But if you think that’s another salute to Obi Toppin, you are wrong.
Long before there was Obi, there was Sneeze.
His real name was Walter T.K. Achiu.
When he came to the University of Dayton a century ago, his football teammates weren’t sure how to pronounce his last name.
“If you sneeze, you got it,” he’s said to have told his fellow Flyers.
And that’s when Walter Achiu forever became Sneeze Achiu.
A year or so ago, an online poll – “Quest for the Greatest Name in Sports” – was conducted and drew 2,048 entries.
Using a NCAA Tournament-type bracket, contenders went head-to-head and finally Sneeze Achiu was named the champion.
He was picked over a field that included the likes of Rowdy Beers, Yourhighness Morgan, Amillion Buggs, Scientific Mapp, Craphouse Thorpe, Always Wright, Pee Wee Butts, Cash Money, Dilly Dally and a lot of names a little too X-rated for me to get into print.
Back when Sneeze was a Flyer – from 1922-1927 – he was trumpeted around the nation much more than was Obi, when he was a UD hoops star before jumping to the NBA in 2020.
Sportswriter Charles Leach, who penned that qualifier at the start of this column, continued that story in the February 11, 1926 edition of the Dayton Daily News like this:
“While wearing the colors of red and blue, Achiu has earned a national reputation. There is hardly a newspaper in the country which has not carried a detailed account of the life of the lad who has lived up to all the advanced praise given him by the many sportswriters in every section of the United States.”
Fan favorite
Sneeze’s father Leong Achiu was born in Shanghai, China but at age 16 came to California to be part of the gold rush. After two years he took a steamer back as far as Hawaii.
He ended up a rice farmer and married a Hawaiian woman, Julia Kaumealani’ikanu’u Pa’anui.
Their son Walter came to UD in 1922 and immediately made an impact with the Flyers sports teams.
Because UD had not yet joined the Ohio Conference, he was able to play as a freshman and not only starred as a football halfback – where he was known for his running, his ability to pass and, even at 5-foot-8, his ability to block – but also played defensive back and was a place kicker.
He won Honorable Mention All-America honors in 1925 and Walter Camp – the fabled player and coach known as “The Father of American Football” for the way he shaped the game’s strategy and rules – singled out Achiu as one of the “great backs” of the time.
Achiu once recounted to Si Burick, the legendary Dayton Daily News sports columnist, how that first year of football at UD there would be “50 people behind a rope” watching the games.
Thanks, in part, to the excitement Achiu brought to the field, Flyers football became a hot ticket in town and by the time he left UD, the school had a 10,000-seat stadium that later was named Baujan Field after Flyers head coach Harry Baujan.
Achiu was an outfielder on the Flyers’ baseball teams in 1925 and 1926 that went unbeaten.
With the track team, he was a 10-second sprinter in the 100-yard dash and tied national indoor marks in the 40 and 60-yard dashes. His teammates elected him to be their captain in 1926.
During a fifth year at UD, he served as an athletic trainer and football manager.
In 1974, Achiu was enshrined alongside six other former Flyers – including Don May and Henry Finkel – into UD’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
He graduated with an electrical engineering degree, got a job at Delco-Remy and played two seasons for the Dayton Triangles, becoming the first person of Asian descent to play in the NFL.
Eventually he switched to professional wrestling and became a popular headliner across the nation for some 30 years.
For a decade – as part of Herb Owen’s wrestling promotions in Eugene, Oregon – Achiu often was pitted against Gorgeous George, the ostentatious and charismatic wrestling star who was one of the sport’s biggest stars.
Both Muhammad Ali and James Brown have said they patterned their flamboyant self-promoting style after him.
Achiu often countered the dirty-tactics George used with his own, patented “sleeper hold,” as he applied clawlike pressure on the nerves in his rival’s neck and back that turned Gorgeous to groggy and sometimes left him snoozing in the ring.
While Achiu wrestled across the U.S. and especially on the West Coast, he also was a huge fan favorite back in the Miami Valley and headlined many shows at Memorial Hall, as well as in nearby towns like Troy, Piqua and Xenia.
Facing discrimination
Although in the 1920s, Chinese often faced intense discrimination in the U.S. in the form of citizenship restrictions, property ownership and employment status, Achiu found an oasis of acceptance at UD thanks to sports.
Growing up in Honolulu, he had gone to a prep school – then known as Saint Louis College and later Saint Louis School – that was operated by the Society of Mary, the Catholic order that founded UD.
As he once recounted to Burick, he was finishing high school when he was visited by a grammar school friend, Pat Wong, who was a year or so older and already a student at UD.
Wong suggested his old schoolmate would do well in Dayton and so, without ever seeing the campus, Achiu boarded a ship to California, took a train to Ohio and showed up at UD without even a scholarship offer.
Baujan was the assistant coach to Van Hill that first year, but took over the team in 1923. Soon other Hawaiian players were following Achiu to Dayton and in 1927, Baujan had seven Hawaiian starters on his Flyers team.
Once he moved on to the NFL and then the world of pro wrestling, Achiu often faced discrimination, his second wife Susan once told the Washington Post.
To that point, here’s the way the Appleton Post Crescent in Wisconsin began its preview of the Dayton Triangles’ game with the Green Bay Packers in October of 1928:
“The Green Bay Packers flushed with their victory over the Chicago Bears last week will play a League of Nations outfit known as the Dayton Triangles in a National (Football) League game here Sunday afternoon.
“The Dayton team is world famous. It has borrowed its uniforms from the wild zebras of Africa and it has gathered players from the ends of the earth.
“In far off China there will be fans waiting for word from the renowned Sneeze Achiu, Dayton halfback, the only Chinese player in captivity…
“Should fortune smile upon the Dayton team, word will be flashed to the Hawaiian Islands and no doubt the girls will put on a few of their Hay skirt straw skirt dances on the beach of Waikiki.”
Forgotten figure
Over the years, Achiu has become a somewhat forgotten figure around UD.
But this past May, in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, UD student Ava Merriman wrote an article for the University of Dayton Archives mentioning a few of the school’s long-ago students from China, Japan, Hawaii and India.
She dedicated a few paragraphs to the accomplishments of Achiu, both during his college days and as a professional athlete after.
Achiu retired in Oregon and later in life battled health issues. He died in 1989 at age 86.
He is buried in an unadorned grave – next to Susan who died a decade later – at Springfield Memorial Garden in Springfield, Oregon.
There is no epitaph on his marker, so for that let’s go back to Charlie Leach, the Dayton Daily News sportswriter, who penned a perfect salute to Achiu:
“The greatest drawing card in the history of the school and also the most popular performer with the fans.”
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