Archdeacon: Raiders’ ‘voice’ headed to HOF
Gordie Wise has been Wright State’s basketball public address announcer for 50 years, but that’s only part of his story.
— As halftime spectacles PIQUA go, Saturday afternoon’s Hall of Fame recognition at Wright State’s Nutter Center game with Youngstown State certainly will be special for Gordie Wise.
But many years ago he was almost part of another spotlight moment during a WSU intermission and that one likely would have wowed Raiders fans even more.
The problem was Gordie’s underhandedness.
It scuttled the halftime moment before it ever happened.
Let’s let him explain.
“I think I’m the only person who can claim to have been the intramural freethrow shooting champion at three separate universities,” the 85-year-old Wise said with a chuckle as he sat with his wife Susie at the kitchen table of their Piqua home. “And I’ve got proof of two of those titles right here.”
After captaining the Houston High School team that won the 1952 sectional title his senior year — and for the second straight season having the best free-throw percentage of Shelby County prep players — he went to Miami University and won the intramural crown
there.
“Made just 90 of 100 though,” he said a bit dismissively.
A few years later, when part of the doctoral program at Indiana University, he entered the freethrow contest there and won again.
As proof he pulled out a Nov. 12, 1958 clipping from the Indiana Daily Student newspaper that included the headline: “Wise Wins Free Throw Toss.”
That story told how he made 97 of 100 attempts.
In 1966, Wise left his Miami teaching job and came to fledgling WSU as an assistant marketing professor and a few years later competed in the campus free-throw contest.
“One of the Wright State basketball players was involved, too,” he smiled. “Both of us ran a good string and finally the intramural director said, ‘If you two guys tie, I’m going to propose having a shootoff at halftime of a varsity game.’
“But we didn’t tie,” he said, pointing to an old trophy on the table. “He missed a couple of shots. I didn’t.”
His prowess goes back to his seventh-grade days in Houston, where he said “an old coach” taught the players to shoot underhanded, and he has ever since.
So how would he have fared against current Raiders point guard Cole Gentry, who is No. 3 in the nation at 91.4 percent and recently made a string of 46 free throws, one off the WSU record?
“To heck with Cole,” Susie said teasingly. “He’d be chopped liver.”
There’s no denying that this weekend Gordie — along with former Raiders basketball player Vaughn Duggins, track star Cassandra Lloyd and the late swimming and diving coach Harold Miller — will be center stage at WSU.
The four will be inducted into the Wright State Hall of Fame on Friday night and then introduced to the crowd at halftime Saturday.
Wise is not being honored for his charity-stripe success and not just because he was the public address announcer of Raiders basketball for 49 years — from the first game to the start of this year’s 50th season.
“Most people see Gordie Wise going onto the Hall and think, ‘Well, 49 years as the PA guy, I see it,’” he explained. “But to my thinking, it’s the stuff that happened before all that that really has something to do with it.”
When he first came to WSU, which had opened two years earlier, he said it was still a branch campus of Ohio State and Miami University.
“That first year we didn’t even have a name,” he said.
He said the first dean of the business school, Dr. J.B. Black Jr., soon appointed him to the committee determining the feasibility of an athletics program at the school.
“There were people on the committee who didn’t want sports at the school,” Wise said.
He disagreed and eventually his thinking prevailed. Soon after, he was asked to draft the original constitution of the Athletic Council, which would oversee the sports programs at Wright State.
He served as the first chair of the Athletic Council, which he remained a part of for 21 years. He was also the university’s faculty rep to the NCAA for 19 years.
Of course, his most high-profile job was his 49 years as “voice” of the Raiders.
“Gordie is part of our fabric,” Raiders athletics director Bob Grant told the Wright State University Magazine a few years back. “He is really very much like Joe Nuxhall was for the Reds or Jack Buck for the Cardinals. You hear his voice and immediately think of Wright State basketball.”
‘We all got a job’
Wise got the PA job thanks to an impromptu decision by his friend Don Mohr, the school’s first athletics director.
“Everyone I hung around with, we used to have lunch two or three times a week at the old Airway Inn,” he said. “It was maybe 10 days before we were going to play our first home game ever at Stebbins High and Don said, ‘I’m going to need help guys. I need somebody to run the scoreboard, somebody to be the official scorer, somebody to be the PA announcer.’
“He just went around the table and we all got a job.”
After that, Wise announced almost every home game the Raiders played as they moved from Stebbins to the Xenia Fieldhouse, the 2,800 seat P.E. Building on campus and finally into the Nutter Center in 1990.
As for the best Raiders player he ever saw, he thought a second, then shrugged: “The two obvious choices would have to be Bill Edwards and Vitaly (Potapenko). And there’s DaShaun Wood. But for my money, the guy who meant the most was Gary Monroe. He was a transfer who carried us to the NCAA Division II national championship.”
His favorite coach? “You can’t get around Ralph,” he said with beaming reference to fellow Hall of Famer Ralph Underhill, who led the Raiders to the national crown, the jump to Division I, the first berth in the NCAA Tournament and a record 356 wins.
He’s also good friends with Jim Brown, the longtime assistant and interim head coach, and he was the same with the late John Ross, the Raiders first coach with whom he was a golfing buddy in the offseason.
“He was marvelous then, but a real (S.O.B.) during the season,” he smiled.
The biggest upset he saw was the Raiders’ 53-49 shocker over No. 6 Michigan State at the Nutter Center in 1999. He especially remembers the victories over Butler and the now defunct Gem City Jam, the eight games against the University of Dayton, including two Raiders’ victories at the Nutter Center.
He had grown up an avid Flyers fan, but said he soured on them when UD discontinued the series with WSU:
“I loved the Gem City Jam. I know why they did it, I just don’t respect it. It’s chicken (crap)!”
The game he especially remembers was WSU’s 101-99 victory over the Flyers at UD Arena in 1990. He and Susie sat in the top of UD Arena.
“We couldn’t come home after that,” he laughed. “We celebrated too much and had to get a hotel room down there.”
Still active in Piqua
Although retired after 51 years in the classroom, Wise remains active in Piqua.
Every Thursday morning he goes to a local elementary school to help first-graders who are struggling with reading.
And for 22 years now, he’s spent a day a week at the West Central Juvenile Detention Center between Piqua and Troy mentoring teenage felons in rehab. “Typically I meet individually with three teens, each for an hour or so,” he said. “Sometimes I just ask, ‘How was your week?’ and we go from there. I love ’em. How could you not? It’s heartbreaking.”
When he and Susie married 38 years ago, he had four children from his previous marriage and she had three daughters. They became a blended family and now have 15 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Almost all will be at the Hall of Fame festivities, except granddaughter Maddie, who’s a 6-foot sophomore starter on the No. 20 Iowa State women’s basketball team. She will be playing No. 1 Baylor on Saturday, but she did send her grandpa a video greeting.
Wise has gotten congratulations from lots of people, including a nice note from Brad Brownell, the former WSU coach who now leads the Clemson Tigers.
And Wise said he asked Jim Brown to be his presenter at the Hall of Fame ceremony:
“We go way back and he said, ‘Gordie, I’m gonna have some fun.’”
That made him laugh: “I told him, ‘I hope you do, baby!’”
After all, he’s had fun and he has the stories, the memories and that old trophy to prove it.