Christian Welp scored 2,073 points during his University of Washington basketball career, making him the only player in school history to surpass 2,000. He passed away at age 51.
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Reid: Christian Welp blazed trails, created cherished memories
March
6, 2015
Updated
6:17 p.m.
BY
SCOTT M. REID /
STAFF WRITER
Christian
Welp, shown playing defense in an NCAA Tournament loss against Dayton
in 1984, was a dominant center in the Pac-10.AP
PHOTO
In the novel
“Terms of Endearment,” Larry McMurtry wrote “…it was all so
strange, the way life went on and seemed the same even though it was
always changing. It never quite slowed down so you could catch it,
except by thinking back, and it left some people more important than
others as it changed.”
In my memory,
Christian Welp has always loomed as he did when I knew him best 30
years ago when we were both students at the University of Washington,
larger than life even if he didn’t see himself that way.
It seemed
fitting that I learned of Chris’ death over the weekend at the age
of 51 from apparent heart failure on a night when a steady rain
danced across the roof. As much as anything, it is those wet, cold
Thursday and Saturday nights that I remember from a time when Chris
was the biggest man on a campus gone hoops crazy; the walks through a
darkened university, pulled through the fog by the promise of
something special. The final steps were across a stone pedestrian
bridge that that carried you over the cars backed up on Montlake
Boulevard as far as you could see to the doorstep of Hec Edmundson
Pavilion as it glowed and buzzed through the winter night’s mist.
My first paying
job in journalism was as the basketball beat writer for The Daily,
Washington’s irreverent school newspaper which boasted that its
coverage of the campus was “finger licking good.” Not exactly
“All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The paper did take two
things seriously – sports and rock ‘n’ roll. The decades have
not shaken my belief that while my friends debated the genius of the
Talking Heads or X or whether “Born In the USA” was too
commercial, I had been granted a press row seat to a cultural
revolution.
Washington had
always been a rowing and football school. When the 1983-84 season
tipped off, the Huskies hadn’t won a conference hoops title in 31
years. Yet as that winter wore on, it was clear that Marv Harshman,
the school’s wise-if-underappreciated coach, and his pair of German
superstars, Welp and Detlef Schrempf, had not only turned the Huskies
into title contenders but were changing the face of college
basketball.
There had been
foreign players in college basketball almost from the moment Dr.
Naismith, a Canadian, hung his first peach basket. The previous
spring, Nigeria’s Akeem Olajuwon had helped Houston’s Phi Slama
Jama crew reach the Final Four. But when Welp entered Washington the
following autumn, there was only one foreign-born player on an NBA
roster who hadn’t been raised in the U.S.
Welp and
Schrempf, however, were more than just a novelty act. Schrempf was
one of the best all-around players the Pac-12 has ever seen. Welp was
simply the most dominant conference center of the decade. Nearly
three full decades after his last college game, Welp remains one of
the top 10 all-time scorers in Pac-12 history.
In the winter
of 1984, Welp and Schrempf, without anywhere near the supporting cast
Olajuwon had at Houston, had Washington in the hunt for the
conference title. On Thursday and Saturday nights, in an era when the
Pac-10 schedule was dictated by concerns about athletes’ missed
class time and not TV network scheduling, Hec Ed was the place to be
in Seattle. Built in 1927, the stone-and-steel barn anchored to the
shore of Lake Washington rocked.
It was standing
room only up to the rafters when Washington hosted UCLA on national
TV on CBS in early February in the most exciting college basketball
game I’ve ever covered, a triple-overtime thriller. There were 22
lead changes in regulation. A Welp tip-in in the dying seconds of the
first overtime pushed a second extra-period. The Huskies finally
secured the upset, 89-81, prompting in the ensuing weeks chants of
“Final Four in ’84” and visions of Washington playing in the
national title game downtown at the Kingdome.
Seattle wasn’t
the only place taking Husky basketball seriously. “Two Bits, Four
Bits, Six Bits, A Deutsche Mark!” was the headline on a lengthy
Sports Illustrated feature on Schrempf and Welp on the eve of the
1984 NCAA Tournament.
Washington
didn’t make it to the Final Four. The Huskies were surprised in the
Sweet 16 by Dayton but not before winning the Pac-10 title and then
knocking off a rising Duke program that featured Johnny Dawkins, Jay
Bilas, Mark Alarie and Tommy Amaker, the nucleus of a squad that
arrived at the Final Four two years later as the nation’s
top-ranked team.
It was easy to
see Washington, like Duke, as a dynasty in the making. Schrempf was a
junior, Welp a freshman and Seattle and its suburbs were starting to
show early signs of one of the nation’s top hoops hotbeds the area
would become a decade later. Indeed, the Huskies repeated as
conference champions in 1984-85. Yet while Harshman might have had
the unwavering respect of the likes of John Wooden and Pete Newell,
he didn’t have the support of the university’s administration,
which squeezed him out after the 1984-85 season. Apparently winning
titles, graduating players and not breaking NCAA rules wasn’t
enough. Harshman had 13 winning seasons in his 14 years at the U-Dub.
Washington managed just six winning campaigns in the next 18 years.
Harshman was
replaced by Louisiana Tech’s Andy Russo, who rode Karl Malone long
enough through the 1985 NCAA Tournament to become one of the annual
GQ flavors of the month athletic directors make fools out of
themselves pursuing every March. Think of him as an ’80s version of
Andy Enfield. It turned out once you got past the mousse there wasn’t
much to Russo. Then Washington lost the 1986 Pac-10 title when it
somehow blew a 19-point halftime lead at home to Cal on the final
Saturday of the regular season. I always felt Chris would have had a
better NBA career if he had been tutored by Harshman for another two
years.
In spite of
Russo, Welp still managed to earn Pac-10 Player of the Year honors as
a junior and was just as dominant his senior season. A few days
before Christmas 1986, he put up 28 of his career-high 40 points in
the second-half of a win against UCLA, hitting 11 of his last 12
shots. “Hey, Walt put Haley in!” cracked someone in the student
section when Welp blew past former UCLA center Jack Haley. Not that
his Bruin teammates blamed the former Huntington Beach High standout.
“It would
have helped to have Kareem,” the Bruins’ Reggie Miller said after
the game.
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