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Spring 2024

Athletes

Pioneer 10/11 Mission Patch
Fall 2016

Talkback for Fall 2016

 

Another close encounter with outer space

Fifty years ago, 1966, I graduated from WSU and then went to work for NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. I spent the next 40 years exploring our solar system. WSU gave me the “right stuff” to be a part of sending a “spacecraft where no spacecraft had gone before.” I was in the Pioneer Project and we sent the first spacecraft to the outer planets, Pioneer-10, to fly beyond the orbit of Mars through the asteroid belt and encounter Jupiter in 1973. After the flyby of Jupiter, Pioneer-10, on an escape trajectory from the Sun … » More …

Olympics rings
Summer 2016

WSU Olympic competitors

More than 50 Washington State University athletes have competed in the Olympic Games over the past eight decades, representing 16 nations and winning medals in nine events. Most competed in track and field but Cougars also have boxed, swam, wrestled, rowed, ridden horses and played ball.

Dawn Allinger ’91; handball. 1996. USA.

John Avognan ’83; track. 1976. Ivory Coast.

Laslo Babits ’83; javelin. 1984. Canada.

Aron Baynes ’09; basketball. 2012. Australia.

Don Bertoia ’63; 800-meter run. 1964. Canada.

Chantal Brunner ’93; long jump. 1996, 2000. New Zealand.

Ian Campbell ’90; triple jump. 1980. Australia.

Gerald Conine x’62; wrestling. 1964. USA.

Francis Dodoo ’83, ’86 MA; … » More …

Olympian and WSU Hall of Famer Lee Orr
Summer 2016

Racing into history

The Olympic moment of WSU Hall of Famer Lee Orr

As rain fell in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in 1936, Lee Orr, a Washington State College student not yet 20 years old, didn’t realize the magnitude of the events surrounding him.

“I was pretty young and didn’t know what was going on,” he said.

It had been over seven decades since Orr raced against Jesse Owens at the ’36 Olympic Games when, in 2008, the soft-spoken Orr recalled his Olympic experience in Germany.

A year after the interview, Orr passed away; however, the story he told lives in sports lore.

Owens’s four gold medals and his … » More …

WSC Olympic boxing gold medal winner Pete Rademacher '53 carries the U.S. flag in the closing ceremony of the 1956 Summer Games
Summer 2016

Pete Rademacher

Long before the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s Miracle on Ice, there was Pete Rademacher ’53.

The tenacious 6-foot-1 boxing heavyweight stunned the world during the 1956 summer games with his one-round knockout of previously undefeated Soviet champion Lev Moukhine for the gold medal.

The decisive, triple-knockdown bout in Melbourne, Australia transformed Rademacher into a Cold War hero and international inspiration. Hungarian athletes, still reeling from the Soviet invasion of Budapest just a few weeks earlier, joined the U.S. team in hoisting Rademacher onto their shoulders in celebration.

“It was very emotional,” recalls Rademacher, 87, now a retired business executive living in Ohio and the … » More …

Chance for Glory book cover
Summer 2016

Chance for Glory

The Innovation and Triumph of the 1916 Washington State Rose Bowl Team

Chance for Glory book cover

Darin Watkins ’84

Aviva: 2015

“I have decided to put my fate in your hands,” said Washington State College football coach William “Lone Star” Dietz to his players, as they prepared to take on Brown University in the 1916 Rose Bowl after an astounding 1915 season. Dietz promised to return as coach if WSC won.

The team fought hard, using Dietz’s … » More …

WSU Olympians thumb
Summer 2016

WSU Olympic medalists

More than 50 of Washington State University’s top athletes have made it to the Olympics since 1920. Here’s a look at the eight who took home medals:

Paul Enquist ’77, rowing; Los Angeles 1984, gold; USA. Part of the two-man double sculls team that edged out Belgium to become the first U.S. team in two decades to win gold in an Olympic rowing event.

Mike Kinkade ’96, baseball; Sydney 2000, gold; USA. Played third base for Team USA which beat perennial powerhouse Cuba in a three-hit shutout for the gold medal.

Peter Koech ’86, 3,000-meter steeplechase; Seoul 1988, silver; Kenya. Kenya nearly swept this event, taking gold and … » More …

No white flags
Spring 2016

No white flags

Steve Gleason made a name for himself on the football field but his most enduring contribution may be tackling ALS.

The statue built in his honor outside the New Orleans Superdome depicts Steve Gleason ’00 on the gridiron doing what he does best: pushing himself harder and, in turn, inspiring others.

That personal drive didn’t stop when Gleason left the National Football League in 2008. Nor when he was diagnosed in 2011 at the age of 34 with ALS, the terminal neuromuscular disease that has since left him immobile and reliant on eye-controlled technology to communicate.

Gleason, who helped take WSU to the Rose Bowl … » More …

Jason Gesser
Winter 2014

The right color back on

Ask Jason Gesser ’02 about the finest decision he’s made and his answer is as pinpoint as each of the 70 career touchdown passes he threw at Washington State.

“Coming to Washington State was the perfect and best decision I made in my life,” he says. “Besides marrying my wife,” Gesser is quick to add, with a laugh. He married his college girlfriend Kali Surplus ’02, a former WSU volleyball player, and the couple has three children.

In his new role as the assistant director of development with the Cougar Athletic Fund, the fundraising arm of the Washington State University Athletic Department, his … » More …