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Stan Love was a standout for the University of Oregon, earning multiple spots in the Ducks' record books. But when his son, Kevin Love, decided to play his college ball at UCLA, fans turned on the family, fracturing the relationship.
Before Dana Altman and his nine NCAA tournament appearances, before the Lukes (Ridnour and Jackson), before Terrell Brandon, before Ronnie Lee and the Kamikaze Kids, there was Stan Love.
He’s the first University of Oregon basketball player who came into my consciousness. I have no memory of seeing him play in person — I was only 8 years old during his senior year in 1970-71. He was just a name.
A big name.
“The main thing I remember about Stan Love was that he pretty much dominated all the games he played in his four years,” said Don Essig, the UO’s longtime public address announcer for both football and basketball.
“It was also the beginning of the students sleeping on the sidewalk the night, or nights, before to be sure they could get a seat for that team,” he said of the days when Love played at Oregon’s old arena, McArthur Court.
Love, who died April 27 at age 76 after a long illness, arrived in Eugene in the fall of 1967 after a standout career at Morningside High School in Inglewood, California. He was 6-foot-9 and a “skinny surfer dude” of a center with a literal “Beach Boy” pedigree.
His older brother, Mike Love, is co-founder and lead singer of The Beach Boys, the Southern Californian pop/surf rock band that had already released a dozen albums and produced three No. 1 songs, including 1966’s “Good Vibrations,” with lyrics written by Mike Love.
“In our living room when I was growing up were a cello, a harp, a Steinway piano and other instruments,” Stan Love told the Portland Tribune in 2019. “We’d get together and sing. My mother pushed the arts. I watched opera at Hollywood Bowl at age 12. I like music, and I can carry a tune, but I don’t play any instruments.”
But Love did, at times, play basketball like a banshee playing the bagpipes.
His name should have been “Stan Hate, Stan Hostile, Stan Nasty or Stan Surly,” wrote sports reporter Dwight Chapin — co-author of “The Wizard of Westwood” biography of legendary UCLA coach John Wooden — in January 1971.
“That bothers me,” Love explained to the Los Angeles media, before the Ducks took on USC and UCLA that winter. “Sometimes I even get depressed about it. I have a fiery temper. When I get pushed too far, it just snaps.”
Love’s temper sometimes got him into off-court trouble in Eugene.
The late Steve Belko, Ducks’ head coach from 1956 to 1971, once indefinitely suspended Love from the team after he got into an off-campus fistfight between his junior and senior seasons.
He “was fined $100 for assault and battery … and earlier found guilty of unlawful train riding,” according to a June 1970 Associated Press story.
“I got into a fight at a party,” Love said. “I was backed up against a wall and there was nothing I could do. I just had to clean house. I suppose I should have turned my head and walked away when the trouble started, but I don’t find myself doing that very often.”
But Love was in the starting lineup for the first game of his senior season, Dec. 1, 1970, at McArthur Court, scoring all 23 of his points in the first half as the Ducks blitzed San Jose State, 95-65.
He finished his UO career as the school’s all-time leading scorer with 1,644 points in three seasons. That mark now ranks as eighth-best in school history, tied with Fred Jones and Malik Hairston.
But the seven players — Ron Lee, Luke Jackson, Anthony Taylor, Payton Pritchard, Greg Ballard, Tajuan Porter and Orlando Williams — ahead of Love, as well as Jones and Hairston, all played four seasons, their careers starting after freshmen became eligible to play varsity in 1972.
Love was the Pacific-8 Conference player of the year in both his junior and senior seasons as well as an Associated Press honorable mention All-American as a senior, when he averaged 24.6 points and 11.3 rebounds per game.
He’s the only player in school history to average more than 20 points per game in more than one season and is still the school leader in rebounds per game with a career average of 10.5.
Against five-time national champion UCLA at Mac Court on Feb. 21, 1970, Love had 19 points and 11 rebounds as the Ducks beat the top-ranked and undefeated Bruins, 78-65, in front of a sold-out crowd of 10,500.
The Bruins, with future NBA stars Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe and Henry Bibby, went on to finish 28-2 and win a fourth straight national title and sixth in seven years, while Oregon finished 17-9, the same record the Ducks would achieve with Love leading the way in the 1970-71 season.
He was inducted into the UO Athletics Hall of Fame in 1994.
