Frazier: A Rock For The Ages

In the course of a morning conversation, with the highlights of his remarkable life passing in review, Bill Frazier’s legendary obstinacy dissolves into warmth and laughter and eventually into tears.

Tears come quicker these days.

With nothing left to prove, and too often with nothing left to do, the man who won more football and baseball games than any coach in Spokane high school history feels the full weight of his 90 years.

Billy Frazier has lost more than a step. He may be unable to repeat what he told you five minutes after he said it. He gave up golf three years ago and a recent Saturday at Martin Stadium was a strain. He can no longer negotiate the long walk to the press box at Albi Stadium on football Friday nights.

“I have an energy problem, a balance problem,” he explains. “Now, old ladies are helping me upstairs.”

If they are, they’re probably giggling, at least part of the way up. Frazier’s wit is standing the test of time.

“I had a CAT scan,” he was saying last week. “There’s nothing seriously wrong with my head except I’ve got a couple of blood vessels that are bleeding a little bit, and my brain is shrinking.”

But nothing serious.

“It’s old age,” he shrugs. “I told my grandson. He said, ‘Your brain’s shrinking? I knew that when you voted for Clinton.”’ The laughs go round the kitchen table in the house on Hamilton, where business has been conducted for 43 of the 65 years of Bill and Edna Frazier’s marriage. They are part of a vanishing generation, links to a forgotten America.

When talk turns to football, Edna goes off to catch up on a little daytime drama. The theme from “The Young and the Restless” plays softly from the living room.

I name a former Gonzaga Prep football star.

“Great player for me,” Frazier answers. “Great friend. Got a girl pregnant when he was a senior. I had to go to bat for him to keep them from kicking him out of school.”

There was the day this standout player showed up for practice with a cold. It was a walk-through for the defense, with no contact, so the kid would get through it.

The player’s dad didn’t see it that way.

Frazier remembers the exchange as the parent charged onto the practice lot.

Dad: “He’s sick. He can’t play!”

Coach: “Get your ass up behind that fence!”

The player’s dad, conceding the point, got his heinie up behind that fence.

“Ran like a jackrabbit,” Frazier said.

This is Billy Frazier, tough guy. No twilight sentimentality will make more or less of him than what he was in his prime - a winner with an edge.

But at 90, he weeps softly at the drop of a certain player’s name or the image of a team that summoned the will to do his bidding. The kid who went to war in Vietnam, the star who later struggled with alcoholism, the classmates who stayed teamed up and built the Spokane Arena. The many who stuck with Bill Frazier seem better for the experience.

If there’s a regret it may be that the sensitivity he hid from an abusive father, the hard coming of age through the economic depression of the 1930s and the pressure - some of it self-imposed - to win made him to many not what he was, but what he seemed to be.

Heartless.

He isn’t. And wasn’t.

The sting of his words hastily summoned and delivered so long ago come back to him now, not always sweetly. He thinks of his late son, Bill II, who quarterbacked for him in the early 1950s.

“I was rough on Bill,” he said, more to Edna than anyone else.

“You mean beating him?” she said. “No. You weren’t like that. But I always thought you expected too much of him.”

Frazier plows on. “The only thing that ever happened between he and I, we were behind Lewis and Clark 21-0 at the end of the third quarter. But then Bill completed 13 passes in a row - practically all of them short passes to Jimmy Etter. We were within a touchdown of winning, coming down the field, to the 25 or something, and Bill completed a pass to Gary Meyers, at about the 7-yard line.

“Instead of getting out of bounds and stopping the clock, he tried to score. Time ran out. I ran out on the field.”

In his memory, it’s 1953 and he’s back in his quarterback’s face.

“Why didn’t you tell him to get out of bounds?”

His only child is gone - the younger Frazier died of lung cancer in 1991 at 54 - but his reply lingers.

“Dad, I wasn’t trying to lose the ball game.”

“I wasn’t trying to blame him,” Frazier explains. “I was proud of the comeback and so forth but I had hurt his feelings tremendously.”

That seems to hurt the old man now, in the absence of a son to talk to.

“When they were playin’ for me,” Frazier said, “I was a rough character. It wasn’t all because of the football but in tryin’ to tell these kids there was something more important than football.”

