NSU basketball teams say goodbye to storied Jack Dobbins Field House with wins

BY JIMMIE TRAMEL World Sports Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2013
2/28/13 at 8:50 AM

TAHLEQUAH - That's how you close an arena.

Northeastern State has been playing basketball games at Jack Dobbins Field House since the 1954-55 season. The Riverhawks played their last regular-season game there Wednesday night - they'll move into a new $14.4 million facility next season - and the finish was straight out of Hollywood.

Junior guard Bryton Hobbs flirted with a triple-double (22 points, nine rebounds, eight assists) and was hoisted into the air by students who stormed the court after NSU needed overtime to secure an 83-71 victory over Central Oklahoma.

Hobbs scored eight points in overtime as the RiverHawks outscored the Bronchos 15-3 in the extra period.

Hobbs was worried students might drop him. Coach Larry Gipson lost his glasses during a postgame celebration. Glasses search or not, he was glad his team survived scoring only two points in the last four minutes of regulation (Landon DeMasters forced overtime by scoring inside with 14.2 seconds left) to go out a winner on a night when NSU honored its 2003 national championship team and closed a chapter in school history.

The farewell doubleheader - NSU's women started the evening with a victory over UCO - will provide one last tale for people to share about Jack Dobbins Field House. The building has stories. Among them:

Time for change

Students were paid 50 cents an hour to do clean-up work during the construction of what would become Jack Dobbins Field House in the 1950s. And they were glad to get pocket change.

"I would have killed for 50 cents an hour," said one of the students who chipped in to help.

The student? It was Ken Hayes, who arrived at NSU in the spring of 1954 and was a player when the Redmen began competing in their new home.

"When that thing opened, we thought it was Madison Square Garden at the time," Hayes said.

Hayes became NSU's head coach in the 1980s, after coaching stops at Bacone, New Mexico State, Tulsa and Oral Roberts. Some of ORU's players were so loyal to Hayes that they followed him to Tahlequah and lifted the Redmen to a No. 1 ranking during the 1984-85 season.

Worm invasion

Many outstanding NSU players competed in the field house. Among them: Darnell Hinson, the MVP of the NCAA Division II national tournament in 2003, and Charlie Paulk, who teamed with Richard "X-Ray" Dumas (he scored a school-record 50 in a game against John Brown University) to lead the Redmen to the 1968 NAIA Tournament.

Hinson is playing overseas. Paulk was selected seventh overall by the Milwaukee Bucks in the 1968 NBA draft and once was traded for Oscar Robertson. Paulk was inducted in the NAIA Hall of Fame 10 years after his college career ended and he attended the farewell game.

Many great players also played the role of "villain" at the field house. Most notable was Dennis "Worm" Rodman, who was a three-time NAIA All-American at Southeastern State University in the 1980s before winning five NBA championships.

Because of Rodman's nickname, NSU students came to games armed with plastic worms (fishing lures) "and they would jiggle those things up and down to try to intimidate him," Hayes said.

Former NSU player Danny Limes (now a coach at Bishop Kelley High School) recalled fans throwing worms on the floor when Rodman was introduced before a game. Limes said Rodman responded by going over to the student section and using both hands for a not-very-nice gesture.

"Looking back on it, there's the beginning of his crazy," Limes said, adding that Rodman loved playing at Jack Dobbins Field House because he gained fuel from the fans.

Rodman was such a dominant force that fans perhaps got a hint they were watching a rock star in waiting. Former NSU sports information directors Scott Pettus and Doug Quinn recalled watching Rodman dive head-first into the bleachers in pursuit of a loose ball. There was a brief hush to see if Rodman would emerge from the crash. By the time the "Worm" popped up, he had won respect and applause from Redmen fans.

Name on the building

The joint wasn't always called Jack Dobbins Field House. It was Redman Field House until former president W. Roger Webb announced at an NSU Athletic Hall of Fame banquet that he was going to suggest to the board of regents a renaming of the facility to Jack Dobbins Field House.

Webb's words resulted in a standing ovation and a 1994 christening of Jack Dobbins Field House.

Putting Dobbins' name on the building was a perfect way to honor Mr. NSU.

