Subdued Or Not, It’s Still the Backyard Brawl

Friday, November 12

Morgantown, W.Va.

8:30 p.m.

West Virginia University

Pitt

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Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks

November 11, 2021 05:03 PM | Men's Basketball

Pitt Game Notes Live Audio Live Stats

By: John Antonik

Probable Starting 5
PLAYER	POS	HT
Jalen Bridges	F	6-7
Isaiah Cottrell	F	6-10
Taz Sherman	G	6-4
Sean McNeil	G	6-3
Kedrian Johnson	G	6-3

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – In the famous words of Michael Buffer, "Let's get ready to rumble!"

Well, not really.

Friday night's Backyard Brawl will likely be much more subdued compared to the West Virginia-Pitt basketball games in which Bob Huggins played during the mid-1970s. Back then, everybody fought – even the players' girlfriends! – which I supposed is part of the reason why the rivalry became known as the Backyard Brawl.

"At (the rivalry's peak) when I played, it was probably way more intense than any rivalry I know," Huggins told a gathering of reporters Thursday afternoon. "Man, it was brutal."

Can you even imagine cell phones being around in those days?

Huggins remembered watching West Virginia's mascot, Junior Taylor, and Pitt's "Tiger Paul" Auslander going at it right on the floor during one game up in Pittsburgh.

"It was kind of like watching two fat guys roll around," Huggins smirked.

The game Huggins was referencing happened at Pitt's old Fitzgerald Field House on Jan. 7, 1976. There were five technical fouls and two ejections following a bench-clearing brawl that was started by West Virginia's Stan Boskovich and Pitt's Tommy Richards, who sadly passed away from colon cancer late last month.

Despite giving up 6 inches to Boskovich, Richards more than held his own, according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Phil Axelrod's post-fight analysis. But the Boskovich-Richards skirmish was merely an undercard to the main event featuring West Virginia's Maurice Robinson and Pitt's Wayne Talbot.

That was some Ali-Frazier caliber fighting.

"WVU's Robinson used Talbot's head as a punching bag as both benches hurried on the floor," was Axelrod's front-line report.

Both guys were awarded double technicals and were kicked out of the game, which turned out to be to Pitt's advantage because Robinson was one of West Virginia's best players while Talbot was only a scrub who rarely got on the floor when the clock was running.

Huggins said he had a better view of another side-card scrum between Pitt's Robert Shrewsberry and West Virginia freshman center Junius Lewis, a Richmond, Virginia, native getting his first taste of those loathsome Panthers.

"Junius tossed him underneath the radio table, and (Shrewsberry) kept poking his head out to see when it was safe to come out. He's finally admitted that it did happen," Huggins chuckled.

By the way, Junius just happens to be a popular ordained minister in Morgantown these days, so even the pacifists became brawlers whenever these two schools got together back in the day!

All these years later, Huggins is at a loss for why the games always seemed to turn out this way.

"They had some fans that were over the top, but we had some fans that were over the top, too," he admitted. "It's changed so much. At a Cincinnati-Xavier game you had everyone there, other than the prison guards. You had the state highway patrol, the Cincinnati city police and the university police. They were everywhere.

"It wasn't that way back then."

Huggins postulates that West Virginia's legendary "Voice of the Mountaineers" Jack Fleming may have contributed to some of the game's volatility because of his celebrity status in Pittsburgh.

Jack was an unapologetic West Virginia rooter who promoted his disdain for just about anything Pittsburgh, except for his Black and Gold employer, of course.

"Jack did our games and he also did the Steelers, so there was a little rub there, I suppose," Huggins said. "And he didn't hide that he was a West Virginia fan, so that kind of got things riled up a little bit."

Today, Huggins' current players don't ask him to talk about the West Virginia-Pitt rivalry. It's not like it was back in the 1970s when high school teammates frequently became college enemies when one chose Pitt and the other picked West Virginia.

The late Joe Fryz was supposed to go to Pitt, just as Moon Township's Richards did a few years prior. So when Fryz committed to West Virginia instead of Pitt, Panther coach Tim Grgurich never spoke to him again for the rest of his life.

That's kind of how things worked back then.

The guys playing in Friday night's game hardly know each other. They come from different parts of the country and in some instances, different parts of the world, so it's really pointless for Huggins to dust off his best "we hate Pitt speech" like Fred Schaus and Gale Catlett used to give to their players.

It was Schaus who taught Catlett to become such a notorious (and occasionally obnoxious) Pitt hater. Catlett took an ass-chewing he once got from Schaus at halftime of a WVU-Pitt freshman game and ran with it. I'm sure Grgurich did likewise with his guys up in Oakland. The same goes for Dr. Roy Chipman.

Tony Robertson

On Friday night, it will simply be two Power 5 programs from different conferences playing each other, albeit before a rare November sellout at the Coliseum.

I suppose nostalgia still sells these days for fans confused with realignment.

The Panthers (0-1) are coming off a disappointing 78-63 season-opening loss to The Citadel on Tuesday night, while the Mountaineers are not yet Bob Huggins-caliber after being outrebounded by 15 during Tuesday night's harder-than-expected 60-53 victory over Oakland.

Huggins calls Jeff Capel's current Pitt squad "intriguing" while saying his team's rebounding "still sucks."

Eight of the nine players Pitt used against The Citadel were 6-feet-5 or taller, including 6-foot-9, 280-pound John Hugley, who scored a team-best 27 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. Femi Odukale, a 6-foot-5, 205-pound guard, finished with 20.

The other seven guys managed to score just 16.

Guard Taz Sherman led West Virginia (1-0) with 18 points on Tuesday. Guard Sean McNeil contributed 10.

Hugley is from Cleveland and Odukale is from Brooklyn, New York. Sherman hails from Missouri City, Texas, while McNeil is a native of Union, Kentucky – not exactly Backyard Brawl territory.

Tipoff is set for 8:30 p.m. The game will be televised nationally on ESPNU.