An Exciting Brand of Basketball | One and Done | Going to the Finals | The Inevitable Decline

In the mid-1950s Virginia Tech coach Chuck Noe detected something interesting in the high school box scores that he was reading in the morning paper. He noticed the scores of the games in Virginia were usually in the 40s and 50s. Over in West Virginia, however, the boys up in the mountains were playing a much more entertaining brand of basketball. The scores were much higher, the shooting more accurate and the games seemingly much crisper.

Eventually Noe decided to get a firsthand look and what he saw in those tiny coal camps, hamlets and villages was astonishing: an oasis of basketball players concealed deep within some of the most difficult terrain a person could ever imagine.

West Virginia has often been called the Switzerland of the United States. Those with a more cynical slant have sometimes referred to the state as “more like Afghanistan than Switzerland,” as a Saturday Evening Post writer once did. When John Kennedy campaigned in West Virginia for the Democratic primary elections in the spring of 1960 he was startled to witness the poverty he encountered and the interminable spirit West Virginians had in the face of it. Kennedy’s aides later admitted that it was a moving experience for Kennedy watching the miners slowly rise out of the ground after a long day, covered in coal dust, and knowing that their next day was going to be spent doing the exact same thing.

Above the ground, on the side of mountains, next to creek beds and wherever else they could find enough room, those miner’s sons were nailing up hoops to sycamore trees, clearing off fields and playing basketball.

Ronnie Retton said the court he played on in Grant Town was comprised of two poles stuck in the ground. In between they played on a hard patch of dirt. More often than not the court turned into a muddy mess.

“When it rained real hard we had to go down to the creek and bring up cups full of sand to throw on it so we could play,” Retton recalled. “When that happened you could hardly bounce the ball.”

Jerry West, who grew up along Cabin Creek about 50 miles south of Charleston, practiced on a court next to a steep slope and whenever he missed a shot the ball rolled all the way down the hill. Tired of chasing the ball, West came up with a simple solution: he decided to quit missing.

“There was a lot of improvising and I guess it was the love of the game,” West said. “When you are in little towns there was a lot more of a chance that you were going to be by yourself a lot and basketball is one of the few games other than golf that you can practice almost every skill that is important (to the game).”

“In 1952 a new gym was built at Mullens and it may have seated a thousand and we all had keys to it,” Willie Akers said. “On weekends we would be in there until midnight playing. We were supposed to be staying at Terry Penn’s house and we would slip off and go play. We played all the time.”

Bob Clousson lived in Clarksburg, a small town of 30,000 about an hour’s drive south of Morgantown, and he played basketball with his buddies on a makeshift court his neighbors helped construct on the street next to his house.

“Somebody donated half a ping pong table for the backboard and we hoisted that thing up on a telephone pole,” Clousson said. “Saturday morning was the big morning for us. I would be out there at 7 o’clock to make sure that nobody parked underneath that telephone pole so we could play all day. If somebody tried to park there I would run out and wave them off. If they did get in there we were mad. Sometimes we would go ahead and play and just bounce the ball off the car hood.”

	The gym Bucky Bolyard played in at Aurora was so small that six inches separated the out-of-bounds line from the wall. Sports Communications photo

Even in the bigger towns like Charleston and Huntington, playing basketball was the thing to do. Anyone who was anyone in the Capital City played ball at the Charleston YMCA. Guys like George King, Sonny Moran, Jim Laughlin and Hot Rod Hundley spent entire days at the Y, sometimes never leaving the court.

“You couldn’t even get on the floor,” Hundley remembered. “You played winner-stay-up and there would be a line of guys waiting. If you lost you wouldn’t play again for hours. We played 20 points and the game was over. You had to write your name on the board for your team.”

Bob Smith, known then as Bobby Joe, said the single proudest moment of his childhood came when Hundley pointed to him standing on the sidelines and asked him to be a fill-in for another player that had gotten hurt.

“I’ll never forget that,” Smith said. “I must have been in the eighth or ninth grade and Tom Crutchfield, a teammate of Rod’s at Charleston High School, couldn’t finish. Rod said, ‘Why don’t you fill in for him?’ I played with those guys in the eighth grade and some of these guys were college and pro players.”

West Virginia coach Fred Schaus once tried to describe the gym Bucky Bolyard played in up in Aurora, just a stone’s throw away from the clouds.

“The gym in Aurora is so small,” Schaus told Richmond sportswriter Shelley Rolfe, barely moving his thumb away from his index finger. “Six inches … six inches - that’s all the distance there is from the court’s out-of-bounds line to the wall of the gym. Why a player can’t even take the ball out of bounds.”

