Winter 2024 45 OSU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES 1964: OSU earns a berth in the Rose Bowl the Beavers’ first year in the Athletic Association of Western Universities. (The name is officially changed to the Pacific-8 in 1968.) 1980–82: Oregon State’s “Orange Express” wins three consecutive Pacific-10 men’s basketball titles, breaking UCLA’s string of 13 straight championships. 1986: The conference expands to include women’s sports. OSU wins its first Pac-10 women’s gymnastics title in 1991, the first of four in a six-year stretch. players. A round robin of finger-pointing ensued. Universities accused one other of providing outlawed extra benefits to football players, including fake work programs in which they were paid to do nothing. (At that time, the PCC did not allow athletic scholarships, while many other conferences did.) By 1957, numerous student-athletes had been declared ineligible and the conference had penalized the University of Washington, UCLA, University of Southern California and UC Berkeley (California) with bowl bans and fines. The PCC was known as a conference that strongly valued academics above athletics, investing governing authority in its faculty athletic representatives — one faculty member from each school — rather than the athletic directors or presidents and chancellors. “We wanted students playing at athletics, not athletes playing as students,” said Robert Sproul, UC Berkeley’s president from 1930 to 1952 and the president of the entire University of California system from 1952 to 1958. But some fans and many in the press, particularly in Southern California, wanted to loosen the grip of the academic side. One of the leaders of the PCC’s faculty athletic representatives, the University of Oregon’s Orlando Hollis, was villainized by Los Angeles media and referred to as “Orlando Hollis, Avenging Angel and well-known inventor of unworkable athletic codes” by Ned Cronin of the Los Angeles Times. College football historian Mark Schipper put it this way in an August interview with Portland journalist John Canzano: “The football powers saw the big stage — major-college football — while schools like Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State and, at that time, Idaho saw a much lower ceiling and wanted to bring the big powers down to their level.” The conference’s larger schools were also weary of smaller Northwest schools receiving more ticket revenue from their away games than they were giving to the larger schools when they played in Corvallis, Pullman and Eugene. In 1957, after USC, UCLA and California announced their intention to depart the PCC, Sports Illustrated magazine observed: “The ostensible reason for the schools’ withdrawal was the refusal of the PCC to approve their athletic policies. A more likely reason lies in the ABCs of fiscal football: the University of Michigan or, say, Oklahoma is a much better bet to fill the 100,000-plus seats in Los Angeles Coliseum than Oregon State or Washington State. After June 30, 1959, when California’s withdrawal becomes effective, the three California colleges can freely schedule the colossi of the South and Midwest to the pleasing whir of turnstiles.” Not as big a factor as ticket sales, but quickly making inroads, was television. The first sports color telecast took place in 1951, moving sports into a whole new age. Oregon State President A.L. Strand noted in the December 1954 Oregon Stater: “Our budgets have become so dependent on such things as Rose Bowl and TV receipts that athletic directors shudder at the mere thought of losing that source of easy dollars.” As football historian Schipper commented: “In many ways it is slightly different circumstances but a direct parallel to what’s happening today out West.” “WE WANTED STUDENTS PLAYING AT ATHLETICS, NOT ATHLETES PLAYING AS STUDENTS.”
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