written by nick lockridge
photos by kurt wilson and dwan feary

The University of Montana Grizzlies run out of the tunnel entering Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Oct. 18, 1986, for the first game in the new facility. “The neatest thing then, and to this day, was walking down that dang tunnel and running out onto the field,” says Brad Salonen, a former player. “There’s no better feeling.”

It’s difficult to pinpoint when Montana Grizzly football first started to become the beast it is today, but one could make a good case for Oct. 18, 1986.

That’s the day the University of Montana unveiled its new $3.2 million on-campus stadium and, fittingly, the Grizzlies scored 17 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to rally for a 38-31 victory over conference rival Idaho State.

It would be the first of many nail-biters associated with the facility. Griz Nation just didn’t know it yet.

Montana’s football program, under the direction of first-year head coach Don Read and his new pass-oriented offense, was struggling at the halfway point of the 1986 season when the Grizzlies first set foot inside the concrete, acoustically superior fan fortress called Washington-Grizzly Stadium.

“We were still finding out who we were,” said Kraig Paulson, UM’s senior fullback that season. “At halftime we made some adjustments and then went out in the second half and found a spark, found some of that momentum that has kind of defined that place. Looking back on it, there’s so many big things that have happened at that place. To trace it all back to that day is pretty cool.”

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the grand opening of Washington-Grizzly Stadium. The football team does not play a home game on Oct. 18 this year – Oct. 15 vs. Portland State is the closest date – so this is a look back at that special day.

October 18, 1986 was a sunny autumn day filled with pregame, halftime and postgame dedication ceremonies throughout the stadium. The Griz, who were 1-3, played their first two home games of the season at their old haunt, Dornblaser Field, so there was a buzz in the air despite the team’s struggles.

Buoyed by a fumble recovery late in the game, the Grizzlies began a tradition of dramatic late-game comebacks over the next 25 years.

Plenty of tickets – general admission seats cost $6 – were available at the gate, skydivers with smoke billowing from their heels landed at midfield and members of the Delta Gamma sorority house released red, white and blue balloons at the end of the national anthem, which was delivered by area barbershop quartets, the UM Marching Band and the Missoula High School Tournament of Roses Parade band.

The Missoulian predicted 8,000 fans would attend the opening of the Save stadium, which had a capacity of more than 12,000 at the time. It turns out, 10,580 fans showed up to witness a quirky, back-and-forth contest that featured a record-setting performance by UM’s star quarterback and receiver – an omen for a school that would become one of the best in the Football Championship Subdivision at passing the ball.

Harley Lewis, Montana’s athletic director at the time, remembers very little of the actual game or the pomp that surrounded it. He still had a stat crew to run after all. But he certainly remembers how satisfying the day felt.

“You don’t forget certain times in your life and that’s one of them,” said Lewis, who served as A.D. from 1976-1989 before moving on to a job with the NCAA. “To build a football stadium at the University of Montana was a long-term and long-involved process. It was one of my goals at the time I took over and it took all 14 years.”

The debut of Washington-Grizzly Stadium followed years and years of campaigning, fundraising and construction. However, UM’s new stadium wasn’t the only thing starting from the ground up.

Montana’s football program had been in a tailspin since a work-study scandal in the 1970s, which pushed out legendary coach Jack Swarthout. His two immediate successors managed just 41 wins over the next 10 seasons. With troubles on and off the field, Grizzly football was in jeopardy.

First-year head coach Don Read, seen on the sidelines on the right side of this photograph, calls the new stadium “frosting on the cake” on his decision to come to Montana.

“When I took over, the University of Montana was not in good shape athletically,” Lewis said. “There was quite a lot of sentiment on campus from the faculty and the students, who couldn’t figure out why we even had to have an athletic program. We had a lot of barriers to overcome and issues to address. But we knew in order to take (the) Athletics (Department) to where it is today, we needed a football stadium.”

That task fell on a lot of shoulders.

Lewis lists UM presidents Neil Bucklew and James Koch, all the coaching staffs – including Larry Donovan, who stumped for support of the stadium well before Read’s arrival – the lead architect of the project, Jerry Ballas, and his vision for future expansions, and the community as a whole among those deserving credit for their contributions to the project.

Most of all though, the group was beholden to Dennis Washington, the Missoula businessman and contractor whose name was affixed to the facility after a $1 million donation by his company, which built the stadium with the help of in-kind donations. It couldn’t have come together at a better time.

Domes were springing up all over the country, including in Flagstaff, Ariz., Moscow, Idaho, and Pocatello, Idaho. Montana didn’t have anything to show its recruits. Some weren’t even taken to Dornblaser. The seating there was rickety, windy and far-removed, both from the field and the campus, making it tough to be a Griz fan – or a player for that matter.
“I came from Great Falls High and I think we had a better stadium than (UM) did,” said Brad Salonen, who was a sophomore on the 1986 team, but had watched his older brother Brian play at Dornblaser from 1980-83. “You had a diminishing fan base, an antiquated stadium and now they were digging this big hole back there behind campus.”

Read, who was hired after the decision was made to build a new stadium that would bring the football team back onto campus, got to witness that hole being filled in. Soon he would fill the Grizzlies’ roster with top-notch talent.

Read came from Portland State, which wasn’t part of the Big Sky Conference yet, but he knew Missoula well enough to know that the coaching staff could use the town, its beautiful surroundings and the school’s sterling academic reputation to rebuild the football team.

The University of Montana marching band celebrates in the stands.

“Montana always had great potential,” Read said. “Washington-Grizzly Stadium was just frosting on the cake.”

The architect of UM’s 1995 national championship team, Read coached just two games at Dornblaser, but it was enough to get the same feeling Griz fans had experienced for years.

