NCAA 50th Anniversary
March 12, 2005 07:16 PM | General
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1955 Southern Conference Champions |
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 Hot Rod
Hundley
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Hundley Low/56 k |
1950s
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Introduction
It was 50 years ago this year that Coach Fred Schaus and his star player Hot Rod Hundley introduced what is now referred to as the Golden Era of basketball at West Virginia University. Schaus, just 29, was returning to his alma mater straight from the professional ranks without a single game of coaching experience under his belt. He was taking over a program in which its star player Hundley was the biggest name in the state. Undeterred, Schaus led West Virginia to its first ever Southern Conference championship and the first of 19 NCAA tournament berths in what has become a rich and proud basketball tradition.
Brown Tabs Schaus
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Fred Schaus |
Fred Schaus always wanted to be a basketball coach. While he was playing pro ball in Fort Wayne, Ind., and then later with the New York Knicks, he kept a notebook stuffed with plays that he had diagrammed. So when Red Brown called to see if he was interested in discussing the West Virginia University basketball job in the summer of 1954 Schaus jumped at the opportunity.
Brown was the University’s basketball coach when Athletic Director Roy “Legs” Hawley died suddenly of a heart attack earlier that spring. Red was named athletic director to replace Hawley and he was in the market for a new coach. In 1954 Brown had led the Mountaineers to a somewhat disappointing 12-11 record in a watered-down Southern Conference without the North Carolina schools and Maryland, but he had a good group of freshmen on campus led by the erratic and unpredictable Rod Hundley of Charleston. It was Hundley who was in the back of Brown’s mind when he approached Schaus about the job.
Brown had gone through a lot just to get the 6-foot-4, ball-handling wizard into school. Hundley was the most well-known high school player to ever play in the state and he had scholarship offers from all of the major basketball programs at the time. Both of Hundley’s parents abandoned him early in his childhood and he had lived with several different families while growing up in Charleston.
Red Brown was disappointed when he found out that Everett Case had convinced Hundley to go to North Carolina State, but during the summer after Hundley’s senior year it was discovered that N.C. State had conducted illegal tryouts that eventually led to 14 players being ruled ineligible. Among those the NCAA wanted to talk to was Hundley. That ultimately led to Hundley’s return to West Virginia, where Brown welcomed him with open arms. He was too much of a talent not to take a chance on.
Hundley enrolled in summer school but soon grew homesick and wanted to return to Charleston and go to Morris Harvey College where his idol George King once led the nation in scoring. But Hundley reconsidered and returned to Morgantown for the start of the fall semester. Brown nursed him through a year of school playing on the freshman team in which he was clearly the best player. Hundley scored 62 points in one game and averaged better than 40 points during one stretch before getting “bored” and he decided to quit shooting. It was during this time that Hundley discovered that the crowd was paying attention to just about everything he did.
The 'Show'
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Rod Hundley |
Once during a game, the player guarding Hundley got his feet tangled up and fell down. Without calling a timeout and with the basketball in one arm, Hot Rod innocently helped the player up to the delight of the fans. The very next game he began doing some of the tricks he learned as a boy playing by himself in the YMCA.
“The fans always started stomping their feet and clapping their hands and they would get louder and louder: they wanted to see the show,” Hundley said.
The “show” was just about anything Hundley could think of off the top of his head. It might be a behind-the-back pass or dribbling between his legs in a close game, it could be a 25-foot hook shot or a behind-the-back free-throw attempt when the games got out of hand. Later, his tricks became even bolder and more ridiculous.
“I never tried to jeopardize a game,” Hundley said. But his clowning had gotten to the point where he admitted he was working on his tricks more than he was working on his jump shot. But the fans could care less -- they just loved everything he did. By the end of the year people packed the old Field House on Beechurst Avenue just to see what Hundley was going to do. Once the freshman game was finished they usually left before the varsity were even finished with their warm ups. Those freshmen games with Hundley were as much Barnum & Bailey as they were basketball.
