Grambo rescued Pirates from trash can

Halls of fame are for champions and chipper nostalgia, and they’re awash in them at Whitworth College this weekend.

The Pirates are celebrating their 100th year of football and already it’s quite a party. Whitworth is 5-0, ranked 12th in the country in its weight class and has invited winless Lewis & Clark to be its homecoming date Saturday. Any time the present is this good it has a way of making the past better, especially with all the lettermen in town for dinner on Saturday night.

Not that the Pirates don’t have some past to get jazzed about. On Saturday, the entire 1960 team – undefeated until it reached the national semifinals – will be inducted into the school’s Heritage Gallery Hall of Fame. The Pirates of 1953-55 won 24 of 25 games. Here’s a Hall of Fame nomination for the 1908 team, which lost only to unbeaten Washington and beat Oregon, though of course the Ducks hadn’t installed the platinum urinals in the locker room yet.

And who’s to say the 100th year won’t be the best?

But for all that, let’s also take the occasion to remember that the most important season of Whitworth football was the one 25 years ago.

The Pirates were 4-5 in 1981, but the record book doesn’t list the biggest victory: saving the program.

If that sounds a little melodramatic, hey, this is a football story. But the fact is, for more than a year before the 1981 season an athletic study commission on campus chaired by vice president Dr. Richard Ferrin had been kicking around the notion of dropping the sport. Or maybe more than kicking it around.

“It was my feeling,” said Bruce Grambo, “that it was in the trash can.”

That feeling seemed to be confirmed when Daryl Squires, who had been the head coach for four years, resigned in June to take a high school job in Seattle. Hamstrung both by the late date and the obvious and public absence of a long-term commitment to the program, the school turned to Grambo – who for the previous couple of years hadn’t been coaching but operating a couple of restaurants that were as good as eating got here in those days.

He was hired part time, a caretaker.

“They told me the one thing I couldn’t do,” he recalled, “was to campaign to save the program.”

Except that’s exactly what he had cooking.

The Pirates weren’t going to do it by going undefeated – there were no 6-foot-7, 260-pound NFL-bound tight ends on the roster in those days. But there were other ways. Assistant coach Paul Merkel – Mr. Whitworth – spent his evenings on the phone to old lettermen urging them to write letters, and more than 150 did. Players like Curt Carr, who’d invested his summers painting the Pine Bowl and picking rocks out of the practice field, tried to rally their friends on campus.

“We had just finished the season,” Grambo remembered, “and we told these guys, ‘Your job’s just starting – you have to let people know this program is on the line.’ One morning, I invited Dr. Ferrin to talk to the team, just for maybe the last thing in his little ditty bag of information. I don’t know how many kids showed up in the gymnasium – I was told 800, but it probably wasn’t that many – but when he walked in, he just looked at me and said, ‘I wouldn’t have ever thought we had this much interest in the game of football at Whitworth.’ “

But in the end, logic carried the day more than emotion.

The football budget at the time – salaries included – was a paltry $45,000. Athletic director Jim Larson had told Grambo the school was planning to start a soccer program and spread the remaining money around to other sports, so there was no bottom-line savings to be realized.

But what had also been overlooked was the flip side of football’s economic impact: the 85 players, each one of whom at the time “was worth $12,000 to the school,” Grambo said.

It’s a lesson the current administration understands well. Yes, while applications now far exceed acceptances at Whitworth and most colleges, a broad-based athletic program makes economic sense, especially at a non-scholarship, NCAA Division III school. It’s one of Whitworth’s best recruiting tools. There’s a reason one of every six undergrads competes in a varsity sport.

And not just competes. Thanks to an investment in facilities and coaches, the Pirates contend for championships in almost everything.

Including football, once again.

“It wasn’t them being stupid or me being smart,” Grambo said. “They just hadn’t looked at it closely. I think they were being sold a bill of goods.”

Maybe. But they were eager enough to buy. Then-president Dr. Robert Mounce said that one factor in keeping football was “a very genuine sense that the college is on the move. We’re enjoying a very good year. If I had found things to be different, the decision might have been reversed.”

Yikes. There but for the grace of a couple of generous benefactors…

Well, Whitworth’s still enjoying good years, and the intersection this weekend of a rare team like that 1960 bunch and the current group is a welcome opportunity to appreciate football’s contribution on campus.

Just don’t forget the ‘81 Pirates, who went into every game believing – whether it was true or not – that they had to win for the sport to survive. To learn there would be a next season had to be a Hall of Fame feeling.