Gerald Fry
Editor’s Note: This is the second in Gerald’s series about sports in his life and continues after his years as a student.
During my Peace Corps experience I was so incredibly busy that there was not much time for sports. With heavy teaching loads in a steamy tropical environment without air-con, at the end of each working day I was totally exhausted. Also had to stand in crowded buses commuting. During my Peace Corps days, I did find my wife to 
be, Tasanee (at left). One key criterion for becoming my life partner was that the lady would need to be a good athlete. To test her, we had tennis dates at AUA, our binational center in Bangkok. Though she was not a great tennis player, she clearly met the test and showed good athletic potential. Never did I imagine that several decades later she would play golf in the Oregon Women’s Golf Association and have trophies in our home showing her four holes in one. It will be several lives before I have my first hole in one. While we were in Oregon, we played hundreds of rounds of golf together, never ever using a cart. Last year Tasanee and I celebrated our Golden Anniversary and we have two new lovely Chaldean-Thai-Chinese-Khmer-German-British-Swiss grandchildren who live in the Detroit area.
My next major sports experience came in 1976-1980 when I was working for the Ford Foundation (FF) in their Office of Southeast Asia (I had the same position and title as Obama’s mother, who was born in Wichita in September, 1942, and was working with the FF in Indonesia). As a member of the FF, I had the privilege of becoming a member of the Royal Bangkok Sports Club (RBSC), an elite social and athletic club in the heart of Bangkok. I was invited to join their basketball team which played in the Bangkok Basketball Association (BBA). It was a league of about 10 teams such as the US Marine Corps, the Thai Naval Academy, a Japanese team of their expats working in Thailand, the International School of Bangkok (ISB), and so forth. Our toughest competition and the most athletic team was the US Marine Corps. But our team was the only culturally diverse team except for ISB. Our power forward was a Black chap from Arkansas who was the CEO of 3M in Thailand. Our center was a 6’8’’ white guy who had played for Harvard, and three of our players had been on the Thai national team that won the Silver Medal in the Asian Games (the Olympics of Asia). My buddy Mark and I were bench warmers, but we won the championship three of those four years, and the other year the Marines won. I never imagined that I would have a sports opportunity such as this playing in the BBA for four years.
After completing my work with the Ford Foundation, I became a visiting professor at Stanford in 1980-1981. The sports highlights of that year was playing basketball at lunch time at the new Maples Pavilion, which has the springiest floor I have ever experienced. Also, we enjoyed watching John Elway as quarterback of Stanford’s football team. While watching the Big Game between Stanford and Cal at Berkeley, my son, Terry, made the front page of the sports section of the 
San Francisco Chronicle. Unlike his “unathletic” father, he later was a high school star in baseball and alpine skiing at Sheldon High School in Eugene, Oregon. Since my wife and I had to drive for the ski team, we took up alpine skiing and did that during the winters for about five years. My big skiing accomplishment was skiing down the face of Mt. Bachelor and surviving. Upon completion of the “trip” down my knees were shaking like never before and I was ready for an ice cold beer. (At right, son Terry Fry at the Big Game, photo from the San Francisco Chronicle)
After Stanford, I went to the University of Oregon (sometimes known as “Nike University”) as a professor of political science and international studies. For nearly 20 years, I played basketball regularly at lunch time there. Sometimes we were we able to play at Mac Court (“the Pit”), so I have scored many baskets on that historic oldest court (opened in 1926) in the country until the new Knight Arena opened. While Elwin Heiny, member of the UO Hall of Fame, was the coach of the Oregon’s women’s team, he encouraged his players to play with us men during the off-season because we were aggressive and had “sharp elbows.”
One of the players with whom I played a lot, Betty Ann Boeving, was also my student and went on to do a MA in public policy at Stanford. After going to Stanford, she recommended to the Stanford Alumni Association that they ask me to lead alumni study tours to Southeast Asia. Actually, I had four such invitations. These were such wonderful gigs since you stay at the world’s most famous hotels in the region such as the Oriental in Bangkok (where Josef Conrad and Somerset Maugham stayed) and Le Grande Angkor in Cambodia. One participant on these trips was our East High classmate Diana Woodward. After having been the voice of the Cardinals for a number of years, Betty Ann now heads up an NGO fighting against sex trafficking in the Bay Area. During these lunch games, I also got to play with some of the Ducks’ men’s players such as Orlando Williams, who would kindly compliment me on my outside shooting.
