Farewell to the WAC

"Joining the WAC, in my opinion, is perhaps the most important happening in the athletic history of the University of Hawaii." — Ray Nagel, UH athletic director, May 27, 1979

It was with great fanfare and expectation that the University of Hawaii exuberantly strode into the Western Athletic Conference, the first intercollegiate league it had known, in the summer of 1979.

Thirty-three years later, the WAC having long ceased to be a launching pad for the school’s dreams and ambitions, UH’s departure on June 30 figures to be a lot more restrained and little mourned.

Matter of factly, like the switchover in stationery, the logos at Aloha Stadium and on the Stan Sheriff Center court will be changed to reflect the July 1 alignments with the Mountain West in football and the Big West in most other sports.

But people who lived and observed UH’s tenure across parts of four decades said the marriage served its purpose, at least for the first 20 years.

"I think it was very good for Hawaii. It gave Hawaii an identity it could use and grow with," said sportscaster Jim Leahey, who had a broadcast booth window of the period.

"(UH) was in a very untenable position as an independent, and the WAC was the right place at the right time," Leahey said. "Hawaii was looked upon as almost a bandit school but in a bonafide conference UH could win — or at least compete for — championships, and it did."

Said women’s volleyball coach Dave Shoji: "I don’t think there is any question that we all grew — we had to." Shoji’s teams won 16 regular-season titles and, at one point, had an NCAA-record 132-match conference winning streak.

WAC AN EARLY TARGET

The WAC was barely two years old and a long-term twinkle in the eye of Hawaii Gov. John Burns in 1964 when he first targeted the young, up-and-coming league for Hawaii’s sports future.

Burns said the six-team circuit — then consisting of Arizona, Arizona State, Brigham Young, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — offered the best fit and future for the aspiring Rainbows and their limited resources.

"We want to belong to a conference that would rate about with our prospects," Burns said. "The WAC does just that."

In those days UH operated as a small college independent. In football it filled schedule pukas with military and community teams and was often out-drawn at Honolulu Stadium by high school football.

Scheduling was difficult, especially when prospective opponents were in conference play, and, except for the an occasional visit by a brand-name team, familiarity with opponents by fans was negligible.

But Burns’ vision was for a program the state could rally around that would also give the 50th state an athletic identity and reinforce a sense that it could compete in other non-athletic areas.

"I started working on it (WAC membership) as soon as I got the (athletic director’s) job in 1968 at the governor’s request," the late Paul Durham remembered.

In the meantime, Burns buttonholed other western governors at conferences to plead UH’s case. He saw to it that UH built up its infrastructure. He got the athletic booster club, ‘Ahahui Koa Anuenue, off the ground with $8,000 of his own money and put the weight of his office behind the project. Aloha Stadium would soon begin to rise.

When UH’s bid for conference membership was rebuffed by a 5-3 vote in 1974, Burns was undaunted.

"My reaction is that we’ll try again next year," Burns said.

It would be a longer wait, one that Burns would not live to see the end of.

Meanwhile, a basketball scandal that brought NCAA sanctions, frequent political meddling and a wholesale turnover in the athletic department made UH a risky choice in many minds.

Washington State athletic director Ray Nagel, a former UCLA quarterback and someone with extensive West Coast ties and major college currency, was hired in 1976 as AD. His task: make the program respectable enough to earn an invitation. Then, make it competitive.

Nagel hired a veteran UCLA assistant coach, Dick Tomey, to rebuild the football fortunes and then set about convincing the WAC, which had also been looking at Nevada-Las Vegas and Air Force, that Hawaii would be a good addition.

Finally, in 1977 UH was extended an invitation. A day later the Pacific Coast Athletic Association, forerunner of the Big West and home to Fresno State and San Jose State, offered UH membership to replace departing San Diego State.

In 1978, UH was formally approved for admission to the WAC for the 1979-80 school year.

UH’s last football game as an independent in 1978 was a 21-5 loss to eventual national champion Southern California. With that game, a sellout in which UH trailed 7-5 in the fourth quarter, the hope that had grown around UH’s impending move to the WAC generated genuine excitement.

When the baseball team won the 1980 WAC championship — the school’s first conference title — Durham, then retired, said, "I wish Gov. Burns could be here to see it. He would have loved it."

LEAGUE OF OUR OWN

"For me, the biggest thing was (UH teams) had a place to play," Shoji recalls. "We actually had a league we could compete in and it got us out of that Division II or III mentality. It was an impetus to move us forward."

Basketball coach Riley Wallace, an assistant in the pre-WAC days and head coach for 20 WAC seasons, recalls, "The conference gave us a title to play for, opponents who were already scheduled and something to recruit to. We got on (mainland) TV and got exposure."

Said UH athletic director Jim Donovan, an offensive lineman in the early 1980s, "When we joined (the WAC), it brought us credibility on the national scene. But, more importantly, a consistent schedule for all sports which led to rivalries like the one we had with BYU in football."

UH CARRIED THE WAC

UH became the senior member of the WAC in 2005 in its 26th year of membership — but it was a Pyrrhic tribute.

As Jim Burns, son of the late governor and past president of the booster club put it, "This isn’t the WAC we joined."

With Texas-El Paso’s departure for Conference USA, all nine schools that preceded it in the conference — Arizona, Arizona State, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, Utah and Wyoming — had exited.

And more would be on the way. By the summer of 2010, when Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada announced they, too, were leaving for the prospect of bigger TV dollars in the Mountain West Conference composed of former WAC members.

Suddenly Hawaii had become the WAC’s reluctant anchor. It was the school commissioner Karl Benson still hoped to build a new, resilient WAC around.

"In the beginning (1979), I think Hawaii needed the WAC more than the WAC needed UH," said Benson, who headed the conference from 1994 to 2012. "But in the modern WAC, the conference needed Hawaii more after 1999. After BYU and Utah left, Hawaii and Fresno State stepped forward and became flag bearers and gave the WAC credibility."

BENSON BLINDSIDED

Benson was attending a basketball game at the University of Denver, a new WAC basketball member-to-be, the November night in 2010 when UH summoned the media to a Bachman Hall press conference to announce an agreement in principle to join the Mountain West in 2012.

Nobody had bothered to tell Benson or the WAC, however.

Informed by a reporter of the news by phone, Benson was, at first, disbelieving if not incredulous. Several times he asked, "Are you sure?"

Some people will tell you it was the dagger blow to the WAC. Benson, however, disputes that.

"If you want to point a finger at what caused the WAC to be where it is today, it was Aug. 19, 2010, when Fresno State accepted an invitation to join the Mountain West and convinced Nevada to join them," Benson said.

This week Benson, now commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference, said, "I have absolutely no ill will, no hard feelings toward Hawaii. They were forced to do what they had to do."