A Look Back At The Big Ten vs Pacific Coast Dual Meet Series 

By David Woods for DyeStat

Photo from Jack Pfeifer Collection

The newly expanded Big Ten will hold its first outdoor conference championship Friday through Sunday at Eugene, Ore. Yet it won’t actually be the first meet pitting old Big Ten vs. Pacific Coast, nor the first at Hayward Field.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the last dual meet matching the Big Ten against the Pacific Coast Conference. The leagues that formed the Rose Bowl pact met 14 times in track and field from 1937 to 1955, featuring some of the biggest names in the sport:

Mel Patton, Herb McKenley, Mal Whitfield, Bob Mathias, Parry O’Brien, Milt Campbell.

The 1951 meet at Eugene drew a crowd of 6,500, then the largest ever to see a track meet in Oregon.

With Southern California, UCLA, Oregon and Washington leaving the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten, the series has effectively been resurrected. The Pacific Coast Conference was 9-5 in the duals.

The biggest name from the series is best known for baseball: Jackie Robinson. Before integrating Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he participated in football, basketball, track and baseball (probably his worst sport) at UCLA.

Robinson competed in the 1940 match-up at Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium in Evanston, Ill. UCLA long jumpers Pat Turner (25 feet, 6 5-8 inches), Robinson (24-11 7-8) and Bill Lacefield (24-11 1-8) gave the Pacific Coast a 1-2-3 sweep.

Robinson had won the NCAA title in Minneapolis at 24-10.25, with Turner fourth and Lacefield fifth.

Also competing in 1940 was Louis Zamperini of USC. He was a 1936 Olympian whose life as a runner and World War II prisoner was dramatized in “Unbroken,” a biography that bbigecame a movie. He was second in the mile behind Stanford’s Paul Moore after winning in 1939 and finishing second in 1938. (Zamperini was NCAA mile champion in 1938 and 1939, and third in 1940.)

The meet at the Los Angeles Coliseum in June 1941 -- less than six months before Pearl Harbor -- produced two world records.

One was by Oregon high jumper Les Steers, who had previously bettered the record in April and May. He cleared 6-11, a record ratified by the IAAF, which had rejected the two other marks. He is reported to have jumped 7-0.5 in an exhibition at Eugene in February, or 15 years before the first official 7-foot jump by Charles Dumas.

The other world record was in the mile relay, won by California over USC, both timed in 3:09.4. Both teams bettered the unratified record of 3:10.5 by Stanford in 1940 and official record of 3:11.6 by USC in 1936. The time was equivalent to the 4x400-meter record of 3:08.2 set by the United States at the 1932 Olympics, also at the Coliseum.

In a tragic twist, the father of Cal anchorman Grover Klemmer had died the day before. His mother asked Cal coach Brutus Hamilton not to tell her son until after the meet.

Klemmer’s split was 46.1, holding off NCAA champion Hubie Kerns, 45.9.

Two Indiana University winners were Roy Cochran in the 440 (47.5) and 220 low hurdles (23.2), and Archie Harris in the discus (168-4.75.). Three days later, on June 20, Harris broke a world record of 174-8.75 in the NCAA Championships at Stanford. He is the only Black thrower to set a world record in the discus. Cochran went on to win a gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1948 London Olympics.

The series was suspended from 1943-46 because of World War II.

McKenley, of Illinois, was Jamaica’s first superstar sprinter. He is the only man to lead the world in the 100, 200 and 400 meters all in the same year (1947), and he is the only one to make Olympic finals in all three.

When the duals resumed in 1947 at Berkeley, Calif., McKenley ran under the ratified world record in the 440 with a time of 46.3. Seven days before, he had clocked 46.2 in the NCAAs at Salt Lake City. So both times were under the accepted record. Also, Minnesota’s Fortune Gordien, who went on to break the world record four times, won the discus at 177-8.75.

In between winning the first of his two Olympic golds in the 800 meters, Whitfield, of Ohio State, won the 440 yarsd in 47.6 in 1948 at Evanston and in 48.1 in 1949 at Berkeley.

Patton, of USC, won the 100-yard dash in 9.6 in 1949. The year before, he broke a world record of 9.3 and won Olympic gold at 200 meters.

Star of the 1949 and 1950 meets had to be Wisconsin’s bespectacled Don Gehrmann, winner of two 880/mile/mile relay triples. The 1950 meet was held before his home crowd of 10,000 at Camp Randall Stadium. There, Gehrmann ran the last lap in 57.8 to win the mile in 4:11.1 and set a meet record of 1:50.7 in the 880.

The 1951 dual, won by the PCC 77.5-54.5, featured 12 Hayward Field records and four winners who went on to win medals a year later at the Helsinki Olympics.

Those four were two-time decathlon gold medalist Mathias, of Stanford, discus throw of 173-4; two-time gold medalist O’Brien, the USC shot putter who introduced the glide technique and set 17 world records, 53-4; Illinois pole vaulter Don Laz, silver the next year, 14-8 13-16, and USC’s Jack Davis, who swept both hurdles before Helsinki silver.

There was no dual in 1952.

In 1953 at Ann Arbor, Mich., O’Brien and Davis repeated their ‘51 victories. NCAA champion Willie Williams of Illinois clocked 9.5 to win the 100-yard dash. In 1956, Williams broke a world record of 10.1 for 100m at Berlin, becoming the first to better Jesse Owens’ time of 10.2 from 1936.

In the last dual, held at Berkeley in 1955, the Pacific Coast Conference won 75-57.

Winners included two future Olympic champions: Indiana decathlete Campbell in the 120-yard high hurdles, 14.0, and USC’s Mike Larrabee, who finished in a dead heat with Michigan State’s Kevan Gosper, of Australia, in the 440 in 47.4. Larrabee, at 30, won the 400m at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in 45.1.

In the mile, UCLA sophomore Bob Seaman set a meet record of 4:04.2, beating Oregon’s Bill Dellinger, 4:04.6. Dellinger, the 91-year-old former Oregon coach and three-time Olympian, remains a link bridging 1955 and 2025.

Contact David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.