Peaks and Valleys
February 08, 2006 05:30 PM | General
February 8, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Just as Wil Robinson was attempting an important free throw in a tightly contested West Virginia-Pitt game at Fitzgerald Field House, a Panther student decided to take out his frustrations by lobbing a dead fish out onto the floor. Pitt was assessed a technical foul and second-year coach Buzz Ridl had to grab the microphone and tell the Pitt students to cool it.
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| West Virginia guard Wil Robinson goes over a Pitt defender to score a basketball at Fitzgerald Field House. Later, he had to step over a dead fish to shoot his free throw.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
The year was 1970, and by this time agitated Panther fans were throwing dead fish onto the court as a way of demonstrating their displeasure for the direction their basketball program was heading. The Panthers had endured five straight losing seasons from 1965-69, including a four-win campaign in Ridl’s first year in 1969.
Equally disturbing was the fact that Pitt wasn’t even getting a sniff from the area’s best high school basketball players –guys like Kenny Durrett (LaSalle), George Karl and Dennis Wuycik (North Carolina), Dick Devenzio (Duke), Jack Tymann (Cincinnati), Norm Van Lier and Maurice Stokes (St. Francis, Pa.), Simmie Hill (West Texas A&M), Gus Gerod (Virginia) and Maurice Lucas (Marquette).
“I really didn’t give Pitt that much consideration,” admitted Robinson, a star prep player at Laurel Highlands in nearby Uniontown. “I was more interested in Duquesne because at the time they had the stronger program. Pitt was probably in my top five behind West Virginia, Michigan State, Illinois and Duquesne.”
For Pitt boosters in the 1960s and early 1970s, the list of Western Pennsylvania standouts migrating to other schools was long and painful. So when Robinson, a Pittsburgh native who spent most of his childhood living in the city, was regularly coming back to Pittsburgh and beating Pitt it was too much for Panther fans to take. Not only was Pitt enduring annual beatings to its most hated rival, but in many instances it was also getting beat by its own high school stars.
Joe Fryz, a Moon High School standout in the mid-1970s who wound up picking West Virginia over Pitt, remembers the disgusted look on Panther coach Tim Gurgurich’s face when he told Grgurich he wasn’t going to Pitt.
“He started recruiting me when I was in the 10th grade and it was a pretty big surprise for everybody,” remembered Fryz. “Tom Richards was about four or five years ahead of me from Moon and when he went to Pitt and had a great career everybody assumed I was going to go to Pitt and follow in his footsteps.
“I just didn’t want to go into the city. I wanted to have more of a campus life and yet I wanted to be close to home so my parents could see me play,” Fryz said. “One of my decision points was the history and the tradition of the two programs and at the time, Pitt’s wasn’t even close.”
Yet Buzz Ridl was able to turn the tide somewhat in the early 1970s by landing Braddock star forward Billy Knight and a handful of other Pittsburgh players who formed the nucleus of the 1974 team that won 25 of 29 games and advanced to within one game of the Final Four.
Today that team is still considered the measuring stick for Pittsburgh Panther basketball.
West Virginia, meanwhile, has had a long and proud basketball tradition starting with Rudy Baric, Scotty Hamilton, Fred Schaus and Leland Byrd in the 1940s, advancing into the 1950s with All-Americans Mark Workman, Hot Rod Hundley and Jerry West, and then carrying over into the 1960s with Rod Thorn and Ron “Fritz” Williams.
By the time Robinson joined the Mountaineer program in 1970 for his sophomore season, West Virginia was undergoing a transition of its own. Bucky Waters had left after only four seasons to take over at Duke, and West Virginia was on its own as an independent after spending more than 15 years in the Southern Conference.
Robinson was about all West Virginia had left in 1972 after a tragic car accident and some academic suspensions decimated the team, and he remembers how Ridl used to employ box-and-one defenses to try and stop him.
“They would double and triple-team me,” Robinson said. “They’d come up with these crazy defenses against me all the time.”
Robinson needed 40 points to break Jerry West’s single season scoring average record and wound up getting 42 in his last game against Pitt at the Coliseum. More importantly, West Virginia won the game 104-90.
“If I remember correctly we beat Pitt most of the time I was there,” Robinson said.