Dobbins, a 1947 graduate of Coweta High School, spent 55 years as a student, coach, teacher and administrator at NSU and still attends games in the arena that bears his name.

Dobbins served three tours of duty as head basketball coach, twice jumping back into the fold when his successors resigned after only one season. Dobbins-coached teams reached the NAIA's national tournament in 1968 (when he was national coach of the year and Tahlequah's citizen of the year) and he's in the NAIA Hall of Fame, but it's perhaps most telling that he once was named NSU's teacher of the year.

Wrote Dobbins in a 1984 guest column for the Tulsa World, "I believe that any university that places athletic accomplishments above academic achievements is deceiving those young people that participate in athletics."

Dobbins retired as NSU's athletic director in 1993.

A star is born

The careers of Redmen and Lady Reds and RiverHawk basketball players weren't the only careers launched at Jack Dobbins Field House.

Once upon a time, a campus fraternity (Phi Lambda Chi) had gotten on the wrong side of a dean (think "Animal House" on a lesser scale). The frat needed to do something, a charity fundraiser perhaps, for the sake of image enhancement.

Car wash? Boring.

A student from Westville was in the frat and was among frat members who liked the idea of staging a pro wrestling show at the field house. The frat put together a plan and contacted Leroy McGuirk and "Cowboy" Bill Watts, who ruled the Tulsa-area pro wrestling kingdom.

Terms were reached and pro wrestlers who appeared on TVs all over the 918 area code were all of a sudden driving to Tahlequah (good guys and bad guys in separate cars, of course) to body slam each other at the field house.

"We had people coming out of the hills for that thing," said the kid from Westville, adding that not many spectators could have passed successfully through a metal detector because they might have been armed with something to cut a bad guy, if necessary.

Danny Hodge was the headliner of the show and nobody got cut because the frat arranged for security.

In fact, the frat did such a good job in all phases, promotion included, that Watts headlined a second show and asked the kid from Westville "got any plans after college?"

The kid from Westville went to work for Watts and McGuirk, initially earning $125 a week and getting his first chance to work behind the microphone as a commentator when a broadcaster in Shreveport was unavailable to go on the air.

The "kid" is Jim Ross, who turned those frat shows into a hall of fame career. Inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2007, Ross is a former executive vice president who serves as a senior adviser for WWE.

Was a pro fishing career launched at Jack Dobbins Field House also? Jason Christie, who finished seventh at the just-concluded Bassmaster Classic in Tulsa, is a former NSU player who hit 10 3-pointers in a 1995 game against College of the Ozarks.

The final chapter

Packed bleachers were an obvious sign that people wanted to be able to say they were at the farewell games.

Capacity is listed at 1,000, but attendance was 1,224 for a women's game in which NSU got 21 points from Tosha Tyler, 15 from Taylor Lewis and nine second-half points from Chelsey Stricklen in a 64-58 victory.

Coach Randy Gipson's team (he's the brother of the men's coach) rallied from a 10-point deficit to improve to 11-0 at home this season and 46-3 at home during the careers of current seniors.

Providing a lift were rowdy students who wore green body paint and green wigs. Tyler used the words "awesome" and "amazing" when describing the crowd.

"I know over the years this gym has been like this on many occasions," Randy Gipson said. "To finish it out the last time playing here and have this kind of crowd and the excitement in the gym is really fitting all the way around."

After the men's game, Larry Gipson said, "This put a cap on what was a great evening for Northeastern State."

If one era ended Wednesday, another began, at least for two people.

At halftime of the men's game, NSU senior Eric Swaim took the public address microphone and proposed to cheerleader Erin Hollingsworth near the scorer's table. She said yes.

Original Print Headline: A fitting farewell

Jimmie Tramel 918-581-8389
jimmie.tramel@tulsaworld.com

Associated Images:

NSU's Bryton Hobbs celebrates a win over Central Oklahoma on Wednesday in Tahlequah. The game was the last regular-season game at the school's Jack Dobbins Field House. MATT BARNARD / Tulsa World

The final regular-season game was played NSU's Jack Dobbins Field House on Wednesday in Tahlequah. MATT BARNARD / Tulsa World