Overview:
UCSB’s league championship team of 1972 won a playoff series at Santa Clara before challenging mighty USC in the NCAA District 8 finals
Every sports fan is a critic, even when it’s about the sports themselves.
Golf was famously called “a good walk spoiled” more than a century ago.
Baseball has been long rapped for the way its constant stops and starts lead to so much dead time.
Research conducted by The Wall Street Journal determined that a baseball fan will see only 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action over the course of a three-hour game.
But that’s why I consider the national pastime to be a good talk unspoiled.
Some of the best conversations I’ve had were held during the lulls in a baseball game.
This weekend’s Santa Barbara Regional of the NCAA Baseball Tournament has stirred memories of the game-time chats I once had with Gaucho Hall of Famers Phil Womble and Mark French.
We reminisced in particular about the first baseball championship UC Santa Barbara ever won in the Big West Conference, which was then known as the Pacific Coast Athletic Association.
Just saying that mouthful of a name took up half an inning.
It was that first title run of 1972 — not this year’s, despite what you might have read or heard on ESPN — that first brought an NCAA Regional to UCSB’s campus.
Meeting Mr. Gaucho
I was a few months shy of 16 when my father, Santa Barbara News-Press sports editor Phil Patton, introduced me to Womble during a Gaucho baseball game.
I can’t tell you what we talked about. I couldn’t understand a word Womble said.
His garbled speech was the result of a tragedy that also had visited my family. He, like my younger sister, Therese, had suffered oxygen deprivation at birth while getting strangled by an umbilical cord.
Therese’s brain damage affected her capacity to learn, leaving her no chance for a normal life.
Womble was sentenced to a lifetime in a wheelchair with severe cerebral palsy. But he turned that around into one of the most extraordinary lives I’ve ever known.
His turning point came in 1969 when he called the News-Press sports desk to talk baseball with my father.
Dad also accepted his invitation to resume their conversation later at Hillside House, a residence facility for the developmentally disabled.
That’s when Womble asked how he could get involved with sports.
My father promised to set him up with the Gauchos’ heaviest hitters: athletic director Jack Curtice, assistant A.D. Tom Morgan, sports information director Donn Bernstein and baseball coach Dave Gorrie.
Womble recalled that meeting 25 years later in a book he wrote titled Never Give Up:
“I said (to them) … ‘The fact that I cannot participate in sports has not deterred me from my love of sports. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know, and I will do the best I can.’”
Morgan arrived at Hillside House four days later to give Womble a blank scrapbook and the offer of becoming UCSB’s official baseball historian.
Gorrie took the relationship even farther down the basepath, making him a full-fledged member of his team. Womble bonded with the players so well that they took turns driving him to their games.
The Ol’ Razzmatazz
Gorrie revealed in one of Dad’s columns in 1970 that Womble even took part in their dugout razzing.
“It’s a real give and take with him, and the rest of us,” he said. “He’s part of the locker room humor — we get on him, and he gets on us.
“Womble is part of our family.”
Gorrie meant that in every way. He would even bring his own family — wife Linda and children LuAnne and Bryan — to Womble’s theatrical performances at Hillside House.
And the relationship grew stronger as the seasons passed.
UCSB’s baseball team had to find a different league in the mid-1970s when the university got temporarily booted from the PCAA for having dropped the sport of football.
Its new conference was stacked with such monied programs as USC, UCLA, Stanford and Cal.
Womble responded by founding the Diamond Club — the Gauchos’ first baseball booster club — in 1975.
It was the first of his many fund-raising endeavors. He literally put his butt on the line many times by conducting one-man trike-a-thons.
Womble remained true-blue Gaucho until his death at age 80 in 2017. When USC coach Rod Dedeaux gave him a Trojan baseball cap, Gorrie got a big kick out of how “Phil refused to wear it.”
Womble was inducted into both the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame and the UCSB Athletics Hall of Fame. The university even named its Hall of Champions after him in 2008.
But not long after that, while awaiting the next pitch to be thrown in a game at Caesar Uyesaka Stadium, he told me that a bus ride many decades earlier had given him his biggest thrill.
Gorrie reserved a seat for Mr. Gaucho on UCSB’s trip to Santa Clara for their best-of-three series to open the 1972 NCAA playoffs.
A Talk Unspoiled
Longtime Gaucho fan Lefty Nied also joined the team for that trek north.
“He was 75 at the time, and he had played a lot of semi-pro, barnstorming baseball,” Womble explained. “We ate on the bus going up, and after everything had quieted down, Lefty and coach Gorrie began telling one great baseball story after another.
“Everyone on the bus just loved it.
“Four hours later, we pulled into Santa Clara — and it seemed like only five minutes had gone by. That was one of my greatest times ever.”
The Gauchos split the first two games at Santa Clara before winning the series, 6-5, on a home run by backup catcher Dave Powers.