That may have been the case, but by the mid 1970s West Virginia was no longer the talk of college basketball, even though its team was playing in the brand-new-and-beautiful-but-half-empty WVU Coliseum. Even the games against Pitt were becoming ho-hum affairs.
The two schools joined the Eastern Collegiate Basketball League (ECBL) in 1977 and the nucleus of those ECBL teams formed the Eastern 8 in 1978. Despite there being a lot at stake playing in the same league and with plenty of Western Pennsylvania players on both team’s rosters, twice a year the two teams were battling it out before half-filled arenas. During West Virginia coach Joedy Gardner’s last year in 1977, the Pitt game in Morgantown drew only 4,600 spectators – or well less than half the capacity of the 14,000-seat WVU Coliseum. It was the first time Pitt had ever won at the Coliseum.
Something was needed to liven things up and it finally came in the spring of 1977 when Cincinnati coach Gale Catlett was hired to take over the head coaching reigns at his alma mater.
The supremely self-confident Catlett was a magnificent bench coach who had turned around a once-proud Cincinnati program with players like Pat Cummings, Steve Collier and Lloyd Batts. Catlett sensed the malaise that had taken over West Virginia basketball and he also understood the importance of great rivalries. Plus, he had had a long history of run-ins with Pitt.
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| Coach Gale Catlett helped revive the West Virginia-Pitt basketball series in the early 1980s.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
When Catlett played for West Virginia in the early 1960s, the Pitt games were always competitive and hotly contested. There is somebody somewhere today still telling the story of how Catlett and Pitt forward Brian Generalovich slugged it out during a game at the old Field House in 1963. Back then, it usually only took one hard foul for players on both sides to put the basketball down and put their fists up.
Fourteen years later as a head coach at Cincinnati, Catlett took an outstanding No. 12-rated Bearcat team into Pittsburgh in 1977 and was upset 65-64 when Larry Harris made a buzzer-beater from the corner. It is still considered one of the most memorable victories in Pitt history. So now with Catlett in tow, West Virginians were once again fired up about Mountaineer basketball.
Up in Pittsburgh, interest in the Panther program was also revived by the late Dr. Roy Chipman, named Pitt's new head basketball coach in 1980. Chipman replaced a frustrated Tim Grgurich, who had grown tired of his money battles and the empty promises made by the Pitt administration. Chipman, an Ivy-League type with a zest for life, proved just as formidable as Catlett.
The 41-year-old ex-Lafayette coach, having a prominent gap between his two front teeth and an even more prominent streak of white hair running down the middle of his head, was a fierce competitor, a great recruiter and a pretty good tactician (Chipman had begun using a quirky half-court 1-3-1 zone defense at Pitt -- a form of which a guy named John Beilein copied two decades later with great success at West Virginia).
Fans soon had one eye on the court watching Roy Chipman’s Pitt basketball team and the other trained on Chipman, wondering what theatrics he was going to come up with next on the sidelines.
“It grew into a pretty heated rivalry, there is no doubt about that,” said former West Virginia assistant coach Gary McPherson. “Chipman did a good job with them and they had some good teams.”
Catlett and Chipman had a healthy respect for each another and having them at one place together was like putting two old hunting dogs in the same room. It wasn’t too long before both were going to start growling. The two also knew how to work a room full of reporters. Chipman was once asked what he told his players before they stepped out onto the court to face West Virginia.
“We tell them it’s a war and to be prepared for it,” he said. “Sometimes our younger players think it’s an ordinary game, and they don’t realize until they get about six elbows in the ear in the first two minutes that it’s not.”
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| Pitt coach Roy Chipman at a press conference being named Pitt's basketball coach on March 28, 1980. According to the book Pitt: 100 Years of Pitt Basketball by Sam Sciullo Jr., Chipman was the third choice for the Panther job.
University of Pittsburgh athletics |
Asked how he would characterize West Virginia-Pitt games he’s been involved in, Chipman answered: “It’s the kind of game you wouldn’t want to bring your mother to because she’d be disappointed to find out the names you have.”
Catlett, too, had a way with words. He was onced questioned by a Pittsburgh reporter what he did defensively to stop an opposing player. Catlett shook his head, glanced up above his reading glasses, and answered: "It's too complicated -- you wouldn't understand it."
After his team’s hard-fought victory over Pitt in Morgantown in 1982, the coach was asked what his feelings were about the Panthers leaving the Eastern 8 for the newly formed Big East Conference.
