After 54 Years -- Student, Sports Writer, SID -- It's Time to Retire
6/30/2023 2:23:00 PM | General
By Eric Burdick
Director of Athletics Communications
Nearly 54 years ago, days before my 18th birthday, my mom and I climbed into her Volkswagen beetle with a few of my belongings and headed south down the 101 toward San Luis Obispo.
Somewhere between King City and San Ardo -- when the highway was still one lane each way -- the engine began belching smoke. We limped into Paso Robles, stayed overnight in a small motel and somehow the light blue bug managed to get us onto the Cal Poly campus the next morning. Mom went looking for a mechanic while I attended my orientation meetings and found my dorm room in Mariposa Hall, part of a group of Army barracks that doesn't exist anymore, torn down to make room for Kennedy Library.
That's how my college career began. I was armed with a letter of recommendation from my high school dean of students because I wanted to be a student manager for the men's basketball team. There were no intercollegiate athletics teams for women back in 1969. That came five years later.
After a nice chat with Robert A. Mott, the physical education department chair, I was introduced to varsity head coach Neale Stoner and freshman head coach Ernie Wheeler -- yes, Cal Poly had freshman athletic teams back then because freshmen were not allowed by the NCAA to compete on varsity teams -- and, the next day, I was rolling basketballs onto the floor for practice and laundering sweaty practice gear when it was over.
Wheeler also threw basketballs my way when I misbehaved, but that's a story for another time.
From that first basketball game in the 1969-70 season -- a 95-90 win over UC Santa Barbara -- to the final baseball game of 2023 -- a thrilling 5-4 victory over NCAA regional-bound Cal State Fullerton -- it has been a wonderful ride for me.
In one way or another -- first as a student manager and mathematics major, then a series of small part-time jobs, including as an intern in Cal Poly's sports information office, two years with the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder in Arroyo Grande, one year as the sports information director for Cal Poly's men's sports, more than 20 years as the sports editor of the Telegram-Tribune (now just The Tribune) and 22 years back at Cal Poly -- as an assistant director of athletics communications for 13 years under Jason Sullivan and Brian Thurmond, followed by nine years as the director -- I have been very fortunate to be able to cover thousands of high school, Cuesta College and Cal Poly athletics events.
Today, I am retiring.
I will exit the office one last time, but I plan to continue helping out any way I can, probably compiling statistics at Mustang home events, maybe a bit more. We'll see. Whatever the case may be, I have so many memories of the last five-plus decades, I don't know where to begin.
I guess the best place would be successfully obtaining my bachelor's degree in mathematics and completing my student teaching duties at Santa Maria High School under the direction of Phyllis Chiado, a wonderful teacher who passed away recently. She climbed Machu Picchu, rode elephants in Thailand, visited the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, safari in Africa and hiked islands in the Galapagos. She traveled to the Alps of Switzerland and Germany, visited friends in France and for decades hiked to the High Sierra camps at Yosemite. She was absolutely a blessing in my life.
After four years of college education in mathematics and earning a secondary teaching credential, I have yet to spend one minute teaching my favorite subject. I wanted to stay in the area, so I filled out an application from the San Luis Coastal Unified School District and returned it to the district office. The lady who received my form said, "OK, you are one of 1,500 applicants we now have on file." That's for just two high schools in the district (San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay). I got the idea that maybe I should find something else to do.
Back to Cal Poly I went, returning to work for then-sports information director Wayne Shaw, a wonderful man who taught me everything I know about writing sports and who wrote fishing columns for me while I was at The Tribune. My top two memories of Wayne Shaw, however, were the time he threw his typewriter out the press box window during a football game in an unknown fit of rage and when he published this sentence in several Cal Poly football media guides in the late 1960s and early 1970s: "Women and children are not allowed in the press box." Fortunately, times have changed.
I also was sports information director at Cuesta College in the mid-1970s, served as the SID for the Central Conference, the league in which Cuesta competed, and also was the SID for the California Collegiate Athletic Association, the Division II conference in which Cal Poly was a member for many years, in addition to my duties as sports editor at the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, covering everything from Five Cities Girls Softball League games to Arroyo Grande High School's numerous CIF-Southern Section titles.
