Not easy being a fan of Oregon State

It started with a pile of leaves, a Saturday afternoon and a plugged-in AM radio.

Who knows why we listened to Oregon State football games on fall afternoons in the late 1960s, as we cleaned up the backyard.

Maybe, since our family lived in Salem, just up the road from Corvallis, that was the only game we could get.

(Back in those days, there was no such thing as a “regional sports network.”)

Maybe it was because an older guy that lived in our neighborhood — of course, when you’re 9 years old, pretty much every guy is an older guy — said he knew Dee Andros, the Beavers’ football coach at the time. And we liked the “older guy.”

Maybe we liked the color orange — the rotund Andros’ nickname was “The Great Pumpkin.”

(Side story: Years later, in the early 1980s when I worked at the Daily Bee in Sandpoint, we put together a team to play in a local mushball tournament. They put me in charge of selecting the team T-shirts. I ordered orange T-shirts for our team.

For some reason, I was never put in charge of selecting the team T-shirts again.)

IT’S HARD to be an Oregon State fan. The Beavers just aren’t good at most sports — the major ones at least — much of the time.

The football team went 6-5 in 1970 under Andros — aka “The Great Pumpkin” — then didn’t have a winning season until 1999, nearly three decades later. It’s hard to be that bad at football for that long, but Oregon State was able to do it.

(Not that the rival Oregon Ducks were much better during that span. After going 6-4-1 in 1970 under Jerry Frei, the Ducks had just eight winning seasons before their breakthrough 1994 season, when they went to the Rose Bowl. The low point for state of Oregon football might have been 1983, when Oregon State (2-8) and Oregon (4-6) played to a scoreless tie in the Civil War in Eugene.)

Oregon, at least, has been a consistent winner for more than two decades, and has played for the national title twice in recent years. Oregon State had a stretch of 11 bowls in 15 seasons, but is coming off four lackluster campaigns.

Oregon State was good at men’s basketball in the 1980s, going to the NCAA tournament eight times between 1980-90. The Beavers were particularly good in the early ’80s. In 1982, OSU came within one game of its first Final Four since 1963 before getting whacked by freshman Patrick Ewing and Georgetown.

OSU’s last NCAA trip during that run was Gary Payton’s senior year — then the Beavers didn’t make it back to the NCAAs until 26 years later, in 2016.

THE GOOD news is, in a region filled with fans of the Cougs, Zags, Vandals, Eags, Griz, Broncos and Huskies, we have local ties to Oregon State’s success.

Under coach Dennis Erickson, who lives in a house on Lake Coeur d’Alene, the Beavs got back in the bowl business for the first time in 35 seasons. In 2000, Oregon State crushed Notre Dame 41-9 and finished fourth in The Associated Press poll, fifth in the coaches poll.

Katie Baker, the former Lake City High star, is an assistant coach for the Oregon State women’s basketball team, which has played in the last five NCAA tournaments, including a trip to the Final Four in 2016.

Timmy Mueller, the former Post Falls High standout, recently completed a stellar four-year career with the Beavers’ men’s soccer team.

Tony Hook, the former Sandpoint High standout who later became an assistant coach at Coeur d’Alene, wrestled at Oregon State.

And of course, Ron Heller, formerly of Clark Fork High and the NFL, played football at Oregon State in the early 1980s.

And next season, pitcher Jake Pfennigs from Post Falls High will join the defending national champion Oregon State baseball team — albeit likely with shorter hair.

TO ME — and most of us in the west, I presume — OSU means Oregon State University. To most of the rest of the country, however, it means Ohio State, or Oklahoma State.

Hence, the goofy-looking abbreviation “ORST” when the Beavs on TV.

In 1989, I was walking through a restaurant parking lot in Salt Lake City, wearing an Oregon State T-shirt — an orange one, naturally — when a car rolled by and a young girl rolled down her passenger-side window.

I got my hopes up.

“Beavers stink,” she said.

And that was more than two decades before the Utes would join the “stinkin’” Beavers in the Pac-12.

One of my favorite T-shirts is one from the 2007 College World Series, a shirt someone from the Coeur d’Alene American Legion baseball program brought back for me from Omaha when the Lums played in a Legion tournament there, held in conjuction with the CWS. 2007 was the year Oregon State won the second of its back-to-back national titles.

I used to wear that T-shirt quite a bit.

If I was any better with a needle and thread, I would continue to wear it in public.

Of course, now that OSU has won another national title in baseball, it might be time to celebrate with a new T-shirt.

And it might very well be orange.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.