Schonely Award winner Sellers: ’As good as they come’

When Joel Roth of the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame called with some good news, Larry Sellers was catching up on a little reading.

“I was reading your book about Bill Schonely,” says Sellers, the reference to my “Wherever You May Be … Now: the Bill Schonely Story.”

Roth was calling to inform Sellers that he is being honored with the Bill Schonely Award, given to an individual who has significantly impacted sports in Oregon. The annual banquet is Tuesday at Doubletree/Lloyd Center.

“How ironic is that?” Sellers asks with a laugh.

Sellers got to know Schonely — the legendary former broadcaster of the Trail Blazers — during nearly three decades as a member of the NBA club’s statistics crew.

“I’m humbled to receive an award named for the Schonz,” Sellers says.

But Sellers, 87, earned the award for his work as sports information director at Portland State for 31 years, from 1968 to 1999. Those who worked with him on the Park Blocks are pleased with the recognition for their former cohort.

“Take the professional part out of it; it couldn’t happened to a better man,” says Tim Walsh, PSU’s head football coach from 1993-2006. “Larry worked behind the scenes and did his job as well as anybody I ever worked with, and never wanted to be in the limelight for it.”

“I nominated Larry for this award several years ago,” says Jack Dunn, the Vikings’ head baseball coach from 1975-94. “I’m so happy for him. Larry put Portland State athletics on the map.”

“Larry is as good as they come,” says Mouse Davis, the Viks’ head football coach from 1975-80. “He did his job very easily and did it like you should do it. He enjoyed everything about it and everyone enjoyed him. He is that kind of guy.”

I always kidded Larry that he was the most aptly named sports promotions guy in the country. His job was to sell Portland State athletics to the media, and he did it expertly.

“One piece of advice Larry gave me when I first started: Don’t burn bridges,” says Mike Lund, Sellers’ successor at PSU. “You learn to get along and relate to everyone you come into contact with. I gleaned that from watching Larry operate.

“We know who we are at Portland State. We’re not the Blazers. Not the Ducks. Not the Beavers. We need to make it easy for the media. We need to do what we can to help them and make them want to cover us.”

Sellers was the closest in personality and performance of any SID I dealt with in working for Portland newspapers for 45 years to my father, John Eggers, who worked at Oregon State from 1950-80.

Dad was innovative — he mounted the first Heisman Trophy campaign that helped Terry Baker win in 1962 — but also thorough, and he understood what the job should be about. In that position, you are an ambassador for your university or pro team. Treat the media with respect. Serve as a conduit, not as a roadblock. That benefits your athletes and teams in the long run. And if the reporter needs no help, let him do his job. Not everybody in the business understands it.

Lund understands that, and Sellers certainly did, though it is a much different world today, with coaches — and sometimes athletes — making so much money, they don’t feel like they have to cooperate with the press.

In more simple times, Walsh, Dunn and Davis were great to work with. As was Sellers.

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As a youth, Larry Sellers thought he might want to become … a sportswriter (courtesy Sellers family)

Sellers’ roots in Banks are deep. Born in 1936 toward the end of the Great Depression, he grew up in a log house in the rural community west of Portland. His grandparents homesteaded in the area in 1891. His mother, Dorothy, was the lone member of the first Banks High graduating class of 1920. His father, Bernard, played on the first Banks High basketball team in 1920-21.

The Sellers were farmers. For awhile, Dorothy was also a schoolteacher in Thatcher, located between Banks and Forest Grove, teaching grades 1 through 8 in a single classroom.

The Sellers consistently had 20 acres of strawberries and 24 acres of prunes. Migrant workers would come from Oklahoma and Arkansas to harvest fruit on their property after World War II in the late 1940s and early ‘50s.

“Dad had about 10 tents and cabins on the farm to provide housing,” Larry says.

There were also plenty of farm animals — pigs, cows, chickens and turkeys.

“We lived off what the family raised and grew,” Larry says.

He and sister Janet, 8 years older, picked crops and had plenty of chores growing up.

“Hard work, for sure,” Larry says. “But extremely satisfying, and of course absolutely necessary.”

The Sellers house didn’t have electricity until 1946, when Larry was 10. Until then, a wood furnace was the main heat source. A wood stove was used for cooking and canning and kerosene lamps for light. Entertainment was provided by a large console radio in a corner of the living room.

“We had a 10-party telephone line,” Sellers says. “Our phone number was 353. Talk about simpler times.”