Hundley’s teammate Clayce Kishbaugh recalled how he used to control a game that year. Kishbaugh was having a good game against West Virginia Wesleyan in Clarksburg near his home town of Nutter Fort. Kishbaugh says he had a team-best 16 points by halftime.
“Rod came into the locker room and he said, ‘That’s it Clayce -- you’re done.’ I scored two points in the second half and that’s how he controlled a game. I didn’t touch the ball and he wouldn’t pass it to me,” Kishbaugh said.
For all intents and purposes Hundley was running the show and he knew it. In the summer of his freshman season he left school to take part in what turned out to be an illegal tryout with the Philadelphia Spas. The Spas were a team that toured with the Harlem Globetrotters. Hundley initially wanted to have a tryout with the Philadelphia Warriors that was arranged by former WVU All-American Mark Workman, but the NBA didn’t accept underclassmen. During the tryout with the Spas Hundley badly injured his knee (he had already suffered one serious knee injury while in high school) and Brown agreed to pay for Hundley’s surgery if he returned to school.
This is what Schaus, then 29, had to confront when he took the West Virginia job. “Fred Schaus got the job which led to his getting to become the coach and then general manager of the pro Lakers because I thought he’d be a good coach for Rod. That was the deciding factor,” Brown told author Bill Libby in Hundley’s first book Clown. However, Schaus doesn’t remember Hundley’s name even being mentioned when discussing the WVU job with Brown. “I don’t recall any specific discussions about Rod and I’m honest when I say that,” said Schaus.
Tough Competitor
Hundley was among those endorsing Schaus, a star player for Lee Patton at West Virginia who helped the Mountaineers make a trip to the NIT in 1947 and was voted school president by his classmates. He came to West Virginia from Newark, Ohio, partly upon the recommendation of former All-American Scotty Hamilton whom he befriended while in the service, according to Norm Julian’s interesting book Legends. West Virginia won 54 of 66 games during Scahus’ three seasons as a player and he was the first to top 1,000 points for his career. “I listened to the games when he was playing at West Virginia and I knew a lot about him,” said Hundley. “They called him ‘Fireball Freddie.’”
Said former West Virginia SID Eddie Barrett of Schaus, “He is the most competitive person I’ve ever been around. He never liked anyone who beat him.” One of the late Jack Fleming’s favorite stories about Schaus was the time he once got paired with him in a low-stakes tennis match against Red Brown and Ray Duncan, the school of physical education dean. Schaus needed a doubles partner and there was no one else around so they asked Fleming to play. Jack wasn’t very good and it soon became evident to Schaus, who got madder and madder every time Fleming tried to hit the ball. Finally Fred said, “Damn it Fleming, concentrate! Concentrate!” Brown and Duncan, knowing Fleming didn’t play tennis, got a good laugh out of it.
Even though Schaus was super competitive, he had never coached a game before and he was taking over a team whose star player was the best known thing in the state. “I’m sure it had to be tough on him,” admitted Kishbaugh. When the team began practicing Schaus could tell right away that they needed a lot of work on defense, particularly playing man-to-man which was the defense he preferred. “We’re not covering as well as we should on the floor, and we’re not protecting on the boards,” he told Morgantown sportswriter Tony Constantine after one practice.
Constantine, known for his sharp analysis, wrote that Schaus’ first team wasn’t as quick and swift as Brown’s ’54 squad consisting of Eddie Becker, Red Holmes, Mack Isner and Dubby Morris. Constantine criticized Brown’s last team for freelancing too much instead of playing an “organized system.”
In addition to Hundley, Kishbaugh, a 6-foot-2 guard, and Marc Constantine from the freshman team, Schaus also inherited 6-foot-5 forward Pete White, 6-foot-6 forward Willie Bergines, 6-foot-7 center Paul Whitting and 5-foot-8 guard Frank Spadafore who Kishbaugh called “pound for pound the best little player I ever saw.”
