'65 Frosh Hoop Team to be Recognized
January 29, 2015 10:17 PM | General
 |
| West Virginia's 1965 freshman team integrated Southern Conference basketball that season. |
| WVU Athletic Communications photo |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Think back to all of the what-ifs in sports through the years. What if Wally Pipp hadn’t gotten hurt? What if Babe Ruth would have continued to pitch?
What if Garo Yepremian had thrown two passes in Super Bowl VII instead of only one?
What if Bo Jackson didn’t have a bad hip? What if Steve Bartman had been messing around with his cell phone instead of paying attention to the game?
What if Kurt Warner would have gotten a job in management instead of just stocking shelves? What if Michael Jordan didn’t have any hobbies?
There are many what-ifs for West Virginia basketball, too.
What if Jerry West didn’t get into foul trouble in the 1959 NCAA finals against Cal? What if Fred Schaus would have been able to sign Bridgeport, Ohio’s John Havlicek to fit in between Jerry West and Rod Thorn?
What if Darryl Prue wasn’t called for a blocking foul during Danny Ferry’s drive to the basket against Duke in the second round of the NCAA tournament in 1989?
What if Dan Dakich had warmer feet?
What if Pat Driscoll would have swallowed his whistle with 0.1 seconds left in the 2005 Big East tournament semifinals against Villanova?
What if Bob Huggins had taken the Kansas State job a year later in 2008 instead of 2007?
You can go on and on with these …
There will be at least four guys in Morgantown watching Saturday’s West Virginia-Texas Tech game wondering what if George King had the opportunity to coach Ron “Fritz” Williams in college?
Three of the four guys – Jimmy Lewis, Norman Holmes and Ed Harvard – were the first three African-Americans to play a basketball game while representing West Virginia University. The fourth, Williams, died nearly 11 years ago in 2004. Lewis, Holmes, Harvard and Dave Reaser will be back in town with approximately 60 other Mountaineer basketball players this weekend taking part in the WVU Varsity Club Alumni Weekend.
This year is the 50th anniversary of West Virginia’s great freshman basketball team in 1965, considered one of the best in the country that year and the group of players that helped West Virginia University evolve into the diverse, multicultural campus it has become today. In addition to Williams, Reaser, Lewis, Holmes and Harvard, that team also included Kermit, W.Va., guard Lewis Hale, Clifton Forge, Va., forward Letcher Humphries and Elkhart, Ind., center Dick Penrod.
Keep in mind, this was a year before Texas Western won the national championship with an all-black starting five in 1966, it was before Maryland, Duke, North Carolina, NC State and Wake Forest integrated their basketball programs in the mid-1960s, and it was considerably earlier than Kentucky finally integrating its famed basketball program in 1970 when 7-foot center Tom Payne enrolled in school.
When Norman Holmes first came to Morgantown in the summer of 1964, he said there were about 14 other black students on campus at the time, but fortunately for him, one of them turned out to be his future wife.
“Meeting my wife there the first week was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Holmes, now 72 and retired after a successful career in the banking industry in Washington, D.C. “The other (black players) were not dating girls on campus and I was the only one and I was with her all the time. Jimmy Lewis and Fritz were always used to being together and they would always say to me, ‘Man, you hang around with that girl all the time and you are never with us.’ I would say, ‘Yeah, well you don’t look like her either!’”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, West Virginia University was searching for ways to integrate its athletic program, especially in football when the Mountaineers were struggling to keep up with some of the other neighboring schools at the time such as Syracuse with Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Jim Nance, Penn State with Lenny Moore, Roosevelt Grier and Dave Robinson, and even Pitt with Bobby Grier.
“Whenever (African-American) prospects heard the word ‘Southern’ (referencing West Virginia’s affiliation in the Southern Conference) that was it,” late sports information director Eddie Barrett once recalled. “Art Lewis always felt the Southern Conference killed his recruiting.”
It wasn’t until the fall of 1962 that West Virginia was able to successfully integrate its football program when Dick Leftridge and Roger Alford agreed to attend WVU.
