April 2024 ~
Not that he needs anyone putting words in his mouth, but if you were to ask Jack Dunn how long he coached baseball in Portland there’s a good chance his response would go something like, “Let me see. When was Pleistocene Man’s sophomore year?”
Point being, the legendary 94-going-on-44-year-old-skipper watched a lot of players come and go during his time at Cleveland and Wilson high schools and Portland State University, 35 of whom wound up signing pro contracts.
So, when he says Dale Murphy (Wilson, 1974) was the best player he ever coached, that’s saying both a lot and, according to Dunn, not nearly enough.
Because, while any Oregonian or Georgian of a certain vintage who knows whether a baseball is pumped up or stuffed (one of countless classic “Dunnisms”) can tell you something about Murphy’s career in Major League Baseball — maybe the two MVP awards or multiple All-Star game appearances — that’s not where Dunn starts when asked for specifics.
He leads with “Dale was a big leaguer before he reached the major leagues,” a line straight out of The Coach-Speak Almanac that gives every impression a recitation of Murphy’s big-league skill set is to follow. The speed. The rocket-launcher of an arm. The ability to hit a ball from the Wilson batter’s box into the Hamburger Helper aisle at Hillsdale’s Piggly Wiggly.
But instead of the heater down the middle, he surprises with a curve.
“I coached a lot of great players,” he says. “But my criterion for that was not making the majors; it was going on to become contributing citizens. I saw baseball as a vehicle to help kids complete their education and be successful citizens. That was the purpose, not sending players to the majors. And Dale was always a big leaguer as a person.”
Dunn then effortlessly pulls from memory a litany of the philanthropic and humanitarian awards Murphy has earned over the years. Those, of course, were honors and thank-yous he received during and after his big-league career. But Dunn, to whom Murphy still refers as “the best coach I ever had, at any level,” still saw the makings of the man Murphy would become before the makings of the major leaguer appeared.
It's a good thing Dunn does highlight his former protégé’s contributions off the field considering the man long called “Murph” (as if there was any male Murphy ever not called that) isn’t prone to talking about them himself. There’s no mention of any of it, for example, when he responds to the question posed by a long-ago teammate, “Soooo, what have you been up to for the last 50 years?”
“A little of this, a little of that,” Murphy says before detailing over the next 40 minutes what that means, most of it offered without the need for any follow-up questions. As if maybe he’s done this a time or 2,000 before. Or, maybe it’s because a little of this and that includes frequent public speaking engagements, which have become a favorite retirement pastime.
Whatever the case, Murphy covers the territory of his personal history as effortlessly as he used to make patrolling centerfield for the Atlanta Braves look. He just leaves out the sort of all-around-great-guy material that back in the glory days would lead so many people, like former Dodger great Don Sutton, to say things like, “Dale may be the only guy I know who could call 24 guys in one locker room a good friend.”
Murphy and his wife, Nancy, met in 1978 when the devout Mormon attended Brigham Young University between seasons and married the next year. They now live primarily in Utah but also spend a few months a year in Atlanta, where their seven sons and one daughter (Chad, Travis, Shawn, Tyson, Taylor, Jake, McKay and Madi) were born and raised and where Murphy “still has a lot of connections and business dealings.”
Those dealings include a restaurant called – wait for it – Murph’s.
“I call it a burger place,” he says. “It’s decorated with old memorabilia, photos and articles. It’s a 10-minute walk to the stadium [Truist Park], so lots of Braves fans and people from back in the day go there.
“So far, it hasn’t been a mistake,” he adds, laughing. “I have a great partner and manager. I’m just a guy who shows up once in a while and eats burgers with people.”
That’s a reference to the MVP Experiences that Nancy suggested and now organizes, which give groups of fans the opportunity to sit down with Murphy and hear tales of their hero’s days in The Show.
“I do that 10 or 12 times a year,” he says. “I share stories, we have lunch together and tour the ballpark. It’s a way to stay connected to baseball. My time in the game seems like a million years ago, but I’ll always miss it.”
Murphy has loved that game as far back as he can remember. As he relates in his 1986 autobiography, Murph (bet you guessed that, didn’t you?), “When I was four, Dad tried to teach me how to throw a baseball but finally gave up. Playing the game didn’t interest me nearly as much as watching it. I would sit in front of the television even at that age and watch whole games. One day, while watching a Boston Red Sox game, I saw an outfielder catch the ball and throw it back to the infield. I picked up a ball and said to Dad, ‘Like this?’ I finally threw a ball.”
