I spent plenty of time at the East Bank Saloon over the years...
Robert ‘Pudgy’ Hunt, Oregon basketball legend who may have met D.B. Cooper, dies at 86
- Updated: May. 12, 2025, 2:28 p.m.
- |Published: May. 12, 2025, 12:45 p.m.
Connie and Pudgy Hunt
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Robert “Pudgy” Hunt — a former Oregon high school basketball star with a compelling life story that may have included a run-in with infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper — died on Sunday from complications associated with a heart defect. He was 86.
“He is the love of my life,” wife Connie Hunt told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “We spent 47 amazing years together full of love, laughs, learning and adventure. When I married him, I knew it would not be an ordinary life, but I had no idea what a fabulous ride it would be.”
Hunt was Oregon’s all-time leading scorer in high school basketball for 50 years, scoring 2,584 career points for tiny Knappa High before graduating in 1957. Kevin Love of Lake Oswego (and later NBA stardom) broke that record in 2007, and would later have his own record broken by Regis’ Isaiah Koehnke in 2025.
While Hunt’s athletic achievements were numerous, they were far from guaranteed. He got the nickname “Pudgy” from his mother after being born a hefty baby.
At age nine, he and his cousin Jimmy were playing with a lighter when Hunt accidentally set himself on fire. The flames left 70 percent of his body burned, and doctors expected he would die within a few days.
“But I kept on livin’,” Hunt told The Oregonian/OregonLive for a 2019 profile examining his unique life.
Hunt received skin grafts, learned to walk again, and didn’t waste time getting back involved in sports. He grew to 6-5 by his senior year of high school, and after a decorated career at Knappa, received a scholarship to the University of Oregon.
He eventually transferred to Gonzaga, where he led the team in scoring his senior year at nearly 20 points per game. With only nine active NBA teams at the time in 1962 and few other opportunities to play professionally in the U.S., Hunt would play Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Masters ball in the Portland area.
Hunt met wife Connie in 1977 at the Bottle Shoppe, a bar Hunt was running at the time. He described being enamored by her beauty. The couple would eventually open the East Bank Saloon, a rough and tumble spot to watch sports and enjoy plenty of libations among an edgy crowd.
He made several close friends through his work, including Frank Peters, who Hunt helped get his start in the bar business. Peters would go on to open 10 establishments of his own after a baseball career at Oregon State and a stint as player-manager for the Portland Mavericks baseball team.
“Pudgy is my best friend, and I went to work for him at his original Bottle Shoppe tavern when I was playing for the Beavers. I got paid $2.65 an hour and was vastly overpaid,” Peters said in a phone conversation Monday. “He was old school B.C., as I like to put it: before computers, before cell phones, and before cocaine. I loved him.”
Keeping up his basketball passion, Hunt was part of a team from Portland that won the first-ever World Masters championship in 1985. His team, named for the East Bank Saloon, won nine gold medals in “Toronto, Brisbane, Melbourne, Edmonton, Buenos Aires, Las Vegas, Costa Rica, (Slovenia) and Brazil,” according to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame.
So, what about D.B. Cooper? While Hunt himself was on the straight and narrow, some of his friends were “idiosyncratic” with questionable associations, according to reporting from The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Doug Perry for the profile on Hunt.
That included a “fire hydrant” of a man — as Connie put it — who Hunt originally met at Oregon named Dick “Bugsy” Briggs. Bugsy ended up in the cocaine trade and would attempt to impress associates by claiming he was Cooper.
Hunt worked with a more substantial Cooper suspect — Robert Rackstraw — on a flooring installation job in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Hunt wasn’t convinced that Rackstraw was the man, but others still are, and Rackstraw himself even hinted at it before going back on the claim. Rackstraw died in 2019.
“I still don’t think Rackstraw is D.B. Cooper,” Pudgy told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2019. “My brother Danny does. He spent a lot more time with him. He believes it.”