Bergines played on Coach Jerome Van Meter's powerhouse high school teams of the early 1950s in Beckley and was considered an outstanding defender and rebounder. Spadfore was a tough, no-nonsense guard from Shinnston who also played football. But White was the best of the varsity players Schaus inherited. He averaged 10.4 points and 6.1 rebounds per game as a junior and shot 40 percent from the floor -- at the time considered a good percentage. White grew up in Clendenin and learned to play the game on a hoop nailed to a sycamore tree across the street from his house. “Rain or snow we were out there playing all of the time,” he recalled. “We didn’t have TV back then or the diversions they have today.”
White had scholarship offers from schools as diverse as Princeton and Kentucky. “Adolph Rupp recruited me but I wanted to live in West Virginia and I wanted to go to West Virginia University,” White said. “There was a great feeling about WVU basketball back then.”
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Clayce Kishbaugh |
Kishbaugh recalls a similar experience. “I could have gone to other schools: Indiana, Penn State and Pitt. I was going to go to Indiana. (Coach) Branch McCracken liked me for some reason. He came to the West Virginia-Kentucky All-Star Game and he offered me a scholarship and I looked the place over and I liked it. Then I told my mother my decision and she said, ‘No you’re not – you’re going to West Virginia!’”
Kishbaugh remembers hitchhiking from Bridgeport to Morgantown to get to school. “I’d thumb from Bridgeport to Grafton and then I’d thumb from Grafton to Morgantown. Back in those days college kids thumbed.”
Sometimes during practices and pickup games Kishbaugh wasn’t against putting the basketball down and putting his fists up if he felt he needed to. “I didn’t take any crap from anybody,” he said. Kishbaugh remembers once getting specific instructions from Schaus on how to guard George Washington All-American Corky Devlin. “Fred said, ‘Get in his face and stay in there,’” Kishbaugh said. Kishbaugh did such a good job following Schaus’ instructions that an irritated Devlin delivered an elbow to his throat during one game that put Kishbaugh out for the rest of the half.
“Sure enough Devlin went up for his first shot and I hit him pretty hard in the face,” Kishbaugh laughed. “Well Corky spun around and hit me and he knocked me out.”
“I don’t know if he knocked him out,” Hundley mentioned. “Of course you never knew when Clayce was out anyway.”
Kishbaugh said Schaus taught him all of the little tricks he had learned in the pros to get an edge on an opponent. “It wasn’t dirty things,” Kishbaugh said. “Maybe you might tip the shooter’s elbow a little bit to knock him off, or give the guy a little push while he was going up the sidelines and knock him out of bounds. When you’re jumping for the ball I would hold onto their pants and I’d out-jump guys five and six inches taller than I was.”
Fast Start
The Mountaineers didn’t need much of an edge in their first four games of the 1954 season against Waynesburg, Carnegie Tech, Washington & Lee and Richmond. In fact, Hundley, still mending the knee he injured during the illegal tryout, didn’t make his first start until the Washington & Lee game. He fired up 28 shots and made 31 points to help West Virginia to a 20-point lead before the reserves let the Generals close the final margin to a more respectable 10 points. Hundley scored 20 points in a good home win against Richmond, but Spiders coach Les Hooker was more impressed with the play of Spadafore, who scored 10 points and made several steals.
The undefeated Mountaineers got their first big win of the year against nationally ranked Wake Forest in the first game of the Birmingham Classic. All-ACC forward Dickie Hemric burned West Virginia for a tournament-record 43 points but West Virginia held on for an 86-82 win. White scored 27 and Hundley added 24. The winning streak was snapped the next night when Alabama beat the Mountaineers by 14, yet many elated WVU supporters rationalized the loss by saying the team wasn’t expect to win either game in Birmingham anyway. Reality set in nine days later when Harold Bradley’s Duke team drilled West Virginia 92-79 in Raleigh. Hundley managed just six points in the loss and rode the bench for the final 14 minutes of the game for doing some clowning at the wrong time. Hundley got the message the next night and scored 47 against Wake Forest, but the Demon Deacons beat the Mountaineers 96-94. About the best thing that came out of the trip was the $5,000 West Virginia got as a guarantee for the two games.
