Originally published August 04, 2026, 12:18 pm at newsinthegrove.com. Republished with permission.
Mike Clock, a Pacific University math professor who spent more than two decades building the Boxers into a small-college wrestling power, died July 25 in Vancouver, Washington, the university said. He was 90.
Clock joined the Pacific faculty in 1967 and retired from teaching in 2002, earning faculty emeritus status after a 35-year career. He led the Boxer wrestling program as head coach from 1966 to 1988 and again in 1991 and 1992.
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In 23 seasons as head coach, Clock led Pacific to seven top-10 finishes at the NAIA National Tournament, topped by a fifth-place showing in 1982, along with six NAIA District II championships and 18 Northwest Conference titles. Sixteen of the conference titles came in a row between 1970 and 1984, when the conference dropped the sport.
He coached three national champions — Rick Franklin in 1978, Ed Ritt in 1982 and Chuck Ahsmuhs in 1988 — along with 37 NAIA All-Americans, 51 regional champions and more than 100 conference champions, according to the release.
Clock stayed with the program as an assistant coach from 1988 to 2003, helping Pacific move from the NAIA to NCAA Division III and win Great Lakes Region titles in 1999, 2000 and 2002. He also helped start Pacific’s women’s wrestling program.
As chair of the NAIA’s Cultural Exchange Committee for 12 years, Clock led teams of wrestlers, many of them from Pacific, on exchange trips around the world.
He was inducted into the NAIA Hall of Fame in 1988, Pacific’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1993, the Oregon chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Lewis & Clark College Athletic Hall of Fame in 2007. Pacific renamed its season-opening tournament the Mike Clock Open in 2003. By the time of his death, 11 wrestlers he coached at Pacific had reached the school’s athletic hall of fame.
Clock wrestled before he coached. He won the 1953 state heavyweight title for Newberg High School and helped the Tigers to a team championship, then became a three-time Northwest Conference champion at Lewis & Clark, where he graduated in 1957. He earned a master’s degree from Oregon State University in 1961 and a doctorate from Oklahoma State University in 1967.
Before Pacific, Clock taught math at Tigard High School and Beaverton’s Sunset High School and spent three years as head wrestling coach at Lewis & Clark, where he coached Harold Weight to the 1965 NAIA national title. At Pacific, he chaired the math department for many years and took three sabbaticals, including one to Siberia.
In retirement, Clock traveled and stayed close to the sport as a volunteer with Restore Oregon Wrestling, which works to bring back wrestling programs at Oregon colleges.
Clock was preceded in death by his wife, Carol, in 1980. He is survived by his brothers, Pat, Barry and Ken; his daughters, Kathryn Barlow and Mary; his sons, Thom and Paul; and nine grandchildren.
Services will be announced later, the university said.
News in the Grove is an independent news publication launched in late 2024 by Chas Hundley, a western Washington County journalist born and raised in the Forest Grove area. Learn more at newsinthegrove.com.