Larry, long and lean at 6-3, was a pretty good athlete at Banks High — a first baseman in baseball, a center in basketball and a quarterback/defensive tackle in football.

During the era of George Mikan, Sellers had a sweet hook shot, too, playing for Banks High (courtesy Sellers family)

“Yeah, I was all-city,” Sellers says. “I always laughed at that.”

At first, Sellers dreamed of becoming a sportscaster.

“I would recreate baseball games out loud while I was picking berries in the fields,” he says.

Then he wanted to be a sportswriter.

“I wrote sports for the school paper in high school and went to Pacific U on a scholarship in journalism,” he says.

His interest flipped back to sportscasting, and Sellers transferred after one year to Oregon, where he got his degree in radio/TV broadcasting. By that time, he was married. Larry and Janice remain together, 64 years later.

Larry and Janice Sellers have been married 64 years (courtesy Sellers family)

For nearly 50 years, the two have lived on the house they built on a piece of property a mile and a half from the farm in which Larry was raised. The farm’s address was route 1, box 193. When Washington County named its roads in the ‘70s, they called it “Sellers Road.”

The Sellers own two plots of land near their property that they lease for farming grain crops, grass and hay.

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Sellers’ first radio job was at KVAS in Astoria, doing news and deejaying music. After six months — and three months after marrying Janice — they moved to the Portland area and he took a job at KGON in Oregon City, working as a DJ and calling high school football and basketball.

Larry decided he needed a graduate degree, so in 1961, they headed for Michigan State, where he got his Masters in communications. They returned to Oregon in 1962.

For the next three years, Larry worked a variety of jobs. He was a DJ and studio host at KOIN radio, moonlighted as an engineer on a graveyard shift at KISN radio and worked part-time at Multnomah Kennel Club in Troutdale, selling wagers and occasionally serving as track announcer for the dog races.

After seven years in radio, Sellers left broadcasting for sales jobs with Allstate Insurance and Xerox copy machines. During that time, he served as public-address announcer for football and basketball games at Portland State. In 1968, athletic director Skip Stahley offered him the sports information director position.

“I must have liked the job to stay there for 31 years,” Sellers muses.

For more than 20 years, until Lund came on as an assistant in 1989, Sellers was a one-man show. Not only did he have to take care of all the men’s (and soon women’s) sports, he also served as radio broadcaster for PSU football. Viking games had never been on radio.

Nobody ever said Sellers was tidy when he served as Vikings’ SID (courtesy Sellers family)

Sellers approached KOIN station manager Bill Mears with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sellers would call the games and Mears wouldn’t have an announcer. And Mears wouldn’t have to pay travel expenses because Sellers traveled with the team, anyway. Sellers called play-by-play for 15 years and served as analyst for another seven or eight. And as someone who heard him work, he wasn’t half-bad.

“It was a combination of things I was interested in — journalism, broadcasting and sports,” Sellers says. “The ultimate triple-header for me.

“Promoting our coaches and athletes and forming friendships with them and media members along the way was interesting and rewarding. Many became like an extended family.”

Sellers says he never had a coach he didn’t enjoy working with. Coaches in the “Olympic” sports, he says, “were all appreciative of anything I could do for them.”

(Contrast that with my father’s experience at Oregon State. Wrestling’s Dale Thomas and track and field’s Berny Wagner were always grumbling about lack of coverage and blamed him for it.)

When I press Sellers for favorites among the coaches he worked with, he comes up with a few:

• Dunn. “Funniest person I have ever known. He can make laughter out of disaster.”

• Walsh and Don Read, another former head football coach: “Fantastic people and friends who treated everyone the same, no matter their status; so considerate.”

• Davis: “A fun guy to be around. A down-to-earth great guy. He is extremely caring and thoughtful. I remember after his first game as head coach (a 35-34 loss at Montana State) him consoling his players and coaches on the field.”

• Roy Love, who served as head baseball coach, head golf coach and assistant football coach at PSU and was also the Vikings’ athletic director from 1975-93: “Roy was a close friend. He was successful in baseball and was pretty doggone sharp at judging character. He hired Read, Mouse, Pokey Allen and Ken Edwards during his time as AD.”

• Teri Mariani, long-time softball coach and assistant AD: “Teri was successful in whatever she did, and was great to work with. When I was calling football on the radio, she was running the press box for me.”

All of those people love Sellers, too.