Two years later, in 1964, West Virginia basketball coach George King was hot on the trail of Weirton’s Ron Williams, considered one of the best high school basketball players in the country that year. Williams was also African-American.
| Mountaineer Immortal: Ron "Fritz" Williams |
King had several problems he was dealing with at the time, the biggest being that he wasn’t Fred Schaus, a highly successful WVU alum who built West Virginia into a college basketball power in the late 1950s.
King’s West Virginia teams performed well during the years Rod Thorn was there in the early 1960s, but they began to decline after Thorn left for the NBA in 1963. Soon King started feeling the heat from a Mountaineer fan base that had grown spoiled by the sustained success Mark Workman, Hot Rod Hundley, Jerry West and Thorn had generated for more than a decade.
Consequently, by the spring of 1964 King was looking for a jolt of energy to boost his sagging program and he found 100 megawatts worth of electricity in Williams.
“When I first saw (Williams) play I thought I was in basketball heaven,” recalled Holmes, who spent a lot of time playing basketball on the playgrounds with D.C. legends Austin Carr, Willie Jones and Bernard Levi. “I was like, ‘Man, I had never seen anybody like that.”
St. Albans forward Dave Reaser, the other big-name recruit in King’s 1964 freshman class, turned down Ed Junker’s offer to play at Cincinnati because he wanted to play with Fritz Williams at WVU.
“Fritz was good,” said Reaser. “I think Fritz is the second-best basketball player to ever play here.”
Jerry West, of course, being No. 1.
King spent most of 1963 and the early part of 1964 in Weirton recruiting Williams - and getting almost nowhere with him.
“He was as difficult a recruiting project as there was,” King said in 2004, two years before his death in 2006.
King said he didn’t have a specific plan of how he was going to go about integrating West Virginia University basketball and basketball in the Southern Conference, but his actions indicate otherwise.
King had learned through his many visits with Williams that Fritz wasn’t really all that interested in being a trailblazer and much preferred going someplace where the basketball program was already integrated, such as Michigan where Cazzie Russell was playing or Ohio State where Jim Parker starred on the gridiron and the Buckeye basketball program had a number of black players on its roster.
So King found out through ex-professional teammate Earl Lloyd (the first African-American to play in the NBA) about Jimmy Lewis, a high-flying forward from Washington, D.C.
King and assistant coach Bob Lochmueller went to see Lewis play a high school game while the Mountaineers were in the nation’s capital playing George Washington; they were impressed with Lewis’ game and they quickly offered him a scholarship.
Lewis accepted King’s offer in early March of 1964 and officially became the first African-American to sign a basketball grant-in-aid at WVU.
At the same time, King was also recruiting Williams’ Weir High teammate Ed “Possum” Harvard, although King insisted that Harvard was good enough to earn a scholarship on his own merit as he proved during his three-year varsity career at West Virginia.
King also brought along athletic director Red Brown to one of his visits with the Williams family to alleviate any concerns they may have had about Fritz going to WVU.
The family had received hundreds of phone calls and telegrams from rabid Mountaineer fans wanting him to go to West Virginia University and his father, a Weirton Steel employee, was also hearing it from some of the company’s higher-ups who supported Mountaineer athletics. “Where is your son going to go to college?” they would ask.
Williams finally announced in early April of 1964 that he was going to attend WVU. A week later Harvard followed suit.
A couple of months after that, U.S. Marine Norman Holmes became ex-U.S. Marine Norman Holmes when King called and offered him a scholarship upon the recommendation of Bucky DeVries, who had WVU ties and became an assistant coach for the Mountaineer freshman team in 1965.
Holmes was 22 at the time, had already served four years in the Marine Corps and was taking classes at East Carolina with plans of becoming a Marine Corps officer when King became interested in him.
“What they did was they were trying to get a whole group of players in there with Ron, and I didn’t know anything at all about Fritzy (when Holmes signed with WVU),” he admitted. “One of the reasons Coach King brought me up there was because I was older. Jimmy Lewis was just 17 and I was 22 at the time. I think he wanted a little stability there.”
