There was no Nissan Hawai'i High School Hall of Honor back in the 1940s, but if there was, Richard Mamiya would have been an ideal charter member.

In fact, he still could serve as a role model even for the newest class of inductees that will be honored tonight along with lifetime achievers Mamiya, Cal Lee, David Ishii and Jim Alegre at a Hawai'i High School Athletic Association Foundation awards banquet.

At Saint Louis, Mamiya starred in football, basketball and baseball, earned straight A's and was student body president. He later became a standout football and basketball player at the University of Hawai'i before graduating from St. Louis University Medical School and eventually becoming one of the world's most renowned heart surgeons.

And today, at age 81, Mamiya still has a clear message about the connection between sports and life after high school.

"In life, when things get tough, the tough get going," Mamiya said yesterday. "You see the same thing in sports. Athletics played a big part in my development."

Mamiya was a master at getting his teammates and patients out of tough situations. In one game as UH's quarterback, Mamiya was under a heavy pass rush and had nowhere to turn.

His solution? A behind-the-back pass to a nearby running back, who caught it and ran 15 yards for a first down.

"He was a natural quarterback, and he was smart," said Jimmy Asato, who played in the same UH backfield as Mamiya for two years. "He was one of those guys everybody always looked up to."

Years later, as a surgeon, Mamiya revolutionized bypass surgery by cutting the normal time in half, from four hours to two. This enabled him to perform twice as many operations and save thousands of additional lives.

"You have to be efficient," said Mamiya, who sometimes performed three bypass operations in one day by traveling from hospital to hospital. "I had to prove (to the medical world) that I could do it in less time with little risk to the patient, and the mortality rate for my patients was less than 1 percent when the nationwide average was about 2 percent. A lot of the surgeries were long-lasting, too, with some patients living for another 20, 25 years."

Mamiya did not just tap into his athletic background during his medical career; he credits sports for enabling him to receive the education necessary to become a doctor.

Growing up poor in Palama, Mamiya caught the eye of baseball coaches at Saint Louis and received a scholarship to enroll as a freshman. Later, UH offered him a chance to play sports and get a free education.

During his junior year at UH, Mamiya impressed a zoology professor who encouraged him to consider medical school.

"We were dissecting a dogfish one day, that was our lab assignment," Mamiya said. "(The professor) saw what I could do with my hands, she saw that I had technical ability."

Mamiya also had the brains.

"We knew he was brilliant," Asato said. "The whole campus knew he was smart."

But Mamiya was by no means just a bookworm.

"He was not the type to stay in the library 24 hours a day," Asato said. "He would hang out with everybody else, shooting baskets in the gym, playing sports. People liked him because he was a nice guy. He was very popular."

Although UH's athletic program was not as large and visible as it is today, Mamiya still had his share of big-time moments. The Rainbows played football at Michigan State one year and played host to teams like Stanford, Fresno State and Nevada (which was a national power at the time).

In basketball, Mamiya played on the UH team that faced St. John's before a crowd of 17,925 at Madison Square Garden.

His most lasting feat, though, was a football game at Redlands (Calif.) in which he threw for 302 yards, a school record that stood for 36 years. While that total might seem modest in UH's run-and-shoot offense of today, it was almost unheard-of back in 1949.

"For those days, that was tremendous," Asato said. "We ran the old 'T' formation with three backs, and we didn't throw the ball that much."

Mamiya said on one play in that game, a 70-yard touchdown pass was called back because of a penalty. The very next snap, he threw one for a 75-yard touchdown.

Mamiya was a charter member of UH's athletic Circle of Honor in 1982, and his post-college contributions went beyond sports and medicine. He has donated thousands of dollars to Saint Louis and Punahou (where his eight children attended), and both schools named buildings in his honor.

And tonight, he serves as a prime example of what sports and education can do for the youth of Hawai'i.

Reach Wes Nakama at wnakama@honoluluadvertiser.com.