Gonzaga’s final WCC season, poetically, features its first league foe from 46 years ago | West Coast Conclusion

With their West Coast Conference farewell tour underway, maybe it’s time to revisit Gonzaga’s welcome-to-the-WCC moment.

Serendipity makes it almost mandatory.

For the Bulldogs’ first game of 2026 on Friday evening, a scheduler with a sense of poetry plugged in as the opponent Seattle University, which returns to the WCC after a 46-year absence … and which just happened to travel to Spokane for the Zags’ first league game all those 46 years ago.

Talk about ships passing in the night.

Just after the Zags made it into the WCC – or the WCAC, in those days – for the 1979-80 season, the Chieftains, as they were then known, backpedaled into a 30-year hiatus from NCAA Division I sports. Now that they’re back as the Redhawks, it’s Gonzaga bolting – in a more aspirational fashion to the rebuilt Pac-12 next season.

And what initially had the makings of a fun cross-state rivalry never made it over the pass.

Instead, it’s a footnote: On Jan. 7, 1980, the Zags prevailed over Seattle, 80-74. And at least one witness was impressed.

“It was thrill to win that game,” recalled retired fireman Mike Shields, who hasn’t missed but maybe a half dozen Gonzaga home games in 70 years. “I was a little intimidated by the new league.” Shields thought Gonzaga would certainly lose.

With the prodding of coach and athletic director Dan Fitzgerald, the Bulldogs, of course, had surrendered their charter membership in the Big Sky Conference for the move into what has on occasion been known as “the church league.” There they found an uptick in talent – six of the WCAC teams they played that year featured at least one future NBA player – and weather.

“It was so much better,” said former Bulldog big man Duane Bergeson. “We’d been to Bozeman the year before and it was 22 below. Fitz and John Dybvig, the assistant, were runners and went out in it and got lost. Luckily, some farmer found them and brought them back in his truck.”

Not that it was so much better in Spokane. The night Seattle rolled in, it was 10 degrees with six inches of snow on the ground.

But the Chieftains were used to that. In the two schools’ days as independents, they often played four times a year – Gonzaga’s first victory over a ranked team came against the No. 11 Chieftains and twins Johnny and Eddie O’Brien at the old 161st Armory on Second Avenue in 1953. Those Chieftains built the school’s considerable basketball reputation that carried through the next two decades, resulting in 11 NCAA Tournament trips in 18 years with players like Elgin Baylor and Eddie Miles.

There was considerable slippage in the 1970s, but future pros kept finding their way to campus on Seattle’s First Hill. The one who would occupy the Zags that year was Jawann Oldham. A slender, bouncy 7-footer, Oldham had taken Cleveland High School to back-to-back state championships with eventual Seattle teammate Carl Ervin and Washington recruit James Woods.

“He was the fastest guy on the (Seattle) team,” said former Gonzaga assistant Bruce Wilson, who had the scouting report. “And it seemed like he could block guys’ shots without leaving the floor – and that was when Bergy could jump, too.”

And he seemed to be No. 1 in every Zag’s thoughts that game, one way or another.

Fitzgerald would talk up WCC players with little prompting – publicly. He would build no pedestals in the locker room.

“Everyone is calling Jawann a superstar,” remembered forward Hugh Hobus, “and Fitz is going, ‘Guys, he’ll be the biggest bus driver in Seattle’ when it’s all over.”

Or not.

“We had a 2-on-1 fast break and I went up for a mid-range jumper,” said guard Eddie White. “I could see the basket when I went up – but not when he went after it. I made it but I never saw it go in. It must have been divine intervention.”

Which made White luckier than Bergeson.

“I popped open on the baseline about 20 feet out – I liked that shot,” Bergeson recalled. “Jawann had lost track of me and was under the basket. I turned to shoot and suddenly he’s right there, slapping it back over my head.”

Oldham would do that 546 times in 329 NBA games over five full seasons and snippets of five more. So, no, not driving a bus.

He also had 23 points and 10 rebounds against the Bulldogs – and still ended up second banana on the night to Gonzaga’s Carl Pierce, a 6-foot-7 forward who went off for 30 and 10, including a hook over Oldham that erased the last of a 13-point GU deficit and put the Zags ahead for good.

“He kept sticking jumpers from the corners out of ‘flex,’ ” said Mike Cooney, the Zags’ manager who went on to a long college coaching career. “That’s not usually where the shots came from, but he couldn’t miss.”

One other footnote: The game was played at the old Spokane Coliseum, as were all but one of the Bulldogs’ conference games. In admitting the Zags and San Diego that year, the members insisted their home games be played in downtown arenas rather than their smallish campus gyms. Seattle and Portland had already been playing their games off campus, too. Meanwhile Loyola Marymount, Pepperdine and Saint Mary’s – all with gyms as small or smaller – somehow weren’t forced into other accommodations.

This left Fitzgerald with a gold mine of “Hey, we have indoor plumbing up here” cracks – and the players with another challenge.

“It was hard to stay warm,” said guard Don Baldwin. “They’d lay the court right on top of the ice. On top of that, we didn’t get to practice in there so there wasn’t a home-court advantage.”

Nor much in the way of body heat. The crowd count that first night was 1,012. Students protested the 10-block walk to the Coliseum until Hobus and teammate Ken Anderson made it a campaign to break down the reluctance – and by the time San Francisco came to town, attendance had climbed to 2,500. The Zags would win five of seven WCAC games in the barn, finishing in a tie for third that first season.

“People in the league didn’t think we’d be able to hold our own making this step up against the USFs and Pepperdines,” said Cooney. “That never happened. Fitz wasn’t going to let it. We were always competitive.”

Right from game one.