Breaking Barriers
April 08, 2004 11:16 AM | General
April 9, 2004
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Bridging the Gap |
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Jim Lewis didn’t have an agenda when he went to West Virginia University’s annual alumni reception in conjunction with this year’s Big East basketball tournament in New York City last month. He simply had an idea. He wanted to reach out to his alma mater and bridge a 40-year gap. Lewis, an Alexandria, Va., native, was one of eight players on West Virginia’s 1965 freshman team that went 20-1 and was deemed one of the best freshman teams in the country by The Basketball News that season. Joining Lewis on that team were Weirton’s Ron “Fritz” Williams and Ed Harvard, St. Albans shooter Dave Reaser, Kermit guard Lewis Hale, ex-Marine Norman Holmes from Washington, D.C., center Dick Penrod from Elkhart, Ind., and forward Letcher Humphries from Clifton Forge, Va. “There were four players from the state of West Virginia, two from Virginia, one from Washington, D.C. and one from Indiana,” said Lewis. “It was a wonderful experience because of the quality of those eight people coming from diverse backgrounds.” More so than their fine record, diversity was probably the most memorable characteristic of that group. Four of them were African-Americans: the first four African-American scholarship basketball players at West Virginia University and the Southern Conference. “We considered ourselves the pioneers in basketball because we were the first,” said Harvard, an assistant principal at Vineland High School in Vineland, N.J. The man responsible for recruiting this group was George King, who never had an opportunity to coach them having left after the 1965 season to take the Purdue job. Of that freshman group only one failed to finish his career at WVU. Lewis says all of them have since lived very productive lives. “We were successful then and we’ve been successful since,” he said. Lewis is currently head women’s basketball coach at Fordham University and has spent the last 35 years coaching all levels of basketball. Before the Big East tournament, Lewis approached former WVU Alumni Association board member John Mallory and Associate Athletic Director Garrett Ford at the alumni function about the possibility of having a 40-year reunion of that freshman team. He later talked to Williams, who also liked the idea. Last Sunday Williams died of a heart attack at 59. The reunion has now turned into a celebration of Fritz Williams’ life. “We want to come back, meet Coach (John) Beilein, meet his coaching staff, meet their players and share our experiences with them,” said Lewis. “It’s imperative that we tell those stories otherwise they’re lost forever.” Lewis isn’t certain when it’s going to happen, only that it is going to happen. “We want to do it sometime in the fall when we can get everyone together,” said Lewis. “I want to reconnect with my alma mater which has meant so much to me.” |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- When coach George King sat down with assistant Bob Lochmueller to begin mapping out his recruiting plans in the spring of 1964, he didn’t have the slightest idea he was about to turn West Virginia University into the pioneering basketball institution of the Southern Conference.
King was simply interested in finding some good players following a disappointing 18-10 season that saw the Mountaineers lose to George Washington in the semifinals of the 1964 Southern Conference tournament. Success at West Virginia University in those days wasn’t measured by winning seasons.
If a Mountaineer coach didn’t go through the Southern Conference regular season unbeaten, win at least 20 games and make the NCAA tournament, then he was in for an uncomfortable off-season.
In the summer of 1964, George King, then 36, was a little uncomfortable.
King had an impeccable basketball background. He went to Morris Harvey College in his hometown of Charleston on a partial scholarship and became one of the school’s two most famous athletes along with NFL football star Jimmy Carr.
King, a small college scoring champion, later spent five NBA seasons with the Syracuse Nationals and one with the Cincinnati Royals in 1957. In 1955, it was his free throw that enabled Syracuse to beat Fort Wayne for the NBA championship. He then stole the basketball from Fort Wayne’s Andy Phillip to save the game.
As far as Mountain State basketball players go, many informed observers believe King ranks just a notch below Jerry West as the state’s top homegrown player.
Count former WVU sports information director Eddie Barrett among them. “In my mind Jerry West was the best, but the second best player in the state was George King,” said Barrett.
