MORGANTOWN, W.VA. – When West Virginia plays Pitt in Fitzgerald Field House on Saturday, March 2, it will mark the final college basketball game for the 51-year-old facility.

	Hot Rod Hundley is bottled up by two Panther defenders in this encounter at Fitzgerald Field House in 1956. (WVU Sports Communications)

It is only fitting that West Virginia closes the aging edifice.

After all, this will be the fourth time these two long rivals have closed facilities at each other’s institutions. On February 18, 1951, West Virginia and Pitt finished the final chapter at old Pitt Pavilion, located on the hillside along the southern end of the football stadium between Gates 1 and 3.

Nineteen years later on March 3, 1970, the Panthers and the Mountaineers came together once again to say goodbye to West Virginia’s 41-year-old Field House, now known as Stansbury Hall.

Pitt was also the last team to play at Old Mountaineer Field -- West Virginia’s 62-year-old football treasure that resided along Falling Run Road. The two teams officially closed that dilapidated structure on November 10, 1979.

Now, history will be served again when the Mountaineers play the No. 8-rated Panthers for the 163rd time in men’s basketball this Saturday at Fitzgerald Field House. West Virginia has enjoyed a fair level of success at Fitzgerald, winning 21 of 40 meetings entering Saturday’s finale.

In 1951, Fitzgerald Field House replaced Pitt’s first basketball venue -- Pitt Pavilion. Even in its day, the Pavilion, opened in 1925, was considered an awful place to play basketball.

Chester Smith of the Pittsburgh Press once described it as “more like the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

The Pavilion seated 4,000 fans who had to walk down a dirt path leading from Gate 3 to get inside. The facility had virtually no heat and Dr. H.C. Carlson, the school’s only coach during the Pavilion years, was said to have known the temperature outside based on “whether I was frozen to the knees or only the ankles, and by how much steam was coming off the players.”

Teams had to run outside almost 100 yards – sometimes in a dead sprint – from their dressing rooms to the playing floor.

Much later, Fitzgerald Field House at least protected the teams from the elements, if not the rowdy Panther fans.

Referred to as “Pitt’s car barn” by the Pittsburgh sportswriters, Fitzgerald Field House today has come a long way from the time a dirt track surrounded the floor. Still it has all of the charm of, well, a car barn.

One of Fitzgerald’s all-time favorite supporters is Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun, who for years turned Pitt's basketball facility into a personal crusade.

In 1998 he lambasted the school for its lack of security and poor shower facilities, forcing the Panthers to undergo an embarrassing inspection by Big East officials.

Calhoun reached his boiling point after Panther fans showered his star guard Khalid El-Amin with plastic bottles and small change following UConn’s stunning, come-from-behind 70-69 victory in 1998. Never mind the fact that El-Amin leaped on the scorer’s table at game’s end and made a No. 1 gesture toward the student section. Four years later, some drunken Panther fans swear El-Amin gave the No. 1 sign with his other finger.

Khalid may have been well served to take a lesson from former West Virginia All-American guard Wil Robinson, whose free throw attempt during a game in 1970 was interrupted when a Panther provocateur lobbed a dead fish onto the floor.

Horse Czarnecki, Pitt’s custodian, had to clean up the fishy situation. He played it to the hilt, displaying the fish prominently while regretting that he and the 15-inch mackerel were not on national television.

“They used to throw eels,” said Carnecki, “but they’re harder to clean up.”

At the time, Pitt had West Virginia hooked by a score of 18-10. However, the Mountaineers, as they had for 10 straight years from 1955 to 1964 and five out of six times after that, defeated the home-standing Panthers, 67-66.

Back during the 1973-74 season when Coach Buzz Ridl’s Panthers were the class of the East, it was said that Pitt players and nobody else knew the exact location of every dead spot on the old floor.

It wasn't uncommon to see opposing players make their way out onto the floor early in an effort to find all of those dead spots.

"I remember there being a lot of them," said West Virginia guard Jim McCormick, who played three times in Fitzgerald from 1961-63.