Love was the ninth overall pick in the 1971 NBA draft, selected by the Baltimore Bullets (Now the Washington Wizards) and signed a $460,000 rookie contract, pretty heady stuff for the early 1970s.
He would play forward, sparingly, in the NBA for the Bullets and the Los Angeles Lakers, along with 12 games for the San Antonio Spurs, then part of the American Basketball Association, before playing professionally for a season in France.
‘Chaotic years’
If Love’s relatively short stint in pro basketball was somewhat of a yawner, his post-hoops persona was anything but boring.
Love and former UO football player — and 1976 “Playgirl” centerfold — Rocky Pamplin became bodyguards and caretakers for Love’s cousin, Brian Wilson, considered the genius behind The Beach Boys. Famously, Wilson also suffered from mental illness and drug addiction.
Love and Pamplin toured with the band for several years, charged with trying to keep Wilson from using and finding other trouble.
“Those were chaotic years,” Love told the Portland Tribune. “It was 24 hours of worrying, trying to keep the creeps away. Fame and money in rock ‘n’ roll — it’s all a very dangerous area to live in.”
But it was Love who found himself in trouble with the law again after trying to keep another cousin, and Brian’s brother, Dennis Wilson, from supplying Brian with cocaine, he told the Tribune.
Love and Pamplin posed as police officers, broke into Dennis’ Los Angeles-area home and beat him up. Love was fined $750 and placed on six months’ probation, according to the story.
In his 1991 memoir, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story”, Brian Wilson accused Love and Pamplin of making his life “hell” by yelling at him and trying to intimidate him as they sought to get Brian to stop using drugs and to get into better physical shape, according to Love’s obituary in The New York Times.
“But Wilson also recalled his two bodyguards rescuing him after he took an overdose of sleeping pills. In another incident, he said, Love once helped revive him when Wilson was left semi-conscious and choking on his vomit after taking heroin.”
Son of Stan
Kevin Love was 3 years old when his Uncle Brian’s memoir was published. Kevin, of course, is Stan Love’s son, the middle of his three children.
Kevin, considered by most as the greatest high school basketball player in Oregon history during his four years at Lake Oswego High School, played one season of outstanding college basketball — he was a first-team consensus All-American — at UCLA before being taken fifth overall in the 2008 NBA draft. The 6-foot-8 forward is a five-time NBA all-star, still playing at age 36 with the Miami Heat, and won an NBA championship alongside LeBron James and the rest of the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers.
But Jan. 24, 2008, Kevin was a 19-year-old freshman with the 8th-ranked Bruins when they visited Mac Court on a Thursday night.
Stan Love was there, too, part of a family contingent that sat behind the UCLA bench and included his wife, Karen, Kevin’s older brother, Collin, then 21, and younger sister, Emily, then 13, Mike Love and Kevin’s grandmother.
This would be Kevin Love’s only college visit (he did play at Mac Court in three straight high school championship games from 2005-2007) to the old gym where his father starred four decades earlier.
But before he ever stepped on the court, Kevin Love had more than an inkling how some UO fans felt about his choosing UCLA, the greatest college basketball program of all time, over the home-state Ducks.
“Kevin Love knew it would be bad. But not this bad.”
The late Sports Illustrated writer, Grant Wahl, wrote those words for the magazine’s March 3, 2008, issue. The article was titled “Over the Top” and delved into the “extreme vulgarity and taunting” by some college basketball fans around the country that season.
Before the Bruins ever got to Eugene, Kevin Love told Wahl, he found more than 30 voicemail messages on his cellphone when the team stopped for a layover in San Francisco.
“If you guys win, we’ll come to your house and kill your family,” he claimed one message said.
“We’ll find your hotel room and blow your f—— head off with a shotgun,” he recited as another.
“I mean, these were death threats,” Kevin Love told Wahl, although he nor his family ever alerted the UO or Eugene Police Department.
Someone with the Pit Crew, the UO’s student fan section, apparently obtained Kevin Love’s cellphone number, and it was circulating among members days before the game, according to Wahl’s article.
Sad signs
“That was an ugly night; students are ridiculous,” recalled Essig, the 86-year-old PA announcer, who’s served in that capacity since Stan Love’s freshman year of 1967-68.