King came to West Virginia University in 1957 as the school’s first full-time assistant coach under Fred Schaus.
Schaus, who also cut his teeth in the NBA, had transformed his alma mater into a college basketball power with players like Hot Rod Hundley, Jerry West and Lloyd Sharrar. Following West’s final season in 1960, Schaus sensed the timing was right to leave and he joined West in Los Angeles to coach the Lakers. The WVU program was turned over to his trusted assistant.
King, with talented guard Rod Thorn in the fold, actually exceeded Schaus’ record during his first three seasons winning 70 of 88 games for a .795 winning percentage. Then in 1964 West Virginia leveled off to 18-10 as Lefty Driesell began turning Davidson into the powerhouse program of the Southern Conference.
Two years earlier in 1962, while watching the West Virginia state high school tournament at the old field house, King became enamored with a terrific sophomore guard from Weirton, W.Va.
Unbeaten Weir High was playing unbeaten Beckley Woodrow Wilson in one of the state’s most memorable triple-A championship games. Woodrow Wilson won the game on a last-second basket, but everyone in the field house came away impressed with Weir High’s sophomore star Ron “Fritz” Williams.
George King certainly was one of them. Having already gone through the ringer once before with Rod Thorn as Schaus’ top recruiter, King realized that he was in for another great battle to land Williams.
“He was as difficult a recruiting project as there was,” said King from his winter home in Naples, Fla.
Two years later in 1964, depending upon which newspaper you read, Ron Williams was every bit as good as Jerry West. Williams had scholarship offers from 102 different schools spanning both coasts.
Former Wheeling Intelligencer sports editor Doug Huff recalled Williams having a large following of fans.
“There were legions of neutral sports fans that followed him around all over the place,” Huff said. “You couldn’t even buy a ticket to a lot of the small places when he played. They turned them away by the thousands. People just wanted to see him play.”
Williams was more than just a terrific basketball player. He was a top sprinter who had the state’s fastest times in the 100, 220 and 440 and was also an outstanding end on the football team. He had at least 20 scholarship offers for football.
“Fritz is still the standard up here,” said Huff.
“A world class, elite athlete,” is how WVU teammate Jim Lewis describes Williams.
George King knew Ron Williams fit perfectly in his system but there was one small obstacle. Williams was African-American and neither West Virginia University nor the Southern Conference had ever offered a basketball scholarship to a black player.
Recruiting Williams wasn’t necessarily a problem for West Virginia University. Eddie Barrett points out that Chuck Blue was a walk-on African-American player from Morgantown who was on the 1955 basketball team, though he never got into a game or was even listed on the team’s roster.
West Virginia also successfully integrated its football program two years earlier when Roger Alford and Dick Leftridge were recruited by football coach Gene Corum.
“The Southern Conference had become pretty accepting because we had Leftridge and Alford in football,” said Barrett. “There was three years to ease into that.”
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| Ron "Fritz" Williams
(WVU Sports Communicatons) |
Consequently, having African-Americans on the basketball team was the next logical step for WVU. Eastern rivals Pitt, Syracuse and Penn State were already integrated.
But according to Barrett, the Williams family wasn’t necessarily interested in their son being a pioneer at West Virginia University. There were African-Americans already at Michigan and Ohio State, his two other top choices.
“He did not want to be the only black on the team,” said Barrett. “I would use the word ‘humble’ to describe him, which is rare for a star.”
King, who Barrett considers WVU’s best-ever basketball recruiter, had already developed a game plan for landing Williams.
Fritz’ high school teammate Ed Harvard was also an African-American whom King deemed good enough to play at West Virginia. And for good measure, King had discovered Jimmy Lewis over in Alexandria, Va., through former NBA teammate Earl Lloyd.
Lewis’ father worked 35 years as a chauffeur for legendary United Mines Workers of America president John L. Lewis, a mythical figure in West Virginia. Having that connection certainly didn’t hurt Lewis’ cause.
