Quick – name someone, anyone, who is a member of eight different Halls of Fame. C’mon; it shouldn’t be that hard.

OK, now name a person who has been inducted into eight different Halls of Fame for his lacrosse prowess.

Pretty short list, isn’t it?

Well, I had lunch this past week with someone who has done just that . . . and then some.

Travis Cook ’78 played lacrosse, basketball, and football at Lafayette High School in the ‘60s, played pro lacrosse all over the US and Canada in the ‘70s, and has stayed connected to the game ever since. He earned a degree in History/Geography from SUNY Oswego in 1978, but when he started classes in the spring of 1971, the college was just starting its club lacrosse team.

At Lafayette, he had earned 1st Team All-League (attack) honors in 1966 and again in 1967. In the 1967 varsity football season, he was named 1st Team All-League (split end). Upon graduation, he considered attending Cornell, but he didn’t get accepted. An attempt to get in as a transfer after a semester or two of junior college didn’t work out, either . . .

Leo Nolan was from Lafayette and had been hired at Oswego State to boost Native American enrollment. Travis remembers, “Leo recruited seven of us – Native Americans – to go to Oswego and start the lacrosse program. We visited the campus in the early fall, and it was just so beautiful. Several of my friends and I went up there together, and the first club team was a combination of us and some guys from Long Island.”

Travis played club football and club lacrosse at Oswego State, paving the way for the lacrosse team to become an NCAA varsity sport in the spring of 1975.

Scrambling to earn his degree, play club ball at Oswego State, and play box lacrosse, too, Travis not only made a name for himself, but for the college, too. “The football team played Cortland’s JV, Scranton, St. John Fisher, Kings, and Ramapo, while the lacrosse club played freshman teams at Cornell and West Point, as well as the JV team at Cortland, the team from Eisenhower, and the Watertown Lacrosse Club.”

The club team even played some box lacrosse, playing teams from the Onondaga Nation in Romney Field House in home-and-home series over a two-year span. “The first year Romney was pretty empty, but the second year word had gotten around and the place was packed,” he recalled.

Travis earned MVP honors for the Oswego State club football team when they won the Empire Bowl in 1972 and again in 1973, and he was named Club Football All-American in 1973. He also played semi-pro box lacrosse for the St. Regis Braves.

Juggling Oswego State club lacrosse, box lacrosse, and his college classes was tough. “The box season started up in the spring, so I had to take quarter courses,” he explained to me. He did iron work when he wasn’t playing or studying, joining his brother in Milwaukee for a short while doing some high-altitude construction jobs. “It didn’t take me long to realize that that wasn’t for me!” he laughed.

He was drafted by the fledgling National Lacrosse League pro league for its inaugural 1974 season. “I was so excited about the draft – this was going to be my ticket out of Central New York. I wanted to go to Philadelphia, New York City, maybe Boston… but then I got drafted by Syracuse. Still, we traveled all over the East Coast. I got to see the sights, meet professional basketball and hockey players.” And, for the record, there were also invitations to pro tryouts for the Dallas Cowboys, the Montreal Alouettes, and the Hamilton Tiger Cats.

In his first pro season, Travis scored 47 goals and 44 assists in the Syracuse Stingers’ 38 games. In 1975, the team moved from Syracuse and became the Quebec Caribou, and Travis led the team in scoring (94 goals and 84 assists in 54 games). The Caribou won the Nations Cup that year, and the championship series against the Montreal Quebecois was actually covered in Sports Illustrated. In two years of pro lacrosse (92 games), he scored 141 goals and 128 assists. That’s 1.5 goals and 1.4 assists per game…

What was it like to play club ball and then see the program elevated to NCAA varsity status? “I was jealous, of course,” he answered, “but I wouldn’t have traded my experiences for the world.”

Travis continued to play box lacrosse as he finished his degree at Oswego State in 1978, playing for the Akwesasne Warriors from 1977-1983. He pulled a Reg Dunlop as player/coach for Team USA in the 1981 President’s Cup, and he was still playing in 1995, earning Outstanding Defensive Player honors in the Canadian Masters national tournament. When he was back on campus, he even helped the young Laker lacrosse team as an assistant coach.

