Levy’s Lobos: a fond remembrance

I loved being a kid in Albuquerque in the ‘50s.

Dukes games at Tingley Field. Riding my bike everywhere. Swimming at the A-Pool and at the Coronado Club on Sandia Base (now Kirtland East). Our black-and-white Packard Bell TV. The party line on our rotary-dial phone (oops, sorry, wrong ring). Sunday dinner after church at Sigler’s Cafeteria on East Central or La Placita in Old Town.

And, maybe more than anything, the renaissance of UNM Lobo football under coach Marv Levy.

Levy, UNM’s head coach in 1958-59 and a Lobos assistant for two years prior, turned 100 years old last Sunday after a storied college and pro career that earned him a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

He’ll likely never know how much his short stay in Albuquerque enriched my life — and, maybe, pointed me in a career direction.

I started following the Lobos in the Albuquerque Journal in 1955 at the age of 7, expanding my third-grade reading vocabulary to include terms such as “fumble recovery,” “offsides penalty” and “hung in effigy” — that last seeing print shortly before the end of a 2-8 season.

To no one’s surprise, coach Bob Titchenal — he of the effigy-hanging — was fired that December. In came Dick Clausen, who’d been a successful head coach at Coe College in Iowa. Clausen brought with him several of his assistants from Coe, Levy among them.

The Lobos went 4-6 in each of two seasons under Clausen, who then left to become the athletic director at the University of Arizona. Athletic Director Pete McDavid unhesitatingly elevated Levy, then 32, to head coach.

Clausen had not left the cupboard bare. By far the most important piece was halfback Don Perkins, who’d rushed for 744 yards on 112 carries as a sophomore in ‘57.

Levy astutely scrapped Clausen’s Split-T offense for the Wing-T, the better to unleash a ground game built around Perkins but with ample contributions from Highland High grads Tony Gray and Bob Crandall and junior college transfer fullback Bo Bankston.

Until 1958, I’d seen just one Lobo football game in person — that a 41-7 loss to old nemesis Arizona at UNM’s Zimmerman field in ‘54. My brother Dan and I had gotten free tickets somehow, but the seats were in the end zone bleachers and as a 6-year old I’d really had no idea from that vantage point what was happening on the field — just a bunch of big kids running around in funny suits.

Typically, I’d listen to Lobo games, home and away, on our floor-model Philco radio — sitting next to it on the living-room couch or on the floor next to the speaker if I needed to keep the volume down.

Thus, when my dad took me to the Lobos’ Oct. 4, 1958 game against Skyline Conference rival Montana, it was my 10-year-old self’s first in-person experience with Lobo football under Levy.

Gray and Perkins ran wild that night, the Lobos won 44-16, and I was hooked.

The Lobos went 7-3 in ‘58, and Levy, Perkins & Company had made Zimmerman Field the place to be on Saturdays in the fall. It helped that Levy, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate at Coe and having earned a Master’s degree from Harvard, was an amiable, witty and erudite frontman for his program.

In recognition of the growing interest, construction began in the summer of 1959 on what would become University Stadium.

The ‘59 season opened discordantly, with losses to New Mexico State and Colorado State. But Levy righted the ship, and the Lobos entered a Nov. 14 home game against perennial power Wyoming with a 6-2 record and a chance for their first-ever outright Skyline championship.

One of my parents dropped me off at the stadium that afternoon, and I went to the ticket window — only to be turned away. Sold out. Sorry, kid.

As fortune would have it, Ongelo Pierson, my schoolteacher mother’s principal at Sandia Base Elementary, was working the gate as a ticket taker. Seeing my long face, Mr. Pierson pointed to a vacant spot on the same end zone bleachers I’d occupied during that Arizona game in ‘54. “Go sit over there,” he said. So I did.

Heartbreak ensued.

Perkins’ 90-yard touchdown return of the second-half kickoff gave the Lobos a 20-13 lead. The Cowboys quickly responded with a touchdown drive, but failed on a 2-point conversion attempt, leaving UNM up 20-19.

Just as it appeared that lead would hold up to the final gun, Cowboys quarterback Jim “Mississippi Gambler” Walden looked right, wheeled to his left and hit Dick Hamilton with a 78-yard touchdown pass with some two minutes left in the game. Wyoming prevailed, 25-20.

All was not lost. The following Saturday, the Lobos traveled to Denver and dramatically defeated an Air Force team that had humiliated them 45-7 the previous year at Zimmerman. Perkins was named the Associated Press Back of the Week for his starring role in the 28-27 upset.

For Perkins and for Zimmerman Field, 1959 was a wrap. It would be, it turned out, for Levy as well. In February 1960, he accepted the head coaching job at the University of California.

The momentum created by Levy stretched into the mid-60s. Bill Weeks, who like Levy had been a Clausen assistant, then stayed on with Levy, stepped into the top job. The next five seasons, he guided the Lobos to a 34-17-1 record. Weeks’ Lobos shared or won outright the first three Western Athletic Conference titles.

Yet, for a kid who’d reached the ripe old age of 12 by the time Levy left, it was never quite the same after 1959.

Levy was gone, Perkins was gone, and University Stadium never had the intimate charm of Zimmerman Field.

As big a Lobo fan as I remained, particularly of spectacular little halfback Bobby Santiago — an Albuquerque kid, after all — something was missing. The ‘60s just weren’t the ‘50s.

Trite but true: you’re only a kid once.

And Marv, thank you.