Golden Memories Part II
November 10, 2008 02:24 PM | General
An Exciting Brand of Basketball | One and Done | Going to the Finals | The Inevitable Decline
An Exciting Brand of Basketball
To many, Fred Schaus could be pretty intimidating. He stood 6-feet-5-inches tall and weighed close to 230 pounds when his playing career was over. He rolled a program up in his right hand, drooped his left shoulder, and stomped his right foot on the ground whenever an official’s call didn’t go West Virginia’s way. At the drop of a hat he could erupt like Vesuvius. One time, an irate Schaus grabbed Bob Smith by the jersey in the hallway following West Virginia’s upset loss to Virginia in Charleston a day after the Mountaineers had beaten Duke badly at the Field House.
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| Ex-pros George King and Fred Schaus would sometimes play two-on-two games with some of the players after practice.
Sports Communications photo |
“He was so mad at me I thought he was going to punch me in the face,” Smith laughed. “It was a bad loss and somebody in the hallway in front of me laughed about something and I said, ‘What the hell are you laughing about?’ All of the sudden a big hand came down on my shoulder and I turned around and it was Coach Schaus.
“I said, ‘If you don’t want to win then I don’t ever want to play for you!’ He said, ‘Don’t you say that!’ I said it again. (Assistant coach) George King jumped over and grabbed him and pulled him off of me.”
“We knew the personalities of the two before that happened,” Jim Ritchie said. “That was just an explosion. It was done and over.”
Another time Schaus was upset with the way Smith was practicing and made him turn his jersey from blue to gold. The blue jerseys represented the first team and the gold jerseys were used for the backups. Instead of putting it on, Smith tore it off and threw it as far as he could up into the stands. Schaus blew his whistle.
“All right, go up and get it!” he yelled.
Smith gave Schaus a disgusted look and slowly started to walk up the steps to retrieve it.
Schaus blew his whistle again.
“Damned it, I mean now!” he roared, moving closer to Smith.
This time Smith flew up the stairs and he spent the rest of the practice running the bleachers.
“Bob would test him and Bob would always lose,” Ritchie laughed.
Bucky Bolyard and Ronnie Retton were characters as well. The two loved to shoot pool and oftentimes on road trips they would barely beat curfew after a late-night excursion to the pool hall. Bolyard, who lost sight in one eye due to a childhood accident, lived on Fifth Avenue candy bars and Pepsis. When he wanted a nutritious meal he would buy a bag of peanuts and push them down into the neck of his pop bottle so he could have them at the same time he drank his soda pop.
“They once gave Bucky a test for sugar and he passed it with flying colors,” said Eddie Barrett. Sadly, Bolyard is one of two players on West Virginia’s 1959 team no longer living. The other is Pineville guard Butch Goode.
“Ronnie and Bucky were really fun to be around,” West said. “They were very, very competitive kids. Just because they were fun-loving doesn’t mean that they were not competitive.”
Schaus was an innovative coach with an uncanny understanding of how to build good basketball teams. His philosophy was to find a great player like a Jerry West or a Rod Thorn and surround them with willing role players. Schaus was also an outstanding tactician who used to diagram plays in notebooks when he played in the pros. Chuck Noe once told Eddie Barrett that no coach in college basketball could control a game like Fred Schaus.
At the time, Fred was still young enough to jump in and give a first-hand demonstration if he felt he had to. When he brought George King in from the pros the two of them would sometimes play two-on-two games with some of the players after practice.
“(Schaus) was dirty,” Joe Posch laughed. “He would step on your feet. He would pull your pants down or hold your shirt. He got all that stuff from the pros.”
“His arms were like logs and when he stuck them out you couldn’t get around him,” Clousson said. “You learned things from him.”
“Both of them were younger and both of them had just retired,” said West. “It was a great environment for any of us who wanted to learn and more importantly, to engage two people that had played basketball at a different level than any of us had played.”
West believes some of those one-on-one sessions with George King were a confidence booster.
“He was very experienced and very smart and I found out that I could play against him OK and it wasn’t going to be embarrassing for me,” West said.
Schaus and King played different roles: Schaus was the disciplinarian and the rule setter. King was the one who later smoothed things over.