“The grass wasn’t even very good over there. It really was a second-class operation as you looked across the Big Sky Conference, probably the worst in the Big Sky,” said Read. “So to go to Washington-Grizzly Stadium was a huge improvement.”
Better dressing rooms, better seats and that boisterous crowd – what an advantage, he thought.

“The atmosphere changed drastically,” said Read, who served as Montana’s A.D. for a stint before retiring in 2005. “There were some big changes in feelings and emotions, in a positive way, as opposed to being at Dornblaser.”

Read made sure to pay his thanks. But it was Washington who delivered one of the more surprising thank-yous at the conclusion of the ISU game.

“After we won the game, Dennis Washington came into the locker room. It was one of those things where Coach Read said this guy made this happen. But he wasn’t looking for much attention. It was a ‘thank you,’ a ‘great job’ and he was out of there,” said Salonen. “You look at Dennis Washington and his wife and what they’ve done for the University of Montana over the last 25 years or more ... it was an amazing thing.”

The contributions to the construction of Washington-Grizzly Stadium were a thing of beauty, but the team’s lead-up to it’s unveiling certainly was not.

In a tradition that remains today, the team celebrates the victory with the fans on the east side of the stadium.

The Griz were shellacked by Boise State 31-0 the previous week, to drop to 0-3 in conference. Two weeks before that, in its final game at Dornblaser, UM escaped with a controversial 42-37 win over Eastern Washington – which wasn’t a member of the Big Sky yet, either – for the Grizzlies’ first win under Read.

The team was on a bit of a roller-coaster ride heading into the Idaho State game, which wasn’t really a hot ticket considering the two sides would meet again in four weeks in Pocatello – UM won that one as well – and each of the two meetings was only worth half of a game in the conference standings.

Idaho State featured a balanced offense, led by senior tailback Merril Hoge and a quarterback with the fortuitous last name of Mariani.

The Griz fell behind 14-7 on a 5-yard touchdown pass from Gino Mariani to Hoge early in the second quarter and ISU led 21-13 at the half. UM scored the only TD of the third quarter, a 24-yard hookup between quarterback Brent Pease and flanker Tony Lambert, to knot the score at 21-21.

That’s when Hoge and the Bengals began to pull away. They scored on two straight possessions, grabbing a 31-21 advantage on Hoge’s 1-yard scoring plunge with 11:35 to play. But in an uncharacteristic display of composure – which would become a hallmark of Read’s teams – the Griz fought back. And fought back. And fought back.

First they scored on an 11-yard touchdown pass from Pease to fellow senior Mike Rice, who wound up catching four TDs that day, to narrow the gap to 31-28. On the ensuing kickoff, Hoge coughed up the ball in his own territory to set up a game-tying field goal by UM’s Eby Dobson.

Hoge, the future Pittsburgh Steelers standout and ESPN analyst, was injured on the play. His fumble was the first in five games by Idaho State, which dipped to 2-5 that afternoon.

“I remember the game vividly,” said Hoge, who would play eight years in the NFL before concussions forced him to quit football. “It was one of my uglier days.”

Because the field was so new – chunks of sod were coming up, some recall – the underground sprinkler heads had little protection and were exposed in some areas. It proved to be detrimental to Hoge, who was injured on the play, and ISU’s hopes of an upset.

“As I was getting tackled and going down, my knee hit one of those risers and I fumbled,” Hoge said. “It was the most severe pain I’ve ever had in my life. It was one of the few times in my career that I can remember not finishing a game. It swelled up so bad, I couldn’t move it.”

The Bengals, who moved the ball at will just 10 minutes earlier, made their biggest mistake of the game with about four minutes to play. Facing a fourth-and-1 at ISU’s own 29-yard line, head coach Jim Koetter decided to go for it.

UM defensive end Pat Foster stuffed Idaho State’s Butch Caston, the same back Foster stood up the play before on third-and-1. It was a questionable play call.

“(The Griz) had scored on their last three possessions and we weren’t doing much on defense,” Koetter told the Missoulian after the game. “I felt like we had to make a move to keep the ball.”

Three plays later, Pease and Rice hooked up for the game-winner.

“It was a horrific game, the way it ended,” Hoge said. “I’ll never forget that.”

It was also an unforgettable day for Pease and Rice.

Pease, who a year earlier was running the Wishbone offense under the soon-to-be-fired Donovan, set school records for completions and touchdown passes in a game. It was an equally impressive effort by Rice, whose position coach that day was a young Robin Pflugrad, who would become UM’s head coach in 2010. Rice finished with a school-record 12 catches for 150 yards. Pease threw for 364 yards.

“Looking back on it now, I don’t know if anybody who played that day knew what it was all leading to,” said Paulson, who’s currently the defensive coordinator at UNLV. “We just thought we’d won a hard-fought game over a good football team.”

Washington-Grizzly Stadium has undergone three renovations since its debut 25 years ago, but there is one element that has stood the test of time, Salonen said.

“The neatest thing then, and to this day, was walking down that dang tunnel and running out onto the field,” he said. “There’s no better feeling. That’s a highlight of that stadium.”

Salonen said he can’t imagine what 25,000 fans sounds like compared to the 14,000 fans Washington-Grizzly Stadium was drawing toward the end of his career. Salonen knows much bigger games followed the one that took place on Oct. 18, 1986, but perhaps Griz fans can reserve a special spot in their hearts for that special day.

“That one kind of set the stage,” Salonen said. “There have been some incredible comebacks in that stadium. If the Griz are down 7 or 10 (points) in the fourth quarter now, people know they’re going to win.”

Nick Lockridge is a sportswriter at the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5298 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .