As Gene Shell undoubtedly goes down as one of the great coaches in University of Tulsa history, the great tragedy of TU baseball is that there are no new Golden Hurricane baseball teams.
Shell's 1969 Tulsa baseball team that finished second in the College World Series was honored during the Golden Hurricane's Homecoming football game this weekend. The team also held a 50th anniversary reunion on June 29, where the 89-year-old Shell demonstrated that he is still the same, sharp straight-shooter.
Shell talked about his time at TU from 1965-1980, including TU’s incredible run in the College World Series, as well as why the baseball program was discontinued.
“It was ignorance on one guy’s part, but that’s the way it happened,” he said about why the program was dropped in 1980 to club level and dropped permanently in 1981.
But before Shell elaborated on that point, he talked about being hired by the legendary Glenn Dobbs, who not only was a great football coach and Athletic Director, but is also perhaps the greatest football player in TU history.
Shell was hired by Dobbs from Webster High School in 1965 to be an assistant football coach for Dobbs in an era where Tulsa football set all sorts of NCAA passing records. Shell had won five state titles in his coaching stints at Webster, Edison,and Claremore.
“When I came to work at the university, they used a football coach off the staff to coach baseball,” Shell said. “I think coach Dobbs did it as a courtesy to the guys on the team who wanted to play baseball. The very first jobs he gave me were football, basketball, stadium maintenance, selling programs, advertising. He wanted me to take a basketball job. That didn’t work out.
“He then asked me if I wanted to coach the baseball team. I said, ‘thank God you finally gave me something I know something about'."
As the sixth and last baseball coach in a program the began in 1948, Shell, replacing Al Kawal in 1966, turned the Golden Hurricane into a juggernaut in a few seasons. Recruiting from a deep pool of talent in and around Tulsa, Shell produced talented teams featuring mostly local players.
By 1969, 12 of the 20 players on the College World Series roster were from the Tulsa Public Schools of Hale (5), McLain (3), Webster (2) and Memorial (2).
“I took what they had. They had one scholarship and I ran him off,” Shell said. “And a lot of guys in town that came to school wanted to play baseball. We got our ball club together and I didn’t have any scholarships. The next year he let me pick up a couple of scholarships. The next year a few more.
“Then all of a sudden in 1969 I had my own ball club and I got fired off the football staff,” Shell said of when Dobbs quit coaching football to focus on being the TU Athletic Director. “And coach (Dobbs) said, ‘Well, how bout I give you 800 dollars to coach baseball.’ And I said, ‘Hell coach, why don’t I just do it for free.'
“I wasn’t making but eight thousand. Coach said, 'No, I’ll pay your football salary.’ He asked, ‘Do you have a good team,’ and I said, 'Yes we do.' And those guys wound up in the World Series."
Shell was out as an assistant football coach because of the ill-fated hiring of Vince Carillot, who finished 1-9 in 1969 and resigned after a year that brought TU football under NCAA probation. But that turned out to be a bonus for the baseball team, as Shell could fully concentrate on baseball.
TU improved on a team that finished 24-4 in 1968. The program had been on a steady rise, going 19-5 in 1967 and 15-9 in his first season in 1966. Shell finished 478-199 at TU in 15 seasons. Amazingly, he had no assistant coaches.
After finishing second in the College World Series in 1969, the 1970 Golden Hurricane lost in the NCAA Tournament in the District Five playoffs at Iowa State in cold, rainy conditions. In those days, the Missouri Valley Conference would play the Big 8 champions in the NCAA District playoffs, with the winner going to the eight-team College World Series.
Getting to host Iowa State in the next year’s NCAA playoffs, Tulsa prevailed and made it back to the College World Series in 1971 and finished third.
With Dobbs quitting as AD in 1971, F.A. Dry was brought in as AD, and TU baseball continued to flourish, although never again making it back to the College World Series. Dry wound up leaving TU for TCU at the end of 1976. He had also become a successful head football coach after taking over the job in the middle of the 1972 season.
