Bohling, Highland star fullback of the ‘50s and a dedicated coach, dies at 87

To a lad of 10 or so, the 16-year-old Dewey Bohling seemed like a giant — a man among boys.

“I mean, he just knocked people over,” said Fred Hultberg, recalling the Bohling of 1954, whom the young Hultberg watched with awe during Highland High School football practices. “He never tried to avoid anybody. He just ran over everybody.”

In fact, Bohling was listed at only 175 pounds during his senior season at Highland that fall. But he was clearly Mr. Inside to teammate Anthony Gray’s Mr. Outside, forming a tandem that paced HHS to its first state title that November with a 20-0 whitewash of Artesia.

Bohling, a dominant, two-sport star at Highland who went on to a sterling college football career, two seasons in the pre-merger American Football League and a high school coaching career that took him all over New Mexico, died in Albuquerque on Oct. 19. He was 87.

Matt Henry was a student at Monroe Junior High School when Bohling was the Mustangs’ football and track coach in the mid-1960s.

“His style of coaching wasn’t typical of those days,” Henry said. “Back then in football, not so much track but football, they’d scream at you. That’s how they’d motivate kids. But (Bohling) was never that way.

“He never, ever talked that way, and he was always chill with the kids. But he knew his stuff. He knew how to coach kids, and he knew how to treat kids.”

Marty Watts, who was a year behind Henry at Monroe, remembers coming up just short of the points required to earn a letter in track. Bohling awarded him a letter anyway.

“I’ve never forgotten that,” Watts said.

To the Highland Hornets’ and New Mexico prep football’s everlasting good fortune, Bohling had moved to Albuquerque from Nebraska with his family in 1950. With Gray, his friend and teammate, he starred in basketball and football at Jefferson Junior High. He and Gray understudied the legendary Tommy McDonald as Highland sophomores in 1952, then became the backfield one-two punch that sparked the Hornets to that 1954 state title.

At Highland, Bohling was a state-champion discus thrower as well as a dominant fullback. His throw of 179 feet, 3/4 inches as a senior was an all-time state best — not a state record because it wasn’t achieved at the state championship meet — and came within 5 feet of the all-time national prep record held at the time by a New York teenager named Al Oerter, who would go on to win four Olympic gold medals.

Whether for football or track or both, according to an April 1955 Albuquerque Journal story, Bohling had scholarship offers out of Highland from at least 10 colleges, including UNM, and got letters/phone calls from the likes of Southern Cal, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

None of those was where he wound up.

Bohling was preparing to play in a national prep all-star game in Memphis, Tennessee when he caught the eye of legendary college and pro quarterback Sammy Baugh, who’d just taken the head-coaching job at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. Bohling decided Hardin-Simmons was the place, and Baugh the coach, for him.

Bohling threw the discus for the Cowboys, though he never again approached Al Oerter status. But on the gridiron, he was an All-Border Conference halfback and helped Hardin-Simmons earn a bid to the 1958 Sun Bowl.

Hardin-Simmons lost to Wyoming in a Cowboys-vs.-Cowboys Sun Bowl matchup, despite an 83-yard kickoff return from Bohling.

After his college career, Bohling was selected by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 13th round of the 1959 NFL Draft. He didn’t make the team and sat out the season.

As fortune would have it, Baugh was hired as the New York Titans (later the Jets) head coach after the ‘59 season and signed his former Hardin-Simmons halfback as a free agent. Bohling rushed for 431 yards on 123 carries during the 1960 season and scored two touchdowns, one on a 20-yard pass reception from Al Dorow — providing the winning margin in a 31-28 victory over the Oakland Raiders on Dec. 12.

Bohling was waived by the Titans during the 1961 season, then hooked on with the Buffalo Bills. He finished the season with the Bills, but that was the end of his playing career.

His prep coaching career began, one that took him to virtually every corner of New Mexico, shortly thereafter.

Over the course of three decades (1967-97), according to newspaper archives, Bohling made stops at:

Questa, 1967-68; Lordsburg, 1968-70; Wingate, 1970-77; Taos, 1983-86 (was out of coaching from ‘77-83); Navajo Pine, 1986-87; Valley (assistant), 1987-88; Santa Fe (assistant), 1988-89; back to Questa, 1989-90; Animas, 1991-92; Cuba,1992-97.

Bohling’s high school football teams never won a state title or played in a state title game. But there’s this telling quote in an August 1991 Journal story, after Bohling had taken up the challenge of replacing the highly successful Billy Henson in Animas:

“No ego,” he told the Journal’s Phill Casaus. “I go into it with no ego.”

Bohling was blessed, he told the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1985 while at Taos, to have played for two legendary coaches: Baugh at Hardin-Simmons and with the Titans, and Hugh Hackett, for whom he played at Highland.

Watts and Henry said they feel equally blessed having played for Bohling at Monroe, where he took the Mustangs to football and track city championships.

Henry, a former UNM star track athlete and a longtime APS track-and-field coach, reconnected with his old mentor after Bohling retired. He’s helped to support Bohling, who was overtaken by dementia in recent years.

His memories of Bohling, he said, begin and end with the strong, caring man who coached him with such dedication and enthusiasm at Monroe.

“He was a very special man,” Henry said. “… When he was with me, he was dynamite.”