Flag-raising pic shows spirit of Kush era
Arizona State football has never lost to San Diego State, going 10-0-1 with the tie way back in 1951.
Oddly none of those meetings was in the Frank Kush head coaching era, although Kush was an ASU assistant under Dan Devine from 1955-57, when the Sun Devils crushed the Aztecs three times by a combined 173-0.
It will be infinitely tougher for ASU on Saturday when the teams play for the first time in a decade. San Diego State is 23-6 since 2015 with ASU 12-14 over that span. Kush, ASU’s winningest football coach who died July 22 at age 88, will be honored in a variety of trib-
utes including players wearing a Sunburst logo circa 1975-79 from the latter part of the Kush era on their helmets.
ASU helmets in the early Kush years, carrying over from Devine, were more spartan -- gold with a maroon stripe down the middle and threeinch numbers on both sides.
That was what the Sun Devils wore as headgear in 1965 when, as the story goes, only five seniors remained out of all the scholarship players and walkons who started as freshmen four years earlier.
An enlarged photo of that quintet -Darrell Hoover, Ben Hawkins, Rick Davis, John Folmer and George Corneal -- raising an ASU flag atop Mt. Kush was presented to Kush’s son Danny at Camp Tontozona on Aug. 5.
Mesa Tribune photographer Ed Wiggins posed the players like an iconic flag-raising photo from 1945 of Marines raising the U.S. flag atop atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima,
“It was Wiggins’ idea,” Hoover said. “ASU was getting all this notoriety about being this tough program that trained in the mountains in a cow pasture in a dead end canyon with players practicing three times a day and filling up their helmets with rocks before every practice.
“Mt. Kush (across Tonto Creek from the camp, located outside Payson in the Tonto National Forest) is more overgrown now. It doesn’t look quite as prominent. Then it was just this pinnacle and the background looked more like a battlefield.”
Hoover said former U.S. President Richard Nixon told him that he at some point had a framed copy of Wiggins’ photo in the Oval Office at the White House.
The photo ran Sept. 8, 1965, accompanying a story by Tribune sports editor Jack Dalby that included an anecdote about sports writers speculating during a card game one night about the variety of ways a player could quit like four junior college transfers did that year at Camp Tontozona.
“When they locked the gates (at Camp Tontozona) it wasn’t to keep the fans out, it was to keep us players in,” Hoover said.
Dalby wrote: “Winner of this little quiz was one offering by a guy who said if it were him he would climb Mt. Kush early in the morning, wait for the coaches and team to form on the field, and then shout down a few obscenities telling Kush what he could do with his program. Then get the heck out of there in a plain, unmarked car which had been left with the engine running.”
Graham on Kush
ASU coach Todd Graham remembers interviewing for a high school coaching job in Scottsdale in 1995 or ‘96 at the request of then school superintendent Dr. Barbara Erwin, who previously held the same position in Allen, Texas, where Graham then was coaching high school.
“She said if you come I have a little surprise for you,” Graham said. Erwin introduced Graham to Kush, who then was beginning to be accepted back at ASU after his firing in 1979. Kush was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995. ASU named the field at Sun Devil Stadium after him in ‘96 and installed a statue of him near the southeast side of the stadium. Kush returned to ASU as a fundraiser and athletic ambassador in 2000 until his death.
“Obviously his reputation is being so tough and hard, but he was so gracious,” Graham said of his first meeting with Kush.
“I even took a picture with him not knowing years later I would be the head coach here,” starting in 2012.
Kush documentary to debut Saturday
A 90-minute Kush documentary will debut at 6:30 p.m. Saturday on the Pac-12 Network leading into coverage of ASUSan Diego State starting at 8. “Kush” also will run after the game and to a national audience on all Pac-12 Network at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
The documentary, produced by ASU video production headed by James Daniels, includes interviews with Kush, Danny Kush, former assistants Dick Tamburo and Larry Kentera, former players Danny White, Ron Erhardt, Steve Holden, J.D. Hill and Charley Taylor. Graham, ASU President Michael Crow and former Phoenix Gazette columnist Tim Tyers also participate. ASU radio playby-play announcer Tim Healey is the narrator.
Pac-12 Network is also scheduled to run it on Sept. 10, 11, 16, 21 and 24. There are also plans for it to air on PBS station KAET in November before the Territorial Cup game, to be played in Tempe this season.