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<\/a><\/p>\nBOYD MCCASLIN, 2009<\/p>\n
Editor’s Note: The \u00a0story below first ran in The Sports Paper in December of 2009. It is being reprinted because of the death of Boyd McCaslin on July 1 in Hayward, Calif. McCaslin was 87 when he died.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By Terry Mosher<\/p>\n
Editor, Sports Paper<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Another wisp of Bremerton\u2019s sporting past lives on in California, recounting the good memories of that past. Boyd McCaslin, son of a toughie named Louis Charles McCaslin in official papers but Boy McCaslin when he was punching the lights out of fighters all through the Pacific Northwest, has a clear memory of the old days that belie his 84 years of age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born in 1925 at Harrison Hospital, which was on Chester (Avenue) in Bremerton,\u201d said McCaslin from his home in Fremont, Calif. \u201cNow it\u2019s some kind of apartments for older people, I believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long before McCaslin, who has lived in Fremont for the last 49 years, turned to retirement and a golfer\u2019s life chasing after that little white ball, he came out of the blue as a basketball player. He wasn\u2019t quite good enough to be a star under Hall of Fame coach Ken Wills at Bremerton but continued to develop and as a late bloomer played college ball at Dartmouth and then Michigan before starting a career in coaching that lasted for many years and included an early stop at Bellingham where he coached the Red Raiders to five straight wins over Wills-coached Bremerton teams.<\/p>\n
He wound up coaching basketball at Arroyo high school in California where in 1966 his team shocked northern California by winning a state championship over a talented and heavily favored McClymonds team at the University of California\u2019s Harmon Gym in Berkeley.<\/p>\n
We are getting ahead of the story, however. It\u2019s a story that included McCaslin living in his early years in a little shack on the ferry dock in Port Orchard. This was before the state stepped in to take over the ferry system.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father was the agent on the ferry boat for the Black Ball Line,\u201d says McCaslin. \u201cThe ferry used to go from Seattle to Bremerton and then Port Orchard. I lived in Port Orchard until 12. We lived on the end of the dock. My father and his brother-in-law built a building, not much more than a shack. It was more like a shoebox. It didn\u2019t have a bathroom. We had to use the public bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
When McCaslin\u2019s father wasn\u2019t working for the ferry system, he was making a little cash as a pro fighter. Results for Boy McCaslin, a welterweight, are sketchy, but he did fight a guy named Enrique \u201cBattling Zuzu\u201d Zuzuarregui five times in the 1920s, winning two by knockout, losing two by knockout and drawing once. At that time, Boy McCaslin had a 9-5-1 record.<\/p>\n
Boy McCaslin also knocked out Sailor Marvin in the first round in a 1920 bout held at the Community House in Charleston (West Bremerton).<\/p>\n
\u201cThey used to have fights in Bremerton and all around the Northwest,\u201d says McCaslin. \u201cThe fans loved him. He just tore at the other guy and gave all he had. He had around 105 fights.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe quit fighting just a little bit before I was born. I know one time he was suppose to have a fight for the Pacific Welterweight Championship, but got a severe case of the boils and never followed up on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The McCaslin\u2019s eventually moved to Bremerton and lived on Lincoln Avenue. Bremerton was beginning its World War II bloom (its population would go over 80,000) and led to the Golden Age of Bremerton athletics. Many of those excellent athletes like Don Heinrich and Ted Tappe were part of the Warren Avenue Gang, although McCaslin was not.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew all those guys, but I wasn\u2019t a part of the gang,\u201d McCaslin said. \u201cBut we used to roller skate and play roller hockey on the tennis courts there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The old Bremerton High School used to be between 4th<\/sup> and 5th<\/sup> Street and McCaslin said that when the school was built at its current location, he helped build it.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 1943, I went t the Labor Union downtown and told them I wanted to work as a laborer,\u201d McCaslin said. \u201cThey set me to work building the school over in Manette. Then they started building the high school and I asked if I could transfer over there because it was closer to home. I was making $1.13 an hour and got time-and-half because I worked six days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n Before that, however, he found basketball.<\/p>\n With a little help from the custodian staff.<\/p>\n McCaslin made a deal with a custodian at the school that allowed him to get the keys to the gym so he could shoot around in the gym in the morning before school officially started.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had these plywood cutouts of policemen they placed in the street to get people to slow down and I would get up early in the morning, go to school and get those cutouts and put them out,\u201d McCaslin said.<\/p>\n In return, he got entry to the gym.<\/p>\n Those early-morning shoot-arounds in the gym would eventually pay dividends for McCaslin. But they didn\u2019t show up in high school. While he played for Wills, he was not a big star. But he did realize Wills was far ahead of what other coaches were doing.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were so many kids who wanted to play basketball,\u201d McCaslin said. \u201c He had two freshmen basketball teams. One was blue and the other was gold. There were 15 players on each one. And he had a \u201cB\u201d team made up of sophomores and then there was the junior varsity team and the varsity team.\u201d<\/p>\n McCaslin played on a freshmen team, on the \u201cB\u201d team as a sophomore and was on the junior varsity as a junior. He was on the varsity as a senior, but didn\u2019t play a whole lot.<\/p>\n The best basketball for McCaslin was yet to come.<\/p>\n In the meantime, Wills continued to develop what became a state power program by spending much of his time enticing kids to play the sport. He opened the gym at 1 p.m. on Sunday\u2019s so as not to interfere with church services and kids would flock to the gym.<\/p>\n \u201cThe kids were really into basketball,\u201d says McCaslin. \u201cIt was fun to be there. And Wills had so much energy. There was no stopping him. And he loved to play himself.\u00a0 Joe Stottlebower and myself, we would play Wills and his assistant Tinny Johnson in the springtime when the gym was empty. We had fun doing that. We held our own against them.<\/p>\n \u201cDarwin Gilchrist used to play Wills. Gilchrist was such a competitor; he wasn\u2019t going to be beat. And Wills was pretty much the same way. Wills got so ticked off at Gilchrist, he told him he wasn\u2019t going to play him anymore because he was so aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n Gilchrist became an all-state player at Bremerton, played at Olympic College, Long Island University (LIU) and Puget Sound. He lives in Manchester.<\/p>\n Stottlebower went on to make the 1944 All-Tournament team at state.<\/p>\n \u201cJoe was a very good high school player,\u201d says McCaslin. \u201cI was just a guy trying to do my best I could and learn.\u201d<\/p>\n McCaslin never quit learning. Even when he was in college, he would come home for the summers and quickly go over to Wills\u2019 home, get the keys to the gym, and practice his game for hours on end, sometimes all by himself.<\/p>\n \u201cI would do that all summer,\u201d McCaslin said. \u201cI was getting ahead of everybody else by just playing more than anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n While he was helping build the high school during the summer of his graduation, World War II droned on and when it became clear he was going to be drafted in the Army, McCaslin choose to enlist in the Navy.<\/p>\n He got into the Navy\u2019s V-12 Officer Training Program, and was sent to Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y, along Seneca Lake in the heart of New York\u2019s Fingerlakes. McCaslin played college basketball there for a year.<\/p>\n When the war started winding down, the Navy closed the V-12 program at Hobart. The Navy sent half of the students in the program to Cornell and the other half to Dartmouth, which is where McCaslin was sent.<\/p>\n That move turned out to be fortuitous because the 6-foot-2 McCaslin was coached at Dartmouth by Ozzie Cowles, who would later become instrumental in him moving on to the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just by chance I went to Dartmouth,\u201d McCaslin said.<\/p>\n