I was chatting with a few friends about Larry Price, former University of Hawaii football coach and broadcaster. Price retired from the KSSK morning show with Michael W. Perry in 2016 after 33 years on the air together.
Price will be 91 this year and is being cared for by his wife, May. Perry told me he doesn’t get out very much.
The first interaction I ever had with Price was in 1974 when he was head coach at UH and I was a student there. To my surprise, he introduced me to a packed lunch meeting of about 250 people at the Honolulu Quarterback Club.
It was Price’s first year as head football coach. UH had just beaten Rutgers 28-16, and fans were in a frenzy.
My friend Randy Hiraki and I came out of the buffet line at the Flamingo Chuckwagon and it looked like there were no empty seats. But right inside the door, two places were open. We asked the guy sitting at the table if they were available, and he invited us to join him.
We chatted and found out he worked with the athletic director at UH. After lunch, Price got up and started talking. He was about 20 feet away from us — at the long table where we were sitting.
He started introducing people at our table, and each stood and waved to the crowd. It was then that I realized we were sitting at the head table!
Price introduced coaches and football players, such as wide receiver Arnold Morgado, and quarterback Alex Kaloi, who had turned a third-down-and-one-yard-to-go quarterback sneak into a 68-yard touchdown.
Price introduced the guy next to me. My anxiety level shot through the ceiling. Was he going to ask who we were and why we were sitting at the head table? He couldn’t know our names.
Then he said, “And representing the UH student body are Bob Sigall and Randy Hiraki.” I was stunned. We stood and waved weakly to the crowd. They applauded weakly in return.
The nation’s first head football coach of Polynesian ancestry’s talk that day began with several pidgin jokes. The crowd loved it. Then he switched gears to explain his new Hula-T offense.
“The ‘Hula-T’ offense utilizes four backs in 15 shifting positions, accompanied by four types of motion. It uses a flexed, horizontal alignment with no apparent set tendencies. It was borrowed liberally from Nebraska and Notre Dame,” he said.
Looking around the room, I saw a few nodding their heads, but most looked bewildered, as if they were awaiting that final piece of the puzzle to fall into place.
“The main thing about it, as far as we’re concerned, is that it’s spiritually significant,” Price said. “It’s a state of mind. And it’s a matter of identity.”
Former Star-Bulletin sports writer Rod Ohira said he asked Price about the Hula-T offense many times and never got a clear answer. Personally, I think it was imaginary and designed to mess with opposing coaches’ minds.
I doubt that I made much of an impact on Price, but he sure had an unforgettable impact on me. I thought I’d write about him today as my small-kine way of thanking him for all he’s done for Hawaii.
Saint Stuprich
KHON2 News anchor Joe Moore told me he remembered Larry Price’s first game as head coach of the Rainbow Warriors. It took place on Sept. 14, 1974, before a near-capacity crowd of 23,000 at the old Honolulu Stadium.
“I was a sportscaster then and called the game on radio. It was the 1974 season opener against BYU, and it was sophomore Alex Kaloi’s first game at quarterback,” Moore said.
Moore and I had been discussing the many great kickers Hawaii had been blessed with, the latest being Kansei Matsuzawa, aka the “Tokyo Toe.” He is the first player in Hawaii football history to be named a consensus All-American.
Moore said that Price’s first game as head coach also featured a superlative left-footed soccer-style kicker named Reinhold Stuprich.
“Reinhold’s 15 points that day were the only ones Hawaii scored in beating the Cougars 15-13,” Moore recalled. “He kicked field goals of 23, 24, 35, 38 and 44 yards. He was the first UH kicker to boot five field goals in a single game.”
“He came through with flying colors,” Price said. “From now on, we’re going to call him Saint Stuprich.”
Broadcasting
Price coached at UH for three years. In 1977, Cec Heftel attended a speech Price gave in 1977. He was such a good speaker that Heftel hired him to do PR for his TV and radio stations.
Perry echoed that thought. Price was the best public speaker he ever saw. He remembered a packed Sheraton Waikiki ballroom listened and laughed as Price spoke.
Price was able to find the right balance between being a regular, down-to-earth guy and a very intelligent guy. It’s not an easy thing to do.
He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1949, which was an English Standard school. He has two doctorates and a master’s from USC and Stanford.
When disc jockey Hal “Aku” Lewis died in 1983, Perry and Price took over his morning KSSK radio show.
“We liked each other from the first day,” Perry said. “We have a similar sense of humor. We think the other is funny.”
Katoosh
Ohira said that he would often talk to Coach Price until 5 a.m., long after he had run out of tape for his recorder.
“He would come up with these gems like ‘katoosh,’ a word Price created that conveys a hard hit in football. ‘If you get katooshed, you never gonna’ forget it,’ Price was fond of saying,” said Ohira.
“Another thing he might say was, ‘Look at those little legs pound poi,’ to describe a running back.”
Larry-isms
Perry labeled his malapropisms and mispronunciations “Larry-isms.”
“Instead of ‘All of a sudden,’ Larry would say, ‘awful a sudden.’ I’d tell him that’s not how it’s pronounced, but he’d reply, ‘That’s how I pronounce it.’
“He called us from Tahiti, where he had gone on vacation. ‘There was a small, friendly octopus in the water,’ Larry told me. ‘I got all caught up in his testicles.’
“Many listeners tuned in to hear what he would say next,” Perry said.
Readers told me a few of their favorites.
“My favorite was when Larry and Mike were discussing the movie ‘The Graduate,’” Kevin Connelly said. “Actress Anne Bancroft played Mrs. Robinson. Larry Price referred to her as ‘Mrs. Rob-a-sun.’”
Emerick LaMontagne remembers, “When it came to Larry reading local news, he pronounced, ‘West Oahu’ as ‘wesso wah-su.’”
Gary Lau added, “I remember one morning during the KSSK news, instead of saying ‘homicide detectives,’ Larry said, ‘homicide defectives.’”
Comedic genius?
“Larry Price uttered one of his doozies during a threatening tsunami,” James Wakari said. “He advised motorists: ‘If you are stuck in traffic right now and are in a flood zone, drive immediately to higher ground outside of the zone. To see whether you are in a flood zone, look at the map on page three of your Hawaiian Tel phone book.’
“While his warning was well-intended, it gave me a chuckle, as I wondered just how many people carry such a phone book in their car? Was his admonition a study in illogic, or comedic genius?”
Gov. Harry Yoshi
Lynne Waters said she had trouble pronouncing local names and words when she moved here in 1981 from Texas. “Arriving at KITV, I listened carefully to my on-set colleagues and how they pronounced them.
“After sitting next to the wonderful Larry Price — who has his own treasured vernacular in the Hawaiian universe — and his ‘60 Seconds on Politics,’ I thought I had picked up everyone’s name. Alas, I was wrong.
“News Director Don Rockwell — a man with his own brand of humor — called me in one day and said, ‘You’re going down to the Capitol for the governor’s news conference.’
“I replied, ‘OK. Is that Gov. Yoshi?’ He cocked his head and said, ‘What???’
“Gov. Yoshi. Harry Yoshi?” I asked naively.
“His lip curled up on one side as only Don Rockwell’s can, trying to keep a straight face.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Larry Price,” I told him.
If you remember a Larry- ism, or have a story about Coach Price, send me an email.
Bob Sigall is the author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com or sign up for his free email newsletter at RearviewMirrorInsider.com.