West Virginia lost its fourth decision of the season at NYU after dropping Cornell by eight. With the score tied at 78, New York froze the ball until Ed Kramer was fouled with three seconds left. He made the first of two free throws to win the game. White broke his nose against NYU and re-broke it three days later.
“With (trainer) Whitey Gwynne you played hurt,” White said. “We played NYU in the Garden on a Saturday night and old Whitey broke out the ammonia capsule to open my head up and then he stuffs my nose full of stuff. Then we played at Virginia Tech and one of those big farmers got it again.”
West Virginia downed the Hokies and then suffered a bad loss to Carnegie Tech. Hundley fouled out with three minutes to go and the Tartans’ Dick Fielder wiped out West Virginia’s comeback attempt with a 25-footer from well beyond the top of the key. The best news of the week was delivered by Fairmont Times sports editor Bill Evans, who wrote that Hundley had passed enough classes to remain eligible for the rest of the season. But the losing continued. West Virginia fell by 22 to Westminster and in that game Kishbaugh scored 20 points off the bench to earn a start against VMI four days later. WVU beat the Keydets twice in a span of a week and also added a come-from-behind victory over Virginia Tech, 64-61 in Blacksburg.
"I'm In For Kishbaugh"
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Hundley today |
Pete White scored 29 points and pulled down 27 rebounds in a fabulous all-around performance to help West Virginia beat Pitt 88-74 in the Field House. But everyone was talking about Hundley, who shot a free throw with his legs crossed and flipped in a basket while kneeling on one knee. Unfortunately he didn’t make many other shots. Hundley was three of 22 shooting in the first half before playing the second half “straight.” He finished the game going nine of 37 for 25 points. “Rod took a lot of shots,” Kishbaugh understated. “One game we were playing he shot 45 times and I think he made 10. I shot 14 in the same game and made seven. If I would have shot 45 times I would have made a helluva lot more than 10 – I’ll tell you that.”
Hundley admits his shooting percentage could have been much better had he not tried some of the crazy shots that he did. He might take one off his elbow or bounce the ball off his head. As the season wore on and as he got more accustomed to what Schaus would let him get away with, his tricks became more creative. “Rod used excellent judgment not to overdo any antic and everything seemed to work out for him when he was doing those things,” said the man whose job it was to explain Hundley’s clowning to the other coaches. “Oh sure there were times when I wished he hadn’t gone quite that far like when he was leading the cheers after I had taken him out of a ballgame … ‘We want Hundley, we want Hundley!’”
“What (Schaus) always said was, ‘I don’t care what you do when we’re 20 points ahead,’” said Hundley. “‘You can kick the ball up into the stands if you want … just make sure we’re 20 points ahead when you do it.’ I said, ‘No problem.’”
And it wasn’t, at least for Hundley. During a game against William & Mary with West Virginia leading by a big score, Hundley ran down the floor and sat right on the bench next to Coach Boyd Baird. Back then the benches were underneath the basket at the Field House. “He said, ‘Get off this bench!’ I said, ‘I’m tired, let me rest,’” Hundley laughed. “I just missed a lay up and they were going the other way. He yelled for the ref to get me off the bench. I said, ‘Show me in the rule book where it says I can’t sit here?’ There was no such rule because no one did anything like that.’
“Then about the time we got the rebound, I said, ‘Hey, I’m gone.’ They passed me the ball and I wound up with a lay up.”
Hundley once tried a crazy running hook shot from the corner and his momentum carried him out of bounds. Instead of going back on the court to guard his man, he decided to keep on going and ran into the crowd and made a turn past the concession stand and came out on the other side of the court. “Red Brown was getting a hot dog and I ran by and slapped him on the back,” said Hundley. “He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Why aren’t you watching the game? I’ve got to get my man – I’ve got to go.’ Schaus was yelling, ‘Where in the hell did he go?’ I got back in time and my man didn’t score.”
