March 2025 ~
Those who know Bob Woodle (Benson, 1959) know he isn’t one to chase the spotlight. And for that reason, you may be one of those who know Woodle but don’t know you do.
For the past decade-plus, Woodle has been working diligently, and mostly behind the scenes, to ensure new Hall of Famers get the personalized recognition they deserve during the annual induction banquet, on the organization’s website and in local media outlets. He has been the gentleman calling new inductees, gathering background information and writing up personal reflections for use in introductory speeches, banquet programs and press releases.
If you are an inductee and are good with names, maybe you know this. But you may not know Woodle hasn’t always worked out of the spotlight. He wasn’t chasing it in his youth, either, mind you. But his golf, basketball and baseball skills ensured he was drawing attention to himself in high school and college and, even later, when even his mad badminton skills brought him some acclaim.
Woodle grew up in the Bridlemile neighborhood of Southwest Portland before it was known as Bridlemile and before its young residents had a Wilson High School to advance to. Like so many members of the PIL Hall of Fame, sports came naturally to Woodle.
“Whatever success I enjoyed in athletics started with being blessed with good genes,” he says.
That’s all well and good, but as any decent athlete who has ever had to repair a foot-deep divot will attest, golf, as general rule, couldn’t care less about your natural ability to shoot baskets or hit doubles. Yet there was the precocious Woodle turning his natural gifts into unnaturally good golf scores for a kid his age.
“I started golfing when I was 11,” he remembers. “My uncle took me out, showed me how to grip a club and told me, ‘This is the most important thing to learn. Swing as hard as you can, all the time. They’ll go all over the place to begin with, but eventually you’ll be getting them in the fairway’.”
A few teaching pros may have quibbled with that advice, but they wouldn’t have with the result. Woodle was soon striking the ball with enough distance and accuracy that he was already flirting with par at 15, the same age he hit his first hole in one. Or so he was told.
“It wasn’t very memorable,” says Woodle, who remembers it, nonetheless. “From the tee, I could only see the top of the flagstick, so I didn’t see the ball go in.”
It was, of course, more than just natural skills that helped Woodle continually decrease his golf scores. He was also putting in plenty of work, if you could call it that, considering how much he loved the sport.
“Dad, who was a parts manager for Caterpillar Tractor, had to work half days every Saturday. So, he’d get my older brother, Jim, and me up at 5 a.m. and drop us off at West Hills Golf Course, which is now the Oregon Zoo. We’d get on the course before it opened, play nine, go pay our 25-cent green fees, then go around again as many times as we could until Dad picked us up on his way home for work. We did that every Saturday for years.”
Woodle augmented those rounds with regular early morning trips with his uncle to Portland Golf Club, where he’d hunt for stray balls before sneaking in a few holes and gaining some experience on a championship-level course.
“I was setting golf goals for myself pretty early on,” he says. “I remember shooting 56 on a front nine when I was 11, so my next goal was to shoot 50, then 45, then par. By the time I was 15, I was regularly shooting 36 to 40.”
After Woodle’s dad bought the lot adjacent to the home he had built prior to getting married, Bob and his brother set up holes in all four corners and played almost every day. “We got pretty proficient,” he says.
All the while, Woodle was also honing his basketball and baseball skills to the point where he had also become proficient in those sports by the time he entered Benson, where his dad had attended, and his brother was then a senior. There Woodle would quickly get to work making a name for himself in three sports even though two of them were played in the same season.
In basketball freshman year, Woodle was the Benson junior varsity team’s MVP before moving up to the varsity his next three years and playing for coaching legend and PIL Hall of Famer Dick Gray. He led Benson in scoring in both his junior and senior years, averaging 17 to 18 points a game, and making 1st All-PIL team his final season.
He enjoyed similar success in baseball, starting at shortstop for the Techmen for three years and batting .380 as a senior on his way to 2nd team All-PIL honors and, of course…the PIL Championship Golf Tournament?
“My baseball coach gave me the OK to play in that tournament for three years,” Woodle explains. “Because I was playing baseball, I hadn’t practiced much golf. So, senior year I was surprised to shoot two-over par for both rounds of the PIL Championship. I even made the prep column in ‘The Oregonian’.”
In addition to being named Benson’s Sportsman of the Year as a senior, Woodle was also his class’s co-valedictorian.