“They had all kinds of rotten stuff on signs,” said Essig, talking about the Pit Crew, whose seats were right on the floor at Mac Court, much as they are in Matthew Knight Arena. Many of the signs Essig and the rest of the sold-out crowd didn’t see that night were confiscated before the game, according to The Register-Guard’s coverage.
“Hey, Stan. Do you have any more coke for Brian?” read one sign, Stan Love told Denver Post sports reporter John Henderson, who watched Love play at Mac Court while growing up in Eugene.
“Stan Was Never a Duck,” was another sign reported by The Register-Guard’s George Schroeder, then the paper’s sports columnist, who wrote that many of the signs he saw that night were not fit for a family newspaper, most containing homophobic or other sexual slurs.
Stan Love told Wahl there were 6-year-olds in the crowd with “KEVIN LOVE SUCKS” signs, although no one could verify that afterward, according to an R-G story by Ron Bellamy, then the paper’s sports editor.
Robert Husseman, then a 19-year-old Pit Crew member, as well as a sports reporter and copy editor with The Daily Emerald student newspaper, told me there was a lot of “saber-rattling” from the UO athletic department after the game.
“If this sort of thing keeps up, you guys won’t be able to attend games,” was the gist of the message, said Husseman, who appeared in Wahl’s SI piece and now works as a senior financial analyst with an outdoor supply company in the Portland area.
“I hoped they would die quickly, but they didn’t,” Husseman told Wahl of certain Pit Crew chants.
“What they chanted at Kevin, the best prep player to come out of (Oregon) and UCLA’s leading scorer, were the filthiest, most distasteful and classless lines I have heard,” wrote Henderson in the column after chatting with Stan Love at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion a month after the Bruins visit to Mac Court.
Henderson added that Love told him he only received a “superficial, nonapologetic apology” on his cellphone from then-UO Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny.
Schroeder wrote about how Love took some photos of the Pit Crew and their signs during the game, which was met with obscene gestures from some students.
“And that definitely happened,” Husseman told me of students “flipping off” not only Stan Love but Kevin Love on the court, including from his own hand. “No question about it. It was a bad behavior day on the part of the students.”
But the Bruins had the last laugh, as Kevin Love had a monster game — 26 points and a UCLA freshman record 18 rebounds — in a 90-85 victory.
“I can’t tell you if I’ve had a better feeling in my basketball career than walking off that court and taking the high road and feeling good about that game,” he told the Los Angeles media upon returning to Westwood. “It was one of my favorite games ever to win.”
Husseman would write a piece for the Daily Emerald in the days after the game.
“We held up signs no one below the age of 18 should read. We taunted (Kevin Love’s) family and occasionally offered to fight a family member (Collin Love). We threw a curse word every chance we could. And we cannot hide from this — in the Pit Crew if one’s culpable, all are culpable.”
‘I’ll never go back there’
The father of one UO student was stunned to spot his son in a photo that accompanied Wahl’s SI piece and wrote a letter to the magazine:
“I was shocked to see, in a photo of the Oregon student section, my son partaking in the harassment of UCLA’s Kevin Love. When he came home the following weekend, his car was taken away and he headed back to school on a bus. I am embarrassed and wish to apologize to Kevin and his family.”
Stan Love saw the letter and later told the R-G’s Schoeder:
“Here’s a guy who’s trying to get his kid back on track. It’s something as parents we’ve all tried to do with our kids, to teach them when peer pressure comes, to turn and go the other way. I’m happy (he) reacted that way. I loved it. I personally thank him for his actions.”
But when Love spoke with Henderson in Los Angeles a month earlier, he said he was “divorcing” himself from the Ducks.
How big is the chasm? Henderson asked Love.
“The Grand Canyon’s not big enough,” he replied.
Love told The Oregonian that Kilkenny, in his voicemail, said “he should have done this, he should have done that, and he didn’t.”
Love told Wahl: “I’ll never go back there.”
Asked what he would say to Kevin Love if they ever met, Husseman said: “I don’t know if I would bring it up, truth be told. Would I be curious how he felt about it later on? Sure. I bet what he has to say looking back on it, being the target, is very valuable.”
Essig said he’s not aware of Stan Love ever returning to the UO.
“I don’t think (he ever came) back on campus, for anything,” he said.
The university has made no public statement on Love’s death.
Neither Rob Mullens, the UO’s athletic director, or Jimmy Stanton, senior associate athletic director for communications, responded to emails seeking comment.
