MORGANTOWN, W.VA. – Pretty soon, Stansbury Hall will cease to exist.
 
Interior demolition work has begun on the 90-year-old facility that was once the home of West Virginia University basketball from 1929-70. In its place will be Reynolds Hall, the new home of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics.
 
The Field House is where All-Americans Mark Workman, Hot Rod Hundley, Jerry West, Rod Thorn and Fritz Williams – all homegrown, incidentally - made life miserable for just about every opposing team that played there in the 1950s and early 1960s.
 
"(Hundley) was a senior when Jerry was a freshman. Jerry was a senior when I was a freshman, and I was a senior in college when Ron Williams was a senior in high school," Thorn recalled in 2014. "About three years, and then in our case four, there was a really good player that came through there. It was a good time; the teams were very good during those days, and it was a highlight of West Virginia basketball during that time."
 
It was also a highlight to a very young Bob Huggins, who used to make the drive from Port Washington, Ohio, with his father Charlie over old Route 250 to watch WVU games at the Field House in the mid-1960s when Williams was starring for the Mountaineers.
 
Back then the drive was all two-lane highways.
 
"It seemed like it took forever," Huggins remembered.
 
But it was a drive well worth it to see some great college basketball. 

During one stretch from the end of 1956 until the second game of the 1961 season, West Virginia didn't lose a single home game. That was a streak of 42 straight victories, encompassing Jerry West's entire Mountaineer career.
 
Yet that pales in comparison to the 57-game Field House winning streak West Virginia had going from the middle of 1944 until the final game of the 1949 season when Pitt coach Doc Carlson took the air out of the ball and stalled his way to a 34-32 victory.
 
This was in the days before a shot clock and Carlson, knowing his Panther teams couldn't keep up with Lee Patton's tremendous fleet of athletes, would usually order his team to hold the ball at midcourt to keep it away from the Mountaineers.
 
Despite Carlson's tactics, WVU appeared to have the game in the bag, leading 29-27 with 10 seconds to go and possessing the basketball. But a turnover led to Dodo Canterna's miraculous half-court shot that went in ahead of the buzzer to tie the game at 29. Pitt then outscored the Mountaineers 5-3 in overtime to produce a stunning upset.
 
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when West Virginia became one of the elite basketball programs in the country, coaches Fred Schaus and George King often took their Mountaineer teams to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas to get increased national exposure.
 
Consequently, WVU rarely played more than 10 games at the Field House in any given year during that period of time. Two expansions increased the Field House's capacity from 4,000 when it opened in 1929 to nearly 6,500 by the time it was retired on March 3, 1970, but Schaus began to view the aging facility as a detriment to his basketball program.
 
It was also becoming difficult to get teams to come to play in the Field House in the early 1960s because of its rowdy reputation, and also because it was nearly impossible to get to Morgantown.
 
When Duke played in the 1963 West Virginia Centennial Classic at the Field House, everyone on the team got sick on the plane ride to Morgantown.
 
Afterward, Blue Devils athletic director Eddie Cameron told Greenville Daily News sports editor Smith Barrier that he would never take another Duke team to Morgantown, West Virginia. He kept his word because when Duke finally returned to play the Mountaineers at the Coliseum in 1977, Cameron was long retired.
 
Schaus even once considered leaving West Virginia for the University of Washington in the summer of 1959 unless something was done about the deteriorating condition of the Field House, yet it took the state legislature eight more years to finally act. 
 
In the fall of 1967, $20 million was appropriated for a new law school, an addition to the medical center and a new field house, but that was not nearly enough to cover the cost of all three.
 
"The Coliseum was over $10 million, so the guys in Charleston said, 'Boys we gave you $20 million – you figure it out,'" former coach Bucky Waters once recalled. "There was this huge dogfight. The dean of the law school called it 'Bucky's Castle' and 'why do we need this thing? We need a law school and we need class rooms.' It was a great argument.
 
"I said, 'If we don't get this now … you've got Cole Field House (Maryland) to the East; Ohio U. (Convocation Center) has got a better arena than we've got, not to mention St. John's Arena at Ohio State. We're surrounded by good facilities, and the Mountaineer basketball tradition cannot survive unless we have an incredible run of kids from West Virginia,' which at the time we didn't."
 
Long-serving athletic director Red Brown astutely knew a stand-alone basketball facility would never fly with the legislature, so he kept the School of Physical Education in the loop as it was when it was a co-tenant with athletics in the Field House.
 
Eventually, funding was approved for the construction of the WVU Coliseum in the fall of 1967 and work was completed in time for the '71 season opener against Colgate on Dec. 1, 1970.
 
West Virginia's last game in the Field House against Pitt gave Mountaineer fans an unfiltered glimpse of what they were about to endure during Sonny Moran's disappointing five-season coaching tenure at WVU, three of them losing ones.
 
A big celebration at the conclusion of the Pitt game was planned, with noted alums Sleepy Glenn of WVU and All-American Charley Hyatt of Pitt invited to speak at halftime to a capacity crowd of 6,200 eager to see the Field House's final curtain call.
 
And what a curtain call it was … for the visiting Panthers!
 
West Virginia fans watched the Mountaineers' 19-point first half lead evaporate with each Kent Scott jump shot. The skin-and-bones sophomore guard from Missouri scored 32 points in helping Pitt to a stunning 92-87 victory.
 
WVU's planned postgame celebration with the pep band playing Auld Lang Syne was hastily canceled. Everybody just quietly got up and exited the arena at the conclusion of the game.
 
"It was a most fitting climax to a frustrating season," said Moran, in his customary tell-it-like-it-is fashion. "All of our season's problems passed in review tonight for 40 agonizing minutes – inconsistency, lack of composure, turnovers and poor execution.
 
"Scott killed us, and we didn't do anything about it."
 
Moran also couldn't do anything about Pitt's tricky defense that confined WVU's leading scorer, Wil Robinson, to the corners where he had less room to operate. Robinson missed 13 of his 16 second-half field goal attempts and the Mountaineers committed turnover after turnover as they began to unravel.
 
Ironically, West Virginia put a lid on the Field House the same way it was opened – by losing to Pitt.
 
The Field House's dedication game played on March 2, 1929, saw the Panthers outgun WVU 41-19 before a capacity crowd of 4,500 – at the time the largest crowd ever to witness an indoor athletic event in the state.
 
Hyatt and Glenn were there as players that night as well.
 
Afterward, a total of 451 basketball games were played at the Field House with West Virginia winning 374 and losing just 77 – two of them, unfortunately, coming in bookend fashion to our old Panther friends, and another loss to Pitt occurring as well to end the facility's longest running winning streak in 1949.
 
That's just something else to keep in mind the next time some damned fool puts on "Sweet Caroline" at your favorite watering hole!