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Pastor’s Booming Cheers Invoke Tournament Win
Way to hustle, Babe!
Gerhard’s winter diversion was the Bemidji high basketball team. When they made it to the state tournament, the kids on the team bought him a bus ticket. The front-page piece ran Saturday, March 23, 1963.
By Jim Klobuchar
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer
The jolly preacher loosened his tie Friday and rumbled in his best fire and brimstone bellow: “Atta boy, bay-bee, way to hustle; come on, babe, all the way.”
Churchgoers from Blackduck to Ten Strike would have recognized the Rev. Gerhard Mueller, a North Woods Lutheran minister who has trailed Bemidji’s basketball team from border to border.
He sat gleefully through Bemidji’s 71-53 consolation victory over Austin at Williams Arena yesterday, booming encouragement to players like Dennis Aguiar (“His dad used to pick me up on a country road when I had to hitchhike to church”).
Toward Bloomington’s 69-56 victory over Wells in the other consolation game, he was polite and neutral. And he was not particularly excited during the evening's title games a few hours later – Marshall’s 61-35 rout of Anoka and Cloquet’s unexpectedly tense 87-81 victory over Sauk Centre.
The basketball-loving minister is a stout, ruddy-cheeked man of 57 with a breezy manner and a voice from the drill field or the baseball dugout.
“It’s really not that strong, though,” he admitted. “I had to cut out going to Saturday night basketball games. They just couldn‘t hear me from the pulpit the next day.”
Mr. Mueller‘s wanderings have carried him from Blackduck, Tenstrike, Sebeka and Frazee to Ponsford and Height of Land, the latter two his current ports of call. He headquarters at Frazee.
“I took to going to baseball games in Bemidji, got to know some of the players and then followed them in basketball. That‘s when I learned that pep talk.
“Two yerars ago the coach asked me whether I was going to the state tournament to root for the team. I said I didn’t think I could. But he said he was going to insist, and do you know, the players and coaches raised money themselves to bring me here.”
Bemidji’s Gerry Suman seized a rebound and scored. The preacher’s face glowed again. “Atta way to hustle, bay-bee.”
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