By George P. Edmonston Jr. for Mid-Valley Sports

"Quarterback Ed Singler told us at halftime the game meant a lot to him and that he wasn’t going to give up. It’s amazing what a speech like that can accomplish.”-Greg Mulkey, 1981

Photo of Ed Singler, picture from the '82 Beaver.

For some Beaver fans watching tonight’s game pitting OSU and the Fresno State Bulldogs (ESPN, 7 p.m.), this suddenly heated series goes back but two games, starting with the 2001 44-24 pasting FSU put on visiting Oregon State before a national television audience tuned in to see if the boys from Corvallis deserved Sports Illustrated magazine’s No.1 pre-season ranking.

Memories of that game still burn: the taunts and jeers and filthy language Bulldog fans leveled at anyone wearing orange and “The Hit,” an illegal smashing of OSU’s Terrell Roberts by Fresno’s Kendall Edwards as Terrell called for a fair catch of a punt.

Last year, it was time for pay-back, as OSU crushed Fresno by a final score of 59-19.

The truth is, this will be the 13th meeting between the two schools, with FSU holding a 7-5 edge in the win column. To some extent, it’s been a seesaw affair, although the Bulldogs have recorded back-to-back victories over the Beavers on three different occasions.

Back beyond ’01, however, the memory for many starts to blur, except maybe for the fans and players who were at Parker Stadium on the evening of September 12, 1981. For them, this will always be the Fresno State game they most remember. Maybe you had to have been there to understand. Or maybe not. For this was and is a story of never-say-die, a moment of Beaver triumph when things looked hopeless, high drama between two schools meeting on the gridiron for the first time.

One person who was there and who truly understands all these years later why some OSU fans would consider this the best game yet played between these new arch rivals is Sacramento State Head Football Coach Steven Mooshagian, who shared in a phone interview earlier this week about what he remembered about the game in which he played for FSU.

“Oh yes, I remember the ’81 game very well,” he said with a big smile in his voice. “In fact, as we ran out on the field at Reser Stadium last Thursday to open our season against the Beavers, I thought of that game. In the first half, our receiver corps had a field day; in the locker room at halftime we were all saying we belonged in the Pac-10.”

As a Division II program representing the Pacific Coast Athletic Conference, the Bulldogs started out as if they hadn’t bothered to notice they were 15-point underdogs to their Pac-10 opponent. OSU’s players, however, had noticed. Even though the Beavers had finished the 1980 season at 0-11, they were confident, almost dangerously so, that they could easily beat almost any team from a lower division. It was an attitude they would live to regret. OSU’s starting center in 1981, Roger Levasa, now pastor of the Grace Community Church in Tualatin, remembers the moment well.

Ed Singler photo from the '82 Beaver.

“From the opening kickoff we didn’t think that much of Fresno. We were too overconfident, and it took us a long time to realize we might lose the game.”

The week before, FSU had defeated Oregon 20-16. Later in the season, it would play Arizona. Now, as quarterback Sergio Toscan connected on the third play of the game for an 81-yard touchdown to put his team up 7-0, he and his mates began thinking “sweep,” the sweet taste of downing three Pac-10 teams in one season.

On the Beaver bench, few were worried. Head Coach Joe Avezzano, still looking for his first win in Corvallis, also showed little concern. Oregon State alumnus Greg Mulkey, a player on special teams who is now athletic director at Marshfield High in Coos Bay, said the feeling was that “we had been in many situations where we were competitive, so this was no different. Even though they scored first, our hopes were high. It was our first game and we were all determined to have a better season than a year ago. Later on we were shocked to see what was happening.”

Toscan began picking the Beaver secondary apart once again, finally connecting with a 5-yard TD pass to increase the lead to 14-0. In the second quarter, things reached the ugly stage when OSU kicker Chris Mangold watched his blocked punt returned for a 21-0 FSU lead. The two teams broke for halftime.

Steve Holsberry, OSU’s starting cornerback, recalls the mood in the locker room during intermission as being “very intense.” The Sherwood, Ore., businessman recalls their coaches telling them that to have a chance they would need to “go out and play better defense in the second half, with no turnovers when they got the ball. Let’s face it, we were overconfident going into that game. We kept saying, ‘Who the heck is Fresno State?’”

Holsberry also remembered returning to the field to start the second half with the belief OSU could win. “My feeling of a momentum shift was right off the bat,” he added, “just after we kicked off to start the third period.”

His “shift” was short-lived. On their opening drive, FSU stunned the Beaver secondary again with another long pass for a TD, this one a 55-yarder to Stephone Paige past none other than Steve Holsberry.