“He is the kindest human being ever,” says Walsh, 68, now retired in living in Pahrump, Nev., about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. “He had a personality of wanting others to be good and doing whatever it took to help make others good. He was a pleasure to work with. He had a quiet sense of humor. He would say things and I’d just crack up. I followed Pokey in the job at Portland State, which wasn’t easy. Larry helped me meet people and gave me confidence we’d be all right.”

“Larry had his finger to the pulse of what was going on in the athletic world and got us publicity when it was warranted,” says Dunn, 94, retired and living in Portland. “He was a great person to work with. Just a super individual who busted his fanny to help us get the attention we wanted.”

“He was a selfless, unassuming guy, and he was no phony,” says Davis, 91, retired and living in Houston. “Larry was a genuine giving guy. Everything he did was for everyone except himself. He’s the right kind of fella to have around in any business.”

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As if Sellers didn’t have enough things to do —  including help raise daughters Suzanne (Kirkpatrick), Cindy( Stang) and Tami (McNamara) — he was also on the stat crew for all home games of the Trail Blazers from the inaugural 1970-71 season until he retired at Portland State in 1999. He kept rebounds and blocked shots through most of that time.

“I very much enjoyed it,” he says. “It was a lot of fun. I had a great seat and good people to work with.”

For most of those years, before Portland traffic became a nightmare, Sellers had a game-day routine down.

“I’d leave PSU at about a quarter to five, be home in half an hour and have dinner with the family” in Banks, he says. “My goal was to get to the arena at five minutes ’til 7. I could count on traffic in those days. I had a good parking spot at the Coliseum. I’d walk in during the national anthem and be ready to go.

“About the time I quit at Portland State, I was tired of the Jail Blazers. That was enough.”

Sellers also handled public-address announcer chores for the state high school basketball tournament “for a couple of decades.”

When Lund arrived in 1990, the world turned for Sellers.

“He helped me tremendously in the transition into the computer age,” Sellers says. “It doesn’t come naturally to people who didn’t grow up with it. He helped me along. When I started, it was typewriters and dittos and blue ink and running off copies.”

Sellers did a good job showing the business to Lund in his years as an assistant.

In the 1990s, Portland State’s SID crew consistent of, left to right, Mike Lund, Jodi Pfaender and Larry Sellers (courtesy Sellers family)

“Anybody who knows Larry knows what a good soul he is,” Lund says. “He is one of the kindest, friendliest people you’d ever know. He made it easy for me. I was young and not too skilled or experienced. He had the patience to let me do the things I did, whether good or bad. He appreciated I was there working in a profession where people tend to be swamped and overworked.”

Sellers took Lund with him when he went out on errands. They’d go to lunch, “or to the Carnival for a milkshake,” Lund says. He introduced Lund about town.

“He always included me, though I was a much younger guy,” says Lund, 58. “It was a good education outside the office. Meeting those people, learning a little more of the history of the school and the city, was good for me.

“Secondarily, I learned right away you can go a long way with a lot of friendliness and kindness. Everybody in town knew him. He was good to everybody.”

Lund has now been Portland State’s head SID for 24 years, meaning that the school has had two people fill the position over the last 55 years. That’s continuity. And both have proved excellent at doing the job.

“I liked my job and never wanted to move out of this area,” Sellers says. “I don’t know that Mike does, either. He would certainly have had an opportunity go somewhere else if he wanted to.”

Ironically, Lund met Sellers when he became a member of the Blazers’ stat crew in 1987. It opened the door for him to get hired by Sellers on a six-month contract from August 1989 to the end of basketball season in 1990.

“I was paid $5,400,” Lund says with a chuckle, “but it got my foot in the door.”

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Life is good for Sellers these days. He enjoys time with his wife, daughters and five grandchildren. Since retirement, he and Janice have enjoyed traveling, including three trips to Europe.

Sellers won’t miss watching televised Oregon State and Oregon football games and will watch the Trail Blazers “now that DirecTV is contracted with them,” he says. “But Janice can watch them longer than I can.”

Larry is still fit, in part because of his puttering around doing chores on their two acres off of Sellers Road.

“We don’t walk as far as we used to, but we try to get out several days a week to walk on the road in front of our house for 25 minutes or so,” he says. “I keep busy. This morning, I was out covering up burning piles I had to get rid of. I spray blackberries. Do stuff around some of the buildings. It keeps me active.”

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