although he admits it was not until later that he found out.

"There was a movement in Portland to get rid of him in 1932," he said in a telephone interview last week. "I'm not sure who was responsible, but I've heard it was a former OSC student body president. I remember something about it being in the newspapers and it made a real impression on me. It forced me to change my mind about what I wanted to do for a living. I had decided I wanted to be a coach, but after watching what Slats had to go through, I changed my major to business."

Many of these same alumni had already forced the firing of football coach Paul Schissler. A "clean house" atmosphere had taken hold. We can only imagine today what might have happened had Slats Gill fallen to the same ax that had ruined his football counterpart: no five PCC Conference championships; no West Regional championship trophy in 1963; no opportunity to coach 12 All-Americans; no 599 wins, the most in school history; no eight consecutive Far West Classic titles; no Naismith Hall of Fame induction; no Gill Coliseum; maybe no Ralph Miller or Gary Payton.

Turkey Legs' revenge

In a very real sense, Slats Gill's 1933 team and their championship performance saved his career and saved OSU from a men's basketball legacy that could have been very different.

Ralph Hill photo from the '33 Beaver.

Washington, which by 1933 had won five Northern Division titles in a row, was again the overwhelming favorite to win it all. When Oregon State split their first series with the Huskies in Corvallis, halting a 15-game UW Northern Division winning streak, a new level of confidence began to descend on Gill's chargers. The new mood, however, was somewhat shaken by a split with Idaho, in a road trip still remembered by Ralph Hill, who played back-up center to Ed Lewis:

"When we played Idaho, the crowd up there was really getting on Ed Lewis, calling him 'Turkey Legs' and making fun of him," Hill recalls. "Now Ed was an extremely good passer and we had a great starting five. Those guys handled the ball real well. The first time Ed passed the ball behind his back the crowd got real quiet and stayed that way the rest of the game."

At season's end, with the divisional title on the line, the Beavers took two from Washington up there to finish on top with a 12-4 conference record. It was only the third time in a 100-game series dating back to 1904 that OSC had won both games in Seattle. Now Gill prepared his team to face the 10-1 Trojans of USC, champions of the Southern Division. It would prove to be one of the greatest series in Oregon State history, all played at the old Men's Gymnasium on campus known today as Langton Hall.

In the first game, Lewis led his team to a 35-33 decision. Coach Sam Berry's Trojans won the second contest 39-28 and now it was down to one victory to win it all. In a carefully played third game, with the state of Oregon tuned-in like never before, OSU prevailed 24-19.

The first champions

Chuck Boice photo from the Dec. 2000 Oregon Stater.

As sports historian Chuck Boice would write for OSU's alumni newspaper The Oregon Stater in 1987: "OSU would win numerous other championships, but this was the first."

Above all else, those teammates who are left - Lewis, James, Taylor and Hill - credit coach Gill with the success they enjoyed that monumental year and also for what they became later in life.

Shared Merle Taylor, a retired VW dealer living in Albany: "The thing I remember most about Slats is how great a man he was. After my first year, in which he talked the freshman coach into not dropping me from the program, I had no money to continue in school, so was planning to leave OSU. My folks were farmers and one day while I was working in the fields, I saw this man walking across our place headed toward me and wearing a suit.

"I asked myself, 'Who can this be?' It was Slats and he asked, 'Merle, do you want to go to school?" I answered him 'yes' and he said that if I would come back he would give me a scholarship and a job. It changed my life."

From his assisted living facility in Tillamook, Clarence "Jiggs" James said in a telephone interview, although he liked everyone on the '33 team, he "liked Slats Gill the most. He was an outstanding human being, was able to handle our players and never had to get nasty with us."

Born in 1910, James said with pride that he still follows the Beavers and considers it a blessing that he was able to attend the homecoming events last weekend.

Lewis cherishes similar feelings about Gill: "I lost my dad when I was young and so I grew up without a dad. Slats was the closest thing I ever had to a father. He was a great man."

-- By George Edmonston Jr., Editor of the Oregon Stater and E-Clips. This story first appeared in the Corvallis Mid-Valley Sunday of the Gazette-Times on Sunday, Feb. 9th.