Like survival. The closest experience to a demanding coach driving a team in full pads under a hot August son is a drill sergeant. The game, as a teaching tool, is at best more than just an exercise in my teenager is tougher than your teenager.

The Frazier legacy, as I see it as an outsider, was built on the hard rock of autocratic irascibility and inspiration and made unique by a bravado described by another coach, who was supposed to have said that the only thing Frazier’s assistants did was make sure he had enough cigarettes on Friday night and a tee time on Saturday morning.

There might be some truth to that, Frazier said. He smoked for 31 years, ‘til 1961. And he was a good enough golfer to shoot 65 three times.

It’s part of what makes Billy Frazier one of a kind. He won 200 football games by demanding a collective effort from players that as individuals they probably never realized they had. A letter dated Aug. 3 lies opened on the kitchen table. The writer speaks to that.

“I saw the article about you in the (Gonzaga University alumni news) and just had to write and thank you for all the help and positive thinking you gave me, and of course many others.

“I was never much of an athlete but the things I learned from you helped me in business and family… . My wife and I ended up with four good sons and a nice life. We enjoy Palm Springs and play a little golf.

“Anyway, I just wanted you to know you impacted my life in a very positive manner. I now even enjoy memories of standing in the cold snow for football practice, waiting to be cut to B squad.

“Great memories, (signed) Bob Pasby, class of ‘48.”

Frazier seems like a guy who would coach the Bob Pasbys as hard as the Mike Oriards, who starred for him. Oriard went from Gonzaga Prep to Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The coach is no Notre Dame fan, despite Oriard’s belated success there.

“In 1949, we had a couple of halfbacks - Dick Sprague and Joe Lynch,” Frazier said. “Sprague was a 4-point student who wanted to go to Notre Dame. They thought they could shake better kids out of trees than we had. He went to Washington and was All-American as a sophomore.

“And the guy who runs the sporting store under the parking center. Pettigrew (Gary). He wanted to go back there but they wouldn’t take him. He was 6-foot-4 with good speed. Another strong student. He went to Stanford (and beyond as a pro).

“And there was Oriard - 6-4, 205 pounds or something like that, who ran the 440 in 49 seconds. Everybody tried to recruit him but he wanted to go to Notre Dame. He wouldn’t accept a scholarship from anybody else.

“They would call from Notre Dame all the time. ‘What’s Oriard thinking about?’ I’d say, ‘He’s a damn fool. He’s thinking about going to Notre Dame.”’ Notre Dame didn’t cough up a ride for Oriard until his junior year. That still rankles Frazier, who’s never lets himself stray too far from an opinion.

“You know there were so many mistakes in your paper about that (1931) Cougar Rose Bowl team last year,” he grumbled. “For example…”

He cites an example. Then another. They don’t seem very important but then I wasn’t there. He was, a sophomore at Gonzaga University in 1930, chafing on the sidelines while the Cougars were charging to the Rose Bowl. Frazier was ineligible as a GU sophomore, after dropping out of Idaho as a freshman and working a couple of years. Thus, he missed playing in the Bulldogs’ 1930 meeting with the Rose Bowl-bound Cougars.

But he saw enough of them, and was the quarterback in ‘31 when GU made the Cougars sweat out a 13-6 win in Spokane.

“They were a fair ballclub,” he says of that WSU Rose Bowl team, “not a great ball club. They got beat 28-0 by Alabama in the Rose Bowl.”

It was 24-0, not that we’re quibbling over four points after 68 years.

His first football game - his Moscow team was at Lewis and Clark - was played in the early weeks of the Coolidge Administration, in the fall of 1923. It was the era of tan canvas pants with built-in hip pads and leather helmets - which weren’t yet mandatory.

“They started modernizing the equipment in 1930,” Frazier said. Modernizing. In 1930. “Going to lighter pads,” Frazier explained.

Born four years before the Titanic went down, Frazier, either as a player or in coaching, bumped into men who would have mascots, stadiums and campus buildings named in their honor. He figures he tackled Butch Meeker in that 1923 game, since he was the Moscow safety and Meeker was at halfback for LC. That’s the Butch WSU’s mascot is named for.

Frazier digs out a copy of the Seattle Press-Intelligencer that strips away the years. It’s dated Friday, Sept. 23, 1932. A huge photograph on the lead sports page introduces Seattle to the “Gonzaga backfield you’ve been hearing so much about. Bill Frazier, quarterback; Ike Preston, halfback; Max Krause, fullback; and John Kearns, halfback and ball carrier.”