During that period, I also volunteered my time with the San Luis Obispo Youth Baseball League and San Luis Obispo Babe Ruth League, assisting with numerous district, state and regional all-star tournaments. In 1973, San Luis Obispo hosted the Pacific Southwest Regional Tournament for 13-year-olds inside Sinsheimer Park's SLO Stadium, where I met one of the host team's players, Larry Lee. Yes, I have known him for 50 years, including 16 years as head coach at Cuesta College while working at The Tribune and the last 22 as head coach of the Cal Poly baseball team. I even took a physical education class or two taught by his dad, the legendary Tom Lee.
In the spring of 1979, I had a difficult decision to make. There were two jobs I wanted more than anything else. I wanted to be sports editor of The Tribune and I wanted to be sports information director at Cal Poly.
The job at Cal Poly was open, but I also knew that Johnny Nettleship was retiring the following year after a 30-year career as sports editor of The Tribune. Nettleship was a survivor of the 1960 Cal Poly plane crash which claimed the lives of 22 people, including 16 Mustang football players and the team manager at Toledo Express Airport.
After consulting with friends, I decided to go ahead and interview for the Cal Poly position, being up front and letting everyone know that I might only be there for one year before the job at The Tribune opened up. The idea that I tried to sell in my interview at Cal Poly was that I would be able to help publicize Cal Poly (and high school) athletics far better as sports editor of the local newspaper than in a small office on campus.
The idea worked to perfection. I accepted the job offer at Cal Poly for the 1979-80 school year, then interviewed successfully for the open position at The Tribune. Twenty years later, I was back at Cal Poly in the athletics communications office, this time for a Division I program.
I can truly say that I feel very fortunate to have been able to work the two jobs I wanted more than any others, each for 20-plus years. I am blessed.
To be sure, those two positions created so many memorable moments for me.
I'll start with the first -- San Luis Obispo High School's CIF-Southern Section Northwestern Conference football championship on Dec. 12, 1980, before a packed house at Mustang Stadium -- a 7-0 win over Northern League rival Lompoc on Robert Haworth's first-quarter one-yard plunge and two interceptions -- followed the next day by Cal Poly's 21-13 triumph over Eastern Illinois for the NCAA Division II National Championship in Albuquerque. Robbie Martin scored all three Mustang touchdowns, two via passes and the third on a punt return.
I covered the Tigers' win on a Friday night, then early the next morning hopped on a couple planes -- one from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles and the other from LAX to Albuquerque -- to report on the Mustangs' regionally televised triumph over the Panthers in the Zia Bowl for the national title. On the Monday following that successful weekend, more than 1,000 fans attended a victory rally at Mission Plaza after a noon parade headed by Mayor Lynn Cooper.
Next would have to be a couple trips to Babe Ruth World Series -- Arroyo Grande to Newark, Ohio for the 13-15-year-old event in 1977 and the San Luis Obispo Rangers for the 16-18-year-old tournament in 1995 at Trail, British Columbia. Arroyo Grande went 0-2 while San Luis Obispo posted a 5-2 mark to finish second.
I have to give a quick shoutout to Don Roberts, who broadcast those Arroyo Grande games on the radio -- yes, Babe Ruth League all-star tournament games on local radio! -- along with hundreds of Eagle football and basketball games. He somehow corralled me to work at the Santa Maria Speedway for 10 years, writing stories of sprint car, hobby stock and late-model stock car race results for the local media while Don performed P.A. duties. No one could hear him because the cars were too loud, but that's a story for another time. Don also provided daily recaps of high school sports events on the radio. One time, while I was at The Tribune, he asked me for results of a swim meet and I told him that an Eagle swimmer won the 100-yard breaststroke. He said, "I can't use that word on the radio!"