“Powers was the least likely to hit one,” Womble said, laughing out loud at the thought. “As you could imagine, we had a good time, too, on the ride home.”
The Gaucho Party Bus would hit the road again 44 years later — from Kentucky to Nebraska for the 2016 College World Series — after another backup catcher named Sam Cohen gave college baseball a highlight reel moment that ESPN replays every June.
Cohen slugged an improbable, pinch-hit, walk-off, grand-slam home run to beat Louisville, 4-3, in the 2016 Super Regionals.
Making His Pitch
Mark French was one of the passengers on that party bus of 1972. The future coach of UCSB’s nationally ranked women’s basketball team was an all-league, senior pitcher for the Gauchos that year.
We chatted five years ago about that season after I spotted him sunning himself in a Caesar Uyesaka Stadium seat during a crucial series against UC Irvine.
French had started his coaching career on the baseball staff at the University of Pacific.
“Reno was in our league,” he said, referring to the University of Nevada. “One time it began to snow while we were playing there.
“I swore to myself that once I stopped coaching baseball, I’d never again go to a baseball game and be cold.”
He paused and laughed, knowing full well that a fog bank was creeping in behind us at Uyesaka Stadium.
“If you see me out here and it’s under 60 degrees, you’ll know it’s a huge game,” French added.
The Santa Ynez Mountain range was spread out in front of us, serving as the backdrop to some baseball theater.
“The view from the stands is pretty similar from when I played, it’s just elevated,” French mused.
“I’ve always loved the mountains in the background.”
The stadium was known simply as Campus Diamond during French’s pitching days.
UCSB threw it together in 1964, plopping several sets of wooden bleachers and a chain-link backstop at a diamond that had been scoured from an open field.
Evicting the area’s long-time residents — colonies of gophers and moles — was a problem that would plague the Gauchos’ field crew long after Caesar Uyesaka Stadium was erected on the same spot in 1994.
“The facility was really old-school back then,” French said as he draped his long legs over the backrest in front of him.
“Rolf Scheel, our pitching coach at the time, would have us run outside of the field among the tree trunks and roots and stuff, even after it rained.
“I’d be thinking, ‘I’m going to die out there some day and they’re not going to find my body because Rolf won’t send anyone to search for me.’”
Gorrie overcame the hardscrabble conditions to construct a championship hardball team by that 1972 season.
The pitching staff was led by first-team all-leaguer Rick Dierker, the younger brother of former Major League Baseball All-Star Larry Dierker.
French, who made second-team All-PCAA in 1972, was the No. 2 starter. He was a 6-foot-8 righthander who whipped at batters in a synchronized snap of legs, arms and a 90-plus-mph fastball.
UCSB’s batting lineup was loaded with five more all-leaguers: catcher David Kuehn, outfielders Steve Ross and Paul Lee, infielder Tony Torres, and first baseman Scott Brown.
The Gauchos set what was then a school record for victories by going 31-16 overall and 14-4 in the PCAA.
Taking on the Trojans
The final obstacle in the road to Omaha and the College World Series — in what was the 1972 version of a Super Regional — was two-time defending NCAA champion USC.
UCSB considered itself up for the task. The first of its 31 wins was a 5-4 thriller in the season opener at USC.
The Gauchos also split a doubleheader with the Trojans the following week at Campus Diamond.
USC, which was in the early stages of building its current stadium, returned to Santa Barbara for its best-of-three series in the NCAA District 8 Regional final.
The Trojans did bring their own version of a cheering section.
“SC had brutal bench jockeys back in those days,” French said. “The joke — and I’m not even sure it was a joke — was that Dedeaux used to put guys on scholarship just because they had the kind of wit to go out there and tantalize the other team.
“They eventually did away with that because those guys got way out of control for a while.”
UCSB appeared in control of the first game of their playoff series, taking a lead into the ninth inning.
But a mammoth home run by future Boston Red Sox star Fred Lynn opened the floodgates of a rally that ended in a 9-5 Trojan victory.
Lynn’s blast has remained seared into French’s memory.
“I’m glad that they did the improvements here, keeping the stadium in the same footprint, because the view is just fantastic … other than they could’ve taken out that big tree over there where Fred Lynn hit that three-run home run,” he said. “He hit it three-quarters of the way up.
“They could’ve demolished that tree and I would’ve been OK with it.”
French started on the mound in the second game. USC roughed up the Gaucho bullpen again to pull away for a 13-6 victory.
The Trojans won their third-straight College World Series a few weeks later.
“I think I lasted 4⅔ innings, and I think I took the loss,” French said. “I don’t really remember a lot of it except that I was nervous.”
He did eventually make his way to Omaha with the Gauchos for the 2016 College World Series.
“I flew my son in from Sacramento and my daughter in from Washington, D.C., to cheer for the Gauchos on Father’s Day,” French said.
“I thought, ‘How much better does life get than this?’”
He knew nine innings a day would give him plenty of time to catch up with the kids.
