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OREGON STATER
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A Heisman
won on the
field and in
the mailbox
It took running, passing and a lot of
work at the mimeograph machine for
Oregon State’s Terry Baker to make
history 50 years ago
by Kip Carlson
erry Baker’s discovery that he had won America’s top football
honor didn’t come in front of live television cameras in New York
City. Rather, it began with a message in class that he needed to hustle
over to Oregon State Athletic Director Spec Keene’s office in Gill
Coliseum.
There, the crew-cut engineering major took a phone call from the
New York Athletic Club informing him he would receive the Heisman
Trophy as the nation’s outstanding college football player of 1962.
“I didn’t even know it was being announced then or anything,”
Baker said as he reminisced about the experience. “It came as a total
surprise.”
This fall marks the 50th anniversary of Baker becoming the first
player from west of Texas to win the award, which will be celebrated at
events on campus during the Beavers’ football season. The trophy itself
sits in the lobby outside the Beaver football coaches’ offices, upstairs in
T
Terry Baker’s Heisman Trophy is displayed in the lobby outside the football
coaching offices in the Valley Football Center. PHOTO BY DENNIS WOLVERTON;
GAME PHOTO COURTESY OSU ATHLETICS
FALL 2012
the Valley Football Center.
“One thing I learned early on after having the trophy is, it’s almost
like a tattoo that’s put on you,” Baker said, noting that it’s been a positive experience. “No question, it stays with you the rest of your life.”
Having scaled back his work as a partner in the Tonkon Torp law
firm in his native Portland, he lives a comfortable life in Portland and
this fall will have time to attend the Heisman presentation for just the
third time since he won and for the first time in more than 20 years.
There he will be among other men who can relate to having “Heisman
Trophy winner” as almost part of their name.
That Baker won the award — that Oregon State had a Heisman
winner before Southern California or UCLA or other western schools
at a time when most Heisman voters paid little attention to West
Coast football — obviously had much to do with his prodigious athletic talents, but the road to the honor was paved by OSU’s then-sports
information director, John Eggers, ’50. His success in drawing attention to Oregon State’s star helped change the way colleges campaign
to help their top athletes get noticed so they can compete for and win
top awards.
Eggers’ approach was simple: Each week, he compiled a page containing Baker’s statistics, some quotes from OSU Head Coach Tommy
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Mostly retired as an attorney, Baker lives a comfortable life in Portland. His framed game jersey had to be retrieved from storage to be
used as a backdrop for his portrait. PHOTO BY DENNIS WOLVERTON
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Prothro and some words of praise about the
Beaver quarterback from the head coach of
Oregon State’s opponent that week. Mimeographed copies went in the mail to influential
sportswriters and sportscasters across the
country.
Baker didn’t even know it was happening.
“I was completely in the dark on that,” he
said.
There was no horserace- or presidential
election-style handicapping of the Heisman
race on a weekly basis on ESPN or in the New
York Times back then. No self-proclaimed
“Heisman pundits” pontificated on who had
worked himself into or out of contention on a
given weekend.
“I don’t think there was any of that, that I
was aware of. Zero,” Baker said.
Eggers’ direct marketing approach grew
into something of a cottage industry by the
late 1970s and early 1980s, as schools sent
away all sorts of items to draw attention to
their players.
“You got the little reporter notebooks with
the player’s picture on the cover and lots of
statistics and things like that,” said Rod Commons, ’65, who worked as Eggers’ assistant
at Oregon State before serving as sports information director at Washington State from
1976 until 2007.
Hal Cowan began his sports information
career in the mid-1960s, succeeded Eggers at
OSU in 1976 and headed the Beavers’ athletic
media relations until retiring in 2003. He
believes high-profile Heisman marketing got
a major boost when John McKay, Southern
California’s head coach from 1960-75, “told
his SID, ‘You call Oregon State and find out
how Eggers did it.’ John told them what he
did and I think SC put more money and effort
into it. It still wasn’t the fancy stuff that you
see today, but I think they were the first ones
that openly started campaigning and they’ve
got, what, six of them?”
It was soon a side competition to see which
school could send the most unique item. In
2005, Memphis sent toy racecars to boost the
chances of running back DeAngelo Williams. In 2008, Missouri distributed a sort of
Viewmaster disc and viewer with highlights of
quarterback Charles Daniels. Last fall, Baylor
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sent out autographed trading cards of eventual 2011 Heisman winner Robert Griffin III.
On behalf of Cougar quarterback Ryan Leaf
in the late 1990s, Commons mailed a single
leaf to each voter.
Baker helped with a campaign when OSU
promoted running back Ken Simonton for
the Heisman in 2001. Wearing his OSU letter
jacket, he posed with Simonton for a photo
that was used on the cover of notebooks and
other promotional materials.
“He was willing to do it,” Cowan said of
Baker. “He was happy to; he said, ‘I hope he
has a chance for it; if I can be of any help,
that’s fine.’ He was more inclined to help that
way, I think, than he would have been in his
own case.”
As a former winner, Baker is a Heisman
voter and has received many such marketing
pieces.
“I’d get these press books on what various schools were dubbing as their Heisman
candidate,” Baker said. “But the trouble with
that is, when these are coming out early in
the year, so many things can happen during
the course of the football season — primarily
injuries.”
All it takes is one play that ends with the
featured player writhing on the ground, gripping his knee, and all that money has gone
for naught. Also, Cowan suspects that a lot of
voters toss the items in the trash because they
don’t want to be seen as being bought.
Commons notes that with the Internet and
cable television, there are now many shows
and other opportunities to provide a mass audience with information and highlights at far
less expense, and so many more games are on
television that voters can see for themselves.
While the techniques may have changed
over 50 years, the key points in winning the
Heisman remain the same: The voters need
to be aware of the candidate and then the
candidate has to perform on the field — and
being on a winning team also helps.
Baker had the trifecta in 1962. Eggers got
the word out as Baker passed for 1,723 yards
and 16 touchdowns and rushed for another
538 yards and five touchdowns. The Beavers,
playing independent schedules in those early
1960s seasons, went 8-2 and were invited to
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the Liberty Bowl.
While on an early awards trip to the East
Coast — he made several that late fall and
early winter — Baker and the Look magazine
All-America team were taken by train from
New York to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy
game. At halftime, they were introduced to
President John F. Kennedy.
“When he shook hands with me, he said,
‘Well, you’re going to see my brother in a
couple of days,’” Baker said. “And I didn’t
even know about it, but he knew that I was
going to be getting the Heisman Trophy from
his brother, Bobby.”
Indeed, U.S. Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy presented Baker with the trophy in
New York. A little over a week later, Baker
Baker got a cryptic tip from President John F.
Kennedy that he would soon be meeting his brother,
Attorney General Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy, who
was presenting the Heisman that year. PHOTO
COURTESY OSU ATHLETICS
elevated his legend with a 99-yard touchdown
run that gave the Beavers a 6-0 win over Villanova in the Liberty Bowl.
Baker would be named Sports Illustrated’s
Sportsman of the Year for 1962, and then
complete one of the greatest athletic years
ever by a collegian, starting at guard on the
OSU basketball team that reached the 1963
Final Four, further securing his spot as a history maker. q
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