SPEADING THE GOSPEL OF WRESTLING
By Kip Carlson

Dale Thomas drops by the OSU wrestling room named in his honor.

Dale Thomas was hired to coach wrestling for Oregon State. As it turned out, he coached wrestling for Oregon, the state.

Few, if any, have elevated a sport in an entire region the way Thomas did after becoming the Beavers’ head coach 45 years ago this season.

"There’s no doubt that he had the most influence on one state of anybody we’ve ever had in wrestling," said Myron Roderick, the former Oklahoma State coach who is now president of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Thomas’ biographical sketch at the Hall of Fame — which inducted him in 1980 — begins, "Perhaps no man has left his mark on wrestling in as many ways as Dale Thomas — as wrestler, coach, official, teacher and innovator."

Kid Wrestling. The Oregon Cultural Exchange. High school state tournaments for Freestyle and Greco-Roman competition. The Double D Wrestling Ranch. Staging the NCAA Championships and East-West All-Star Meet in Corvallis. Emphasizing a style that went after pins, not merely points. Launching officiating careers that reached the World Championships.

From the youth through international levels, Thomas turned Oregon into one of the nation’s top wrestling states.

Prior to Thomas’ arrival before the 1956-57 season, Oregon State dominated collegiate wrestling on the West Coast, but the focus was on regional competition. The Beavers had just one All-American until Thomas arrived from the Midwest, bringing his focus on competing nationally.

In the first of Thomas’ 34 seasons, John Dustin, ’61, placed fourth nationally at 177 pounds, starting a string of 33 athletes who would earn All-America honors under Thomas. Of those, 30 were from Oregon high schools, and it was more than just a pipeline from a handful of strong prep programs. Twenty-four high schools, ranging from little Lowell and North Douglas up to giants like Roseburg and Beaverton, were represented among Thomas’ in-state All-Americans; Oregon provided most of the rosters for teams that earned top-10 national finishes 14 times.

"There for a period of time, everybody knew Oregon wrestlers, all over the nation," said Doug Bashor, ’61, a Beaver football player from 1957 to 1960 who was one of Thomas’ physical education students and worked out with the wrestling team. Bashor later coached wrestling at Rex Putnam, Corvallis and Crescent Valley high schools for more than 35 years.

Having the ideas is one thing, but combining that with the motivational and organizational ability to pull it off is another. Thomas had that rare combination and drew others into his dream.

"You know Dale," said Dick Weisbrodt, who coached at Lebanon High for 22 years and was the National Coach of the Year in 1974. "When Dale says, ‘We’re going to do this,’ it’s done."

Weisbrodt was one of several coaches Thomas recruited to the state after taking the job at Oregon State. Thomas had worked in the woods of Coos County during World War II and wanted to return to the state.
Thomas captained Cornell College of Iowa to the 1947 NCAA title, won nine national championships in Freestyle and Greco-Roman competition, and earned places on United States Olympic Teams in 1952 and 1956. He’d been an assistant wrestling and football coach at Purdue and Michigan State, where he was when Carl Anderson of the Oregon State physical education department began recruiting him to Corvallis.

"That wasn’t a hard decision for me to make," said Thomas, whose duties lay mainly in PE when he was hired. "I wanted to come out here. I thought this would be a good town to raise kids in ... I came out here because I wanted to live in Oregon, not because they wanted me."

Thomas was aware that wrestling took a distant back seat to basketball during Oregon State’s long, wet winters. He immediately set out to raise his sport’s profile, moving home meets and the state high school tournament into Gill Coliseum from Langton Hall.

Drawing on his Midwest background, Thomas began recruiting coaches to come west and work in Oregon high schools. Two of the first were Weisbrodt and Bob Majors, both Cornell grads; Weisbrodt won two state titles at Lebanon while Majors produced state championships at Sweet Home and David Douglas.

"The caliber of wrestling in the state wasn’t real good," Weisbrodt said of what he found upon arriving in Oregon in the fall of 1957. "There were some good teams, but the rest of it wasn’t real good. So Dale decided, ‘Let’s bring in some people out of the Midwest where the wrestling is.’"
If part of Thomas’ goal was getting more coaches involved, another was getting more kids involved. In the spring of 1959, Thomas told Oregon Journal sports columnist George Pasero that wrestling was the fastest-growing high school sport in the state: "Great sport for boys ... gives them competition, builds up their bodies. Can’t beat it."

Pasero wrapped up the item by writing, "Wrestling, prep and collegiate, may be a minor sport to some, but to Olympian Thomas, it’s major now and growing so fast that the doubters are being crushed in the rush to the mats of the high schools from Portland to Klamath Falls."

That was shortly after Thomas convinced then-Gov. Mark Hatfield to hand out the trophies at the state high school tournament. Going hand in hand with his coaching abilities were Thomas’ abilities as a promoter; he knew how to get attention focused on his sport.

There were his "Wrestling Queens" to promote the 1959 Pacific Coast Championships, for which he gained international publicity by crowning swimsuited coeds as Miss Takedown, Miss Near Fall and so on; the statewide television specials to promote the 1961 NCAA Championships; taking sportswriters on wrestling exchange trips to foreign countries to gain coverage ... the list is long and varied. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrestling was drawing crowds of more than 5,000 to Gill Coliseum for Beaver meets against highly ranked visitors.

Staging the 1961 NCAA meet — the first held west of the Rocky Mountains — was a key step. Thomas had been told by athletic department officials not to try for the event; he ignored them, getting assistant business manager Bill Neland, ’61, to write a letter on the department letterhead telling of Oregon State’s enthusiasm for hosting.