There was the five-overtime Cal Poly basketball game against San Fernando Valley State College (now CSUN) in 1972, a 124-116 Mustang victory in Mott Athletics Center that was half full at best during regulation but was almost packed when the game ended, the eighth longest in NCAA history at the time. Robert Jennings produced 25 points and 18 rebounds while Billy Jackson also had 25 points.
In 1981, Cal Poly beat New Hampshire College 77-73 in a quarterfinal-round game of the NCAA Division II playoffs before the first sellout in program history. Kevin Lucas tallied 22 points for the Mustangs, who went on to finish third in the Final Four at Springfield, Mass.
Cal Poly's four trips to the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision playoffs were memorable as well, particularly the 35-21 win at Montana in 2005, the Mustangs' first win ever against the Grizzlies in 11 tries. James Noble rushed for 188 yards on 41 carries, scoring four times, Kyle Shotwell notched 11 tackles and Chris Gocong recorded three of the Mustangs' seven sacks. Noble broke the school record for yards rushing in a season while Shotwell shattered the mark for tackles in a season. A photo of the postgame celebration featuring Mustang players singing the school's fight song still hangs in the hallway behind the press box at Mustang Memorial Field.
I'll never forget the blizzard-like conditions at Washington-Grizzly Stadium last fall either.
Cal Poly baseball has produced many memorable moments, topped by the 2014 Big West Conference championship and NCAA regional at Baggett Stadium. Cal Poly drew over 2,700 fans for each of its four games and almost earned a trip to Fort Worth for the super regionals against TCU, but Pepperdine snapped a 6-6 tie in the ninth inning and held on for the win in the championship game.
I witnessed Joe Protheroe's run through the Cal Poly record book scampering with the football in 2018, one year after suffering a devastating knee injury at San Jose State. His 23rd career 100-yard game -- 183 yards on 34 carries in a season-ending 38-24 win over Southern Utah -- gave him 1,810 yards for the season and 4,271 yards in his career, both school records.
I've seen many dual wrestling meets at Cal Poly, the top two moments being the Mustangs' first-ever 5-0 mark in Pac-12 dual meets this past season and the 27-12 upset of defending national champion and No. 1-ranked Iowa, coached by legendary Olympian Dan Gable, in a December 1979 dual meet at Mott.
There are so many outstanding individual moments as well, including Brooks Lee's pair of grand slams, both against Cal State Fullerton in 2021 and 2022, along with Joe Yorke's pair of five-hit games in a four-day span during a torrid hitting streak last year, the 15-strikeout performances of Drew Thorpe versus UC San Diego in 2022 and Matt Imhof against Seattle in 2014, and the walk-off 9-8 win over defending College World Series champion and No. 1-ranked Vanderbilt on sacrifice flies by Cole Cabrera and Tate Samuelson in 2020 at Scottsdale, Ariz.
Back to the high school front, San Luis Obispo High's 4-0 win over South Hills at Angel Stadium for the CIF-Southern Section 4-A title followed four consecutive come-from-behind 4-3 victories in the preliminary rounds. Tim Kubinski made a catch while slamming into the center field wall in the third inning, drove in the first two runs of the game with a fourth-inning double and retired all nine batters he faced in the final three innings on the mound, striking out four of the final five South Hills hitters.
I watched Mike Krukow and Ozzie Smith when they played baseball at Cal Poly in the early to mid-1970s and it was enjoyable to watch local athletes shine on the national stage, such as ...
• Paso Robles' Rusty Kuntz, whose sacrifice fly scored the tie-breaking run in the fifth and deciding game of the 1984 World Series for the Detroit Tigers; Kuntz was a star football, basketball and baseball player at both Paso Robles High School and Cuesta College.
• Louie Quintana of Arroyo Grande High claimed the national high school cross country championship at Balboa Park in San Diego in 1990 and went on to earn nine All-American awards in cross country and track at Villanova.
• It also has been fun following the progress of many other Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo County high school student-athletes as they continued their careers, such as Mitch Haniger, Robin Ventura, Jordan Beck, Chuck Liddell, Chase Pami, Travis Bertoni and many others.
