Sports Column

Knight and Casey show true character

By dwight jaynes

The Portland Tribune, Jul 18, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

When it was all over last week and Oregon State had held its news conference with Pat Casey, announcing it had retained its baseball coach and, in fact, had signed him to a 10-year contract, a call came in to the Portland Tribune sports department.

It was someone in the sports information department at Notre Dame. The guy said he really wanted to set the record straight and had a problem with our story on www.localnewsdaily.com – the first one on the Internet with quotes from Casey about why he decided to stay at OSU. Notre Dame had interviewed a lot of people, the man said, and never said that it actually had offered the job to Casey. In fact, the school wasn’t even willing to state, on the record, that Casey had been in South Bend, Ind., interviewing for the job.

I laughed out loud. The baseball coach at Oregon State had turned down the Fighting Irish, and they just couldn’t stand that everyone knew that. It’s a delicious irony.

This whole saga taught us something about two people. One of them, of course, is Casey. We’ll get to him in a minute.

But the second is Phil Knight. A source inside the OSU athletic department has confirmed the rumor that’s been raging since last week – Knight, Super Duck, as he’s called around Eugene – played a big role in keeping Casey in Corvallis.

Casey’s base pay at OSU has nearly doubled, and Knight, it is now known, is going to pay a sizable chunk of that raise, every single year Casey is coaching at Oregon State. And Knight stepped up to do it without being asked. He volunteered.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit