Dead Conferences, Part 2, Chapter 1: From Wild West to Western Athletic Conference

How the Shootout at the OK Corral, the Romney Family, and the evolution of the Western United States from Wild roots to cosmopolitan ambitions shaped the formation of the Western Athletic Conference.

It shouldn’t at all be considered a divisive position to suggest that Albert B. Fall is one of the all-time villains in American political history. As Secretary of the Interior, Fall engineered an Interior Department takeover of Naval Reserves in California and Wyoming so that he could in turn sell off no-bid oil-drilling contracts to his businessworld cronies.

Known as the Teapot Dome Scandal, it resulted in Fall’s ouster and arrest — a testament to how far we’ve regressed that a century ago, nakedly corrupt politicans faced real punishments. But that’s beside the point.

Mentioning Fall at all may seem beside the point, which is the launch of Western Athletic Conference football. After all, the WAC completed its first season on the week of Thanksgiving 1962, almost 18 years to the day of Fall’s death in 1944.

But that it took until 1962 for the Western United States to form a second high-level football conference, almost a half-century after the launch of what became the Pac-12, is a reflection of the general attitudes toward the West as a far-flung oddity not up to par with the refined cities of the East. In terms of sports, the introduction of the Rose Bowl in 1902 and its establishment as an annual tradition in the subsequent decade helped build some bridges by pitting Eastern powers against the best of the West.

And, indeed, the West scored a major breakthrough in the 1921 edition of the Rose Bowl Game when Cal routed Ohio State in a matchup of unbeaten teams, 28-0. It wasn’t the West’s first Rose Bowl win, but it was the first that earned a Western team claim to the national championship.

Yet, while Cal and USC established nationally recognized powerhouses in the 1920s, the West was collectively decades away from having much of a sports presence. Major League Baseball didn’t move to the Pacific Coast until the latter half of the 1950s, for example. And when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, their transfers were akin to USC and Cal (and Stanford a decade later) growing into recognized football powers: Los Angeles and San Francisco were outliers among the Western U.S. as a whole.

The West was made up of outcasts, delusional dreamers and hooligans — a reputation that the late Senator Fall didn’t exactly help refute — and a similar dismissiveness plagued the WAC throughout its 50 years of sponsoring football. BYU’s 1984 national championship is an anamoly, bookended with Arizona State teams in the 1970s and Boise State teams in the 2000s that deserved better from college football decision-makers.

Meanwhile, WAC football also reflected its region with the game it popularized. The peak of the Western Athletic Conference is still celebrated today for transforming the sport as a whole. An upcoming chapter in this part of Dead Conferences will go deep into the WAC’s revolutionary offensive approach, particularly from the late 1970s into the 1990s. In the meantime, suffice it to say the WAC loved itself a shootout. The football league kept part of the region’s 19th Century Wild West spirit alive.

Beyond his ahead-of-its-time political chicanery, Albert Fall gained a reputation for having an especially nasty disposition in the courtroom as an attorney, and in his general existence. Fall’s defense of reputed cattle-rustler Oliver Lee, on trial for the murder of Fall’s legal nemesis Albert Jennings Fountain and Fountain’s son, contributed to Fall’s infamy. He was seen as the type more than happy to solve disputes in the Wild West way, which is to say with a shootout.

That didn’t prevent him from being elected to the United States Senate in 1912, however, the first year in which New Mexico gained statehood. New Mexico joined the Union a month before Arizona at a fascinating time for the American West.

The turn of the 20th century into the 1910s marked a transitional period. Modernization’s encroaching inevitability clashed with the independence (or lawlessness, depending on perspective) that shaped the American frontier in the 19th Century. Borrowing from cinema, the 1969 cult classic The Wild Bunch depicts the unease of the era for bounty hunters in West Texas.

Another frame of reference courtesy of the big screen: Arizona and New Mexico’s entry into the Union was as many years removed from the Shootout at the OK Corral as we are today from the release of the beloved cinematic depiction of the notorious gun fight, Tombstone.