• The list also includes Loren Roberts, who played golf at San Luis Obispo High School and Cal Poly before embarking on a long professional career that resulted in eight PGA Tour wins, 13 more victories on the Senior Tour (including two Senior Open titles), a second-place finish in the 1994 U.S. Open (losing in an 18-hole playoff to Ernie Els), 93 top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour and 87 more on the senior circuit, and competed in the 1995 Ryder Cup and 1994 and 2000 Presidents Cup. Oh, and $28,697,431 in career earnings. Walking with him while he was competing in several Pebble Beach National Pro-Ams and the 1998 U.S. Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco are memories I will always cherish.
Brooks Lee makes my list as well, but there is so much more ahead for him.
I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the best sports writers who made me look good at The Tribune -- Dennis Steers, Jon Hastings, David Kraft, Peter J. Wallner, Dan Ruthemeyer, Greg Manifold, Brian Milne and more. All of them moved on to bigger and better things -- Steers and Hastings with Volleyball Monthly, Kraft with ESPN, Wallner with Michigan Live, Ruthemeyer with the Skagit Valley Herald in Washington state, Milne with The Holloway Group and Manifold with the San Diego Union-Tribune and Washington Post. They all made for a great team in the Tribune sports department!
Athletic facilities at Cal Poly underwent major renovations during my time in the county.
Mustang Stadium seated just 6,000 upon my arrival in 1969 with a wooden press box and stands on the west side. Additional seats were added in two phases on the east side, increasing the capacity to 9,000 by 1978. The wooden bleachers and press box were condemned and torn down in the late 1980s. An auxiliary press box with metal framing and a tarped roof was erected alongside a "new" press box on the east side. A few years later, portable bleachers were installed on the west side with scaffolding for expanded press seating erected behind the bleachers. I remember the edifice swaying and vibrating every time a train roared through town on the other side of California Boulevard. It was eventually removed as well. Mustang Stadium transitioned to Alex G. Spanos Stadium in the mid-2000s, much to the relief of us all.
The baseball team played in an on-campus facility with wooden stands and a wooden snow fence while track and field home meets were held on a dirt oval beyond the right field fence adjacent to the railroad tracks until the early 1970s when they were removed in favor of the Engineering Building. Today, Baggett Stadium with the new Dignity Health Baseball Clubhouse is one of the finest college baseball facilities in the West Region while the track and field teams call the Miller & Capriotti Athletics Complex their new home. Mott Athletics Center underwent modest changes, namely a new seating arrangement and fresh paint, in 1998. Soon to arrive are the Comerford Pavilion tennis clubhouse and John Madden Football Center.
For many of my 20 years at The Tribune, I would have lunch on Thursdays with Nettleship at the Elks Lodge. Nettleship was sports editor at The Tribune from 1950-80, retiring just before computerized typesetting equipment arrived in the newsroom on Johnson Avenue. Joining us at lunch most of the time were such legends as Roy Hughes, Cal Poly's football coach from 1950-61; Vern Brody, a beloved educator in San Luis Obispo and a great joke-teller who officiated many high school sports events; and Phil Prijatel, who coached several sports at San Luis Obispo High School from 1953-87 and was athletic director from 1960-69. They would tell me all the things I was doing wrong at The Tribune and I would try to make things better for them.
It's been a great ride. I hope to witness more of the same during my retirement. I won't be writing previews and game wrapups, nor will I have to find timers, public address announcers and official scorekeepers any more. I'm done with media guides, press releases on academic progress rates and obituaries on former Mustang greats of the past. Those tasks will be left to others.
But I will be at the football, basketball and baseball games, watching more Mustangs excel on the field and court and perhaps parking myself at a laptop to compile statistics if my former workers let me.
After all, my degree in mathematics won't go for naught. I'm not teaching, but maintaining statistics in sports is much more satisfying to me than engaging students in calculus and trigonometry.
How else would Larry Lee know who to bat first in his lineup?
Director of Athletics Communications
Nearly 54 years ago, days before my 18th birthday, my mom and I climbed into her Volkswagen beetle with a few of my belongings and headed south down the 101 toward San Luis Obispo.