“Fred would never put his arm around you,” Smith recalled. “George was the guy that came in because that’s what assistants did. I was an assistant for Gale Catlett for eight years and that was my job.”
Schaus also had a knack for showmanship. It was Schaus who introduced the gold and blue carpet the team ran out on during introductions that has become a longstanding tradition at West Virginia.
It was Schaus who had the team warm up with a special colored basketball. It was Schaus who copied the high knee socks popularized by North Carolina. Not only did those high socks look good, but Ronnie Retton said it served another purpose. “With those long socks when you were coming down on a fast break you didn’t have to look up. You could look down at the floor and you could see those socks and you knew it was one of your players.”
The jerseys West Virginia players wore had buttons in the crotch so they remained neatly tucked in. Schaus also made his players shave their armpits. Some of them thought it was for hygienic purposes. The real reason Schaus had them shave their armpits was because he wanted his players to look good for everyone. Schaus was well ahead of his time, realizing that young ladies bought basketball tickets, too.
With Hundley’s clowning, Schaus’ impeccable style and the team’s exciting brand of basketball, a ticket to the Field House was one of the hardest things to get in the state. By the mid-1950s everyone in the country knew who Hot Rod Hundley was.
Jim Ritchie, growing up in Drexel Hill, Pa., knew absolutely nothing about West Virginia University but he had read about Hot Rod Hundley in the basketball magazines.
“I had scholarship offers to all of the city schools, NC State, Michigan State and a whole bunch of them,” Ritchie recalled. “For some reason Hot Rod was my attraction there.”
It was a similar circumstance for Joe Posch, who grew up in Riverside, N.J.
“I didn’t know one thing about the school. Nothing. To tell you the truth I wasn’t going to go. I was going to go into the service,” Posch said. “I told Schaus that I wasn’t coming and then at the last minute I made my mind up to go down there.”
Ritchie, Posch and Bellaire, Ohio’s Lee Patrone were the only three players from out of state on the 1959 team. Patrone began his career at Ohio State and a week later he showed up in Morgantown. It didn’t matter where Patrone was on the court - every shot he took was a bank shot.
“Benny Banker we called him,” Retton laughed.
Bob Smith idolized Hot Rod growing up in Charleston and Hundley played a big part in Smith winding up at West Virginia. Smith even tried to mimic Hundley’s clowning for a while. Longtime WVU scorekeeper Al Babcock remembers Smith having a flair for the dramatic on the floor.
“He would get knocked down and would lie on the floor for 10 minutes,” Babcock laughed. “Just about the time you thought the stretcher was coming out he would jump up and get a standing ovation.”
A more serious-minded Jerry West was much more pragmatic about his college choice and wasn't affected by Hundley's charisma.
“Certainly when Rod got there because of the way he played they had a lot more publicity associated with the team,” West said. “He got so much publicity but I had been a West Virginia fan like anyone who grows up there.”
West entertained offers from every school in the country and he became mildly interested in attending the University of Maryland.
“At that point in time when I was being recruited for college Maryland played a very slow-down game and I kind of liked that school a little bit but I couldn’t go there and play that way,” West said. “It just didn’t look like it would have been fun for me to play like that.”
Willie Akers had nearly as many scholarship offers as West and like West, he grew up following Mark Workman and the West Virginia players he listened to on the radio.
“It was kind of the thing to go to West Virginia if you lived in West Virginia,” Akers said.
Bob Davis, Jay Jacobs, Paul Miller, Howie Schertzinger, Nick Serdich, Nick Visnic and Jim Warren, all West Virginians on the 1959 roster, thought so, too.
West Virginia was winning with Hot Rod but the Mountaineers were winning with one big caveat: Each season Hundley was in a WVU uniform in 1955, 1956 and 1957 West Virginia won the Southern Conference, finished ranked in the polls, and then performed a belly flopper in the NCAA Tournament.
In 1955 West Virginia lost badly to Tom Gola and LaSalle, 95-61, it fell by two to Dartmouth in 1956, and lost by eight to Canisius in 1957.
