SEQUIM — Improvisation and teamwork are important in both athletics and in jazz, said Sequim’s Andy Geiger, who retired from a storied career as athletic director at Ohio State, Stanford and other colleges to pursue his other lifelong passion through playing the sax.
“A great athlete can create in the moment and is forever finding new ways to excel … and support the team,” said Geiger, 85.
And the same is true in jazz where, just like in sports, the whole is only as good as its weakest member, Geiger added.
Geiger’s quintet plus singer band, Fat Ferdie & the Stolen Sweets, will perform at the Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s Harvest of Hope Wine & Dinner Gala on Sept. 28.
The 22nd annual Harvest of Hope gala, presented by longtime supporter Sound Community Bank, will once again raise funds for local cancer patients being treated at the Olympic Medical Cancer Center in Sequim. Funds will go toward the provision of services, programs and equipment.
The gala will begin at 5 p.m. in the Guy Cole Event Center, 202 N. Blake Ave., in Sequim. Dinner will be served at 5:45 p.m. Those who attend will have the opportunity to help raise funds through the purchase of raffle tickets or live and silent auction items.
Tickets are $135 per person or $1,080 per table of eight and are available at https://www.omhf.org or by calling the foundation at 360-417-7144.
In addition to dinner, auctions and speakers will be the naming of this year’s recipient of the Rick Kaps Award, named for the celebrated Sequim teacher and coach who died of cancer in 1998. The foundation award goes annually to an organization or person for outstanding support of cancer patient care on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Geiger began playing saxophone in his early 40s when the legendary Stan Getz urged him to take lessons.
Retirement from athletics meant he could focus on jazz. And he is still taking lessons.
“I want to get better,” Geiger said. “I don’t think anybody who plays jazz feels like they finish learning.
“You want to be as good as you can be for the benefit of the team.”
Geiger, whose first name is Ferdinand, formed the Fat Ferdie band three years ago after resigning from the Stardust Big Band to give himself more time to travel and see family.
He plucked from well-known talent on the Peninsula. Ed Donohue of Port Angeles plays the trumpet. George Radebaugh of Port Townsend is the pianist. Ted Enderle of Bainbridge Island plays bass. Tom Svornich of Chimacum is on drums. Jessie Lee of Port Angeles is the vocalist.
They perform an eclectic blend of jazz, show tunes, blues, some rock and selections from the Great American Songbook.
“They are all first-call musicians,” Geiger said. “It’s an honor to play with them.”
Geiger, who is the band leader and plays tenor sax, is modest about his own ability.
“I’m not a great player, but I can get by,” he said.
Geiger fell in love with jazz when he was 13. His mother introduced him to her own fascination with such Big Band greats as Benny Goodman and Count Basie. He became especially enamored of tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins.
But he didn’t have time for it right then. He was an athlete. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., he competed as a rower at Syracuse University after earning an academic scholarship there. He was a member of the U.S. squad that won a gold medal in the 1959 Pan American Games.
The team, he said, became his “anchor.”
“My coach said that a team is only as strong as its weakest member,” Geiger said.
“I grew up.”
The motivation, dedication and sense of community of the team dynamics led him to change his major from business — aiming for a career involving trains — to physical education. He had decided to become a coach.
After graduation in 1961, Geiger hitchhiked to Hanover, N.J., to instruct physical education and coach the freshman heavyweight crew rowing team at Dartmouth College. Three years later, Jim Decker, athletic director at Syracuse and his mentor, invited him to be his assistant.
After six years there and another year as assistant commissioner of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, Geiger became the director of athletics at Brown University at the age of 32, the youngest person to have taken that position.
“That got me started,” he said. “I was able to do some good work and able to grow.”
“I was able to find good people to do things I wasn’t able to do,” he explained.
“A good administrator knows a little bit about a lot of things but not a lot about anything and is able to find people who do. And able to find the resources so they can be successful.”
In 1975, he moved to a similar position at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1979, he accepted the head athletics position at Stanford University. During his 12 years there, Stanford won 27 national championships.
It was at Stanford that Geiger met Getz. They became good friends and the legendary saxophonist, who died in 1991, urged Geiger to follow his jazz heart.
In his early 40s, Geiger began saxophone lessons.
After a little more than three years rescuing a Maryland program, Geiger assumed the athletic director position at Ohio State in 1994.
There, at the largest athletic department in the U.S., he left a legacy known as “Andy-land,” a building program for athletics that included the 4,450-seat Bill Davis Stadium for baseball, the 10,000-seat Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium for track, soccer and lacrosse, and the 19,200-seat Schottenstein Center for basketball and hockey as well as a $194 million renovation and expansion of Ohio Stadium in 1999 and 2000.
He also did a Sunday jazz show on a Columbus Radio Station.
He retired from Ohio State in 2005 and became athletic director at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2012.
In 2017, he and his wife Eleanor — with whom he now marks 62 years of marriage — bought land on Place Road west of Port Angeles. The couple, who have two sons, later moved to Sequim.
During his first career, Geiger received the 2009 Homer Rice Award, the NACDA FBS Athletics Director of the Year Award for the Northeast Region in 2004, the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame’s John L. Toner Award and the Sports Business Journal Athletics Director of the Year Award, both in 2003.
Now he has returned to his first love.
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Leah Leach is a former executive editor of Peninsula Daily News.