Being at Oregon interestingly kept me connected with Wichita and Kansas sports. My first year as a tenure track faculty member at Oregon, Ralph Miller our former East coach (at left) was the head coach of the Oregon State Beavers, who were 26-2 that year, led by the great Gary Payton. So, as I had watched Miller coach at the Forum and the Round House, I watched him often coach at Mac Court. While Ralph Miller was basketball coach at East High, he invented the full-court press and also through his clever coaching against superior opponents caused a shot clock to be introduced in college hoops. At KU, he studied with Dr. James Naismith, the Canadian who invented basketball! The floor today at Gill Coliseum of Oregon State University is called Ralph Miller Court. I have seen many games there.
Also, as readers may know, Eugene is the track capital of the world, and my wife and I often went to see Jim Ryun (East’s best-ever athlete) compete. In July 2022, Eugene will host the World Track and Field Competitions, the first time in history that the USA has hosted this event. During the course of our long marriage, Tasanee and I have seen hundreds of exciting college football and basketball games at Stanford, Oregon, and Minnesota. (Below, Minnesota Football Coach P. J. Fleck and I, Fall, 2017, “Row the Boat”, photo courtesy of the University of Minnesota Athletic Department)
While at Oregon, I had one sabbatical which took me to live for 15 months in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, one of only five remaining communist countries. There was a statute of Lenin overlooking me in the room where I often taught and trained. I never anticipated that there would be a sports dimension to my life in Laos. Soon after arrival, my wife (an accountant by training and our family accountant) urged me to acquire a bicycle for my primary means of transportation. So during my sabbatical in Laos, I put about 20,000 kilometers on my bicycle, and I used it for all my personal private transport. We had a van for our Asian Development Bank project activities, which I never used personally.
I would frequently play hoops at the court of the Medical University of Laos. Someone noticed that I had a good outside shot. The Vientiane Dream Team had a tall 6’7’’ center from California. The coach thought that my outside shooting would open up things for him inside. So I was invited to join this dream team which was expected to be the Lao champion since we were so “tall and long.” With many problems, we turned out to be far from a dream team. First, our top player, a power forward from Canada, often missed games and practices because of his work obligations. Second, we had a “gunner” who loved to shoot, but was a terrible shooter. He could have contributed if he had just played defense and rebounded for us. Third, with my being 53 at the time, I was too slow to get free to get any decent looks and I was a terrible liability on defense. Not surprisingly we lost in the semi-finals to the National University of Laos where I was working by something like 95-65. The Chinese School of Laos was the eventual champion. Sadly, my former student at the UO with whom I played a lot, Rick Reese, had not yet arrived in Laos. He could have led us to the championship. He now heads up Village Focus International in Laos and is a truly outstanding athlete, both in basketball and golf.
Also during my time at Oregon, I was invited once to speak about Vietnam in Portland as part of an Asia-Pacific lecture series. During the intermission of my lecture I struck up a conversation with a gentleman I met in the men’s room. He turned out to be the co-founder and CEO of Nike, Phil Knight. As part of Nike’s philanthropy, he sponsored the lecture series and wanted to get a feel for the quality of the presentations. Fortunately, he seemed happy with what I had presented. A few weeks later a found a note at my desk at the UO that Phil from Nike had called. I assumed that it might be one of my former students named Phil working for Nike. When I returned the call, I was surprised that it was Phil Knight and that he wanted me to work for Nike during the coming summer.
The great thing about an academic career is that the normal appointment is only for nine months so you have three months of “freedom” to pursue outside opportunities. As a result, I got to work at the brand new Nike World Campus in the Michael Schmidt building. Each building at Nike is named after a famous Nike athlete such as Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Ironically, Mike Schmidt had been a star for the Eugene Emeralds before becoming an all star with the Phillies. Working directly for Phil Knight for a sports-nut like me was a wonderful example of Cervantes’ “dream the impossible dream.” Also in Eugene, I came to know the other co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman, who was at the UO and a former coach of our Olympic team. Knight’s autobiography, Shoe Dog, by the way, is a great read as is Kenny Moore’s Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. Moore is a great sports writer.
Editor’s Note: Ralph Miller coached the 1951 Wichita East basketball team that were state champions that year. Members of the team included several future stars: Cleo Littleton and Gary Thompson who went on to play at WSU and Lafayette Norwood who was a long-time assistant basketball coach at KU.