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| Jerry West scored 37 points in a 76-75 come-from-behind victory over Villanova as a sophomore in 1958.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
Even when Jerry West moved up to the varsity in 1958 the Mountaineers could not avoid a similar fate. The ’58 team was probably the best in school history with sophomores West and Akers playing the forward position, 6-foot-10-inch Lloyd Sharrar at center and Joedy Gardner and Don Vincent playing in the backcourt. The Mountaineers pulled off a pair of upset victories over Kentucky and North Carolina in the Kentucky Invitational, and West later guided West Virginia to amazing comeback win against Villanova at the Palestra.
“I had these Philadelphia people – you work right in the crowd at the Palestra – and they had been on my back – ON MY BACK,” the late Jack Fleming once recalled. “We came back and won the game and I screamed the final score over the air. When we went to commercial, I turned around and said, ‘Take it and shove it …!’”
Jerry West played wonderfully in the KIT, but it was the Villanova game that caught everyone’s attention. There were many big-city sportswriters at the game as well as several coaches from other schools and Eddie Barrett remembered afterward a number of them coming up to him astounded with what they had seen from West. He finished the game with 37 points and fed the winning basket to Sharrar in overtime.
Despite a loss at Duke, West Virginia had reached No. 1 in the polls and finished the year as the top-ranked team in the country. In the Southern Conference Tournament semifinals Don Vincent broke his leg against Richmond. West Virginia had no trouble with William & Mary in the championship game without Vincent, but the damage was done.
“We were winning handily and Fred was taking out players one at a time,” Bob Smith said. “Well Vincent was left in the game for whatever reason and a guy from Richmond took him out and broke his leg.”
The team had just two days before its NCAA Tournament first-round game against Manhattan in New York City and the Jaspers pulled off an 89-84 upset victory. It remains one of the most disappointing losses of Fred Schaus’ coaching career.
“If I remember correctly they might have shot 50-some free throws, maybe even 60, and we had everybody on the team foul out,” West said. “It was a terrible loss and each and every one of us who participated felt that we could play that game 10 times and we were going to win nine of them.”
Longtime sportswriter Mickey Furfari, who traveled with the team back then, remembered the cold plane ride home.
“There was nothing but silence on that plane,” said Furfari. All Furfari could see in the dark cabin was the silhouette of Schaus and the breath coming out of his mouth.
Vincent, Gardner and Lloyd Sharrar were gone in 1959. In Sharrar’s place, Schaus chose Bob Clousson as his replacement. Clousson gave up nearly five inches to Sharrar and wasn’t even on scholarship when he came to West Virginia.
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| Forward Willie Akers puts in two against Penn State at the Field House.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
“I was walking down High Street with a bunch of other guys and this blue Buick pulled up along the curb and it was Fred,” Clousson said. “He introduced himself and he asked me to come down to the Field House to play with the guys. That’s how I got started.”
Two years later Clousson was a starter. None of West Virginia’s regulars in 1959 stood taller than 6-6. Smith played guard with Bolyard, and the two forwards were West and Akers. Ritchie, Retton and Patrone were occasional starters.
“At times we weren’t very big but we were extremely quick,” West said. “We were capable of real big scoring runs and I think those are the things that divide and separate teams as I look back.”
Fourteen times in 1959 West Virginia overcame second-half deficits to win games by using a zone press Schaus had borrowed from West Virginia Tech’s Neal Baisi. No comeback was bigger than the Mountaineers’ 95-92 win over St. Joseph’s in the NCAA Tournament second round in Charlotte. Three days earlier, West Virginia had finally earned its first tournament win by defeating Dartmouth in New York City; against the Hawks the Mountaineers were once again confronted with another premature tournament exit.
With WVU trailing by one point, Ronnie Retton stole the inbound pass and made a driving lay up to put the Mountaineers ahead in a game they eventually won 95-92. To this day Retton isn’t sure how it happened.
“They didn’t call one timeout but two timeouts to set up a play,” said Mary Lou’s father. “Somehow I anticipated the pass coming in from mid-court, stole the ball, and went in and laid it up.”
The Mountaineers had another difficult game in the regional finals, beating Boston University 86-82. That set up a trip to the Final Four at Louisville’s Freedom Hall. As luck would have it, West Virginia was paired against Louisville in its home arena. The other national semifinal pitted Cincinnati and All-American forward Oscar Robertson against Pete Newell’s California Bears.