But wait, there’s more.
“I also won the Mobil Gas Economy Run,” he says with a laugh. (It’s a long story but in the short version, the young Woodle claimed that title by coaxing an efficient 25 miles per gallon out of a 1953 Nash Ambassador over a 100-mile course.) In addition, Woodle was one of the Benson seniors chosen as a driver for members of the Portland Rose Festival Court. “I had a pretty good season that year,” he muses.
Before graduating, Woodle had been recruited by the University of Portland to play basketball and by Linfield College and Willamette University for both basketball and baseball. He wound up accepting Willamette’s offer of an academic scholarship.
As a freshman, Woodle played on Willamette’s JV varsity squad, where he averaged nearly 20 points and shot almost 50 percent from the field during what he calls “the most enjoyable playing experience of my career.”
After playing a “run, gun and fun” style of ball on JV, Woodle endured a “more deliberate” coaching style over his next three years on varsity. “The coach even tried to talk me into shooting two-handed set shots,” he says. “Basketball was changing, and he was a bit behind the times.”
After his first fall term juggling hoops and studies, Woodle decided to give up playing baseball that spring in order to focus on basketball and schoolwork.
“I got a 3.2 GPA and, because I had gotten 4.0s at Benson, I was worried I was flunking out of college,” he says.
As it turned out, Woodle just gave up one spring sport for another.
“I hadn’t even thought about playing golf at Willamette,” he says. “But the golf coach, who heard I wasn’t going to play baseball, called one Thursday and said he needed a sixth man for Willamette’s next match and asked if I’d be interested. We played at Broadmoor, which didn’t have a driving range. So, I didn’t hit a ball until the first tee, and it dribbled over the lip of the tee box and down the hill. Pretty embarrassing. But my second shot, I hit an iron to the green and then sank a 20-foot putt for a birdie. I wound up shooting a 76.”
Unsurprisingly, Woodle also wound up a full-time member of the Willamette golf team. He lettered four years and, as a senior, finished seventh in the NAIA nationals, earning All-American status, and leading Willamette to an eighth-place finish. Both his and the team’s finishes were the highest in school history, and Woodle’s efforts, along with his other achievements over four years, earned him a spot in the Willamette’s Hall of Fame.
Then, of course, there’s the badminton thing.
As sports editor of The Willamette Collegian, Woodle also assumed a sports information role in the university's Office of Public Information. When his boss resigned at the same time Woodle earned his degree, in 1963, the new grad wrote the university president suggesting that if a Willamette education was worth what the big guy had earlier told him it would be, he should be considered for the vacant director's position. It worked. Woodle landed the position and held it for 14 years.
During that time, Woodle would meet daily with other faculty members to use the university’s athletic facilities, in part to prepare for tennis and badminton intramural competitions with the students. By the mid-70s, he and a math professor friend and partner stumbled into the Oregon Closed Badminton Tournament as relative newcomers to the sport.
“We drew the defending state champions in our first doubles match. They had this arsenal of metal racquets, and we were playing with well-used wooden racquets from the Willamette P.E. department. We didn't even know how to start a match," Woodle says, laughing.
The Willamette neophytes still wound up taking the former champs to overtime before losing, and just a year later, armed with new metal rackets, they won the title themselves.
Woodle wound up working at Willamette until 1978 when a fraternity brother offered him a job in real estate. Over the course of 28 years, Woodle sold homes and worked with more than 700 clients before retiring in 2008 as a productive broker with REMAX/Equity Group in Portland.
In 1965, he married the “marvelous” woman he fell in love with at first sight. Over 58 1/2 years of marriage, he and Judy, who passed away in 2024, raised three daughters, the oldest of whom lived for 12 years in the same house Woodle’s dad built. “Four of my grandchildren grew up in the same house I did,” he says, proudly.
Woodle’s 2006 PIL induction was his fourth hall of fame honor, which, in addition to Willamette’s also include the sports shrines for Benson and NAIA District 2. He was elected to the PIL Hall of Fame Board of Directors in 2011 and since then has written more bios of fellow inductees than he can remember.
And even if many of those inductees don’t remember it was Bob Woodle who wrote their bio, it’s a sure bet they (you?) remember that the words he wrote meant an awful lot.
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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