With football season just a few months away (Sept. 1), all talk around campus seems centered around OSU star running back Ken Simonton and his chances of winning the Heisman Trophy.

Oregon State's connection to college football's most coveted player award, given annually by New York's Downtown Athletic Club, is significant.

Terry Baker

OSU remains the only school in the Pacific Northwest to claim a Heisman winner and was the first school west of Texas to have a player so honored, despite all the stars who have gained fame at USC, Stanford, UCLA and Washington. As almost every Oregon Stater knows, quarterback Terry Baker's Heisman Trophy of 1962 remains one of the significant achievements in the history of OSU athletics. His honors remain virtually unmatched in school history and had a tremendous impact on the OSU sports scene of the 1960s and on Beaver athletic fans and alumni of that era.

Baker was a first-team All-America selection on 11 teams, including squads named by the Associated Press, United Press International, Football Coaches Association and Football Writers Association.

He was named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated and was featured on the cover of the magazine.

Other athletes who won this same award during the 1960s included golf great Arnold Palmer, pitching legend Sandy Koufax and NBA superstar Bill Russell.

Baker also won the Maxwell Trophy as the outstanding college football player in the nation and the Helms Foundation Award for being named the best athlete in North America. OSU's Football Media Guide for 1963 lists an additional 25 other major awards and honors earned by Baker.

His remarkable football statistics emphasized why he captured so much national attention. Some of the great offensive players in the college game have been predominantly passers; others have been runners. Baker was both.

His 4,979 total yards placed him (at the time) second only the Johnny Bright of Drake on the all-time list of ground-gainers in the history of the game. Official NCAA records do not include bowl games so if you include Baker's 260 yards gained against Villanova in the Liberty Bowl, his total adds to over 5,000 yards, with an average per-play average of 5.5 yards!

His numbers include 23 TDs by the pass and 16 by the run, including a 99-yard Liberty Bowl game-winner, on frozen Municipal Stadium turf. In the 1962 season alone, Baker accounted for 2,276 total yards, again good for second-place on the all-time list.

Baker's numbers include 23 TDs by pass (far left), and 16 on the ground (above). Left: He was awarded the Heisman in 1962 (presentation by Robert Kennedy). Photos from The Beaver, unless otherwise noted.

One of the great ironies in the Terry Baker story is that in spite of a brilliant high school football career at Portland's Jefferson High, he was actually recruited to play basketball for the Beavers. As a result, Baker never played freshman football at OSU and did not return to the sport until his sophomore year.

He also never abandoned his love for basketball and captained OSU's 1963 "Final Four" team, one of coach Slats Gill's all-time best.

John Eggers Photo courtesy of OSU Sports Information

Historians today give at least part of the credit for Baker's Heisman to then Sports Information Director John "Johnny" Eggers, who helped mastermind the media campaign that gave Baker the national exposure he needed to have enough votes to win the trophy. In his Herculean efforts to bring exposure to a football player and program located in the far-away (some would say "isolated") Pacific Northwest, Eggers was among the first in his profession to demonstrate the importance of public relations and the wise use of media to build a player's Heisman credentials.

In short, it was Johnny Eggers who first showed the nation you can have the best career statistics in the land, but if Heisman voters outside your geographic area don't know who you are, your chances of winning are slim-to- none.

More on the Eggers story next week.

-- By George Edmonston Jr.