ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The headline was simply two words: “Tradition Broken.” Next to it was a photo of a Lobo baseball player and the head coach.
And that’s how in 1964 David Hunt found out he was named the first captain in Lobo Baseball history.
“It was a total surprise,” Hunt said. “At practice Carlos Salazar (of the Albuquerque Tribune) was there with a photographer. (Head coach) George (Petrol) said, ‘Come over here and stand by me. Look like you know what you’re doing.’
“In the morning in the mess hall there were a lot of athletes like basketball players, track and field athletes, and everyone started cheering for me. I had no idea until they showed me the paper with the headline and the picture they had taken. It was quite an honor.
“What it really is was a local boy made good.”
An All-City player at Sandia High School in Albuquerque, Hunt was happy enough to be able attend a major university and play baseball, which he did for the Lobos from 1963-65.
“Back in those days athletic scholarships were rare,” he said, “and if you got one you needed to get a job in addition to that. You would need to mop the floors or work in the athletic department or training room. Only the out of town guys would get full rides. But it was just a thrill to be able to play for a D-I school against great teams like Arizona, Arizona State, USC, UCLA, Hawaii — some real powerhouse ball clubs — and we did really well.”
The Lobos reached their first NCAA Tournament during Hunt’s freshman year in 1962. even though he was unable to play due to NCAA rules at the time. Although UNM never quite returned to that level, the Lobos did manage to beat some top-level teams, including a pair of wins over the Sun Devils, which were UNM’s only wins against Arizona State in a 15-year period.
Still, though, Hunt was a deserving captain, perhaps best illustrated by a single at bat against Air Force.
“We were playing them at the old Lobo Field,” he said, “and they had this real hotshot pitcher on the mound. It was the bottom of the ninth, there were two guys on in a tie game, and I was at bat. I fouled off 26 straight pitches before he finally grooved one. I smacked it right back at him, it hit the inside of his thigh — really, probably closer to his knee than anything — and it bounced into the first-base dugout. I got a single and the winning run scored.”
That kind of determination showed a truly deep commitment to his team and his coach.
“There’s nobody like George,” Hunt said. “He’s a legend. He doesn’t put up with anything. His line was, ‘The day I stop chewing you out is the day I don’t care about you anymore.’ Some kids would come in, screw up, and he wouldn’t talk to them so they knew they were on a ticket out. He’s an old-school baseball coach, a hard knocks kind of guy. He used to wrestle bears for money at circuses to pay his way through school in Pennsylvania. He did the best he could with an unbelievably limited budget at UNM. It was abysmal. A lot of guys would have to bring their own bats because the school couldn’t afford to replace them.”
Hunt’s love for the program and university didn’t end once he graduated, though. Back in 1988 when the program was in danger of being cut, he led a group that was determined to save the team.
“I put a year and a half of my life into making sure UNM had baseball,” he said.
Along with Tom Dunn and Ernie Blackstone and with the help of Vince Cappelli, the head coach at the time, the group put on the Legends for Lobos event that centered around a Hall of Fame exhibition game featuring Joe and Frank Torre, a golf tournament, and a celebrity roast of former Lobo player and New Mexico senator Pete Domenici.
“This was a real black-tie affair,” Hunt said. “We were selling 15-person tables, and we put the AD at the time (Dr. John Koenig) at the front of the room at a table all by himself. During his speech senator Domenici pointed right at him and said, ‘You will reinstate baseball.’ And that’s what happened.”
Hunt refused to allow baseball to be cut because it meant so much to him and allowed him to achieve his potential.
“If it wasn’t for baseball I would be scraping paint off of old ships in San Diego for the US Navy,” he said. “Baseball made me what I am. I ended up earning seven degrees with two PhDs and it was all because of baseball. My success in life is associated not only with my education, but also with the lessons that athletics teaches kids.”
He continues to follow the program and is thrilled with the work current head coach Ray Birmingham is doing with the team. Like Hunt, Birmingham is a native of New Mexico and dreams of taking the best players in the state all the way to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.
“It’s unbelievable what he has been able to accomplish,” Hunt said about Birmingham. “I take my hat off to him. He’s dealing with a population of about a million and a half in the state. There are not too many kids to pull from when you compare it to Arizona, California, Texas or Oklahoma, but he’s still competitive. That’s amazing.”