Of the four teams in the tournament, Cal scored the fewest points. The Bears also gave up the fewest points.
West Virginia had little trouble with Louisville, beating the Cardinals 94-79. California upset Cincinnati 64-58.
“We were pulling for Cincinnati to beat Cal because we wanted Jerry to go against Oscar,” Bob Smith said. “I think down deep we were disappointed that Jerry didn’t get a chance to go against Oscar. Now it didn’t have any bearing on the game. We jumped out to an early lead and then all of the sudden things went bad for us.”
West Virginia hit its bad stretch when West went to the bench with three fouls. Official Red Mihalik was one of the best in the business but he had called many West Virginia games and Schaus thought Mihalik always anticipated calls against the Mountaineers. Robertson had also gotten into foul trouble with Mihalik calling the semifinal game against Cal.
Once again the zone press got West Virginia back in the game, but a late tip-in basket by Cal center Darrell Imhoff was the deciding score. The scoreboard read Cal 71, West Virginia 70 when a missed free throw came down into West’s hands with just two seconds left on the clock. It was not nearly enough time for a last-second shot.
“We just ran out of time,” Schaus said after the game.
A mere point stood in the way of West Virginia capturing basketball’s national championship in 1959.
During a span of nine years from 1955-63, West Virginia finished ranked in the national polls each year. The Mountaineers also won eight Southern Conference titles and made eight NCAA Tournament appearances. The school had a run of three-straight All-American players in Rod Hundley, Jerry West and Rod Thorn.
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| West Virginia's 1958-59 team that reached the NCAA Tournament finals, losing to Cal 71-70.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
With the exception of Kentucky and perhaps a few others, no school during that period of time had a better basketball reputation than West Virginia. And WVU did it with mostly West Virginia boys, born and raised on the Mountaineers, sharing similar hardships, and proud of their heritage.
Inevitably the well was going to run dry. A national recession in the late 1950s led to a steep decline in the West Virginia coal industry and a massive population exodus ensued in the 1960s. West Virginia fans used to seeing their Mountaineer basketball teams made up predominantly of West Virginians were confronted with a different set of circumstances by the end of the decade. Integration also became a part of the equation when Weirton’s Ron Williams was one of four African-Americans to break the school’s color barrier in 1964. Williams turned out to be the last in a streak of great West Virginia players to attend WVU. By then basketball was becoming more of an urban game and WVU’s rural setting, aging Field House and Southern Conference affiliation made it difficult for the Mountaineers to keep pace with rival Eastern schools.
There were good state players that came to West Virginia in the late 1960s and 1970s, but nothing close to what the school had in its glory days with Hundley, West and Thorn.
Willie Akers later became one of the most successful high school coaches in the state at Logan High School and he could see first-hand a changing of the guard.
“I had good players but they were not the caliber of what we had at West Virginia when I played,” Akers said. “The southern part of the state was hurting a little bit.”
Akers believes there were others reasons as well.
“You have got to have role players,” he explained. “A lot of them didn’t want to be role players. They wanted to be stars.”
Akers, Bob Smith and Bucky Bolyard were big scorers in high school who each took on different roles at West Virginia.
“I averaged 30 points per game in high school and I could score around the basket but my thing at West Virginia was to rebound, play defense and set up,” Akers said. “We were interested in winning. We didn’t care who scored the points.”
During his playing days with the Lakers, and later as one of pro basketball’s most successful general managers, West always remained close to his alma mater. His advice on issues related to the WVU basketball program has frequently been sought.
“Sometimes things don’t work right,” West said. “Who knows what happens? Things do run in cycles, I will say that. For everyone who has ever played sports you are hopeful that you can be successful for a longer period of time. For us it was an interesting period.”
It was an interesting and unprecedented period of basketball that Mountaineer fans will forever point to with great pride.
From the moment West departed for the Los Angles Lakers in 1960, West Virginians have been searching in vain for the next Jerry West. But as Pittsburgh Press sports editor Roy McHugh so eloquently wrote in 1967, “The Jerry Wests of this world don’t come in pairs.”
Indeed they don’t.
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