March Memories: Mountaineers’ Best Game of the Season Propels Them To National Title Game in 1959

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Willie Akers readily admits he remembers very little about West Virginia's 94-79 victory over Louisville in the 1959 NCAA semifinals played on the Cardinals' home court at Freedom Hall.

He doesn't recall being a five-point underdog nor the fact that Louisville was one of the hottest basketball teams in the country, winning 10 of 11 heading into the West Virginia game, including impressive NCAA tournament triumphs over second-ranked Kentucky and seventh-ranked Michigan State.

He also had a rough time remembering much about Louisville's three best players - John Turner, Don Goldstein and Fred Sawyer - other than the fact that one of them (Sawyer) was much taller than everybody else.

And he was. Sawyer stood 6-feet-11, or five inches taller than West Virginia's tallest player, Bob Clousson.

But ask Willie about West Virginia's one-point loss to California in the finals one night later and he can still recall many of the agonizing details of that game 61 years later, almost like reliving a horror story over and over.

This pretty much falls in line with something Hall of Fame football coach Barry Switzer once told me – you rarely remember the victories, but you never forget the losses!

What Akers and the other surviving members of that great West Virginia basketball team have since forgotten is perhaps the best game they played all season.

And what a season West Virginia had in 1959!

The '58 team Akers played on as a sophomore finished the regular season ranked No. 1 in the country in both major polls and was a much deeper and more talented basketball squad.

It had size (6-foot-10-inch Lloyd Sharrar), backcourt depth, toughness and, of course, Jerry West.

But it was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament in the first round by Manhattan, probably the biggest first-round upset until UMBC stunned No. 1 seed Virginia a couple of years ago.

The Manhattan defeat extended West Virginia's NCAA Tournament "jinx" to four straight years.

The '59 Mountaineers were small and scrappy, with West emerging as one of the game's superstars.

Willie Akers

"We knew where our bread was buttered," Akers said.

Many times that year, West Virginia fell behind and had to resort to a zone-press defense that coach Fred Schaus had stolen from West Virginia Tech's Neal Baisi. The more chaotic and frenetic the games were the better, as far as the Mountaineers were concerned.

Turnovers back then were characterized as "errors," and there were usually a lot of those in the games West Virginia played.

They were simply a byproduct of the Mountaineers' style.

This is how one unnamed coach sized up West Virginia before it faced Louisville in the first national semifinal game played on Friday, March 20, 1959: "West Virginia makes an awful lot of errors, but they always are putting on the pressure, running you to death. And they are the doggonedest scrappers you ever saw!

"I think Fred Schaus has the worst team overall – but a very good one – that's he's brought to the NCAA (tournament). But he's gotten a lot of mileage out of 'em, using eight or nine men in strategic spots."

Earlier that season, West Virginia had fallen behind by 18 points in the first half against William & Mary in Norfolk, and at halftime, Schaus had reached an epiphany.

The young coach instructed everyone to leave their warmups in the locker room when they returned to the floor for the second half (except Jay Jacobs, of course) because he was going to use an all-out press, and he needed everybody to be ready to go.

Then, he kept the same five guys who began the second half in the game until the Mountaineers finally got things under control with about five minutes to go.

"I remember Butch Goode saying, 'Man, I thought I was going to get into the game!'" Akers laughed.

It's was wild, and it was wonderful.

What came of that was Team Chaos, which consisted of Ronnie Retton and Bucky Bolyard up front, Bobby Joe Smith and West on the wings with Akers in the back as a last resort.

But the ball rarely ever got to Willie because of the Tsunami taking place in front of him. Retton was barely 5-feet-7 standing on his tip-toes, and he weighed only 160 pounds, but he was quicker than a cat and was a ball handler's nightmare.

Bolyard wasn't much taller, yet he was built like a fullback, weighing more than 200 pounds. He was as strong as a bull and almost as quick as Retton, but what also made Bolyard so unique is that he was blind in one eye, the result of a childhood accident. If the basketball somehow got past those two, then there was West behind them, patrolling the court like a centerfielder in baseball.

"Jerry could play anywhere he wanted, and he was so good at reading passes and deflecting the ball," Akers recalled.

Against St. Joseph's in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, West Virginia trailed the Hawks by 18 points and another early exit seemed imminent. Then, the zone press kicked in and eventually it came down to a Retton steal and layup to win the game.

That's the hire-wire act these guys performed for most of the season.

One night later, following West Virginia's four-point victory over Boston University, Lowry Stoops, WVU athletic director Red Brown's right-hand man, got on the radio broadcast with Jack Fleming and announced to the entire state that he was personally handling tickets for the Final Four.

By then, the Mountain State had become basketball crazy.

Stoops was a take-charge sort of guy who was the epitome of integrity when it came to money, according to late Eddie Barrett. It was said that his financial career began during World War I when he started loaning money to soldiers and was forced to keep raising the interest rates as, in his words, "the poor bastards kept dying on me!"

"Everybody had a story on Stoops, and they're all true!" the former WVU sports information director said.

When people found out where Stoops lived in the South Park section of Morgantown and realized that there were only 250 Final Four tickets available for Mountaineer fans to purchase, the line of traffic leading to his house extended far beyond the bridge into Westover.

"He finally had to go out the back door and escape," Barrett laughed.

Barrett, in 2004, recalled a ticket controversy at the Final Four involving the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) that wasn't fully resolved until the first game was played.