Murphy also writes that he spent his Little League years “looking as average or below average as a kid can look. I certainly wasn’t one of those types who was thinking about the major leagues.”
He wasn’t the only one not thinking that. Mike Clopton was an assistant coach for the Viking Hall Babe Ruth team Murphy played for from ages 13 to 15. He saw a good player, sure. But, when asked if he had any idea he was coaching a future big league star, his response is a quick, “Not a clue.”
However, the future Wilson coach and fellow PIL Hall of Famer was the first to suggest Murphy might want to give a new position a try, the one he’d still be playing when Major League scouts started paying attention. Murphy remembers that conversation going something like this:
Clopton: “Murph, do you want to try catching today?”
Murphy: “Sure, but I don’t have a catcher’s mitt or a cup.”
Clopton: “Oh, you’ll be fine.”
“My first day behind the plate, I broke my thumb,” Murphy recalls with laugh.
If anyone was going to see big-league potential in the youngster Murphy, it would have been Dunn. His son, Jeff (a 2014 Hall of Fame inductee), and Dale had been best friends since kindergarten at Hayhurst School and the Dunn and Murphy parents, Jack and Jeanne and Chuck and Betty, were equally close. (Chuck has passed, but Betty still lives in Hillsboro. Murphy’s older sister, Susan, lives in Tillamook.)
Back then, what the coach saw in Murphy was just a kid hanging around the house. But about halfway through Murphy’s Wilson career, Dunn’s perspective started to change,
“Dale was just an average-sized guy going into adolescence,” Dunn remembers. “He had the size and athleticism that you associate with all the skill positions in sports — shortstop, point guard, wide receiver. Then, almost suddenly it seemed, he shot up to six-foot-four. But he still had those same skills.”
Like Clopton, Dunn saw Murphy as a catcher, especially knowing there was a shortage of future big-league talent at the position, so teams were always in the market. And especially now that Murphy had both size and the kind of throwing arm Dunn had only seen once before.
“I played in the Dodgers organization with a guy named Glen Gorbous. He had the best arm I’d ever seen, and I’d been comparing Dale’s to his,” Dunn recalls. “One day, I was listening to a radio show and [legendary MLB manager] Leo Durocher was a guest. The host asked him who he thought had the best arm in baseball and I’ll be damned if he didn’t say Glen Gorbous. I thought, If that’s good enough for Leo Durocher, I must be onto something with Murph.”
Back to Murphy’s book, where he acknowledges that he was going to advance in baseball only as far as his arm could throw him:
“I was hitting homeruns and batting .400, but a lot of guys do that in high school…all things considered, they (scouts) figured I was only an average batter who could learn to hit. That can be taught. But the arm was something I was born with.”
While Wilson always fielded state tournament teams during Murphy’s tenure, and he would earn All-PIL and All-State awards, the Trojans never won a state title. The team enjoyed most of its success during the summer season, especially in 1973 when Watco Electric made it to the American Legion World Series, where they finished third.
“I have great high school memories,” says Murphy, who entered the PIL Hall of Fame with its third class of inductees in 1986. “We always had good Wilson teams but never won a state title. But we had an incredible run with Watco. We got to the world series in 1973, and that wound up being the only one I ever got to.”
Only a few months later, after his senior season, Murphy was selected by the Braves with the fifth pick of the 1974 MLB draft.
Dunn remembers the night before the draft (and virtually everything else that’s happened in his 94 years, it seems) as if it were yesterday instead of half a century ago this June. Years earlier, he had befriended the supervisor of scouting for the Braves, a fellow named Bill Wyght, who would visit the Dunn household whenever he was working in Portland.
“Bill called the night before the draft and asked me, ‘If we draft Murphy, will he sign? Because I can’t afford to draft a guy who won’t sign.’ (Murphy, who assumed if he was drafted it wouldn’t be in the early rounds, was planning to attend Arizona State University, then a perennial college baseball power.) I told Bill, ‘Well, his dad said he would sign.’ So, Atlanta drafted him in the first round. The next day we talked and I asked him, ‘Did you ever think that little kid running around my house would be a first-round draft choice? Bill said, ‘Nope.’”