Schaus did well for himself at WVU getting West Virginia players, but he didn’t get all of them. Duke’s Hal Bradley came in and stole Beckley’s Howard Hurt and Huntington’s Johnny Frye. Bones McKinney from Wake Forest plucked guard George Ritchie out of Chattaroy. Virginia’s Billy McCann found Buzzy Wilkinson in Pineville. Wilkinson later earned All-America honors for the Cavs and was the nation’s second-leading scorer in 1955. Charleston’s Jim Laughlin was an all-Big Ten center at Ohio State and Everett Case at NC State had Hot Rod Hundley on the hook for a short period of time until an illegal tryout caused Hundley’s eligibility at State to be revoked.

“We played the Kentucky all-star team and they were supposed to have the best players in America,” remembered Jerry West. “As it turned out we had the better players. We played them twice and beat them twice. It was a very high caliber group of guys that we had in West Virginia at that time.”

Marshall did well with Huntington players Hal Greer and Leo Byrd, and Logan's Walt Walowac. Richmond was successful with guys like Theryl Willis and Carl Slone. George Washington had Martinsburg’s Bucky McDonald. Even the great Adolph Rupp made recruiting raids into West Virginia, once plucking Dwayne Wingler out of Beckley.

However, the man who staged the biggest mining expedition of West Virginia talent was Virginia Tech’s Chuck Noe. He was the guy the old-timers claim is responsible for costing West Virginia at least two national basketball championships. Noe first set up camp in Mullens by taking Terry Penn in 1956. He then branched out to Charleston where he was able to export 6-foot-6-inch center Chris Smith along with two of his high school teammates.

“That was the cruncher,” said Eddie Barrett, West Virginia’s sports information director at the time.

“We needed a big, strong center that could score and play defense and Chris Smith was all that, believe me,” Schaus said. “He was also just a great human being.”

	West Virginia's zone press creates another fastbreak opportunity. Bob Smith(21) deflects the ball with Jim Ritchie (35) trailing. Sports Communications photo

Schaus mentioned the great distance between Morgantown and Charleston being one of the factors in Smith’s decision to attend Tech. Back then it was an eight-hour trip to get to Morgantown from the southern part of the state and the only thing that came close to bridging the distance between the two was Jack Fleming’s radio broadcasts.

“I used to listen to West Virginia when I was a little boy,” remembered West. “It was very interesting because listening to these games they would fade in and fade out. I remember a lot of times listening on the radio not knowing the outcome of the game until the next day because you couldn’t get it.”

Jack Fleming soon became the school’s biggest promoter. Fleming’s distinctive style and his willingness to ride the refs on the air sometimes caused problems for Athletic Director Red Brown and Eddie Barrett, but the fans loved it and the coaches didn’t mind it either. If West Virginia lost Fleming often gave the impression that the Mountaineers had been wronged in the face of insurmountable odds. It was the good guys versus the bad guys. In that respect, radio lent an imaginary façade that television could never later duplicate.

West Virginia’s other big attraction was Hot Rod Hundley, the so-called “Clown Prince” of college basketball. Red Brown literally moved mountains to get Hundley into WVU and moved even more mountains to keep him there. Hundley was abandoned when he was a child and spent most of his adolescence living with different families in Charleston, or spending his time in the city pool halls. Clayce Kishbaugh, Hundley’s teammate at West Virginia, said he might run into Hot Rod two or three days in a row and not see him again for a month.

“This guy doesn’t have a friend: he’s got millions and millions of acquaintances,” Kishbaugh said. “He wouldn’t let anybody be his close friend.”

Hundley said he first began clowning during West Virginia freshman games in 1954.

“The fans started stomping their feet and clapping their hands and they would get louder and louder,” Hundley said. “They wanted to see the show.”

The show turned out to be just about anything off the top of Hundley’s head. It could be rolling the ball up his arm and faking a pass, tossing up a couple of hook shots at the free throw line or lining up the team in the T-formation. The fans loved it. The New York City writers loved it and tournament directors around the country were ringing Red Brown’s telephone off the hook wanting to invite West Virginia and Hot Rod Hundley to their holiday events.

Fred Schaus, then barely 30 years old and fresh off a career in the pros, put up with Hundley’s antics because he knew it was going to be helpful to him as he started to build the West Virginia program. There is nothing like free publicity and Hundley attracted writers in droves. Schaus also secretly got a kick out of Hundley’s clowning, even when there were times when he was put in the awkward position of having to explain it afterward to irritated coaches.

“Rod used excellent judgment not to overdo any antic and everything seemed to work out for Rod when he was doing something like that,” Schaus said. “Oh sure, there were times when I wished he wouldn’t go quite as far like when he was leading the cheers after I had taken him out of a ballgame … ‘We want Hundley!’ But it was fun. I enjoyed it.”

[PART TWO]