These were clearly not the actions of a person who was haphazardly going about his business. King knew exactly what he was doing and getting Ron Williams to West Virginia University was his No. 1 objective because Williams was the type of player who could immediately turn around a struggling program.
More importantly, Williams was the type of person capable of handling what he was going to encounter at some of the places West Virginia played at in the Southern Conference back then.
“Fritz had the right kind of heart,” explained Reaser. “That was the real foundation.”
King, when asked about his plan to integrate WVU and the Southern Conference, refused to take any credit for his actions.
“I’m surprised they were the first (African-American players recruited to play in the Southern Conference),” King said modestly in 2004. “I never sat in on any plan to actively recruit and integrate our program. If it happened I didn’t know about it. I don’t remember anyone mentioning any of that to me.
“If there was (an integration plan at WVU) I must have been in my little shell because I don’t remember any of that,” King added.
Those involved with West Virginia basketball at the time see it differently, and George King deserves a lot of credit for what he did – for the athletic program and also for West Virginia University in general.
And in the eyes of his contemporaries, Ron Williams is one of the most important athletes in WVU sports history – the school’s Jackie Robinson in actions and deeds.
“Fritz is the one who broke the color barrier and here is how he did it. One, he was such a good basketball player and, two, he didn’t act like a good basketball player,” said Reaser. “He wasn’t self-centered; he was very kind.”
Reaser continued.
“You know how some people exclude others? Well, Fritz was always inclusive. We would all run around together and go places together. It was Fritz who really taught me that there was no difference between blacks and whites - we were all just people. It was extremely important what he did for West Virginia University.”
King, too, was well liked and admired by the players because he possessed the same outstanding qualities Williams had as a human being.
“I think George King was an exceptionally wonderful person,” said Reaser.
A freelance, wide-open, up-and-down style of play was what King had in mind for Fritz Williams and the freshman basketball team he assembled for 1965 – exceptional athletes on the perimeter, leapers in the paint and Dave Reaser standing over in the left corner ready to nail another wide-open jump shot.
But after a losing season in 1965 that saw the West Virginia varsity upset its way through the Southern Conference tournament to reach the NCAAs, King decided to take the Purdue job a couple weeks after the end of the season.
“It really surprised us the day he told us he was leaving,” said Holmes. “We all just looked at each other like, ‘what are we going to do now?’ The freshman coaches tried to help us keep our heads together but some of us were talking about leaving school.”
 |
| Jim Lewis, pictured here with George King in 2004. |
| King family photo |
“He recruited us,” added Reaser. “All of us were sickened when he left.”
Bucky Waters replaced King in 1966 and he brought the Duke basketball system to WVU – a system that emphasized structure, precision and discipline. The players Waters inherited from King, however, were probably more suited to play King’s freelance style of basketball.
And while the Mountaineers were successful under Waters - especially in 1967 when West Virginia won the Southern Conference championship and reached the NCAA tournament - those still around today wonder what George King would have been able to accomplish with them.
King, too, hinted at what could have been when he recalled Williams in 2004.
“I was only with him the one year and I didn’t have a chance to follow his career, although he played well and went into pro ball,” said King. “To a degree, I thought he did do the things that I thought he could do.
“My style of coaching was a little more freelance than Bucky would have been involved with,” he continued. “I was more of an individualist. In fact, I once saw a quote from the kid that made me a hell of a coach for three years - Rick Mount. Rick said, ‘Coach King let us play the game the way we wanted to play the game’ or something to that effect. That was really the thought I had in mind with Fritzy, too.”
Indeed, one of West Virginia’s what-ifs.
Gold-Blue Spring Festival Fan Recap
Sunday, April 19
John Neider | April 18
Saturday, April 18
Coach Zac Alley | April 18
Saturday, April 18
Coach Rich Rodriguez | April 18
Saturday, April 18
