TUPAVIEW: PART ONE

By Mike Tupa

Oct. 1, 2025

BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT

I often have to shake my head in amazement at some of the amazing sports personalities with which I’ve rubbed shoulders, despite having spent my entire journalism career working for community-sized newspapers.

— I shared a backseat with Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams during his 2005 visit to Bartlesville. I conducted exclusive interviews both in that car and later on the telephone. He sent me a personal letter of appreciation.

— While in Southern California, I conducted a compact interview with two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin. He mailed me a thank-you letter that I still cherish.

— When the American Legion World Series took place in Bartlesville in 2003 and 2007, I interviewed an incredible man named Bill Haase — then a senior vice-president for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

— I interviewed both in person (briefly) and on the phone Heisman Trophy winner Jason White and wrote a long feature.

— Rickey Henderson once chatted with me briefly while he was “in the hole” (getting ready to go into the batting circle), while I stood near the Oakland A’s dugout with a photo pass.

— I went in the visitor’s locker room at Arco Arena (Sacramento, Calif.) to interview the NBA Comeback Player of the Year.

— Super Bowl quarterback Joe Kapp consented to an hour-long face-to-face sit-down interview with me.

— Among pro players and coaches I’ve interviewed or been in close proximity with are Jerry Sloan, Spud Webb, Wally Joyner, Steve Young, Billie Jean King, Dale Murphy, Jesse Sapolu, Barry Switzer, Janet Evans, Vida Blue, Charles Barkley, Mark McGwire, Joe Washington, LaVel Edwards, Rafer Johnson, and many others.

— I’ve also participated in phone interviews with other major sports personalities.

— This doesn’t count the Hall-of-Famers, All-Americans and other athletic greats I’ve interviewed in Bartlesville. Some of these include Bob Kurland, Paul Endacott, Jesse “Cab” Renick, Bobby Plump (the real-life star around which the movie “Hoosiers” is based), Brenda Rouse, Jerry Shipp, Barron Tanner St., and many, many others.

— I even got a call about 20 years ago from “Elvis,” informing he was living in a house in the densely populated part of southwest Bartlesville. He gave me an address, and I made a good-faith effort to try to find it. But the “King” remained incognito.

For someone who didn’t get his first newspaper job until 31-and-a-half years old with a circulation of 2,500 in a town stuck on the top of the high mountain desert in Eastern Nevada, my breadth of experiences has been breathtaking to me.

But a couple of celebrities near the top of my list are not part of that crowded constellation of universally recognizable sports names — former pro wrestler Rey Urbano and genuine American hero Torao “Rusty” Kimura.

There were commonalities between my encounters with these two world-class warrior heroes. I met both of them in Oroville, Calif. Both served valiantly in World War II. Both were born of immigrant parents. Both lived well into the new millennium. 

Physically, they could have comprised a Mutt and Jeff pair — Rusty with a compact, lightweight frame draped on a well-cared-for 5-foot-3 (approximately) frame, Rey a stout-shaped muscle man with his 200-plus pounds draped on a 5-foot-9 to 5-foot-10 frame.

I don’t know that they ever met — or were aware of — the other. I’m just amazed the world had room for two such outstanding giants whose humanity exceeded the breadth, length, and height of any of the world’s natural wonders.

Let me start with Rusty.

I could literally write tens of thousands of words about what I know or have researched about this man’s history. But I’m attempting to distill the major truths and lessons available from this remarkable life.

Instead of trying to make you endure a complicated, lengthy, chronological biography, let me reduce the main points into an introductory summary.

Rey was a Nisei — a second-generation Japanese-American who was born in the United States after his parents immigrated here. Despite his small size and ancestry, he grew up in the 1910s and 1920s in an All-American setting in Oroville, Calif. — in some ways reminiscent of George Bailey’s childhood in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” His father taught him to be completely devoted to America and American ideals.

From what Rusty told me, and from my research, he blended in with little or no prejudice. He was part of a small group of tightly knit Caucasian friends, including his lifetime buddy “Opie’, who in the early 1990s introduced me to Rusty.

Rusty played all the sports as a boy. Despite weighing less than 130 pounds, he became one of the fiercest tacklers on the Oroville High School football team. From what I gathered, after high school he helped with the family business and I think did farm-related work.

One Sunday — when he would have been in his late 20s or early 30s — he and some of his Nisei friends went on a hunting trip in Northern California hills.

It was a fateful day — December 7, 1941. The carload of hunters stopped at a gas station and heard on the radio the report of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Within months, Rey and his entire family were taken into custody by the federal government and eventually assigned to a relocation camp.

While Rusty was passing time in confinement, the U.S. military sent recruiters to the camp seeking Nisei volunteers for the fight. Rusty was one of thousands of Nisei who enlisted in the military. For him, it was a matter of devotion to a cause more important than the government’s discrimination against Japanese-Americans. He wanted to prove he believed in the American ideals of freedom and that he was patriotic.

Rusty underwent intensive training to become an interrogator of captured Japanese prisoners. He served in the Pacific theater and saved the lives of many, many soldiers of the Allies.

After the war he became part of the force of occupation in Japan and then returned home to America to live out the rest of his long — and as far as I could observe — and happy life. He was one of the leading forces in creating the Go For Broke Monument in Los Angeles to honor Nisei soldiers.

When Rusty was 96, the federal government awarded his unit the Congressional Gold Medal.

He passed away at age 97 in April 2012.

My tears flow easily when I think of this incredible man, his courage, his humility, maturity, and foresight in fighting for freedoms that had temporarily been denied him and his loved ones, his alertness, his sense of humor, and his great kindness and patience to a little-known newspaper sports writer.

(Note: This is the first part of a multi-part column.)