When we were attending Father Ryan, the NCAA Basketball Championships were nothing like the tournament is today. For one thing, there were only about 22 to 25 teams annually selected to compete for the crown, or about a third of the 64 squads that get bids today.
I can't remember anybody running a pool at school on who was going to win the tournament and live TV coverage was mostly limited to the final championship games themselves, with some regional coverage of earlier NCAA tournament games if a local school was involved.
Maybe another reason interest was not as great back then was that one team more or less dominated the sport: the UCLA Bruins under legendary coach John Wooden. They won the NCAA title the two years before we came to Ryan (1964 and 1965), then beginning we were sophomores, UCLA began an unprecedented streak of winning national championships for the next 8 of the next 9 seasons (1967-1973 and then again in 1975).
But that doesn't mean college basketball history didn't happen while we were on Elliston Place. Actually, the most famous game while we were in school, labeled by many as "The Game of the Century" and "The Greatest Game Ever Played" came on January 20, 1968.
The University of Houston Cougars took on UCLA in the Astrodome in Houston. This was a rematch of the previous year's NCAA national semifinal game won by the Bruins 73-58. But with both teams again national powers, UCLA with Lew Alcindor(later Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and Houston with Elvin Hayes, interest was so high that for the first time ever a regular season NCAA basketball game was televised nationwide in prime time. It was on the TVS Television Network with Dick Enberg doing the play-by-play and Bob Pettit doing the color commentary. It also attracted a paying crowd of well over 50,000 fans, the largest audience to ever attend any basketball game up until that time.
Courtesy of YouTube, here's a look back at this college basketball classic, won by Houston 71-69, snapping a 47-game winning streak by UCLA that had extended more than two and a half seasons.
According to Wikipedia, the 1968 Houston-UCLA game: "established college basketball as a sports commodity and paved the way for modern "March Madness." I personally remember watching the game that Saturday night in January, 1968. I was working the 6PM-12AM shift as a sack boy at the HURRY BACK MARKET, just down the street from the Father Ryan campus on Elliston Place. I watched the game while sacking beer and other items and also going outside to get bags of ice for customers.
As for the Houston-UCLA rivalry, the Cougars ended the season undefeated and Number One in the national polls. But UCLA got its revenge in the national tournament again defeating Houston in NCAA national semifinals, this time quite decisively, 101-69 as the Bruins went on to another college basketball championship.
One more important note about college basketball history while we were students at Father Ryan. Our freshman year, in the spring of 1966 (March 19, 1966), Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso) defeated Kentucky for the national crown 72-65 in a game played at College Park, Maryland. It marked the first time in history that school starting five black players won the title. The game is credited with opening the door for more and more black athletes to be recruited to play at major colleges and universities that had previously shunned them.
Here, courtesy of YouTube, is how the Disney movie, "Glory Road" portrayed a key segement of the second half of the Texas Western-UK game when the Minors pulled ahead to win (also note some of the historic names on the Kentucky team such as Pat Riley, Larry Conley and Louie Dampier)...
The winds of change from the Texas Western-UK game even reached Nashville and Vanderbilt University, as the Commodores became the first SEC school to have a black player when Perry Wallace was recruited. It was Perry Wallace who played on those great Pearl High School teams in the mid-1960s.
In fact, it was the Ryan-Pearl game played in 1965 (the winter before we came to campus) that marked the first time a white and black school had ever played each other in Tennessee. Ryan won the game held at the Nashville Municipal Audutorium 52-50 on a last second basket by reserve guard named Lyn Dempsey.
Ryan had its own black player in that first Pearl game, Willie Brown, who had integrated the Nashville Interscholastic League (NIL) a few years ealier. In the spring of 1965 (just a few months before we enrolled)he led Ryan to its first berth in many year in the State Basketball Tournament.
Not to be outdone, Pearl responded the next year in 1966 (when we are freshmen) with a legendary, undefeated season, winning the Tennessee state championship in the first year the school was allowed to play other white high school teams in Nashville and across the state.
Indeed, college basketball history was being made on all levels while we were at Ryan. And what occurred has all led not only to increased athletic opportunties for all, but also to the wonderful "March Madness" of the NCAA basketball tourney and ongoing national TV college basketball coverage we all enjoy today.
Do you have basketball memories of the time we spent at Ryan? If so, please feel free to share them below or e-mail them to me (pat.nolan@dvl.com) and I will include them on this blog site.
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