Ray Meyer, George Mikan, and DePaul

When Chicago native Ray Meyer signed on as DePaul University’s basketball coach in 1942, he agreed to a one-year contract for the modest sum of $2,500. He turned down a three-year deal, he later explained, “because I didn’t know if I’d like the job or the profession.”

 

RAY MEYER and GEORGE MIKAN.

Meyer’s first agenda item was to turn the gangly, six-foot-10 freshman George Mikan into a basketball player. The two had met before, when Meyer was an assistant coach at Notre Dame (where he had been a member of the 1936 national championship squad). When Mikan tried out for the Irish, Meyer was not encouraging. “He said I was so uncoordinated I tripped over the lines on the court,” Mikan recalled. Head coach George Keogan suggested that Mikan try a smaller school where he might get to play some. Mikan heeded the advice and enrolled at DePaul, only to find when he got there that Meyer had been hired in the meantime. “I thought, ‘Oh, no, here we go again,’” said Mikan.

But if Mikan’s lack of polish was a problem, Meyer now made it his problem and project. “I knew the value of the big man in basketball,” he wrote. “He gets more points by accident than a little guy does on purpose.” Every day after the team’s regular practice, Meyer put Mikan through a grueling regimen of skipping rope, shadow boxing, jumping over chairs, playing catch with medicine balls and tennis balls, and, almost incidentally, dribbling and shooting a basketball. In one drill, Mikan would stand under the basket and make a layup with his right hand, then rebound and make a layup with his left, rebound and layup with his right, etc., etc., etc. Known as the “Mikan Drill,” this routine has been used for virtually all big men ever since; among its adherents are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal.

“Mikan was raw material with a little talent,” Meyer wrote. “His greatest asset was the desire to improve, which made him willing to listen and work. You can measure height and even talent, but not heart. Mikan showed me in the beginning he had the heart to be great.”

Meyer’s patient tutelage transformed the Clark Kent look-alike into a Superman. Mikan learned to execute hook shots deftly with either hand and to rebound and block shots like no one else. In his first season at DePaul, he led the Blue Demons to a 19-5 record and an appearance in the NCAA tournament’s semifinal round (which hadn’t yet been labeled the Final Four).

In 1943-44, Mikan and DePaul advanced to the championship game of the National Invitational Tournament, which was then equal to the NCAA in prestige, before losing to St. John’s to conclude a 22-4 campaign. Mikan was chosen national player of the year. The next year, DePaul won 18 of 20 regular-season games and marched through the NIT with awe-inspiring ease, crushing West Virginia 76-54, Rhode Island 97-53, and Bowling Green 71-54. In the semifinal game, Mikan nearly outscored the other team, settling for a “tie” with 53. He was selected most valuable player of the NIT and repeated as national player of the year.

Following the title game at Madison Square Garden, the Demons remained in New York for a contest with NCAA champion Oklahoma A&M and its six-foot-11 center Bob Kurland, Mikan’s only rival as the finest player in the country. Although the event was technically an exhibition to benefit the wartime Red Cross, it was hyped as a national championship game. DePaul had beaten the Aggies 48-46 several weeks earlier, and the rematch was expected to be a barn-burner. Unfortunately, it became somewhat anticlimactic when Mikan fouled out with six minutes left in the first half and three other starters soon followed. DePaul lost 52-44.

 After three seasons at DePaul, Mikan had become so outstanding that the rules were changed to diminish his dominance. It had been his custom to station himself under the opposition’s basket and simply swat incoming shots away or even catch them in midair and fling them ahead to teammates for easy fast breaks. Goaltending was outlawed prior to the 1945-46 season, but the change seemed not to bother Mikan, who continued to shine. He scored 555 points in 24 games (the previous year he had tallied 558 points, also in 24 games) and played superb defense. Rebounds were not counted in those days, but Mikan’s excellence in that area was well documented by contemporary sources.

DePaul rolled to a 19-5 mark in 1945-46, winning its final six games by an average of 20 points. Despite this, the Demons were snubbed by both the NCAA and NIT. Meyer suspected that his harsh comments about the officiating in the previous spring’s Oklahoma A&M game had gotten him and the Demons blackballed from both tournaments, but he never knew for sure. With no postseason opportunities forthcoming, the Mikan era at DePaul ended with a lopsided 65-40 victory over Beloit College in the regular-season finale on March 9, 1946.

Meyer then prepared to face life without the man who would later be voted the greatest player of the first half of the century. “While he was around,” Meyer wrote, “I was a great coach.” For his part, Mikan said of Meyer, “I’d be nothing without him.” The Demons had won 81 of 98 games in the four years and finished third, second, and first in their three postseason tournaments. Now Mikan was bound for greater glory in the pro ranks, while Meyer was destined for decades of obscurity. The 32-year-old coach would see his age double before he and DePaul returned to national prominence. 

 

 
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March Madness Memories: Loyola vs. Mississippi State, 1963

There were serious questions confronting head coach George Ireland and the Loyola Ramblers as they entered the 1963 NCAA tournament. They had not looked like the same team since losing Pablo Robertson, a lightning-fast point guard, and Billy Smith, a strong rebounder and inside scoring threat, when both were declared ineligible in early February after failing to pass their midterm exams.  

     It says something about the academic integrity of the university and its athletic department that Ireland’s top two reserves could be booted off a team that was undefeated, ranked No. 2 in the country, and taking aim at a possible national championship. Many other universities would have finagled a way to keep the two players on the team, but at Loyola the term “student-athlete” retained its intended meaning. Loyola’s players were students first and athletes second. As if to drive the point home, the Ramblers’ five starters went on to earn eleven college degrees among them.  