There was that kooky, tuxedo-clad Tiger Paul Auslander, who used to race up and down the student section leading the cheers.

There was also Bob Prince's sidekick, the multi-sport expert "Radio Rich", who used to yell out all of the out-of-town scores to the sportswriters on press row before the days of fax machines and Internet hookups.

Panther public address announcers broke protocol (and sometimes decorum) a time or two through the years to get in an extra dig on their sensitive southern rivals. A Pitt fan favorite was the clever announcement that a car with West Virginia license plate number E-I-E-I-O had its headlights on.

Remember the time a football goon named Mike Ditka nearly ended Jerry West's career when he knocked the All-American forward off the elevated floor into the end zone seats?

How about the time in 1982 when referee Jack Prettyman whistled the Panthers for a lane violation in a tight game West Virginia won, 48-45? A furious Roy Chipman chased Prettyman all the way to the locker room when the game was over.

A few weeks later after West Virginia outlasted the Panthers at the WVU Coliseum, Mountaineer coach Gale Catlett antagonized Pitt players, coaches and fans by jokingly calling their program "mediocre."

And of course there was longtime “Voice of the Mountaineers” Jack Fleming, who like Calhoun, held a special affection for Fitzgerald Field House. “What a lovely place,” he once said facetiously.

Although there was no specific security plan, West Virginia officials made sure Fleming never wandered around inside the 6,800-seat facility alone. Fleming once had a cup of urine dumped on his head during a basketball game in Morgantown, and one Pitt predator actually called Fleming’s Pittsburgh hospital room while he was recovering from an ailment and wished that his blood pressure “would rise past 200.”

“I thought that was rather odd,” said the late broadcaster.

Like Fitzgerald Field House, West Virginia’s old Field House -- Stansbury Hall or “Harry’s Folly” (whichever you prefer) -- wasn’t without its own charm.

Back in the late 1940s when Coach Lee Patton was developing WVU into the national power it would become in the 1950s and 1960s, the Field House provided a home to a fanatical fan in his mid-fifties called “Chop ‘Em Down.”

According to the late Shorty Hardman, “Chop ‘Em Down” was actually Frank Henderson, a lay minister who lived in Morgantown. He became known as “Chop ‘Em Down” because that was his favorite expression when he heckled visiting coaches and players.

“Chop ‘Em Down” liked the nickname so much that he later began carrying a small hatchet and would prance down High Street, lustily waving the weapon and yelling “You’ll be sorry, Pitt.”

	A packed Field House was the norm for West Virginia-Pitt basketball games. (WVU Sports Communications)

“Chop ‘Em Down” had many enemies among visiting players and coaches, but none were greater than Pitt coach Red Carlson, who often brought an umbrella with him to games at the Field House to shield himself from flying debris that sometimes made its way out of the student section. Carlson would pull his hair and shake his fist at “Chop ‘Em Down” and threaten to come up into the balcony and get him. The Pitt coach always complained to West Virginia athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley about “Chop ‘Em Down’s” antics.

Hawley would have to climb up to the top of the Field House, negotiate around some chicken wire, and plead with “Chop ‘Em Down” to cool it. Eventually Hawley had to ban “Chop ‘Em Down” for life, but he still found a way to sneak in.

“Chop ‘Em Down” wasn’t the only WVU supporter banned for life from the Field House. During West Virginia’s final season in 1970, a misguided fan ran out onto the floor and joined in on a slugfest that was taking place between Syracuse and West Virginia. The fight started when Syracuse center Bill Smith broke a cardinal rule by punching the game official. The melee lasted a couple of minutes before city police restored order.

The contest was called with a full minute left on the clock. The Orangemen not only left the building, but they also had to leave their Holiday Inn hotel rooms and go to Pittsburgh after some West Virginia fans found out where they were staying. Thankfully West Virginia won the game. And of course there’s Hot Rod Hundley, who personally turned the Field House into the state’s most popular attraction in the mid-1950s. This self-proclaimed clown hung from the basket and shot free throws from behind his back. He would shake hands with officials, kiss girls sitting in the front row and discuss strategy with the opposing coach … all during the game.