Many times when Schaus took Hundley out of the game the crowd would demand that he put him back in. “Fred couldn’t do anything about it,” said Kishbaugh. “If he took Rod out and we were ahead by just two points those people would have killed him.” Sometimes Hundley egged the crowd on, too.
“We were playing Pitt and we were way ahead and Fred wouldn’t put me in and the crowd was stomping their feet and clapping their hands,” Hundley said. “I got up and sat down next to Schaus and he wouldn’t even look at me. I started smiling and I asked him, ‘Do you think the people came here to see the game or to see the show?’ Fred said. ‘Well then go in and don’t get hurt.’”
One time later when Kishbaugh was scoring a lot of points during a game their junior season, Hundley pestered Schaus to let him go back in. Schaus didn’t tell Hundley who to go in for. “I went to the scorer’s table to check in and I asked how many points I had? They said, ‘You’ve got 28.’
“I said, ‘Who’s next?’”
“Kishbaugh’s got 27.”
“Well, I’m in for Kishbaugh!” Hundley said. “I wanted to make sure Clayce didn’t out-score me. Clayce is a good friend and I’ll tell you what, he was a helluva player. He’s the best player I ever played with all four years I was up there.”
Despite the laughs Hundley was delivering to the fans on a nightly basis, West Virginia’s season was turning south. And Schaus wasn’t laughing. The Mountaineers got hammered at Richmond 106-67 with Hundley scoring just seven points. Three nights later, Penn State and its great All-American Jesse Arnelle downed the Mountaineers in overtime by nine points at the Field House. The Mountaineers had a two-point lead late and “kicked away the game,” complained Schaus after the game.
Then Duke pounded West Virginia by 40, 115-75, at Indoor Stadium. Penn State followed with another clobbering to drop West Virginia’s record to 11-10. “We were just 50-50 and playing really bad,” recalled Kishbaugh.
The Mountaineers recovered with a pair of wins over Washington & Lee and William & Mary, and were able to pull off a tough 93-86 victory against Pitt at Fitzgerald Field House. That gave WVU a 14-10 record heading into its big home game against Corky Devlin and the No. 5-rated George Washington Colonials. Despite having 10 losses, West Virginia was still in the thick of the Southern Conference race with just the one loss to Richmond. The winner was assured the No. 1 seed in the Southern Conference tournament.
West Virginia played its best game of the year and upset the Colonials, 83-74 in the game Devlin uncorked Kishbaugh. Hundley scored 39 points and took more than half West Virginia’s shots (42 of 75). Spadafore scored 15 and White added 14. Devlin made 29 and all-conference forward Joe Holup added 21 for GW.
Now everyone was back on West Virginia’s bandwagon. The Mountaineers were supposed to end the regular season with a game against Cincinnati, but a discrepancy in the Bearcats schedule forced West Virginia to play a Rutgers team that had won only two games. A bad team in West Virginia’s last regular season home game was the perfect ingredient for some Hundley fun.
“I remember Schaus pulling me out and saying, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’” White laughed. “Rod decided he was going to go for the Field House record (for field goals attempted) and he took the first 12 shots of the game. Fred said, ‘What is this, a shooting gallery?’ That game had to be tough on Fred.” West Virginia won easily 94-71 and for the record Hundley only tried 24 shots, making eight.
Post-Season Surprise
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Pete White |
In the first round of the Southern Conference tournament in Richmond, Va., VMI coach Chuck Noe used a zone defense to slow down and frustrate West Virginia. The Mountaineers won the game by seven, 73-66, but Schaus wasn’t happy at all. “We didn’t move the ball well and we were out-hustled and out-rebounded by them,” the coach told reporters after the game. West Virginia played much better in the semifinals against a hot Washington & Lee team that won 10 of its last 12 games. Hundley scored 27 points and White contributed 20 in the 15-point victory. Although West Virginia didn’t reach the Schaus-imposed 20-point margin, Hundley still found time to do some fancy ball-handling to the delight of the fans packed into 5,000-seat Richmond Arena. In the other semifinal game George Washington had a rough time with the hometown Spiders, beating them 67-65 to set up a rematch with West Virginia in the championship. It was the first time the Mountaineers qualified for the title game since joining the league in 1950. The Mountaineers’ best previous effort came in 1952 when, with All-American center Mark Workman, West Virginia was upset in the semifinals by Duke, 90-88.