Other highlights include serving as chairperson of the SUNY Oswego Native American Studies Advisory Committee (1992-2002), sitting on the North American Indigenous Games Council (1994-2000), carrying the Olympic Torch through Syracuse on its way to the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, serving as Commissioner of the Iroquois Lacrosse Association (1996-1998), sitting on the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Museum Board of Directors (2000-2004), and introducing lacrosse to the Oneida Nation in 1995.

Whew! That paragraph alone is HOF worthy!

By the way, the stats and honors listed in this piece didn’t come from Travis. In my 90-minute lunch interview with him, I don’t think he mentioned any numbers or accolades. No, all the figures and awards come instead from Oswego HS varsity lacrosse coach Doc Nelson, who has been friends with Travis ever since they met the fall of 1974. Since then, Doc has played with and against Travis, traveled throughout the US and Canada with him to watch games, and has taken it upon himself to be Travis’ unofficial public relations agent. He has nominated him for a few of the Halls of Fame, and he was kind enough to give me about five pages of Travis’s career highlights.

Oh yeah – the eight Halls of Fame, you ask? Well, according to Doc, in chronological order, they list like this:

1997 Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame
1997 Akwesasne Lacrosse Hall of Fame (“Legends of the Game” category)
2001 Oswego State Athletic Hall of Fame (charter member)
2002 Upstate New York Chapter US Lacrosse Hall of Fame
2004 Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame
2006 Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame (“1967 Lafayette HS Team”)
2015 Akwesasne Lacrosse Hall of Fame (“The Pros”)
2017 Lafayette High School Hall of Fame (charter member)

Travis was also named a recipient of the David J. Burns Award by Oswego State’s lacrosse alumni, which is pretty much the Laker lacrosse team’s s’ own “Hall of Fame.”

Which is where our paths eventually crossed… literally. Or so the story goes…

If you asked my parents, who are 90 years young and living in Florida these days, who Travis Cook is, they’d laugh. And then they’d tell the story they’ve been re-telling me for almost 40 years.

In the fall of 1978, my first semester as an undergrad at Oswego State, the Laker lacrosse team played its second-ever annual alumni game. At some point in the game I apparently broke out for a clearing pass and received a “buddy pass” from a “teammate.” I suffered a separated shoulder, and as I sat and iced on the sideline, varsity and alumni alike reassured me and let me know that I had indeed been hit by none other than Travis Cook. I had never heard of Mr. Cook before, but as I listened to everyone tell me how great he was, I guess I took some sense of pride in getting laid out by the best player in the land – and that night, as the story goes, I called my parents and excitedly told them that I had been knocked out of the game by Travis Cook.

You know how you start to believe a story after hearing it repeatedly? I can’t say that I really remember making that phone call or saying what I’ve been charged with saying, and when I asked Travis about it last week – after 40 years – he confessed that he didn’t remember it either. But my parents? They might have been six hours away on Long Island that night, but they’ll still swear today that that’s exactly how it all went down.

So maybe that was, in fact, the first time we met, but Travis became an Alumni Classic regular for quite a while. We’ve got a great photo of his accepting the Burns Award in 1996, and I know we named him MVP of an Alumni Game played in the dome we had in Scriba back in the early 2000s. He was a guest speaker at the Oswego State Lacrosse Camp soon after that, and he helped Doc and Dan Bartlett ’96 as a volunteer assistant coach with the Oswego boys’ varsity teams in 2014 and 2015.

For the past three years, every time I’ve gone down to the Onondaga Nation’s Pavilion to watch box lacrosse, I’ve found Travis helping out – with the FIL World Championships in 2015 and the Lax All Stars North American International in 2016 and 2017.

Doc tells me that when he walks into a box arena with Travis, everyone recognizes him and treats him like a rock star. I guess that’s well-deserved – after all, he is in eight Halls of Fame.

Thanks, Doc, and thanks, Travis – you are both RTD Hall of Fame material…

Drive carefully, everyone – seems like Mother Nature is asserting herself!

- Dan Witmer daniel.witmer@oswego.edu