There’s ample reason to laud the 2006 Kansas baseball team that has made such a joyful noise in Big 12 circles. It deserves accolades galore. Yet let’s also honor the 1949 Jayhawks, the last KU club to capture a league title.
The current team was blessed with 12 or 13 scholarships; that colorful ’49 club had not a single baseball grant. It was driven by hustlers from other sports. Even coach Red Hogan was primarily known as a football quarterback, though he also played good baseball.
Consider the 10-deep for the ’49ers. Catcher Ken Morrow, first baseman Lou DeLuna, second baseman Jim Cavanaugh, third baseman Floyd Temple, shortstop Carl Ellis, outfielders Bud French, Dick Bertuzzi and Guy Mabry. The top pitchers were Dick Gilman and Charlie Moffett. Their 11-7 record won the Big Seven, but Oklahoma State prevailed in a Fifth District NCAA playoff.
Morrow, Temple, Ellis, French, Bertuzzi, Gilman and Moffett were on football scholarships, DeLuna and Cavanaugh were walk-ons from Kansas City and Coffeyville, and Mabry had a basketball ride. Morrow was a reserve quarterback, Temple a do-everything halfback and kickoff head-hunter, French and Bertuzzi were excellent halfbacks on tremendous teams. Gilman was a record-setting rubber-armed quarterback. He won all-league honors after being shoved under center when a crafty Missouri-sponsored wartime-eligibility ruling cost KU quarterbacks Hogan and Tom Scott days before the season opened. Ellis was an outstanding two-year tackle.
Moffett was a solid three-sport star, lettering as a versatile football halfback and also in basketball. He became one of the nation’s top-notch college football officials with a number of Rose Bowl assignments.
It’s easy to get a glow-on when you recall the fun with this gang. I was in the KU Class of ’49. It wasn’t exactly the Lawrence Loud-Singing and Heavy-Drinking Club, and it knew it was on Mount Oread to get an education, but this team enjoyed life. The camaraderie from the other sports carried over in delightful fashion.
These WERE NOT diamond ragamuffins – they could play the game damned well. Sadly, Red Hogan, Red Morrow and Bud French are gone now.
The most visible local alumnus of that club, of course, is Floyd Temple, always good at stirring up something in his impish, rascally way. He head-coached the Jayhawks for 28 years, spent 12 years as a do-everything assistant athletic director and retired in 1992 to enjoy life even more.
He was hired as coach in ’54 at the enormous salary of $2,800 and leaped at the job when Dutch Lonborg called. Temp played and managed – well – for minor-league teams like Iola. During summers, he was allowed to make extra loot by playing and managing with various clubs, and, I’m not making this up, one of his assignments was with the Moose Jaw Mallards in Saskatchewan, where he led the Ducks to big successes.
Temple assisted in football, did everything else he was asked and claimed 436 baseball victories as KU coach. “I’ve been so lucky to be around so many great people, like that ’49 team,” Temple says with little choke in the throat. Never won a league title, but he posted a .950 record in a field that counts far more.
“Seeing 95 percent of my guys graduate was my championship,” he says with understandable pride.