Lewis was also very close to Lloyd, the NBA’s equivalent to Jackie Robinson. Lloyd, a 2003 inductee into the Naismith Hall of Fame, played college ball in West Virginia at West Virginia State.
King and Lloyd became great friends in the pros and King recalled an upsetting incident when their team once made a trip to Baltimore for a game.
“Earl couldn’t stay in our hotel and that made us all mad,” King said. “There was definitely racism and you could see it lots of times in lots of places. But to the pro players, a black man was accepted just like anyone else. There were no differences made. We became great friends.”
According to Lewis, King called up Lloyd to see if he knew of any players interested in coming to West Virginia and Lloyd told him that he did know someone whom he might be interested in. So King found out about Jim Lewis, a chiseled 6-foot-2, 195-pound forward and a D.C. all-metro player.
Barrett said King’s method was simple: if he could land Jimmy Lewis and then also convince Ed Harvard to come on board it would create a smoother path to Ron Williams.
“George wanted to be able to say to Fritz, ‘Look we’ve already got Jim Lewis with us.’ And I think previously he said that he wanted Possum (Harvard), too,” said Barrett.
“I was going to possibly meet (Williams) during the West Virginia state high school tournament in Morgantown but I was unable to make my official visit then,” said Lewis.
The Williams family had other things to consider. His father Raymond worked at Weirton Steel where Thomas E. Millsap, a prominent WVU booster, was chairman of the board. Millsap, a well known philanthropist in the Upper Ohio Valley, had donated the funds to construct the first electronic scoreboard at Mountaineer Field and was a rabid West Virginia University supporter.
“I would say there might have been unspoken pressure put on his dad,” said Barrett. “But I don’t think it was anything extraordinary.”
Williams in a 1965 interview with the Pittsburgh Press said he wasn’t privy to any of this, “My father never told me,” he said. “He tried not to bother me with that stuff.”
“There were a lot of people that wanted him to go to West Virginia because at that time he was like a Jerry West coming out of high school,” said Harvard. “He was a legend and everyone in the country wanted him. But he never really got into that with me about feeling any pressure (to sign with WVU).”
Finally, Williams made his choice during the first week of April.
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| Jim Lewis
(WVU Sports Communicatons) |
“George King kept coming and coming and (Ron) finally committed to West Virginia,” said Harvard. “Everybody in the state of West Virginia was very happy.”
Huff, who probably saw as many of Williams’ games as anyone, says Fritz was extremely mature for his age.
“He played on the varsity team as a freshman. He was muscular and was so much more advanced than kids his age,” said Huff. “He had long arms and long legs. When he went to the top of his jump shot nobody could block it.
“The one thing I remember about watching him play basketball is he always had the look of a deer in headlights,” Huff added. “His eyes were seeing everything. I never saw anyone that intense or focused.”
King envisioned Williams being a player at WVU very similar to Hundley and Thorn.
“I recruited Fritzy basically to fit a pattern that the University had fallen into, maybe accidentally, of having a great player kind of lead and become the spark for the rest of the people,” said King. “It started with Hot Rod Hundley and Jerry West and continued with Rod Thorn. All of these guys were in the 6-2, 6-3 range; great players, great shooters and great scorers.”
King then added a fourth African-American player later that summer when he discovered ex-Marine Norman Holmes, a 23-year-old, 6-foot-2 guard from Washington, D.C.
In each instance, whether planned or by accident, King brought in four very well-rounded African-American student-athletes. All of them earned their degrees from WVU.
“We were successful then and we’ve been successful since,” said Lewis.
To King’s knowledge, there was no specific integration plan established at West Virginia University.
“I never sat in on any plan to actively recruit and integrate our program,” he said. “If it happened I didn’t know about it and I don’t remember anyone mentioning it to me. It was a situation where we were simply looking for the best players we could recruit.”
Barrett confirmed King’s assertion, “There was no integration plan.”
