Fulton remembers 1958 Tigers run

WHEN CLEMSON’S 1958 baseball team made the NCAA tournament under first-year coach Bill Wilhelm, there were no television or radio broadcasts of college baseball.

However, Bob Fulton thought the Tigers’ postseason games should get coverage. He convinced Columbia radio station WCOS it was a good idea, and Clemson, of course, was delighted.

Fulton, the voice of the Gamecocks for 43 years, doing games for the Tigers? Were things that different then?

“Oh, not at all,” Fulton said this week. “The rivalry between Carolina and Clemson was just as heated in 1958, but no one seemed to mind my doing the games. I never got one letter of complaint.

“I used to do both USC and Clemson games in the ACC basketball tournament.” Fulton said with a laugh, “Most times back then, that meant I was through after one day.”

Wilhelm’s baseball team traveled to Gastonia, N.C., in 1958 for the District 3 playoffs (now called regionals), which included Florida State, Florida and George Washington. The Tigers lost the opener to the Gators 8-6 then defeated the Colonials and the Seminoles to stay alive. To get to the College World Series in Omaha, Clemson had to beat Florida twice.

The Tigers won the first game in a 15-14 thriller when Bailey Hendley singled Larry Wilson home with the winning run in the bottom of the ninth. Clemson’s Harold Stowe hurled a four-hitter for a 3-1 victory in the second game.

As a teenager, I remember listening to Fulton describe the action against the backdrop of a roaring crowd. It felt like I was there. A few years later, I learned Fulton wasn’t even in Gastonia. He was in the WCOS studio re-creating the game.

“I set it up with Western Union for them to feed me a ticker of each pitch and each play,” Fulton said. “Then I filled in the color and descriptions, and an engineer provided the crowd noise. It worked pretty well.”

Fulton had the same setup to call Clemson’s games in the College World Series, although the Omaha broadcasts didn’t go as smoothly. The day the Tigers played their first game, against Arizona, Fulton took his wife to the train station for a trip she was making to her native Little Rock, Ark. Then he hustled back to the studio to call the game.

“I had to sit there for a while because it turned out that the game didn’t start until around 1 a.m. our time,” Fulton said. “I had been up all day, and I’ll tell you, I was tired. Several times I nodded off while doing the game. The engineer would keep the crowd noise going and come in and wake me up. Somehow we made it through.”

The second game, against Holy Cross, presented a different problem. In about the seventh inning, the Western Union wire stopped working.

“I called (Clemson Sports Information director) Bob Bradley, who was in Omaha, and asked him to call in periodic updates, which he did,” Fulton said. “But for awhile there, I had to do some stalling by saying there was a discussion going on between the coaches or something like that.”

Clemson defeated Arizona then lost to Holy Cross and Western Michigan to end its stay in Omaha. Wilhelm led the Tigers back to Omaha in 1959, and Fulton was “there” again to describe the games.

“Re-creating baseball games was nothing new,” Fulton said. “You know, President Reagan did it when he was at a radio station in Iowa back in the 1930s. Even when you try to tell people what it is, some of them still don’t understand it.”

Re-creation can leave some fans puzzled. One year, Fulton did an American Legion came from Florence on a Friday night then called a Dixie Youth game Saturday from Alabama in the morning and a Pony League game from Pennsylvania in the afternoon.

“I know some people must have wondered how I could get to those places so fast,” Fulton said.

Did he ever tell them?

“Only if they asked.”