Within a few weeks, Murphy was playing rookie ball, the first stop in what would be an orderly progression through the Braves farm system, advancing from rookie league to A ball, AA and AAA over the next three years. Murphy remembers the time fondly, even considering the high-and-low nature of the minor-league experience.
“We were just a bunch of young kids getting paid to play professional ball,” he says. “I’m putting air quotes around the word paid because my first year I made $500 a month. It was hard, not glamorous, but it was a real good apprenticeship. Most of us were single and just trying to battle home sickness and slumps. Each level I went up I’d be thinking, Dang, I don’t know if I can make it at this level. But like a lot of things, sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward. You figure it out.”
After making his first MLB appearances with brief September call-ups from the minors in ‘76 and ‘77, Murphy stuck with the Braves for good in 1978. In a strange twist, it turned out to be Murphy’s hitting, not his arm, that earned him a spot on the roster. In 1976, he had developed a mysterious case of the throwing “yips” that he was unable to solve during the 1977 AAA season. The Braves fixed it by turning Murphy into a first baseman, his primary position for his first two full years with the parent team.
Though he was a starter who played in 255 games, hit 44 homeruns and drove in 136 runs during that period, Murphy says he didn’t start feeling “comfortable, like I had made the team until 1980 and 81.” That coincided with another position switch, this time to centerfield. That was another conversation and day Murphy remembers well.
Braves Manager Bobby Cox: “Let’s get you in the outfield.”
Murphy: “Do I have a choice?”
Cox: “No, not really.”
Though Murphy was initially reluctant to make the move, it helped kick his career into high gear.
“I really took to it,” he says. “I started developing some power and hitting more homeruns. I knew it was my shot to find a position for good. I loved it. It kept me in the big leagues. Things went better than I expected.”
It would have taken someone with a level of cockiness as foreign to Murphy as a four-letter word to have expected these results:
- Seven All-Star selections, five Golden Gloves and four Silver Slugger awards.
- Leading the National League in total homeruns and RBIs during the decade of the 80s.
- Becoming, in 1983, the youngest player in MLB history to hit over .300, slug more than 30 HRs and 120 RBIs, score more than 130 runs, steal more than 30 bases and walk more than 90 times.
- Hitting 398 career homers.
- Four straight seasons without missing a game; nine without missing more than eight.
Murphy won his two Most Valuable Player Awards in 1982 and 1983, becoming the youngest player ever to win consecutive MVPs.
He played his last game on May 21, 1993. Knee problems and just the general feeling that it was time led to his decision to end his career 49 at-bats into his final stop in Colorado. He had spent the previous three years with the Philadelphia Phillies after spending 13 full seasons with the Braves.
During his time in the game and after, Murphy was honored repeatedly for his contributions to charity. Sports Illustrated named him one of its “Sportsmen and Sportswomen of the Year,” representing baseball as the athlete “Who Cares the Most.” He won the Lou Gehrig Award as well as the Roberto Clemente Memorial Award, given annually to one major leaguer in recognition of his character and charitable contributions. He is one of the fewer than 50 members of the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame alongside the likes of Arthur Ashe, Dr. J. and Magic Johnson. He even accepted an award from President Ronald Reagan at the White House.
Again, Murphy doesn’t mention any of these details over the course of 40 minutes, and before he can be asked about them, he apologizes for having to cut the conversation short. With 19 grandchildren, his “a little of this, a little of that” includes a whole lotta grandparenting these days, and duty is calling.
The good news is, the old coach says, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he has always been more than willing to accept some of the credit for Murphy. Dunn recounts another tale, this one about the time he got interviewed by a Sports Illustrated writer preparing an article about Murphy, who appeared on the magazine’s cover three times.
“I told the guy, ‘Look, I take all the credit for Dale,’” Dunn deadpans. “I always tell him, ‘Look both ways when you cross the street, fasten your seatbelt and just kind of watch out for yourself. Because you’re making me look good.’”
All these years later, Murphy is not shy about giving Dunn credit where credit is due. “Back at Wilson, Coach Dunn would say, ‘I’ll teach you lessons that will last a lifetime,” Murphy says. “And he did.”
For more information visit DaleMurphy.com
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption.
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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