Unsound thinking was a plague in the mid-to-late 1970’s in the Tulsa athletic program under TU President J. Paschal Twyman. TU almost dropped football in 1976. Tulsa fired successful coach Ken Hayes in basketball in 1975, and that program immediately took a serious nosedive.
Unlike football and basketball, baseball would not survive.
“The timeline started when F.A. quit because he couldn’t get enough for the football program and went to TCU,” Shell said. “They didn’t have an Athletic Director, so Paschal appointed Emery Turner, who was Dean of the Business School.
“Emery knew absolutely zero about athletics. I mean, nothing. Then basketball coach (Jim King) gets fired and he goes up to the junior college national tournament and hires a coach and his whole ball club. That was Nolan. And he hit a home run.”
Nolan Richardson’s success is well-documented. But before an AD who knew athletics could take over after Turner left TU (John Cooper, also a standout football coach from 1977-1984), Shell was out.
“Emery didn’t know how to handle Title IX. Title IX was not intended to drop men’s sports,” Shell said. “It was intended to help girls to get scholarships on an equal basis. And the one program he could accomplish all of that by was baseball.”
Across the nation, Title IX has caused many men’s sports programs to be dropped. The law that made men’s and women’s sports be made accessible equally to athletes (meaning similar number of scholarships in each program) has been a killer to men’s programs outside of football and basketball.
“I had a 150 thousand dollar budget and 15 scholarships,” Shell said. “With those 15 scholarships he could start five girls programs. He later told me that he was sorry, but I took it personal.
“So he gave me a choice. I could stay with no scholarships, play 15 games, and we’d call it a club sport. They’d pay me 15 thousand dollars and I could get another job. I took it really too personal because after all we’ve done for the university, this is what you’re going to do?
"The final deal was I said, ‘Take the job and shove it,’ and I walked out.”
After sounding the famous Johnny Paycheck song lyrics to Turner, Shell had different jobs, including working in an oil field and running a sports grill. He was also the head coach at Southwest Louisiana (now called Louisiana Lafayette) from 1985-1987, going 77-59 in three years.
Shell now chooses to focus on the great times at TU, and stressed to players at the reunion that they should all love the University of Tulsa.
“The big point is this, that coach Dobbs finally got me to understand, the University of Tulsa did not take our program,” Shell said. “Emery Turner was the impetus for it out of ignorance of the athletic department. Unless you’ve been there and done that, we’ve won championships, you can sit there and imagine what they’re thinking there and dreaming of. It is something they live with the rest of their lives."
Tim Rector was one of 14 of the former TU players on the 1969 team who attended the reunion, along with 33 players from other TU teams. Like many other of Shell’s players at TU, Rector, a clutch performer as one of only two seniors on the 1969 team, hasn’t given up on the realistically slim hopes of a baseball revival at TU after 40 years.
“I’m a big promoter of some day, if it can ever happen, is for TU to have the baseball team back again,. I’ve seen the players around here. We’ve got some really good players around Tulsa,” said Rector, of seeing many of those players while watching his children and grandchildren play.
“You take a 90-mile radius from Tulsa, and I promise you, the right coach, and these players, and they could be in Omaha again. It might take a little bit, but they’ve got the players to go to Omaha again. And to go to a school like the University of Tulsa and play in front of your friends and in front of your family. There’s a lot of kids who would love to have that opportunity.”
Rector, whose seventh-inning grand slam homer lifted Tulsa over Cincinnati in the Missouri Valley tournament at Oiler Park, can never tire of talking about how much of a positive impact Shell has had on his life.
“There was just something about Shell. When he looked you in the eye, whether you liked it or not, you know you were getting the straight scoop,” Rector said. “He made you a better player. He made every one of us better players.
“Sometimes when he’d get through talking with you, I’m going, 'I'm done.' But then when you thought about what he was trying to do, you start realizing it was true. He knew how to drive people. Everybody is different, but he knew how to take that and make you a better player.
“Everything I am I owe to Gene, it’s true. The tenacity, the aggressiveness that he showed me, every bit of it is true. He taught you to never, ever quit. That has stayed with me all of my life. I tried to teach that to my kids and grandkids and that’s something that is very important and I will cherish that forever.”