Those four joined St. Albans, W.Va., shooting whiz Dave Reaser, Kermit, W.Va., guard Lewis Hale, Elkhart, Ind., center Dick Penrod and Clifton Forge, Va., native Letcher Humphries. Those eight players provided the nucleus for one of the school’s best-ever freshmen teams. All but one completed school.
That unit went 20-1 against arguably the toughest freshman schedule in school history. Williams averaged more than 30 points per game and toward the end of the year newspapers began running game-by-game comparisons of Williams’ and Hot Rod Hundley’s freshmen years.
The Basketball News listed that freshman team as one of the nation’s five best in 1965 along with Louisville, Houston, Washington State and Kentucky.
Bucky Waters, then an up-and-coming assistant coach at Duke, had heard great things about West Virginia's freshmen and made it a point to scout one of their games.
“We had a series going at the time with West Virginia when I was at Duke and they were playing somewhere and I went out of my way to see them,” Waters recalled. “I had heard so much about this freshman team and when I watched them I saw immediately that Fritz Williams was a great talent. Chapter and verse it was his group.”
The irony of that scouting trip was that Waters had taken his first peak at what was to become the nucleus of his basketball team.
King’s 1965 team, despite a losing record, upset its way through the Southern Conference tournament to make the NCAAs with just a .500 record. WVU lost to No. 4-ranked Providence in the first round of the tournament to finish the year with a losing mark.
Less than a month later King was offered the Purdue job and he accepted. Twenty three days after that, WVU athletic director Red Brown handed 29-year-old Bucky Waters the keys to the company Cadillac.
“We had three pretty good years at Duke,” said Waters. “We were at the Final Four three out of the four years and that kind of thing.”
According to Waters, he also considered taking the LSU job. Waters said WVU athletic director Red Brown was the primary reason he came to West Virginia.
“It came down to LSU and West Virginia. At the time basketball was really, really important at West Virginia with it’s great tradition,” said Waters.
Some viewed Waters’ tenure at WVU as simply a stepping stone for him to get back to Duke once Vic Bubas retired. Those holding that viewpoint mention the large number of junior college players Waters recruited as proof that he wanted to win quickly and then hightail it off to Durham. Waters’ first WVU recruit was 6-foot-4 junior college jumping jack Carl Head of Dodge City College in Kansas. Head joined the team for the 1966 season.
Waters, a North Carolina State graduate, refutes that assertion.
“One of the hardest decisions I ever made was leaving for Duke,” he said. “The hard part was turning my back on Wil Robinson. I had put so much time in recruiting him, plus, there was the new Coliseum that I never got to coach in.”
When Waters began in 1966, he was a dramatic change from King, whose freelancing style of play was replaced by a more disciplined, structured system.
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| Ed Harvard
(WVU Sports Communicatons) |
“I didn’t follow them closely but I would say my style of coaching was a little more freelance than Bucky would have been involved with. I was more of an individualist. That was really the thought I had in mind with Fritz when I recruited him,” said King.
Although Waters didn’t recruit Williams while he was at Duke … “the word was he was a lock for West Virginia all along,” says Waters … Bucky knew he inherited a gem of a player.
“I’ve been around a lot of outstanding talent for a lot of years,” said Waters. “He was just a great human being who was blessed with this incredible skill. When you’re in coaching and you have to manage a group of individuals who vary in talent, who vary in personality, it can sometimes be a love-hate thing.
“It’s easier when your best player is like Fritz Williams: not arrogant, not selfish, not above the team,” Waters added. “The best player sets the ground rules. If you’ve got a bad actor a lot of things you’d like to do you don’t do because you try to avoid confrontation.”
Williams was certainly not a bad actor and he was even a better basketball player. He averaged nearly 20 points per game his sophomore season in leading West Virginia to the NIT.