Below the photo of the leather-helmeted backfield that would lose the next day to Washington 19-7 is the lead story. Rogers Hornsby, manager of the Chicago Cubs until Aug. 2 of that year, is expressing indignation that the Cubs had agreed on a split of the World Series proceeds without making any allowances for him.

Hornsby was one of the earliest selections to baseball’s Hall of Fame. And for one fall day in 1932, Billy Frazier was crowding Rogers Hornsby for space in the Seattle P-I.

Frazier counts Bing Crosby and Nig Borleske of Whitman College fame among his absent friends. And he once ignored marital advice from Mike Pecarovich, Frazier’s personal role model and the guy they named GU’s baseball field for.

“Edna and I had been going together for nine years …”

“Off and on,” Edna prompts from the living room.

“Off and on,” Frazier agrees. “When I graduated, she said we ought to get married. I didn’t have a job at the time.”

He went to his mentor, Pecarovich, the GU football coach who was described in a 1953 piece as “a talented, handsome, well-groomed Slav with a flair for dramatics.”

Edna wants to get married. What do you think?

The talented, handsome, well-groomed Slav dropped his flair for drama. You don’t have a way of making a living, Pecarovich said. I wouldn’t advise it.

Frazier relayed the message.

“You’re not marrying Mike Pecarovich,” Edna replied. “You’re marrying me. And it’s now or never.”

They were married, promptly, and employment followed. Claude McGrath, a coach at GU whom Frazier says ought to be in the university’s Hall of Fame, doubled as superintendent of schools at Mead. McGrath hired Frazier, which seemed like a good deal because the Mead district paid salaries in cash. Others, he said, paid in script issued by the county, redeemable at grocery stores and other local retail outlets.

Frazier remembers making $98 a month, in cash.

By 1939 a position at Gonzaga Prep opened and Frazier signed on to teach and coach football and baseball. He picked up pocket money as a college football and basketball official but was best cast as a coach.

“I quit officiating because of the booing,” he said.

He offers a story never published; an offer to coach football at Washington State. He turned it down because his son was suffering from Hodgkin’s disease and required medical attention he couldn’t get in Pullman. The job went to Forest Evashevski in 1950.

“Idaho offered me a job three times,” Frazier said. “Central Washington tried to hire me. Whitworth. If I had sought jobs, applied for them, I might have been able to move, but I was happy.”

Too happy to retire. Frazier offers another story I hadn’t read. He was forced out at Gonzaga Prep in 1971.

“I didn’t feel like I was ready to retire,” he said. “The president at Gonzaga Prep at that time thought that I was old enough (63), that I should retire. Insisted I retire, really.”

Once retired he never looked back. “I never really missed coaching football,” he said, “I guess because I had something - golf - that I really liked. Football season is the best time of the year to play golf. Everything’s nice, and you get tee times.”

So after all these years, tell us, did you recruit Ted Gerela? Gerela starred on Frazier’s finest team, the ‘63 Bullpups, whose seniors were graduated in 1964.

“Everybody said we did,” Frazier replied. “I never talked to anybody about going to school except one kid, Billy Diedrick Jr., because his dad and mother were friends and they wanted him to go to Prep.

“He wanted to play American Legion baseball with North Central. He did go to North Central. He’s the only one - ever - in my life that I talked to.”

So, who’s the best baseball player you coached?

“Bill Carbaugh, probably. A pitcher who could play the outfield and was a terrific batter. That was on the ‘40-41-42 teams. Had one of the best pickoff moves I ever saw.”

His best football player?

“McCanna,” Frazier said. “What’s his first name? Ray. He played wingback for us on that ‘63 team. Held the record for yardage for wingbacks, as far as passing and running yardage at that time.”

Frazier still sees football through a coach’s eyes.

In Pullman for the Illinois game as a guest of one of his former players, Mike Gleason, whose son Steve is a standout linebacker at WSU, Frazier was asked to evaluate the play of young Gleason.

“He was a little bit too eager at times,” Frazier said. “He was running himself out of position trying to make the big play.”

Then the legend tempered the criticism, something he might have overlooked in 1953, or 1971.

“Gleason’s a good ballplayer,” Bill Frazier added. “His dad was proud of him.”