Now, looking up at the scoreboard and the 28-0 score, to a team they were supposed to handle without difficulty, the feeling of enough-is-enough began to descend on the psyches of the Beaver players. Remembers Ed Singler, who quarterbacked that day, “We couldn’t get things going for a while. It may have been first-game jitters; I know we were out of sync. But we all felt, even when we were down by four touchdowns, that they were not overwhelming. We kept thinking, ‘Here’s a team we’re supposed to beat and it’s not happening. What do we need to do?’”

Chris Mangold, photo from the '82 Beaver.

Without meaning to, Fresno State began answering Singler’s question with a performance that suddenly turned so inept, it was like the Bulldogs were now playing in a different game. As staff writer Jeffrey Welsch of the Gazette-Times wrote the next day, “The Bulldogs seemed to find ways to fold like a tablecloth.”

It began with poor field position in the second half after enjoying good field position to build their big lead. It continued with a series of second-half errors which Bulldog Head Coach Jim Sweeney later explained were “unexplainable.”

“I think our inability to run the ball was a big factor, and we cooperated with their pass defense by not making catches,” he concluded.
All the things that had worked for FSU up to this point in the game suddenly went cold. It was Oregon State’s turn to strike back.

Midway through the third quarter, with Ed Singler directing the show, Darryl Minor scored from five yards out for OSU’s first TD. During the drive Singler connected with tight end Ron Vogel three times, including a 36-yarder on third-and-13.

Now the lead was 21.

Next, Avezzano called for an outside kick. It worked. Suddenly hope began to beat in thousands of Beaver hearts. OSU failed to make a first down on the possession but the defense held. After a 29-yard FSU punt from its own end zone, Singler scored on a 34-yard run and the Parker crowd of 25,000 began to believe.

Fourteen points down, 14 to go.

Singler engineered a drive of 53 yards to start the final period, delivering a 12-yard pass to Randy Holmes for the score. Now it was 28-21 and FSU’s turn to feel stunned. The Beavers marched 61 yards to score the tying touchdown with 5:54 to play in the game. The clincher was an 18-yard pass from Singler to Victor Simmons, whose catch caused a crowd noise so loud it seemed like the mid-Willamette Valley had just exploded.

What the Beavers needed now was a minor miracle, a fumble, an interception, any kind of turnover. The gods were smiling. With 4:01 left, strong safety Tony Fuller intercepted a pass intended for FSU receiver Otis Tolbert.

OSU … first–down on the Bulldog 37.

Oregon State’s running game took over at this point, advancing the ball to the Fresno 12-yard line before being called for illegal motion. On third-down, Avezzano decided to put the game away with a Chris Mangold field goal. It traveled 33 agonizing yards. It was good. The Beavers and Joe Avezzano finally had a win, over somebody, over anybody … score 31-28.

In the dressing room, there was, as one can imagine, total elation. Remembers Beaver team member Ken Peckham of Tukwila, Wash., “It was a great comeback, and there was much excitement that we could use this victory to turn the program around.”

But it didn’t happen. Alas, the Beavers would not win another game for the rest of the campaign. In fact, it would not be until the next-to-last game of the next season, against Montana, Nov. 20, 1982, before OSU would celebrate another football victory.

In total, this remarkable win over the Fresno State Bulldogs was the only win Oregon State would put on the books during a period stretching from an Oct. 27, 1979, win over Stanford to the ’82 win over Montana mentioned above. That’s one win and 31 losses over a three-year period, with a tie against Washington State in 1982 thrown in for good measure. Ouch!

Said Dr. Ben Johnson, a reserve on the ’81 team who today is a Corvallis chiropractor: “We thought this was the start of a turnaround but it turned out not to be. It’s interesting when you think about what could have been. The next week we went to LSU and got beat at the end of the game. After that, we lost in very bad weather to Minnesota. Both games sucked the life out of our team.”

But this game wasn’t just a rare victory in what was otherwise a very dark time in the history of Oregon State football. It was and is something much more, and it is precisely on this point that this team deserves the everlasting respect of all Beaver fans. Their remarkable win that day set an NCAA record for the biggest comeback in college football history, not to be broken until 1984, when Maryland defeated Miami after falling behind by 31 points.

How could it happen, a 28-point lead flushed down the toilet? Probably, only FSU’s 1981 team can answer this question. Coach Mooshagian took a try at it toward the end of our interview:

“A lot of times what happens is that a team can’t handle a lead and maybe it’s a team that can’t really handle success. In this game, this was true of Fresno and it put a lull on our season for a few weeks. We did beat Arizona later in the season to finish 2-1 against Pac-10 teams. So from that standpoint, we felt like 1981 was a success. But losing to OSU the way we did was tough. We got relaxed, complacent, and were in a state of shock after the game, upset that we had given up that last touchdown to tie the score. Like I said, I had memories of that game last week but mentioned nothing about them to my players.”

-- By George Edmonston Jr. editor of the Oregon Stater, OSU’s alumni magazine and a frequent contributor of history features to the Gazette-Times.