His junior and senior years he averaged better than 20 points per game. WVU won the Southern Conference in 1967 to advance to the NCAA tournament and the Mountaineers also qualified for the NIT his senior season in 1968. West Virginia won 19 games all three seasons Williams played but never won either an NCAA or NIT game. That in itself may be one of the reasons Williams is sometimes forgotten when people begin mentioning West Virginia’s great tradition of players after Jerry West.
But Williams, like Hundley and Thorn, scored more than 1,600 points for his career and still owns the school record with 197 assists in 1967.
“Ron was probably the most unselfish player in WVU history,” said veteran sportswriter Mickey Furfari.
“Jerry West was the best hands down,” said Lewis. “From there it’s all about your personal preference and as far as I’m concerned Fritz Williams was the next best.”
“Of those guys he was definitely the better all-around athlete,” said Doug Huff, who points out that Williams was also drafted by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys.
Mountaineer fans used to seeing Williams frequently putting up 30 and 40 points in high school games wanted to see more of that from him at WVU. They blamed Waters for holding him down.
Lewis, a college and professional coach the last 35 years, draws an interesting comparison.
“One of my favorite coaches is Dean Smith and for five years I was an assistant at Duke going up against his teams. They said the same thing about Dean as far as, ‘The only person who could hold Michael Jordan to less than 20 points was Dean Smith.’ People fail to sometimes keep the importance of the team first and foremost,” said Lewis. “I understand but I don’t necessarily agree with all of that. Fritz’ teams at WVU were successful, regardless of how the system was whether it allowed him or any of us to have the green light. It’s a team sport.”
Ed Harvard basically came to the same conclusion, “Ron probably could have scored more but I think each year we won 19 games so we were successful,” he said.
Waters says there were times when he wished Williams would be more assertive and score more but that just wasn’t his nature.
“If anything, if I had a fault with Fritz it was that there were nights when he didn’t have that much talent around him and I’d get up in his face and I’d say, ‘Fritz take it over. Here’s the steering wheel.’ I wished he would have been more assertive,” said Waters. “It didn’t make him a bad person and it didn’t make him a bad player … that was just the way he was wired.”
And while Williams’ easy going nature may have given Waters additional anxiety on the basketball court, his demeanor was an asset living in Morgantown, West Virginia, in the mid 1960s.
Morgantown wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama, by any stretch, but at the same time it wasn’t a very stimulating environment for young African-American men either.
There were no barbershops, churches, movie theaters or radio stations for blacks to enjoy.
Lewis paints this picture: “The black population in Morgantown in 1964 was very, very small,” he said. “I think most of us came in with our eyes wide open. But we found ways to get stuff done. We went over to Osage and found places where we could do things and have the kinds of experiences that we were accustomed to.”
Lewis wanted to join a fraternity so he improvised and found a black fraternity at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I had to travel up there to go through those initiation efforts so that I could have the college fraternity experience that West Virginia University could not afford me at the time,” he said. “We dealt with what we were presented.”
Lewis said he only encountered blatant racism when West Virginia played road games.
“We were playing the University of Richmond, my home state, and the Richmond team would come out onto the floor as we did at home to a spotlight running out through a hoop. We ran out through a state emblem. At Richmond, they would run through a confederate soldier with the band playing Dixie. We were beating them pretty badly and we began hearing the racial epitaphs.
“Dick Penrod (a white player), who had muscles everywhere, was sitting on the bench next to me and he said, ‘Jimmy if anything breaks out I’ve got your back.’ That was what it was all about at West Virginia University.”
“Richmond was the worst experience,” added Harvard. “Those people were outright calling us every name in the book. We had to have a police escort and have the cops take us in because those people were vicious back then.”
Racism wasn’t the only external pressure the four African-American players had to consider. There was a war going on 8,000 miles away in Vietnam that was claiming a disproportionate number of blacks.
Lewis, a journalism major who worked for the Daily Athenaeum as a student, says the daily routine of playing in a major college basketball program kept them from becoming too engulfed in the war.
“We weren’t void of political activity but we were isolated, not only because of the geographic of West Virginia University, but also the discipline that goes along with athletics,” he said.
Waters, a product of a different generation, says the culture of the time became very difficult for him to deal with. Particularly when it became evident to college students in the late 1960s that the war wasn’t going the way the government said it was.
“It was a sensitive time,” he said. “There was campus unrest, Kent State, the long hair … it was painful. You could understand the kids with Kent State and Vietnam and all of that. But it really got into the culture that if you were a coach or a college president or anything of a traditional authority figure then immediately, not only did they dismiss you but it was like, ‘Hey how are you doing?’ and they were like, ‘What, are you manipulating me?’ It was bizarre. It was the reason I left coaching.”
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| Norman Holmes
(WVU Sports Communicatons) |
Waters’ military style … short hair, ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ answers and his precise practice schedules were tolerated at West Virginia. That same style resulted in many defections when he later coached at Duke, according to Bill Brill in his book Duke Basketball, An Illustrated History.
“Bucky was tough,” admitted Ed Harvard.
Waters’ departure for Duke in 1969 after just four seasons put the Mountaineer basketball program into another transition period.
In the meantime, West Virginia University continued to attract more exceptional African-American basketball players. Waters fought off many suitors to land Uniontown’s Wil Robinson in 1969 before handing him off to assistant Sonny Moran. Robinson is still the school's last All-American basketball player.
Mountain State standouts like Warren Baker, Jerome Anderson and Maurice Robinson followed in the 1970s. And the impetus began in 1964 when George King brought in four outstanding young men to integrate West Virginia University basketball.
Harvard is now an assistant principal at Vineland High School in Vineland, N.J., located near Philadelphia.
Norman Holmes is a successful attorney and is believed to be living in the Washington, D.C., area. Lewis has had a fabulous coaching career at all levels of basketball. He served assistant coaching stints at Tennessee State, Gannon, Duke and Tulane on the men’s side, and has coached the George Mason women, the Washington Mystics of the WNBA and is now head women’s basketball coach at Fordham University.
And then there’s Fritz Williams. After finishing at WVU in 1968, Williams played eight NBA seasons with the Golden State Warriors, Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. He averaged better than 14 points per game twice in 1970 and 1971, just missing winning the NBA free throw title in ‘71 to Chet Walker and Oscar Robertson. Williams joined Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee in 1974, helping the Bucks to the NBA championship series where they lost to the Boston Celtics.
After his playing career, Williams spent time as an assistant men’s coach at Cal-Berkley and Iona and was most recently helping coach girl’s high school basketball in the San Francisco Bay area when he died suddenly of a heart attack on April 4, 2004.
The news jolted all of those close to Fritz.
“He never had a bad day,” said Lewis, fighting back tears. “He never met a guy he didn’t like. He was just a gentle man who had an easy laugh about him and a love of life.”
“He was just an all-around person,” said Harvard. “He got along with everybody. He was a tremendous worker and he always worked on his game. He was also a great team player.”
“Ron was a great teammate and a classy guy,” Warriors broadcaster Jim Barnett, a teammate of Fritz’ in 1972-73, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He always had a smile on his face and a chipper attitude.”
“He was really a terrific kid,” mentioned King. “I always thought he did things right during the times I was involved with him. I just hate it that he’s gone. He was a heck of a kid and he accomplished a lot for himself and for others.”
Jim Lewis says he will continue to preach the lessons learned from their experiences integrating basketball at West Virginia University.
“It’s about service and really trying to positively impact the lives of young people who are so eager for discipline, leadership and the kinds of things born out of experiences and stories we have to tell,” he said. “I’m going to keep talking and sharing my experiences and letting people know about my friend Ron “Fritz” Williams.”
It’s a story worth listening to.
In memory of Fritz Williams, donations are being accepted for his summer basketball league in Weirton: Fritz Williams SBL, PO Box 72, Weirton, WV 26062. Tax ID # 34-1893909.
