The Register-Guard

September 20, 2007

Ron Bellamy: Horton fan knows about field of dreams
By Ron Bellamy
Columnist, The Register-Guard

The OSU baseball team visits the White House this week. George Horton is simply trying to find a house, in Eugene.

The Beavers, for winning the 2007 national title, their second straight, will shake hands with the president of the United States on Friday.

Horton is still waiting to shake hands with his first Oregon player.

Maybe nothing was more symbolic of the task that Oregon is undertaking in bringing back baseball, of the distance between Oregon's newest program and its Civil War rivals - and this rivalry could one day make all the others seem meek in comparison - than those contrasting vignettes of the two programs this week.

Coach Pat Casey's Beavers are off to see the guy who works in the Oval Office. Oregon's new baseball coach was just being issued an office. Stuff for it will come later. So will baseballs, bats, pitching machines and uniforms.

Oh, and players, and a ballpark.

"Most coaches might be intimidated by that," said Horton, who, with his own national championship, won at Cal State Fullerton, isn't most coaches. "We know where we're headed and where we want to head."

That the team just up the road has climbed to the mountaintop doesn't, in Horton's view, make the mountain seem any higher.

"If anything, I take that as a positive thing," Horton said Wednesday. "That somebody was able to do it. ... Kudos to coach Casey and his staff because he's proved to me that it's possible up here, whereas five years ago, or four years, baseball fans and the baseball community in the Northwest were probably wondering if it would ever happen up here. ...

"I don't think Pat's said to me, with what he's accomplished, that it's going to be easy, but it's going to be possible, and I guess my personality is that if it's possible, I'm going to do my best to find a way to do that ourselves."

When he was introduced on Sept. 1 as Oregon's first baseball coach since the program was dropped in 1981, Horton noted that he didn't know enough about the state to know whether Corvallis was north or south of Eugene, and quipped that he'd try to make folks forget where Corvallis is anyway.

It was a joke, in the spirit of the moment, but figure it didn't play well at Oregon State.

Neither did Horton's stated goal of wanting to "dominate" the Northwest in recruiting. Nor did his audacious goal of taking the Ducks from nothing to the College World Series, perceived in the OSU camp as a slight of Casey, in that it took him a decade to get the Beavers there after he took over a mature OSU program.

Nor the fact that Oregon, in Oregon fashion, opened the bank for Horton (after allegedly making a run at Casey, which the Ducks deny).

Horton's package totals $400,000 per year over five years - an amount that Casey wouldn't reach until 2016 under the 10-year contract he signed last year - with the opportunity to earn an equal amount in incentives.

Wednesday, Horton was more diplomatic. "I was probably a little out line, and a little excited in the press conference, and said we were going to dominate the Northwest in recruiting," he said.

"Of course that's the goal, but easier said than done."

So, right now, you're thinking that first pitch in the reborn Civil War series is going to be in somebody's ear, but that's a story for 2009, and there's a lot for Oregon to do between now and then.

Horton's assistant coaches, Jason Gill and Andrew Checketts, are on the road recruiting, playing catch-up.

The early signing period falls in November, and the Ducks have yet to land their first. Horton will have recruits in for official visits Sept. 29, when the UO football team hosts Cal, a week before his 54th birthday.

The scholarship limit is 11.7, which can be allocated over a number of players - though each scholarship player must receive at least 25 percent of a full ride - to a maximum squad size of 35.

Horton said UO, which had talked about phasing in the scholarships over four years, has given him approval to issue as many as he wants the first year.

A year from now, his first recruiting class will be enrolling. "If we ended up with 25 good players (for the first year), we'll be happy with that," he said.

The Ducks don't yet have the conceptual design of a new stadium, or a location, to use in recruiting. At this point, Horton sees three options for the 2009 season:

Putting a field on whatever site is selected as a permanent home, with temporary bleachers and amenities the first year, and then adding on; playing at Civic Stadium or North Eugene's Swede Johnson while a new stadium is being built, or putting a temporary field on the UO soccer/lacrosse field.

"In recruiting," he said, "we'll concentrate on where we're going, not what we're starting with."

While immersing himself in his new baseball program, Horton also has a family to move, and he's very much a family guy. His wife, Francie, recently retired from her job of 31 years, managing a big dental concern. They own two homes in Southern California, and their eldest daughter, Michele, lives in one and will move into the home the Hortons will vacate.

Their youngest daughter, Rebecca, 16, a high school student, and their niece, Loyal, who has lived with the Hortons as a daughter for 11 years and is a student at Fullerton, will probably move up here in January, after the current school semester ends. (Another daughter, Heather, 23, lives in San Antonio.)

George and Francie, staying at a hotel while they go back and forth to Southern California, have to figure out house or apartment, when and how, and they haven't packed a thing yet.

In the frenetic pace since accepting the Oregon job, Horton finally found time last weekend to connect, via telephone, with an old friend, actor Kevin Costner, whose baseball movie credits include "Bull Durham," "Field of Dreams" and "For the Love of the Game."

Costner, a CSF grad, threw out the first pitch at Fullerton's new ballpark in 1992, when Horton was an assistant coach there, and the Titans went on to reach the national title game wearing a patch "KC1" on their uniforms.

At that College World Series, where the Titans ultimately lost to Pepperdine, 3-2, in the title game, Costner sent a written message to the team. "It was a real deep message to all of us, about enjoy this particular moment for what it is, not what it can be," said Horton, who still has it, framed, at home.

From that experience a long friendship developed. The Hortons have been Costner's guests in Aspen and Santa Barbara, and attended his wedding, and Horton said Costner was thrilled at Horton's decision to take the Oregon job.

In fact, Costner plays in a rock band, and offered to come to Oregon next spring and put on a concert to promote Oregon baseball. Which, in passing, brings us back to this week, because as the Beavers meet President Bush, the Ducks, in this bold return to baseball, are faced with raising presidents to make this go.

Many, many presidents, the kind found on money.