No. 56 • Arizona AD Clausen instrumental in UA joining Western Athletic Conference

July 27, 1962: Arizona joins the new Western Athletic Conference

In his first days as Arizona’s athletic director late in 1958, Dick Clausen got a sinking feeling. Had he made a terrible mistake by leaving his football coaching job at New Mexico?

The UA’s football and basketball facilities were antiquated. Basketball coach Fred Enke had lost his touch; the Wildcats would go 4-22. The football program, coming off 1-8-1 and 3-7 seasons, was under NCAA sanctions for making illegal payments to players.

Clausen told me in a 1998 interview that his first priority was to leave the Border Conference and persuade athletic directors at ASU, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming and maybe Oregon, Washington State and Oregon State to form a new conference.

“We had Idaho on our football schedule five years in a row and the crowds kept getting smaller,” Clausen said in the ’98 interview. “One day, my business manager came in and said we had to start playing somebody else. So we scheduled Nebraska, Ohio State and Michigan.”

Determined to at least give the UA a chance at better things — to attract a growing and more sophisticated Tucson population that had reached 250,000 — Clausen pulled the Wildcats out of the Border Conference after the 1960 season and began recruiting allies that would result in the Western Athletic Conference.

At first, the working name was the Great Western Conference. Clausen planted seeds with ADs at the NCAA Conventions of 1959 and 1960. The Wildcats, who were the muscle behind formation of the Border Conference in 1931, were now the key lobbyists for a more modern athletic alliance, leaving Hardin-Simmons and New Mexico State behind.

Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State were interested; at the time, they were not part of the West Coast fivesome of Cal, Stanford, USC, UCLA and Washington.

But ultimately, meeting secretly at Gilhooley’s Restaurant in New York City in 1960, Clausen and the ADs from Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah settled on six schools. After political differences were solved, ASU and BYU were the last to be added.

“We had to step up in class,” said Clausen, who said the idea of the WAC was formally presented at the 1960 NCAA Convention in an agreement between him and New Mexico AD Peter McDavid. “We had many, many talks with the Oregon schools, but it became clear to me that they wanted to get back with USC and UCLA. So we moved on.”

It didn’t help that the Portland Oregonian newspaper referred to Arizona and ASU as “cowtown” schools, even though the population of Tucson was more than four times that of Oregon, OSU and WSU.

On Sept. 22, 1962, Arizona played its first game as a founding member of the WAC, beating BYU 27-21 in front of a sellout crowd at Arizona Stadium. A few months later, Clausen announced 10,000 seats would be added to the stadium. Plans to replace Bear Down Gym as home of UA basketball began that year, although it would take another decade to complete the financing and construction.

“No tears were shed when they laid the Border Conference to rest,” wrote Star sports columnist Abe Chanin in 1962. “The Border Conference was a failure. It had failed to live up to the dreams of its founders and it came to a sorry end in almost total disintegration.

“From its inception in 1931, the Border Conference had a healthy growth until after World War II. But soon Texas Tech and New Mexico left for better opportunities. And Arizona has simply outgrown its old place.”

Where are they now: Clausen remained Arizona’s athletic director until 1972. His administration was as productive as any in school history. He got McKale Center built, hired Jerry Kindall (cq Jerry Kindall) as baseball coach, hired the first NCAA Division I African-American head coach in any sport, track coach Willie Williams (Cq Willie Williams), and laid the groundwork for gaining admittance to the Pac-10 in 1978. He died in Tucson in 2000; he was 88.

How they did it: Tucson was also the birthplace of the Border Conference, in 1931. UA professor Emil Larson was the conference commissioner for the entire duration of the league, 1931-61.

Photo: Arizona athletic director Dick Clausen, April 8, 1969. Photo by Jack W. Sheaffer / Arizona Daily Star file photo