Campus Connection: Midweek Notes
February 03, 2015 01:15 PM | General
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| Former West Virginia University men's basketball players Carey Bailey and Jimmy Lewis were in town for last weekend's WVU Varsity Club Reunion. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Kansas’ win Monday night over Iowa State moves the Jayhawks a little closer toward an 11th straight Big 12 regular season title.
If KU is going to get Big 12 championship No. 11 in a row it will have to do so against a schedule that includes five out of its last seven remaining games against ranked opponents, including a pair of games against 15th-ranked West Virginia.
The first meeting against the Mountaineers comes in Morgantown on Monday, February 16, and the rematch will take place in Lawrence on Tuesday, March 3.
Both games will tip off at 9 p.m. and will be nationally televised.
If West Virginia wants to remain in the hunt for the conference title it is going to have to win at some places it has struggled to win at in the past, including tonight’s game in Norman, Oklahoma.
Road trips to Iowa State, Oklahoma State, Baylor and Kansas won’t be easy either.
Stay tuned.
Briefly:
* I have had an opportunity to watch Big 12 basketball for a couple of years now and I think from top to bottom the league is probably a little bit better than the Big East, particularly from the middle to the bottom.
Big 12 heavyweight Kansas is very similar to UConn, Syracuse, Georgetown and Villanova when those programs were at the their peak in the Big East, in my opinion, but the real difference is from the middle to the bottom where the bottom teams in the Big 12 are much more difficult to beat than the bottom teams in the Big East ever were.
There were about four or five automatic wins in the Big East each year that coaches could count on that I just don’t see right now in the Big 12.
* Last week, Gary McPherson returned to VMI where he was honored with an endowed scholarship in his name that will benefit the Keydet basketball program.
The longtime WVU assistant coach and athletic department administrator spent six years at VMI, one as an assistant coach under Weenie Miller and five as the Keydet head coach. VMI upset its way through the Southern Conference tournament to reach the NCAA tournament during McPherson’s final season as Miller’s top aide in 1964 before taking over the VMI program during the ‘64-65 season.
One of McPherson’s biggest wins at VMI came against West Virginia at the Raleigh County Armory in Beckley in 1968 when the Keydets knocked off the Mountaineers 92-90 in overtime.
Congratulations to Coach Mac on a well-deserved honor!
* Speaking of honors, I was glad to see the state sportswriters recently induct former West Virginia University Director of Athletics Ed Pastilong into the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Ed’s West Virginia University career included successes in all sports, as well as a couple of BCS bowl wins in football and a trip to the Final Four in men’s hoops. He had one of the longest serving AD tenures at a major university when he retired in 2010.
Once again, another well deserved honor for a great West Virginian who always emphasized teamwork amongst his staff and within the WVU athletic department.
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| The Ramsburg family, including Grace, at Hawley Field for last year's final baseball game at the facility. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Midway through the commercial there is an image of a father and daughter hugging, and that’s none other than Dale Ramsburg Jr. and his daughter Grace. Of course, the late Dale Ramsburg was West Virginia University’s outstanding baseball coach from 1968-94.
Here is the commercial if you haven’t seen it already: http://youtu.be/iq2Sm2XGv_s
* This is about the time of year my cellphone starts blowing up with calls from friends wanting to know about this year’s football recruiting class. I must confess, I lost interest in recruiting years ago when Vince Powell never showed up on campus and Osa Nosa didn’t turn out to be the next Warren Sapp, which is probably a good thing for Osa these days.
My education on this year’s recruiting class will begin on Wednesday afternoon once I talk to the coaches and then later when the new recruits get here in the fall.
I will reserve judgment until then … or perhaps much later.
* I had a great time visiting with all of the former Mountaineer basketball players who came back to campus for the WVU Varsity Club Alumni Weekend last Saturday.
