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Terry Mosher
| Columnist
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Who locally has been a professor and vice president at major universities, been a gold miner, worked for legendary actor Marlon Brando while living in Tahiti, and has 62 individual Masters national track and field championships?
Oh yeah, he also is 81.
It is Roger Vergin of Poulsbo, an adventurer who late in life found out he could do something he never would have imagined. Vergin is recognized as one of the premier USA Track and Field Masters athletes in the country. His picture was on the cover of the August issue of National Masters News.
What is amazing is that Vergin never got a chance to make an impression on the track and field team at Washington High School in Brainerd, Minn.
“I went out for track for one year,” Vergin said of his high school experience. “The coach didn’t coach much and he didn’t pick me to compete in a single event.”
Disgruntled, he played golf the next two springs and became a two-time district champion.
Vergin has since shown that the rejection was a big mistake.
Ten years agohe saw somebody at the gym wearing a “Bremerton West Sound Senior Games” T-shirt.Curious, Vergin looked that up on the Internet and thought to himself, “Why not me?”
He had started running long distances in his mid-30s, but not to any great success.
He was basically an average long distance guy who would sometimes put in 100 miles of running a month. But when he started competing in senior games, he discovered he was not too shabby in the shorter distances and jumps and pretty quickly a mastersstar was born.
In his first West Sound Senior Games, Vergin won the 50, long jump and triple jump and placed third in the shot put in his age group (70-74) and he was off and running into history.
The last weekend of July, Vergin competed with Club Northwest in the USATF National Masters Championship at Eastern Washington University in the 80-84 age bracket. He won eight events – long jump, triple jump, pole vault, 200 hurdles, pentathlon and he was on three winning relays. Helikely would have won the 80 hurdles, because he is ranked No. 1 in the country, but he was 15 minute late for entering it.
Vergin also took second in the 100 and high jump and third in the 200 and javelin.Of the 951 athletes who competed over the four days of the meet, he won the most national championships and medals. He now has won 17 national championships this year and 62 for his career in events like the decathlon, heptathlon, indoor pentathlon, outdoor pentathlon, 200, 400, 80 hurdles, 200 hurdles, 300 hurdles, long jump, triple jump, pole vault, and weight throw.
Vergin went on a different track in college. He went to the University of Minnesota and earned his BA in industrial engineering and business, then continued on to earn an MBA and a PhDin business administration, which would come in handy when he met up with Brando.
First, though, Vergin became a professor teaching business at California-Berkeley from 1963-’66 and then at the University of Washington from 1966-’71. He then went to Simon Fraser in Vancouver, B.C where except for one year he taught there until 1983.
He was introduced to Brando at a meeting and the two-time Oscar winner (1954 for “On the Waterfront” and 1972 for “The Godfather”) asked him if he would come to work for him and rescue a resort venture he had started on the island of Tetiaroa just north of Tahiti’s main island. Brandohad purchased the island in 1968 and was trying to develop commercial businesses, including a lobster farm, on it. It was not working well, so Vergin agreed to become his business manager and see if he could turn it around.
“That never did reach fruition,” Vergin said of the lobster farm. “A major problem was that when the lobsters were confined they became cannibalistic. You could tuck the little lobsters into their beds at night and wake up in the morning with one very big lobster.”
Vergin and his family left the island (which today is a resort called“The Brando”) after one year because one of his sons got ill and Brando insisted he take the boy to what is now the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Vergin’s wife did not want to go back to Tetiaroa, so he returned to Simon Fraser.
“But it was a fun adventure,” Vergin said of the year with Brando. “It could be tough at times because he changed his mind a lot about what he wanted to do.”
But it was so memorable that Vergin wrote a book about it – “Brandowith His Guard Down” – that was published in 1997 and is still available through Amazon.
After leaving Simon Frazer, Vergin got into gold mining at Empire Mine in California.
”Mark Twain defined a gold mine as ‘a hole in the ground owned by a liar,’” said Vergin, who had moved to Reno, Nev. “That rather appropriately illustrates how I got involved in the business.”
The man who sold Vergin a percentage of the business was not entirely on the up and up and eventually Vergin wound up with the business.
“It provided a good income for a couple years,” said Vergin, who left gold behind in 1990 to teach at the Great Valley campus of Penn State located just outside of Philadelphia, where he was the chair of the business department. He helped turna struggling MBA program into, he said, “the largest graduate program in the entire university system with about double the number of students at the main Penn State campus at University Park.
After 10 years, later spent a year as vice president at Heald college in San Francisco, then wasexecutive vice president and director of academics at the American College in Bryn Mawr, Penn.,before retiring for good and moving to Poulsbo in 2005.
All during his long and winding professional journey, Vergin was running long distances and lifting weights and working out. It didn’t dawn on him until he saw that T-shirt in the gym that he could compete as an older adult in competitive races, especially shorter ones that he discovered he was good at.
“It did surprise me,” he saidof his latent talent. “It took me a little while on the big stage, but I never imagined I would win a national championship.”
He has competed in 24 states and has the second-highest score in the world in the heptathlon and fifth-highestin the world in the indoor pentathlon.
Last year in the Washington State Senior Games, he won all eight events he entered – 50, 100, 200, 400, long jump, triple jump, high jump, and standing long jump – and set records in every one of them.
Does Vergin look back at his high school days and wonder what could have been if he had only been given the chance?
“Of course I do,” he laughed. “I was fairly fast in high school, but not the fastest guy. I wish I would have been able to try my luck in a meet, but the coach never picked me.”
Vergin hesitatedand then added,” The secret (to his success) is to stay healthy all your life, to work out all your life. I can lift now as much weight as I did in high school.”
The journey for Vergin, who has wintered in Fort Myers, Fla. the past six winters, is far from over. He plans to continue on and make some more history.
Terry Mosher is a former sports writer at the Kitsap Sun who publishes The Sports Paper at sportspaper.org. Reach him at bigmosher@msn.com.