Somewhere between King City and San Ardo -- when the highway was still one lane each way -- the engine began belching smoke. We limped into Paso Robles, stayed overnight in a small motel and somehow the light blue bug managed to get us onto the Cal Poly campus the next morning. Mom went looking for a mechanic while I attended my orientation meetings and found my dorm room in Mariposa Hall, part of a group of Army barracks that doesn't exist anymore, torn down to make room for Kennedy Library.
That's how my college career began. I was armed with a letter of recommendation from my high school dean of students because I wanted to be a student manager for the men's basketball team. There were no intercollegiate athletics teams for women back in 1969. That came five years later.
After a nice chat with Robert A. Mott, the physical education department chair, I was introduced to varsity head coach Neale Stoner and freshman head coach Ernie Wheeler -- yes, Cal Poly had freshman athletic teams back then because freshmen were not allowed by the NCAA to compete on varsity teams -- and, the next day, I was rolling basketballs onto the floor for practice and laundering sweaty practice gear when it was over.
Wheeler also threw basketballs my way when I misbehaved, but that's a story for another time.
From that first basketball game in the 1969-70 season -- a 95-90 win over UC Santa Barbara -- to the final baseball game of 2023 -- a thrilling 5-4 victory over NCAA regional-bound Cal State Fullerton -- it has been a wonderful ride for me.
In one way or another -- first as a student manager and mathematics major, then a series of small part-time jobs, including as an intern in Cal Poly's sports information office, two years with the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder in Arroyo Grande, one year as the sports information director for Cal Poly's men's sports, more than 20 years as the sports editor of the Telegram-Tribune (now just The Tribune) and 22 years back at Cal Poly -- as an assistant director of athletics communications for 13 years under Jason Sullivan and Brian Thurmond, followed by nine years as the director -- I have been very fortunate to be able to cover thousands of high school, Cuesta College and Cal Poly athletics events.
Today, I am retiring.
I will exit the office one last time, but I plan to continue helping out any way I can, probably compiling statistics at Mustang home events, maybe a bit more. We'll see. Whatever the case may be, I have so many memories of the last five-plus decades, I don't know where to begin.
I guess the best place would be successfully obtaining my bachelor's degree in mathematics and completing my student teaching duties at Santa Maria High School under the direction of Phyllis Chiado, a wonderful teacher who passed away recently. She climbed Machu Picchu, rode elephants in Thailand, visited the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, safari in Africa and hiked islands in the Galapagos. She traveled to the Alps of Switzerland and Germany, visited friends in France and for decades hiked to the High Sierra camps at Yosemite. She was absolutely a blessing in my life.
After four years of college education in mathematics and earning a secondary teaching credential, I have yet to spend one minute teaching my favorite subject. I wanted to stay in the area, so I filled out an application from the San Luis Coastal Unified School District and returned it to the district office. The lady who received my form said, "OK, you are one of 1,500 applicants we now have on file." That's for just two high schools in the district (San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay). I got the idea that maybe I should find something else to do.
Back to Cal Poly I went, returning to work for then-sports information director Wayne Shaw, a wonderful man who taught me everything I know about writing sports and who wrote fishing columns for me while I was at The Tribune. My top two memories of Wayne Shaw, however, were the time he threw his typewriter out the press box window during a football game in an unknown fit of rage and when he published this sentence in several Cal Poly football media guides in the late 1960s and early 1970s: "Women and children are not allowed in the press box." Fortunately, times have changed.
I also was sports information director at Cuesta College in the mid-1970s, served as the SID for the Central Conference, the league in which Cuesta competed, and also was the SID for the California Collegiate Athletic Association, the Division II conference in which Cal Poly was a member for many years, in addition to my duties as sports editor at the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder, covering everything from Five Cities Girls Softball League games to Arroyo Grande High School's numerous CIF-Southern Section titles.
During that period, I also volunteered my time with the San Luis Obispo Youth Baseball League and San Luis Obispo Babe Ruth League, assisting with numerous district, state and regional all-star tournaments. In 1973, San Luis Obispo hosted the Pacific Southwest Regional Tournament for 13-year-olds inside Sinsheimer Park's SLO Stadium, where I met one of the host team's players, Larry Lee. Yes, I have known him for 50 years, including 16 years as head coach at Cuesta College while working at The Tribune and the last 22 as head coach of the Cal Poly baseball team. I even took a physical education class or two taught by his dad, the legendary Tom Lee.
In the spring of 1979, I had a difficult decision to make. There were two jobs I wanted more than anything else. I wanted to be sports editor of The Tribune and I wanted to be sports information director at Cal Poly.
The job at Cal Poly was open, but I also knew that Johnny Nettleship was retiring the following year after a 30-year career as sports editor of The Tribune. Nettleship was a survivor of the 1960 Cal Poly plane crash which claimed the lives of 22 people, including 16 Mustang football players and the team manager at Toledo Express Airport.
After consulting with friends, I decided to go ahead and interview for the Cal Poly position, being up front and letting everyone know that I might only be there for one year before the job at The Tribune opened up. The idea that I tried to sell in my interview at Cal Poly was that I would be able to help publicize Cal Poly (and high school) athletics far better as sports editor of the local newspaper than in a small office on campus.
The idea worked to perfection. I accepted the job offer at Cal Poly for the 1979-80 school year, then interviewed successfully for the open position at The Tribune. Twenty years later, I was back at Cal Poly in the athletics communications office, this time for a Division I program.
I can truly say that I feel very fortunate to have been able to work the two jobs I wanted more than any others, each for 20-plus years. I am blessed.
To be sure, those two positions created so many memorable moments for me.
I'll start with the first -- San Luis Obispo High School's CIF-Southern Section Northwestern Conference football championship on Dec. 12, 1980, before a packed house at Mustang Stadium -- a 7-0 win over Northern League rival Lompoc on Robert Haworth's first-quarter one-yard plunge and two interceptions -- followed the next day by Cal Poly's 21-13 triumph over Eastern Illinois for the NCAA Division II National Championship in Albuquerque. Robbie Martin scored all three Mustang touchdowns, two via passes and the third on a punt return.
I covered the Tigers' win on a Friday night, then early the next morning hopped on a couple planes -- one from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles and the other from LAX to Albuquerque -- to report on the Mustangs' regionally televised triumph over the Panthers in the Zia Bowl for the national title. On the Monday following that successful weekend, more than 1,000 fans attended a victory rally at Mission Plaza after a noon parade headed by Mayor Lynn Cooper.
Next would have to be a couple trips to Babe Ruth World Series -- Arroyo Grande to Newark, Ohio for the 13-15-year-old event in 1977 and the San Luis Obispo Rangers for the 16-18-year-old tournament in 1995 at Trail, British Columbia. Arroyo Grande went 0-2 while San Luis Obispo posted a 5-2 mark to finish second.
I have to give a quick shoutout to Don Roberts, who broadcast those Arroyo Grande games on the radio -- yes, Babe Ruth League all-star tournament games on local radio! -- along with hundreds of Eagle football and basketball games. He somehow corralled me to work at the Santa Maria Speedway for 10 years, writing stories of sprint car, hobby stock and late-model stock car race results for the local media while Don performed P.A. duties. No one could hear him because the cars were too loud, but that's a story for another time. Don also provided daily recaps of high school sports events on the radio. One time, while I was at The Tribune, he asked me for results of a swim meet and I told him that an Eagle swimmer won the 100-yard breaststroke. He said, "I can't use that word on the radio!"
There was the five-overtime Cal Poly basketball game against San Fernando Valley State College (now CSUN) in 1972, a 124-116 Mustang victory in Mott Athletics Center that was half full at best during regulation but was almost packed when the game ended, the eighth longest in NCAA history at the time. Robert Jennings produced 25 points and 18 rebounds while Billy Jackson also had 25 points.
