1958 AGGIES WERE UNLIKELY DIAMOND KINGS AMAZING FEAT EARNED THE HALL OF FAMERS THE TITLE OF “TEAM OF LEGEND” Without a doubt, this is as remarkable a national championship tale as you will ever hear. It starts with Ted Owens – yes, the great Ted Owens, who found fame as the Kansas Jayhawks’ men's coach who took his basketball squad to numerous Big 8 championships and two appearances in the Final Four during his 19 years there – and ends on an August night in Oklahoma City more than six decades later.
Top photo: Ted Owens (center) proudly holds Cameron’s Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame plaque while flanked by Hall director Mike James and emcee Mick Cornett.
Long before his fame as a Jayhawk, Owens accepted his first coaching job at Cameron State Agricultural College in 1956. The Aggies hired him to coach basketball, teach U.S. History, serve as an assistant football coach … and start a baseball program. Although baseball was among the first sports at the Cameron State School of Agriculture when it was founded as a high school nearly 50 years earlier, it was discontinued when the Great Depression paralyzed America. For 27 years, Cameron went without hearing the crack of a bat in the springtime.
Bottom photo: The 1958 national champs. Standing, left to right: manager Bub Smith, Tony Owings, Don Hendricks, James Ray, Dexter Rolette, Homer Watkins, Patrick O'Dell, Sid Griffin, Ted Handke, Donnie Sinclair; kneeling, from the left: Wayne Tedder, Jackie Martin, Toby Tillman, Jim Marr, Terry Byrd, Bill Short, Earl Tankersley, Don Gosa, coach Ted Owens.
Seeing an opportunity during the mid-1950s to use baseball as a recruiting tool to draw football and basketball prospects, Cameron administrators were suddenly eager to restart baseball – until they learned that the Pioneer Conference, which the college had joined, didn’t offer it as a competitive sport. Administrators’ zeal cooled considerably, so Coach Owens focused his efforts on basketball, which he did quite well, putting together an Aggie team that went undefeated during the 1957-58 regular season and rose to the top of the national junior college basketball polls. But that’s a story for another day. 20
CAMERON UNIVERSITY
Although administrators had lost interest in baseball, several of the junior college's athletes did not, especially ones who chose CSAC under the impression the sport would be reinstated. Owens – who had played a little minor league baseball in Texas – felt a duty to those athletes, so he put together a team in the spring of 1958. The squad was diverse in a day when diversity was still lacking in many sports. It included a Black player, three Native Americans – and a number of students who had never played on an integrated roster of any kind. This unique assemblage of football and basketball players, farm boys, boxers and veterans would meet on the college's ROTC drill field near where Howell Hall and Veterans Grove now stand. No scholarships, no budget, no uniforms, no playing field and no bleachers … still, the group got in regular practice time using their own equipment. Their opponents were almost exclusively military units from nearby Fort Sill, since the Aggies had been allowed access to one of the post’s baseball fields one day a week. Those battles were hard on the boys from Cameron, and it took most of the spring