Catlett didn’t hold back, calling Pitt a “mediocre” program. Catlett’s “mediocre” quote was in the Pittsburgh newspapers the next morning and it was plastered all over the Panther locker room by that afternoon. Chipman got a lot of mileage out of that quote, keeping it in the Pitt locker room years afterward.
“Coach Catlett saying things like that in the newspapers always gave us the incentive to back it up,” said Fryz.
By 1982, fans were once again packing both arenas to watch West Virginia-Pitt basketball games. A record crowd of 16,704 turned out to see West Virginia beat Pitt 82-77 at the WVU Coliseum on Feb. 24, 1982. Many years later, a couple of WVU officials admitted that the attendance for that game was well over 17,000, but they feared repercussions from the state fire marshal had they announced a crowd that large.
“They were standing in the isles and they were four and five deep in the walkways,” remembered McPherson. “You couldn’t move.
“We had our shoot around at 4 o’clock and I remember after shoot around we were looking at film and when they opened that door at 5:30, it sounded like a damned stampede upstairs,” McPherson said. “You’re sitting in the locker room and you can hear the rumble from the bleachers as the students ran to get into their seats. The whole place was shaking.”
Two weeks later, more than 16,000 showed up at the Civic Arena to see Pitt beat West Virginia in the rematch in the Eastern 8 championship game.
But just as it did in the mid-1970s, interest in the games began to dissipate in late 1980s as the two teams only faced each other once a year playing in different conferences. There were no longer any Western Pennsylvania players on each team’s rosters and additional luster was lost when Chipman stepped down in 1986. Paul Evans was an outstanding basketball coach, but he wasn’t nearly the lightning rod Chipman was to Mountaineer fans.
Jes Hutson, a Uniontown native and a WVU letterman in 1978, says the series has always meant a lot to those living in the area.
“Pitt was our biggest rival and back then we were playing in the old Eastern 8 and being that it was a conference game it took on more meaning,” he said. “I think the rivalry will always be there and it just goes in peaks and valleys.”
Evans had some very good teams in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Pitt could never quite get over the hump. Catlett, too, had good clubs in 1989, 1992 and 1998, but his Mountaineer teams were infrequent visitors to the national rankings.
Ben Howland brought the excitement back to Pitt basketball in 2001, taking the Panthers to back-to-back NCAA Sweet 16 appearances before handing the program off to his capable assistant Jamie Dixon, who took the Panthers back to the Sweet 16 in 2004 and had another trip to the NCAAs in 2005.
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| West Virginia fans storm the court after the Mountaineers upset No. 16 Pitt 83-72 in Morgantown last year.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
This year Pitt has been in and out of the Top 10 and is currently ranked No. 14. West Virginia, under John Beilein, made it to the NCAA tournament Elite Eight for the first time in 46 years in 2005, and this week is ranked No. 9 in one poll and No. 10 in another.
Even when Beilein was just getting started at West Virginia, he got his first taste of what this game can be like.
“I sensed something special when in our first year when we were really struggling and Ben and Jamie had it really going at Pitt,” Beilein said. “It was an 8 o’clock ESPN game and I came here at 6 and the student section was already filled. I had never experienced that before at all these college levels where the students were coming out that early.
“That’s the first thing I think of when I think of this rivalry,” Beilein said.
Thursday night’s game will mark the first time in the 100-year history of basketball’s version of the Backyard Brawl that two nationally ranked teams will hook up on the hardwood. It’s not a series on par nationally with North Carolina-Duke, but it is every bit as competitive. Only 21 times in 168 games has there been a blowout of 20 points or more. Sixty two times the games have been decided by five points or less.
And Thursday night this longstanding series will once again reach its pinnacle with the bright lights of ESPN, Dan Shulman and Dick Vitale making their way to Pittsburgh to televise the game.
“Of course Thursday (the series) is going to be at one of its greatest peaks with both teams basically around the Top 10,” said Hutson.
Somewhere, maybe on his farm back in Hedgesville or someplace overseas, Catlett might be tuned into ESPN to watch his former school. And Roy Chipman, who died of cancer in 1997, will probably be looking down from above – and probably complaining about the officials.
One thing is for certain, there won’t be any fish flying from the student section. With the way Pitt plays basketball these days, there’s no reason for it.