In 1981, Cal Poly beat New Hampshire College 77-73 in a quarterfinal-round game of the NCAA Division II playoffs before the first sellout in program history. Kevin Lucas tallied 22 points for the Mustangs, who went on to finish third in the Final Four at Springfield, Mass.
Cal Poly's four trips to the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision playoffs were memorable as well, particularly the 35-21 win at Montana in 2005, the Mustangs' first win ever against the Grizzlies in 11 tries. James Noble rushed for 188 yards on 41 carries, scoring four times, Kyle Shotwell notched 11 tackles and Chris Gocong recorded three of the Mustangs' seven sacks. Noble broke the school record for yards rushing in a season while Shotwell shattered the mark for tackles in a season. A photo of the postgame celebration featuring Mustang players singing the school's fight song still hangs in the hallway behind the press box at Mustang Memorial Field.
I'll never forget the blizzard-like conditions at Washington-Grizzly Stadium last fall either.
Cal Poly baseball has produced many memorable moments, topped by the 2014 Big West Conference championship and NCAA regional at Baggett Stadium. Cal Poly drew over 2,700 fans for each of its four games and almost earned a trip to Fort Worth for the super regionals against TCU, but Pepperdine snapped a 6-6 tie in the ninth inning and held on for the win in the championship game.
I witnessed Joe Protheroe's run through the Cal Poly record book scampering with the football in 2018, one year after suffering a devastating knee injury at San Jose State. His 23rd career 100-yard game -- 183 yards on 34 carries in a season-ending 38-24 win over Southern Utah -- gave him 1,810 yards for the season and 4,271 yards in his career, both school records.
I've seen many dual wrestling meets at Cal Poly, the top two moments being the Mustangs' first-ever 5-0 mark in Pac-12 dual meets this past season and the 27-12 upset of defending national champion and No. 1-ranked Iowa, coached by legendary Olympian Dan Gable, in a December 1979 dual meet at Mott.
There are so many outstanding individual moments as well, including Brooks Lee's pair of grand slams, both against Cal State Fullerton in 2021 and 2022, along with Joe Yorke's pair of five-hit games in a four-day span during a torrid hitting streak last year, the 15-strikeout performances of Drew Thorpe versus UC San Diego in 2022 and Matt Imhof against Seattle in 2014, and the walk-off 9-8 win over defending College World Series champion and No. 1-ranked Vanderbilt on sacrifice flies by Cole Cabrera and Tate Samuelson in 2020 at Scottsdale, Ariz.
Back to the high school front, San Luis Obispo High's 4-0 win over South Hills at Angel Stadium for the CIF-Southern Section 4-A title followed four consecutive come-from-behind 4-3 victories in the preliminary rounds. Tim Kubinski made a catch while slamming into the center field wall in the third inning, drove in the first two runs of the game with a fourth-inning double and retired all nine batters he faced in the final three innings on the mound, striking out four of the final five South Hills hitters.
I watched Mike Krukow and Ozzie Smith when they played baseball at Cal Poly in the early to mid-1970s and it was enjoyable to watch local athletes shine on the national stage, such as ...
• Paso Robles' Rusty Kuntz, whose sacrifice fly scored the tie-breaking run in the fifth and deciding game of the 1984 World Series for the Detroit Tigers; Kuntz was a star football, basketball and baseball player at both Paso Robles High School and Cuesta College.
• Louie Quintana of Arroyo Grande High claimed the national high school cross country championship at Balboa Park in San Diego in 1990 and went on to earn nine All-American awards in cross country and track at Villanova.
• It also has been fun following the progress of many other Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo County high school student-athletes as they continued their careers, such as Mitch Haniger, Robin Ventura, Jordan Beck, Chuck Liddell, Chase Pami, Travis Bertoni and many others.
• The list also includes Loren Roberts, who played golf at San Luis Obispo High School and Cal Poly before embarking on a long professional career that resulted in eight PGA Tour wins, 13 more victories on the Senior Tour (including two Senior Open titles), a second-place finish in the 1994 U.S. Open (losing in an 18-hole playoff to Ernie Els), 93 top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour and 87 more on the senior circuit, and competed in the 1995 Ryder Cup and 1994 and 2000 Presidents Cup. Oh, and $28,697,431 in career earnings. Walking with him while he was competing in several Pebble Beach National Pro-Ams and the 1998 U.S. Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco are memories I will always cherish.
