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Abrahamson competed in the 1972 and 1976 games in team handball for the U.S. He has also a member of the men’s basketball team at the University of Oregon.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Rick Abrahamson, a two-time Olympian in team handball who also played basketball for the University of Oregon, will be inducted in the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame later this month.
Abrahamson grew up in a small town in southwest Oregon. The son of a coach, his first loves were baseball and basketball. He would finish his last two years of high school in McMinnville and planned on playing on the basketball team at Linfield College. Those plans changed after a standout performance in a tournament his senior year.
“I ended up at the last minute getting a scholarship from the University of Oregon basketball, and I just jumped on it. I really wanted to be a Duck,” Abrahamson said.
Abrahamson was a contributor on the University of Oregon basketball team his junior and senior year, averaging 10.5 points as a junior and 8.2 points his senior season.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating in 1969. That’s when he was introduced to team handball, as part of General William C. Westmoreland’s Army Champs Program.
“He saw handball in Europe; it’s played everywhere in Germany. He was on a German base there and said, ‘you know, that is a terrific sport to get my soldiers in shape,'” Abrahamson said.
Westmoreland pushed for an all-Army Olympic handball team that would attempt to compete in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Abrahamson was told he could either try out for the team or be deployed to Vietnam. Abrahamson tried out with roughly 75 other former college athletes for seven spots on the Olympic training squad. He was one of the lucky seven selected.
To prepare for Munich, the team headed to Europe to play some of the best teams in the world.
“Our first six months, we would go over there and get beat, and handily at times,” he recalled. “But we just kept getting better and we kept improving, and by the time we got to Munich, we were competing with the best Olympic teams and national teams in the world.”
The U.S. team didn’t win a medal at the Munich Games, but they did have one of the most improbable wins in Olympic history when they knocked off Spain, one of the best teams in the world.
Abrahamson was also on the U.S. team that competed at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
The two-time Olympian calls the induction into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame “a great honor.”
“I’m just humbled to be included,” he said. “I know my dad will be looking down. He was a coach and Oct. 29, he will be looking down with pride.”
The 2024 Oregon Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony is Tuesday, Oct. 29 at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Portland. KGW’s Orlando Sanchez and sportscaster Neil Everett will emcee the event.