Cyrus Jones told me all about the 1995 UMass game and how the Mountaineers were unable to seal the deal against the No. 1-rated Minutemen (WVU blew an 18-point lead with four minutes left in the game), I reminisced with Noah Moore, Herbie Brooks, Darryl Prue and Dale Blaney about all those excellent Gale Catlett teams in the 1980s, I shared hair-grooming tips with forward Jeremy Bodkin and I also had a nice visit with 1960s-era players Jimmy Lewis, Norman Holmes and Carey Bailey.
Of course, Lewis and Holmes were part of the first integrated men’s basketball team at WVU in 1965 that also broke the color barrier in the Southern Conference. The stories they have to tell are amazing.
That group of players, which included Ron “Fritz” Williams and Dave Reaser, were supposed to return Mountaineer basketball to the glory days of the late 1950s and early 1960s when West Virginia dominated the Southern Conference on a yearly basis.
However, West Virginia’s eagerness to integrate the Southern Conference also opened the door for other schools to become more diverse, and no program in the Southern Conference benefitted more from integration than Davidson.
The Wildcats were already formidable under Lefty Driesell, the lefthander producing outstanding teams in the mid-1960s with players such as Fred Hetzel and Dick Snyder, but Davidson got to another level in the late 1960s when Driesell was able to sign 6-foot-7 forward Mike Maloy from New York City. It was Maloy who led the Wildcats to a pair of Elite Eight appearances in 1968 and 1969 that ultimately led to Driesell getting the Maryland job.
Norman Holmes, a member of West Virginia’s Southern Conference championship team in 1967, recalled beating Davidson in the title game with Maloy and the rest of Driesell’s great freshman class watching in the stands (freshmen were not eligible to play back then).
“Davidson had an unbelievable group of freshman that year and they were already good before these freshmen came in,” recalled Holmes. “But when these freshmen came in (in 1968), not only were they good but they were big. They were sitting up in the stands when we beat them in ’67 telling us what they were going to do to us. And Mike Maloy ran his mouth more than anybody.”
Maloy backed all that talking up in the 1968 Southern Conference championship game against the Mountaineers by scoring 23 points and grabbing 19 rebounds in Davidson’s 87-70 victory.
Back then, only the conference champions advanced to the NCAA tournament so West Virginia was relegated to playing in the NIT that year where the Mountaineers lost in the first round to Dayton.
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| West | Hundley | Thorn | Williams |
The other two would have to be Rod Thorn and Ron “Fritz” Williams.
For some reason, Fritz seems to be the forgotten guy whenever people talk about the school’s greatest basketball players.
The guys who played with Fritz are adamant that Williams was the second-best player in school history behind West. I can only base my opinion on what I’ve seen of them from archival footage, but the guess here is what it really comes down to is a matter of personal preference.
All I can say is that all of them were great players.
* And finally, one more basketball story to get you primed for the remainder of the week …
West Virginia had a young basketball coach in the late 1960s named Bucky Waters, who later coached at Duke for a short period of time before becoming a well-known college basketball analyst for NBC. During his days at WVU in the late 1960s, Waters was a strict, no-nonsense coach who demanded that his players wear jackets and ties on the road, answer questions “yes sir” and “no sir” and only speak up if they had something intelligent to say.
“That’s why I never asked questions,” joked forward Dave Reaser.
Well, before one game - Reaser is not sure where but he believes it may have been in Beckley at the old Armory - Waters had his team assembled in the locker room going over strategy prior to tipoff.
Former All-American Mountaineer guard Hot Rod Hundley was by then working as an announcer and was assigned to do the game that night for television.
Not surprisingly, Hundley got to the arena late, barged right into the locker room while Waters was addressing his team, slapped Bucky on the back and said to the young coach, “How ya’ doin’ baby?”
Hundley then proceeded to walk right over to the sink where there was a mirror, pulled out his electric razor and began to shave while Waters was trying to talk to his team.
Waters never said a word to Hot Rod as the rest of the guys in the room struggled to suppress their laughter.
Only Hot Rod Hundley could get away with that!
Enjoy your week!
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