Credited with changing the face of sports information publicity, John Eggers enters CoSIDA Hall of Fame
by Rod Commons, Washington State
PULLMAN, Wash. - John Harold Eggers ranks among the giants of college sports information directors, a trail blazer who showed more than half the college nation in the 1960s their athletes could receive national attention despite being from lesser known schools, especially those not situated in the eastern third of the nation.
In the fall of 1962, with 12 years of promoting Oregon State University athletes, teams and coaches under his belt, he undertook a monumental task that no one in his field thought he could accomplish.
Eggers set out to show the college football nation Oregon State University had the best player in college football, maybe the best college athlete in the nation, in Terry Baker, a quarterback who threw the ball from the left side and who handled the basketball or the baseball with equal ability.
What Eggers accomplished that fall probably exceeded anything he had hoped for and certainly changed how college sports promotion was orchestrated.
On Tuesday, July 6, the late John Harold Eggers will be inducted into the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) Hall of Fame at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, Calif. The ceremony will take place during the 2010 CoSIDA Hall of Fame Gala.
The Veterans Committee selected Eggers, who passed away in 1992, for induction.
Prior to college, Baker had excelled in football, basketball and baseball at Jefferson High in Portland. At OSU, he not only quarterbacked the football team to success, including the 1962 Liberty Bowl win, but was a starter on the Beaver basketball team that reached the Final Four in the spring of 1963.
Baker earned a slew of national awards that fall and winter and Eggers is widely credited with the success the future lawyer earned as a college athlete. Baker became the first football player west of the Mississippi River to receive the Heisman Trophy and is still the only player out of the Pacific Northwest to be so honored.
In addition, Sports Illustrated named him its Sportsman of the Year, which earned Baker a cover photo. Baker was not only a standout athlete; he was a top student, earning CoSIDA Academic All-America honors. Years later he was inducted into the CoSIDA Academic All-America Hall of Fame.
Eggers’ work on behalf of Terry Baker opened up a new world for college athletic publicists, creating a model on how to promote the student-athlete. For his 30-plus year career, Eggers was inducted into the state of Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1981 and into the Oregon State University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1991. The Portland Rose Festival Association knighted him in 1963 for his efforts on behalf of college athletes in Oregon.
Among his many passions was CoSIDA. He rarely missed national workshops in Chicago and usually could be found working at the College All-Star football game that was often held in conjunction with CoSIDA meetings.
Eggers’ love of sports dated back to Pendleton (Ore.) High, where he earned 1940 all-state honors as a senior in basketball before taking his hoop skills to Willamette University and Oregon State University (Oregon State College in those days).
From Pendleton, Eggers enrolled at Willamette University and played the sixth man role for the Bearcats as a freshman. A year later he found his college athletic career on hold after enlisting in the Navy. He spent most of his four-year military career in Panama.
When released in 1945, he returned to Oregon, but this time famed Oregon State College head basketball coach Slats Gill came calling with the offer of a chance to play basketball for the Beavers. Eggers jumped at the opportunity and enrolled in 1946.
His basketball career, however, took a strange twist a year later. Eggers had fallen in love with journalism as a career and decided, while as much as he enjoyed playing basketball, his real future was as a writer.
With the support of Gill, Eggers gave up his hard court aspirations and jumped head-long into his new love, writing about sports, especially the Beavers, and in particular the basketball team.
By the time he completed his college studies in 1949, he had served as sports editor of the school newspaper, the Barometer, and earned a position with Oregon’s premier newspaper, The Oregonian.
His stay with the Portland paper lasted less than a year when his alma mater came calling, offering him a position in 1950 as assistant to Irwin Harris in the sports information office. After two years with Harris, Eggers was named the director and held that title until retiring in the spring of 1981.
Oddly enough, he began his career as an assistant, but after being named the director, he was not able to hire his first assistant until 1968, working with minimal part-time help for 16 years.