Team spirit takes hold
By Jeff Kolpack
The Forum - 09/05/1999

The romanticist would love to paint a fall sports event that pictures North Dakota at its best. The trees changing colors. A beautiful, golden prairie in the background.

Several thousand fans, some of whom traveled from a picturesque lake in western Minnesota, watching a football game on a 70-degree day. The sky is clear. Crystal clear, not like the smog of the West Coast, the haze of the East Coast or the humid air of the South.

This is the Midwest, where sportsmanship and friendly competition are primary. This is the last bastion of what is good in sports in America.

North Dakota is one of only two states that doesn't field a Division I program, sans the University of North Dakota hockey team. South Dakota is the other. Still, we see quality in effort.

UND vs. NDSU; take one or the other. But certainly, don't sit on a fence. Close doesn't count in horseshoes, hand grenades and not knowing which school you like better.

It's been documented as one of the top 10 football rivalries in the country in any division. Every few years, some out-of-town journalist ventures to Fargo, Grand Forks and all points in between to document the Bison-Sioux angle. It's as if they expect teepees and free-roaming buffalo.

It's as close to the movie "Pleasantville" as America gets. Or so it may seem.

Not in the script are some of the behind-the-scenes takes. For most of this last half of the century, Bison football and Sioux hockey have defined athletic success in the area. In the 1990s, women's basketball has taken the top step.

The NDSU football program has won seven national championships. UND hockey has taken six national titles. The UND and NDSU women's basketball teams have won eight of the last nine Division II championships.

The romanticist would love to say the beginning was easy. That the communities held a town hall meeting with punch and cookies and threw money into a hat to get a booster club going.

Save it for the novel.

"It was a long, long haul," said Roy C. Pedersen. "A ... lot ... of ... work."

The boost behind NDSU's football success can be traced to Pedersen, Carl Rorvig and Ernie Wheeler, three alumni of North Dakota Agricultural College (the name before NDSU) who couldn't handle football ineptness anymore. It was Pedersen who coined the name "Team Makers," but it was for reasons other than to raise money.

They didn't want to get caught.

'Scared to death'

It was in June of 1950 when Team Makers officially became an incorporated entity with the North Dakota Secretary of State. Pedersen was the president, Rorvig the vice president and Wheeler the secretary/treasurer. The objective had one sentence: "To promote athletics in Fargo." The college was intentionally left out.

"There was not one mention of the NDAC," Pedersen said, "because of that conference booster thing."

The North Central Conference had a stipulation that prohibited member schools from forming booster organizations. That was later dropped in the mid 1950s.

"In the beginning, we were scared to death because we didn't want to get the school in trouble," Pedersen said.

In the beginning, Pedersen and Rorvig knocked on doors. They took every penny people were willing to donate. A breakthrough came from Ray Warner, who liked the sales pitch on the seventh floor of his Black Building insurance office so much that he called his friends.

Warner gave $100. Donations then came from the likes of Fargo Glass & Paint, Dawson Insurance and Union Storage and Transfer.

"God's sake we were excited," Pedersen said.

Pedersen figures Team Makers raised about $10,000 the first year. (It's approaching $700,000 annually these days). Distributing it to the players was another matter, however. Rorvig was the bridge. He set up a special account at his Ted Evanson's Men's Wear store on Broadway.

A player would come into the store with a note from athletic director Casey Finnegan and Rorvig would make the kid sign the note as a loan.

"The note would say Joe needs 10 dollars, Hanks needs 15," Pedersen said.

That was the definition of a scholarship in those days. The group said they got around the NCC rule by "lending" the money to the school.

"We knew we wouldn't get it back, but we wanted to keep our nose clean," Pedersen said. "That was the way we handled the book keeping."

Pedersen was so paranoid that he went to the local media in June of 1950 and begged them not to tie Team Makers to NDAC. He talked to Forum sports editor Eugene Fitzgerald and broadcasting personalities Bill Weaver and Manny Marget.

"I said, 'You're going to see a story announcing the incorporation of Team Makers in Fargo,'" Pedersen said. "I said, 'Don't tie the organization into the NDAC.' Every one of them kept their word. ... Talk about a bunch of conniving. I had to pick a name that had to be very general."

Despite the sneaky ways, NDSU still didn't have a winning program. It would take 13 years for Pedersen and his Team Maker friends to realize the fruits of their labor.

It started with NDSU president Herb Albrecht, who took office in 1962, a year in which the Bison finished 0-10. To win, Albrecht ordered the football team to increase its assistant coaches from one to five. Darrell Mudra was appointed head coach. His assistants were Ron Bodine, Ron Erhardt, Ev Kjelbertson, Ardell Wiegandt and Jim Driscoll.

The Bison went 10-1 and won an NCC title in 1964. They won a national title in 1965.

"From there, everything was inherited," Pedersen said. "The pattern had been set."

Today, Pedersen is 82 years old and loving every bit of the pattern. He's as green and yellow as a Bison fan can get.

'Begging for money'

While NDSU's pattern of football success has been well documented, many North Dakota individuals achieved greatness in the last century. Of the 29 recipients of North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, four are athletes: baseball player Roger Maris, Olympic skier Casper Oimoen, hockey player Cliff "Fido" Purpur and basketball coach Phil Jackson.

There are so many others.

Others like Cliff Cushman, a silver medalist in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. Cushman had a gold medal in sight in 1964, but stumbled on the last hurdle at the Olympic Trials in Los Angeles. On his way back to Grand Forks, Cushman wrote a letter to the Grand Forks Herald newspaper asking the young people in his hometown not to feel sorry for him.

It still stands as one of the most touching letters of the century.

"Don't feel sorry for me, I feel sorry for you," he wrote. "Some of you have never known the satisfaction of doing your best in sports, the joy of excelling in class, the wonderful feeling of completing a job, any job, and looking back on it knowing that you have done your best."

Cushman's life was cut short when, as a fighter pilot in the Air Force, he was declared missing in action in Vietnam.

Other Grand Forks legends would not miss out. John Noah was UND's first All-American and first Olympian. That came just a few years after UND started its hockey program in 1946.

Pedersen and Rorvig weren't the only boosters to go door-to-door in a program's fledgling stages. Purpur performed a similar labor of love with UND and the city of Grand Forks hockey.

"He went up and down the street begging for money," Noah said. "He kept UND going."

Purpur got his nickname because he skated so close to the ice. He has about 200 stitches from the neck up, a tribute to his toughness. In Grand Forks, Fido is an institution.

"He was god up there in the early years of hockey in Grand Forks," Noah said.

Purpur returned to Grand Forks after a 14-year NHL career. Don Norman was the coach when Noah enrolled at UND. Then Purpur took over.

"He's one of the most sincere people I've ever run into," Noah said.

Noah played on the '52 Olympic team that won a silver medal. It staged a reunion in Eveleth, Minn., a few years ago and attendance was almost perfect.

The biggest thrill for Noah was the thought of representing his country and that kind of pride and camaraderie among the players still holds true today. Noah still thinks the uniform the U.S. contingent wore at the opening ceremonies in Oslo, Norway, is the best the country has ever had.

It hangs in Peppers American Cafe in south Fargo. When the team returned from Oslo, members were introduced to a big crowd in an event at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

That's a long way from the prairie. A long way from the clear air, the color of the leaves in the fall, the gleaming white snow in the winter and the glistening lakes in the summer.

Over the years, there's been a lot of romance with our sporting heroes.