So naturally West Virginia was a prohibitive underdog against GW. The Colonials led by eight in the second half before West Virginia came alive. Schaus, frustrated by his team’s inability to step Devlin, called a timeout. “Devlin’s killing us and we’ve got to do something to stop him,” Schaus told his team.
“Let me have him,” said Hundley.
Hundley by a long shot was the last guy Schaus had in mind to guard Devlin. The Pittsburgh writers always brought up Hundley’s unwillingness to play D. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play defense – it just didn’t interest him very much. “I didn’t let him touch the ball,” said Hundley. “I face-guarded him wherever he went. I really frustrated him and he couldn’t do anything.”
Devlin scored 24 points but only had one basket in the game’s final 18 minutes. During West Virginia’s comeback Hundley was able to make a basket and was fouled on the play. He missed the free throw and White was able to work himself free for the follow up to tie the game. George Washington coach Bill Reinhart instructed his team to freeze the ball for the remaining 2:06. Devlin’s last shot was off target to send the game into overtime with the score tied at 48. In the overtime period Hundley was magnificent. West Virginia outscored GW 12-2 in the extra period to win the game 58-48.
Hundley was even able to have some fun at the end. Standing at the foul line with just a couple of seconds left and the game in the bag, WVU PR director Rene Henry was able to get Hundley’s attention. “Hey, Rod,” Henry hollered. “You make these two free throws and you’ll have the Southern Conference three-game record for points with 85.”
Hundley gave the OK sign and winked. His first shot clanked hard off the bank board. The second one landed out of bounds. The shot attempts? The first one was a hook and the second one came from behind his back. “They said, ‘Why did you do that?’ I said, “If I broke the record nobody would care. This way people will be talking about it, plus, if I made them I wouldn’t have anything to shoot for next year.’”
The people in Richmond just ate up Hundley’s act. It was West Virginia’s first Southern Conference championship and the fans stormed the court. Both Hundley and Schaus were carried off the floor. During the awards ceremony Hundley fired off the Mountaineer’s musket, and he even managed to get in a kiss on the cheek of the West Virginia beauty queen Ethel Smith who was the team’s sponsor. A picture of Hundley’s playful peck appeared in the newspapers the next day. Of course this being the 1950s, the poor girl looked like she was about to have a stroke. Hundley called it the best game of his career.
“That was the most memorable game of them all to me,” Hundley proudly admitted. To this day he can still recite his scoring line: “I had 30 and we had 58,” he said. “It was the first time we had ever won the Southern Conference and we beat a good team.”
Schaus and West Virginia’s public relations men Henry and later Eddie Barrett got a lot of mileage out of Hundley’s defensive performance against Devlin, bringing that game up every time someone hinted that he never played defense. “Fred always said, ‘You stopped Corky Devlin.’ I was walking on a cloud then. That was about as good as it got personally,” said Hundley.
The victory gave West Virginia its first ever trip to the NCAA tournament. West Virginia fans had become familiar with the NIT, having watched Dyke Raese’s terrific 1942 team win it all. Lee Patton’s teams were also regular visitors to Madison Square Garden.
But by the mid 1950s the NIT had lost some of its luster and the national championship was now being awarded to the team that won the NCAA tournament. The NCAAs began in 1939 two years after the NIT and was billed as the “World Series” of college basketball. It was a brainchild of the NCAA basketball coaches.
“Walter Byers was the executive director of the NCAA and he didn’t like New York,” said Eddie Barrett. “Because of the gambling scandals of the early 1950s (at CCNY, NYU and Kentucky) he was against the NIT and actively promoted the NCAA tournament. It was not on TV – it was not a real big deal – but he sort of coerced the members into accepting th