Brooks Lee makes my list as well, but there is so much more ahead for him.
I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the best sports writers who made me look good at The Tribune -- Dennis Steers, Jon Hastings, David Kraft, Peter J. Wallner, Dan Ruthemeyer, Greg Manifold, Brian Milne and more. All of them moved on to bigger and better things -- Steers and Hastings with Volleyball Monthly, Kraft with ESPN, Wallner with Michigan Live, Ruthemeyer with the Skagit Valley Herald in Washington state, Milne with The Holloway Group and Manifold with the San Diego Union-Tribune and Washington Post. They all made for a great team in the Tribune sports department!
Athletic facilities at Cal Poly underwent major renovations during my time in the county.
Mustang Stadium seated just 6,000 upon my arrival in 1969 with a wooden press box and stands on the west side. Additional seats were added in two phases on the east side, increasing the capacity to 9,000 by 1978. The wooden bleachers and press box were condemned and torn down in the late 1980s. An auxiliary press box with metal framing and a tarped roof was erected alongside a "new" press box on the east side. A few years later, portable bleachers were installed on the west side with scaffolding for expanded press seating erected behind the bleachers. I remember the edifice swaying and vibrating every time a train roared through town on the other side of California Boulevard. It was eventually removed as well. Mustang Stadium transitioned to Alex G. Spanos Stadium in the mid-2000s, much to the relief of us all.
The baseball team played in an on-campus facility with wooden stands and a wooden snow fence while track and field home meets were held on a dirt oval beyond the right field fence adjacent to the railroad tracks until the early 1970s when they were removed in favor of the Engineering Building. Today, Baggett Stadium with the new Dignity Health Baseball Clubhouse is one of the finest college baseball facilities in the West Region while the track and field teams call the Miller & Capriotti Athletics Complex their new home. Mott Athletics Center underwent modest changes, namely a new seating arrangement and fresh paint, in 1998. Soon to arrive are the Comerford Pavilion tennis clubhouse and John Madden Football Center.
For many of my 20 years at The Tribune, I would have lunch on Thursdays with Nettleship at the Elks Lodge. Nettleship was sports editor at The Tribune from 1950-80, retiring just before computerized typesetting equipment arrived in the newsroom on Johnson Avenue. Joining us at lunch most of the time were such legends as Roy Hughes, Cal Poly's football coach from 1950-61; Vern Brody, a beloved educator in San Luis Obispo and a great joke-teller who officiated many high school sports events; and Phil Prijatel, who coached several sports at San Luis Obispo High School from 1953-87 and was athletic director from 1960-69. They would tell me all the things I was doing wrong at The Tribune and I would try to make things better for them.
It's been a great ride. I hope to witness more of the same during my retirement. I won't be writing previews and game wrapups, nor will I have to find timers, public address announcers and official scorekeepers any more. I'm done with media guides, press releases on academic progress rates and obituaries on former Mustang greats of the past. Those tasks will be left to others.
But I will be at the football, basketball and baseball games, watching more Mustangs excel on the field and court and perhaps parking myself at a laptop to compile statistics if my former workers let me.
After all, my degree in mathematics won't go for naught. I'm not teaching, but maintaining statistics in sports is much more satisfying to me than engaging students in calculus and trigonometry.
How else would Larry Lee know who to bat first in his lineup?
Mustang Insider Show with Chris Sylvester -- Sept 1, 2025: Ty Dieffenbach, QB for Cal Poly Football.
Tuesday, September 02
The Mustang Report: Farewell Interview with AD Don Oberhelman
Wednesday, August 27
Day in the Life With Men's Basketball Guard Cayden Ward
Monday, August 25
Cal Poly Men's Basketball 2025 Summer Practice
Thursday, August 07
