Editor’s note: In the Colorado Classics series, The Denver Post takes a weekly look at individuals who made their mark on the Colorado sports landscape and what they are doing now.
The year before Jack Williams arrived from Oklahoma to take over the baseball program at Lamar Community College, southeastern Colorado was hit by a severe drought.
With the area in the grips of a water shortage, Williams didn’t exactly find a field of dreams in 1970 when he fielded his first team.
“The sun had really baked the ground and we lost all the grass on the infield,” Williams, 81, said from his home in Houston. “Our infield was heavy sand and kind of an unusual surface. But we had a good playing surface even without grass.”
Williams was that way. He didn’t let shortcomings in facilities or anything else bother him. He just went to work, and over the next seven years put together a baseball program that ruled the state in junior college competition.
“We won our regional tournament all seven years, but we never were able to get to Grand Junction,” Williams said, referring to the Junior College World Series. “We never could beat Meramec (Community College of St. Louis) in the districts.”
But the losses to Meramec hardly will be mentioned when Williams and players from his seven teams gather for a reunion June 14-17 at Runyon Field in Pueblo.
There will be plenty to talk about and plenty of laughs to go around. Lamar’s baseball program wasn’t overly well-funded. Accommodations on road trips could well be sleeping bags, with lodging space in a local high school gymnasium, if the coaches and players were lucky. And there was the Blue Goose, the name applied to a bus that hauled the Antelopes near and far for road games.
“We’d take 25 players on the road,” Williams said. “We went everywhere for games: Oklahoma, Arizona, anywhere we could get scheduled. Sometimes we’d play a few games at sites on the way. We never stayed at hotels.”
One thing’s for sure: There were plenty of innings to go around. Sometimes, pitchers would umpire on their off days.
“We weren’t in a conference, so there wasn’t a limit on the number of games we could play,” Williams said. “We played an unbelievable number of games, maybe 65 in the fall and 80 in the spring. We played tripleheaders and sometimes even four games in a day. We had about 130 players overall from 14 states, including Colorado.”
Williams said he has no idea what his record was at Lamar. No one kept track, and the results have long ago become property of a wastebasket.
Baseball had been added to Lamar’s sports program three years before Williams arrived, but had not produced much attention. The biggest story of the era was a victory over Trinidad State Junior College in basketball when Spencer Haywood played for Trinidad.
During Williams’ time, there were some star players. Brothers Carl and Gary Krug came out of Colorado Springs, Gary Krug taking the long way to Lamar after going first to the University of Colorado.
Williams thinks Gary Krug, who went on to coach baseball and softball at Cheyenne Mountain High School in Colorado Springs, was his best player.
“I think Gary Krug was the best left-handed hitter in the country in 1975, when he led the nation in home runs, doubles and RBIs,” Williams said. “He went on to play at Oklahoma. Our best team was in 1974.”
In 1972, Lamar needed a basketball coach, and Williams did double duty for five years. Gary Krug scored 39 points in a game against Casper before concentrating on baseball.
“Nothing fazed him,” Krug said of Williams. “He always was in control of everything. He drove one of the vans on our basketball trips.”
A baseball maverick, Williams didn’t believe in the sacrifice bunt, saying, “We didn’t even have a bunt sign.”
Although Williams took the basketball coaching job more or less out of necessity, baseball was his sport.
“I went to two high schools in Oklahoma, and neither one had baseball,” Williams said. “I played on sandlot teams in the summer. I remember listening to games on the radio almost all night. I read books on baseball. In one of the books, Paul Richards (a former White Sox and Orioles manager) said the sacrifice bunt was a bad play.”
Williams returned to Oklahoma when he left Lamar. He went on to coach women’s basketball at Redlands Community College in El Reno, Okla.
“Several people have wanted to write a book about my coaching career,” Williams said. “They’d have to change the names to protect the guilty.”
Scott Crampton, the baseball coach at Lamar the past 14 years, fills in some gaps.
“The program at Lamar almost vanished in the 1980s,” Crampton said. “Baseball didn’t do very well from 1978 to about 1993. There’s a much different look to the baseball complex now. We’ve rebuilt the program. We’ve come out of the dark ages quite a bit.”
Crampton hopes to attend the reunion to hear the stories.
For two or three days, the Blue Goose will be on the road again. It will log a lot of memory miles.
Irv Moss can be reached at 303-954-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com.