More often than not with Hundley in the lineup, West Virginia won and left opposing players and coaches steaming. WVU captured 82.9 percent of its contests at the Field House (374-77).

Like all great structures, time was running out on the Field House. In the early 1960s, West Virginia actually toyed with the idea of building a “stadium-arena” made by a retractable enclosure over the bowl end of Mountaineer Field. The facility would have seated 12,000 fans for basketball games. The idea got as far as being published in the 1963 basketball press guide before those in charge came to their senses (seven years later athletic director Red Brown christened the new 14,000-seat WVU Coliseum on Monongahela Boulevard).

In all, Pitt and West Virginia played 40 times in the Field House between 1929 and 1970, with West Virginia claiming 26 of those games. However, Pitt took the last one played there on March 3, 1970, 92-87. West Virginia blew a 19-point first-half lead to lose its 15th game of the season. West Virginia’s 11-15 mark that year was its worst record since 1944.

For the happy Panthers, playing for first-year coach Buzz Ridl, the triumph meant a 12-12 final mark – their best season since 1964.

Pitt, too, got the last laugh against the Mountaineers when it closed the Pavilion on February 18, 1951. West Virginia had a far better basketball team that year, winning 18 of 27 games for first-year coach Red Brown. The Panthers, by comparison, were just 9-17 and had lost at West Virginia just 11 days earlier.

A crowd of 2,365 fans showed up for the Pavilion’s final game. Many in attendance were students who had come in anticipation of a postgame dance on the Pavilion court. Tom Hamilton, Pitt’s athletic director, predicted in front of the entire crowd at halftime that Pitt would win.

Reserve guard Scott Phillips made the prediction come true when he scored a putback basket in the game’s waning seconds for a 74-72 Panther victory. West Virginia had won four of its last five at the Pavilion before that loss. A losing result to Pitt was also the case at Old Mountaineer Field on Saturday, November 10, 1979.

Mountaineer Field had served as the home for West Virginia football for 62 years from 1925 to 1979. However, by 1979 Mountaineer fans and opposing teams were ready to bury the concrete monster.

A push came in the late 1970s to build a new football facility when it was discovered that Mountaineer Field was becoming a serious heath hazard. Falling chunks of concrete had turned the structure into a ticking time bomb.

“I can remember pulling up the blocking dummies and watching the rats run out from underneath them,” recalled long-time equipment manager Danny Nehlen, whose father Don took over the football program in the spring of 1979.

In its last game there, West Virginia fought the No. 12-rated Panthers valiantly, scoring 17 second-half points before losing, 24-17. Pitt claimed 12 of 18 meetings at Old Mountaineer Field from 1925-79 (back in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, Pitt and West Virginia had a three-for-one arrangement in football).

So now comes time for West Virginia to bid farewell to Fitzgerald Field House, its dark hallways, its antiquated locker rooms, that indoor track, and its unbearably hot or cold temperatures, depending upon whether or not its heating system is working.

"It was obsolete when they laid the first concrete block," Panther announcer Dick Groat recently told Pittsburgh author Jim O'Brien.

Pitt moves into a fancy, new, state-of-the-art, 12,500-seat arena located where Pitt Stadium once stood. The new Peterson Events Center will boast a private basketball practice complex, restaurants and luxury suites. And while it’s a far cry from the two other basketball venues constructed at Pitt, it remains to be seen if the Peterson Events Center will have the same type of charm and hospitality.

I, for one, join all other area fish lovers in hoping it does.

Jim Calhoun? I’m not so sure.

Information for parts of this story were taken from Pitt Stadium Memories 1925-1999; Mountaineer Illustrated Commemorative Issue, March 3, 1970; 2002 Pitt Basketball Media Guide; Inside Panthers Sports, March 2002; and Morgantown Dominion Post Panorama, August 31, 1986.