     The five were forwards Jerry Harkness and Vic Rouse, center Les Hunter, and guards Ron Miller and John Egan. They were four African Americans and an Irish kid from the South Side, representing a Jesuit school that was virtually unknown outside of Chicago. Their climb to the top of the college basketball world was an inspiring story in itself, which also took on greater significance as a harbinger of changing times.

 

HARKNESS AND GOLD MEET BEFORE THE GAME.

The absence of Robertson and Smith meant that the five “iron men,” as they soon came to be called, had their work cut out for them. Ireland’s bench produced a total of 15 points in the final six regular-season games, of which the previously unbeaten Ramblers lost two while narrowly averting two other losses.

Loyola opened the tournament on March 11 against Tennessee Tech at McGaw Hall in Evanston. The Ramblers were ready. They scored 16 of the game’s first 18 points and surged to a 61-20 lead by halftime. Loyola shot 56 percent from the floor and presented an almost perfectly balanced attack—none of the five starters scored more than 21 points or fewer than 17. Ireland called off the dogs when Loyola went over the 100-point mark with five minutes left. He emptied the bench, and all four of his remaining reserves not only played but scored. (None of the backups scored another point in the tournament, and just one of them, Chuck Wood, saw further action.) The final score was 111-42.

Among the awestruck spectators was Babe McCarthy, coach of the Mississippi State team that was due to face Loyola next. “I wish I’d stayed home,” McCarthy said. “Nobody can beat a team like that. They are the best fast-break team, the best ball hawks, I’ve ever seen.”

McCarthy, his players, and the Mississippi State administration emerged as heroes of a sort in the following days. Not only was their university all-white, but its athletic teams were forbidden by tradition to even play against integrated teams. Nonetheless, the Maroons intended to keep their date with Loyola on March 15 in East Lansing, Michigan.

The Maroons had accepted an automatic bid to the tournament as champions of the Southeast Conference on March 2, and the question of their participation might have ended there. However, when the brackets were published and the likelihood of a matchup with Loyola became apparent, newspapers and politicians in Mississippi saw a chance to make some hay. A paper in Jackson invited readers “to clip the photo of the Loyola team and mail it today to the board of trustees” of the university. An editor in Meridian was more explicit: “Especially in these times we should make no compromise regarding our Southern way of life; we cannot afford to give a single inch.”

After Loyola defeated Tennessee Tech (itself an all-white team), the issue came to a head. When asked about the controversy, Harkness showed that he was wise beyond his years. “I think that Mississippi State wants to play us,” he said. “If they don’t, they’ll never know how good they are.”

Mississippi State did want to play Loyola—and went to great lengths to do so. The Maroons were scheduled to fly from Starkville, Mississippi, to East Lansing on Thursday morning, March 14. On Wednesday, a state legislator obtained an injunction prohibiting the team from leaving the state. That night, coach McCarthy and several other officials drove from Starkville to Memphis, then flew to Nashville. On Thursday morning, the Hinds County sheriff showed up at the Starkville airport to enforce the injunction. The injunction was duly served—to the Maroons’ freshman team, which had been sent to the airport as a decoy. The varsity team had already left from a small private airport. They met up with McCarthy and the others in Nashville, then continued on to East Lansing.

“We wanted to play,” Mississippi State guard Leland Mitchell said many years later. “We had just won the SEC championship for the third year in a row and we hadn’t been allowed to play in the NCAA tournament the past two years. For us, the biggest thing was getting the opportunity to play in the tournament because it was something we felt we deserved.”

The game attracted an overflow crowd of 12,143 at Michigan State’s Jenison Fieldhouse. Flashbulbs popped all over the arena when Loyola captain Harkness shook hands with his counterpart Joe Dan Gold at center court before the game. 

Mississippi State came in with a record of 21-5. The Maroons were a methodical, disciplined team whose tallest starter was only six-foot-five. The Ramblers also were undersized (the lithe, six-foot-seven Hunter was their tallest starter), but their athleticism made up for what they lacked in height and heft.

From the opening tip, Mississippi State did everything but deflate the basketball in order to slow the pace. The Maroons held Loyola off the scoreboard for almost six minutes as they crept out to a 7-0 lead. A pair of three-point plays by Harkness jump-started the Ramblers, and strong rebounding by Hunter and Rouse carried them to a 26-19 edge at halftime. In the second half, the Maroons patiently stuck to their plan on offense, allowing 90 seconds or so to elapse in each possession before taking a shot (there was no shot clock in those days) and not attempting any shot that was closely contested.

Mississippi State was poised and determined throughout, but ultimately Loyola’s relentlessness proved too much to overcome. “We don’t let up,” said Ireland.

Loyola won 61-51. Harkness tallied 20 points, Rouse 16 points and 19 rebounds, and Hunter 12 points and 10 rebounds. 

 

 Loyola then advanced to the Final Four by dispatching the Fighting Illini 79-64 in the first-ever NCAA tournament game between Illinois schools. After victories over No. 2 Duke and No. 1 Cincinnati, the Ramblers reigned as national champions.

 In later years, as the Ramblers looked back across the decades to the dream season of 1963, their stirring and unlikely victory over Cincinnati in the title game was a fond memory, of course. But the game against Mississippi State was perhaps even more meaningful in the long run. “In a game like that you have two winners,” Harkness said. “Mississippi State made a statement to the community that broke down some of the barriers, and we played a part in it.”

 “It was much more than a basketball game,” said Mitchell. “We were making history, though none of us realized it at the time.”

 

 

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