Thomas got the tournament, and he made the announcement directly through the newspapers rather than the school’s athletic news bureau so that word would reach the public before it reached Oregon State officials.

"(Athletic director) Spec Keene called me into his office to fire me," Thomas recalled. "And I said, ‘Spec, you can’t fire me anyhow. I don’t have a job (in athletics; he was in PE) and you don’t pay me. But there’s one thing you’ve got to think about — you’re going to have to explain to the people in Oregon why you don’t want an NCAA Championship here, and that’s going to be tough.’"
The tournament went on. Thomas enlisted the Corvallis Ambassadors service club as hosts. He had visiting athletes, coaches and officials taken on excursions to the coast, and he made a good enough impression on his guests from across the country that OSU again hosted the tournament in 1980. With 167-pounder Don Conway winning the Beavers’ first NCAA individual wrestling title, Oregon State placed fourth, its best-ever finish to that point.

By then, Thomas had begun Kid Wrestling, which grew out of CH2M-HILL co-founder Jim and Ruth Howland asking for help in developing a fitness activity for Cub Scouts. OSU wrestlers and Thomas’ PE students served as instructors for kids age 4-12.
"He just thought it was a good idea," Bashor said. "He got parents involved. They had a great big tournament in Gill Coliseum every year, and they gave you red ribbons if you lost and blue ribbons if you won, and they kept matching reds against reds until everybody won ... the important thing was to learn about wrestling, in hopes that the kids would then follow it up. Some of the communities really jumped on it."

In 1962, the Jaycees adopted Kid Wrestling as a national youth fitness program. Later, the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce was a national sponsor, printing and distributing thousands of copies of a Kid Wrestling booklet.

Another high profile project got started in 1962 — the Oregon High School Wrestling Cultural Exchange. Thomas wanted athletes thinking internationally; however, as an Olympian, he had found the games to be "a big phony."

"They didn’t create better world understanding," Thomas said. "They did just the opposite ... I was in Helsinki (in 1952), and the communist countries stayed in a different camp."

Thomas went out of his way to meet athletes from other countries, and some of those friendships eventually led to a college team from Japan visiting Oregon. They wrestled a meet at Corvallis High, with the proceeds going toward funding a return trip by Oregon wrestlers to Japan the next year. Other places Oregon wrestlers eventually visited were Europe, Mexico, New Zealand and South Africa.

Bashor recalls a group of coaches setting out a 44-point philosophy for the exchange program. It would be wrestlers reaching those points, not a committee of coaches, used to select wrestlers for the trips. When a team had been selected, Thomas and the organizers held a training camp in which participants were taught how to properly behave overseas. Wrestlers on both sides of the exchange stayed in the homes of host families, rather than hotels, for a more genuine exposure to a country’s culture.

"When Dale started the cultural exchange, that was a tremendous influence," Weisbrodt said. "Kids got better and better. There was a period of time there when Oregon, at the high school level, was as good as anyone in the country."

Another stop for many of the state’s top wrestlers was the Double D Wrestling Ranch, which Thomas opened in the Coast Range near Harlan in 1974. It wasn’t your typical summer sports camp.

"The first time I went, I think I was in fifth grade," said Jeff Cardwell, now an OSU assistant coach, who wrestled for Thomas and was an All-American at 150 pounds in 1986 and 158 pounds in 1987. "I went with (Lowell High coach) Jerry Dilley. We got to go for free, but in the mornings we worked building trail on Dale’s place; in the afternoons, we went to wrestling sessions.

"I think part of Dale’s whole philosophy as a coach and in running that camp was to teach kids values outside of wrestling — to teach them to work hard, how to respect each other and basically how to be a good person ... It was always a great experience for the kids. A lot of them didn’t like it, but I think they look back and see it was tough and it was good for them."

All this went into developing wrestlers that helped Thomas compile 22 conference championships and a 616-168-13 dual meet record — the most wins ever by a collegiate wrestling coach. But Thomas didn’t develop the non-collegiate programs just to help the Beavers win.

"It was for the love of the sport, and to get them to become national- and international-minded," Thomas said. "My goal was to give the coaches in the high schools the chance for some professional advancement and to be in the national sports picture."

Those enlisted by Thomas to help build Oregon’s wrestling network agreed.

And, even though he retired from OSU after the 1989-90 season, Thomas’ influence is still felt in the number of his former wrestlers and students now coaching. And Thomas himself, now 78, continues to do what he can to improve wrestling in the state. In recent years, he’s been invited to a number of high schools.

"I don’t care if their program is any good or not," Thomas said. "I go over there and run the practice and talk to them about the things I’m talking to you about now. I just tell them, I want the teachers at this school to tell me one thing — ‘I like having wrestlers in my class. They’re polite, they get their work in, and they’re reliable.’ Every place I’ve gone, the coach has said, ‘Boy, that’s changed the attitude of the team.’"

Thomas has been slowed over the past decade by primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare liver disease. It’s a measure of his determination, though, that he’s outlived his original diagnosis by not just months, but years.

"The average guy dies after seven years; I’ve doubled that," Thomas said. "So I feel pretty fortunate. I have just as much desire to live now as when I was 20 or 30 or 40."

A lot has been accomplished with that desire.

"I’ve read a lot about empire builders," said Bashor, who taught history during his coaching career. "But I’ve only known one." OSU