OREGON COACH RON FINLEY

Youth passes with the people important in our youth: Oregon Coach Ron Finley.

How does anyone leave a small town? Some never do, and the towns are all better for it.

Oregon Coach Ron Finley left Newberg on a wrestling mat and he never got off. The sports world is better for him.

For some he is former Oregon Coach Ron Finley. He’ll always be the coach around here.

He was ‘that guy,’ the one who ran the wrestling table in Oregon with two high school titles, a second place in nationals at Oregon State, the 1964 Olympic Team, then high school coach before Oregon, and Olympic coach during his Oregon career.

He and Steve Prefontaine each won the fourth place medal at their Olympic Games. They probably knew each other in Eugene.

Coach Finley traveled the world and saw the sights, but still took the high school coaching job in tiny Reedsport, Oregon. How small was it? If Reedsport saw North Bend as Big City, imagine what they thought of Coos Bay.

A North Bend wrestler named Gary West made the jump from high school to Division 1 when he left the Bulldogs for the Ducks. For Oregon’s southwest coast wrestlers in the early seventies, Coach Finley’s room was the next destination, and we already had someone in there. Just follow 101 to Hwy 38 to I-5. Couldn’t be easier. One right turn, one left turn.

All you needed to do was be worthy. While a Duck, West won a national Greco-Roman title in the open division, the sort of competition that leads to Olympic Trials. Call it Man Wrestling. All you have to be is man enough.

If believing in a goal hard enough means you’re halfway there, all you need is the other half. It’s always the other half that trips people up.

One of the auditions for Oregon high school wrestlers looking for a college is the Cultural Exchange Meet. In those days the best of the best competed for trips to Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa. One of our older teammates, Robin Richards made all the trips.

I didn’t win the trip, but my teammate Mark Mullins did. He wrested his way through Japan before suiting up for the Oklahoma Sooners the next year. I did well enough to get invited on a Cultural Exchange team full of well-traveled Triple Crown wrestlers. Since I was the Greco-Champ at 190 I got a spot. To Iowa and the Junior Nationals.

We traveled to the midwest in two vans, joking about the language barrier, the food, and setting off enough fire crackers and bottle rockets to start a range fire.

Halfway through my Junior National Championship bracket, I had a hard match. In between towel waves my coach said, “Ron Finley used to circle guys fast with a leading shoulder. He’d fake an attack, then counter the other guy’s defense. He circled instead of tying up and pummeling.”

Great advice to someone getting pummeled. If it was good enough for Oregon Coach Ron Finley, it was good enough for me. Besides, now I had someone to blame if I lost.

This might have been the moment I knew I wasn’t Division 1 material, but I won, then won again, and kept winning until the Round Robin Finals where each weight had three guys wrestle off.

I tied the eventual champ, Silverton’s Larry Bielenberg, who turned into an Oregon State champion.

He’d already decisioned the New York guy, and future Iowa champ, who I faced in the tournament’s last match of the night.

It happened on an Iowa campus BDG, or Before Dan Gable, on a mat circled by wrestlers and the stands full of screaming wrestling experts. If I out-pointed my guy by enough I might win the Greco title due to the tie with the other guy.

If I pinned my guy I’m the champ. I needed to pin him.

It felt odd circling a guy fast, but Coach Finley’s style worked. I faked, he twitched, I countered and threw him to his back three times.

Then lost by a point for third place.

The two guys ahead of me went on to big things. My bragging rights from then on was I got beat by really good wrestlers. A few bad ones, too, but I leave that out.

I owe Ron Finley a debt of gratitude, both for the style my coach explained between rounds, and for treating my old coach so well when he retired.

His name is David Abraham. He’s the “Abe” in the top image under “What I had I gave, What I saved was lost forever,” on Oregon Wrestling’s old wall.

I’ve got a feeling Oregon Coach Ron Finley is giving all there is, and people who remember him are too. He’s ‘that guy.’

If youth passes with the people important in our youth, try keeping the spirit alive. Tell kids about sports, about the friends you make in sports.

Tell them about wrestling, about the kid from Newberg who ran the table. Tell them they could do the same thing if they want to.