"The manager of the Kentucky Fairgrounds bowed to political pressure and let his friends have the NABC tickets," Barrett said. "The NABC and the NCAA complained, and as a result, they put the coaches in aisles.

"Guys like John Wooden and Adolph Rupp were sitting in aisles!"

With the exception of the Louisville fans, the basketball savvy people among the 18,000-plus who crammed into Freedom Hall to watch the national semifinals wanted to see an Oscar Robertson-Jerry West final.

The oddsmakers like Robertson's chances, and his Bearcats rated a five-point favorite over coach Pete Newell's Cal Bears.

But West Virginia-Louisville?

The Cardinals were playing on their home floor and the Mountaineers were simply too unpredictable. How could you count on a team that had fallen behind in so many games and thrived on chaos to win?

How would the Mountaineers handle Louisville's great size?

Fred Schaus

And, what about Schaus' offensive system? What exactly was it?

Unlike Louisville, Cincinnati and Cal, West Virginia ran very few set plays. It was more of a read-and-react style with lots of freelancing.

Akers remembers frequently driving across the top of the lane like he was going to the basket and then dropping the ball off to a trailing West, who would either shoot it, drive to the basket or pass to a teammate.

That was something they had come up with on their own by playing together so much.

"It was guard to forward and you could go behind or you could throw the ball to the other guard and set a pick," Akers said of Schaus' offense. "Naturally, Jerry was the guy we went to all of the time. He'd drive or shoot it and if not, then you just rotated right back into your positions and started all over again. Both guards could do that and both guards could also run the middle of the fast break."

What West Virginia did back then is today called motion offense.

That's why so many years later, when John Beilein came to West Virginia and incorporated a similar system, the players from those great Schaus teams could relate to what they were seeing and really took a liking to what Beilein was doing.

Even Schaus was a big fan of Beilein, mentioning in 2005, five years before his death: "Beilein has a passing game. I would rather see him go to the basket more often, but I really think he's doing a great, great job, and I like his system.

"And I like his defense," he continued. "We used a 3-2 defense and a zone. That 1-3-1 he uses does a great job of covering up the passing lanes in the defense. I don't think there is a great deal of difference in our two philosophies, just a difference in eras."

For those who remember those Beilein teams in 2005 and 2006, that gives you a much better understanding of what the Mountaineers were doing back in the late 1950s under Schaus.

And, of course, having Jerry West to pass the ball to didn't hurt, either.

West was unstoppable against Louisville, the 6-foot-3 forward scoring 27 points in the first half as the Mountaineers built a 16-point halftime lead. Turner, Louisville's defensive ace who held Kentucky All-American Johnny Cox to just 10 points on 3-of-15 shooting in Mideast Regional Semifinals, got worn out by West.

Jerry finished the game with 38 points and 15 rebounds, demonstrating to the country what a tremendous all-around player he was.

The Mountaineers' second-half lead swelled to as many as 23 points before Louisville rallied to cut it to 12. It was one of those rare instances in 1959 when WVU had complete control of a game against a quality opponent.

West picked up three early fouls, but was able to avoid drawing any more despite remaining in the game.

Sawyer fouled out early in the second half and Goldstein, Turner and forward Joe Kitchen finished the game with four fouls each for Louisville.

A total of 40 fouls were called, resulting in a combined 41 free throws. West Virginia shot an impressive 53 percent from the floor, thanks to West's 12-of-20 shooting.

"The kid pulled us through," Schaus said of West's play afterward. "He certainly did everything."

West Virginia sat in the stands and watched California upset Cincinnati in the other semifinal game to set up a West Virginia-Cal championship one night later.

The foul trouble West managed to navigate through in the semifinal caught up to him in the championship game. He picked up his fourth foul early in the second half as West Virginia's deficit grew to 13.

Once more, the press turned the game chaotic, and West Virginia trailed by just one point with 52 seconds to go when 6-foot-10 Darrall Imhoff retrieved his missed hook shot and scored the game's deciding basket.

Some of the West Virginia players later swore the ball bounced off Imhoff's shoulder before it went through the basket.

That's what they remember.

What Akers remembers most about that great season was how close they were and how much they enjoyed each other's company. The chemistry on that basketball team was off the charts.

Akers attended the ceremony at the White House this past fall when Donald Trump awarded West the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he observed some of the players from the Golden State Warriors, an organization for whom West was a special consultant for six seasons with three NBA titles, acting exactly the same way the West Virginia players acted way back in 1959.

It was obvious to him that they liked each other and got along so well together.

Beyond his greatness as a basketball player, Jerry West is also considered one of the best team builders in NBA history.

The roots of this undoubtedly span all the way back to 1959 when he was a West Virginia player.

"You knew what you were supposed to do," Akers, who later became one of the most successful high school basketball coaches in state history, explained. "I had guys on my high school team that in crucial times in the last quarter, they knew not to shoot the ball. I wanted certain players to have the ball because I knew they were going to come through for you.

"They understood."

As did those West Virginia players on the 1959 team when it came to Jerry West.

Our next Mountaineer March Memories feature next Friday will profile the West Virginia women's big victory over Clemson in the 1992 NCAA Tournament at the WVU Coliseum.

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March Memories: Mountaineers’ Best Game of the Season Propels Them To National Title Game in 1959

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March Memories: Mountaineers’ Best Game of the Season Propels Them To National Title Game in 1959

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