Sports fans around the country have any number of ways to celebrate their favorite players, such as wearing the player’s old uniform number, reciting a long list of impressive stats or even reserving a place in the house for pictures and memorabilia.
Sports fans around the country have any number of ways to celebrate their favorite players, such as wearing the player’s old uniform number, reciting a long list of impressive stats or even reserving a place in the house for pictures and memorabilia.
One of the most significant players in the early days of athletics at the University of Hawaii at Hilo has, at the same time, very little in his Vulcans past to refer to statistically, while having a profound impact on the community today.
There are players from some schools with statistics and trophies that verge on the unbelievable, but fans of those teams very seldom see the athlete back in the community after his playing days conclude.
For them, it’s all about big numbers and championship banners, but at UH-Hilo, for all its issues of isolation and travel that complicates the business of NCAA competition beyond that known to other schools, there are some too often overlooked benefits other schools can’t match.
He isn’t the only one, but Dennis O’Brien is a remarkable example of the pull of ohana here on the East side of Hawaii.
O’Brien was inducted into the Vulcans Athletic Hall of Fame a couple weeks back and you have to wonder what took so long. O’Brien was a Chicago-area kid somebody mentioned to UH-Manoa Coach Red Rocha in 1971 and the Rainbow Warriors flew him and two others to Oahu for a look-see, but the roster was filled with talent that came to be known as the Fab Five.
“I could have stayed, but they didn’t really need me,” O’Brien, principal at DeSilva Elementary in Hilo said last week. “(Rocha) mentioned there was a new UH team starting up in Hilo and I might want to take a look because I could play more there.”
“He almost literally fell in my lap,” said retired Vulcans’ coach Jimmy Yagi, “I had no idea who he was.”
O’Brien had an open invitation to return to Manoa after a year or two but he couldn’t make himself leave, he had fallen in love with Hilo.
“Back then, Hilo had one traffic light,” O’Brien said, “and Honolulu was more like Hilo today. Just stepping off the airplane I really liked the place and after a couple days, I knew I wasn’t going back.”
It was more than 40 years ago, the Vulcans were in their infancy, playing community college teams and senior men’s league squads.
“We had a bunch of 5-9, 5-10 guys,” Yagi said, “we had no size, no inside game at all and then this 6-3 kid shows up who could really shoot.
“A better person than a player, but he was a great player for us. Those first few years (of NAIA competition) would have been really brutal without him.”
As it was, O’Brien helped UH-Hilo into NAIA district competition those first couple of years, but it was so long ago, only memories remain. There are no stats posted online, no standings, no playoff results.
But there is a memory of a game at the University of San Diego in the 1972-73 season when Yagi preached mental toughness and showed the team a trick of cutting a banana essentially with the power of concentrated thought. It was a trick and Yagi isn’t about to give away the secret, but something must have worked for O’Brien that night, he put up 27 points and grabbed 25 rebounds, career-highs in each, for which he doesn’t require a score book to remember.
“For whatever reason,” O’Brien said, “everything clicked that night. I had that one night that great players have every night, I could do no wrong.”
He’s done even better since graduation. O’Brien has been contributing to the community from the time he first arrived on Hawaii, his work never more important than now, guiding keiki at DeSilva. He spent time at Hilo High, but for the last seven years O’Brien has centered his career on what he thinks is the most vital aspect of learning.
“A lot of research has been done in this area,” he said, “and it all points to, if a child can read comfortably at grade level in the second grade, they’ll never fall behind and need reading help.
“If they start off third grade struggling, falling behind in reading, they almost always stay behind through school and the rest of their lives.”
He was a pillar of determination who was a major contributor to building athletics in the past for UH-Hilo, now he’s building a future for our keiki.
Vulcans fans may not have an O’Brien jersey to remember the past, but some would say those sports souvenirs are trivial when compared to the work he is still doing with children for the future.
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