Final Four Nostalgia

It's been 50 years. I think about that and think how fast those years have gone. I'd like to have a few of them back.

It was 50 years ago that I saw my first NCAA championship game. It was that epic triple overtime Carolina win over Kansas.

I think that was probably the first one that many of my age will remember. Television was in its infancy and college basketball wasn't a big deal. That sure has changed, hasn't it?

On March 23, 1957, the game was beamed into our little black and white television set in Rocky Mount from Kansas City. Gathered in our small den were my mother and father, my friend Bill Robbins, and myself. I was 8, soon to be 9 in a few months.

I will tell you I have read a lot about this game over the years but I really don't remember all that much. I do remember 5-foot-10 Tommy Kearns going out to jump center against the great Wilt Chamberlain.

I remember that banner across the way that read "NCAA Jayhawks All The Way" that flashed across the small screen at every change of possession. l don't remember any of Carolina star Lennie Rosenbluth's 20 points.

But I do remember Joe Quigg's foul shots that gave Carolina the 54-53 lead. And I remember the final sequence when Kansas couldn't get the ball into Chamberlain and Kearns threw the ball as high as he could as time ran out.

Fifty years ago that happened. It was my first championship game. It came at a time that basketball was beginning to overtake baseball as my favorite sport. I would go out in my backyard and I was Duke against Carolina, the announcer, and all 10 players. That's when I decided that it would be pretty neat to be able to cover sports for a living.

Funny thing, I didn't see another championship game on television until 1963 when Loyola of Chicago played two-time defending champion Cincinnati. For me, it was either trying to pick up a broadcast on the radio or just reading about it in the paper. I know this is hard for many to believe, but the NCAA tournament just wasn't that big a deal on a national scale back then.

I listened to parts of the 1962 championship game on a transistor radio, the signal fading in and out as Cincinnati beat Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek and Ohio State for its second straight title. That was the last time that Ohio State has been to the finals until Monday night.

I saw that 1963 Cincinnati-Loyola game at my grandparents home in Orangeburg, S.C. I was home from boarding school and my mother wanted to go by her parents' home on the way to taking me back to school outside Asheville. But before I agreed to go, I had to make sure the game would be shown in South Carolina. It was. The semi-finals on Friday where Duke lost to Loyola and the championship game the next night.

Cincinnati blew a big lead and ended up losing in overtime on Loyola's Vic Rouse's put-back at the buzzer. Everybody else had gone to bed, and I watched it by myself. Cincinnati had the chance to win three in a row, a remarkable feat if they could have pulled it off. Since then, I have seen every championship game either on television or, thanks to my job, in person.

The next year began the UCLA dynasty. I again watched this one in Orangeburg, as Duke with Jeff Mullins and the 6'10" towers, Jay Buckley and Hack Tison, were favored over small but quick, undefeated UCLA. The Bruins were down 30-27 in the first half and all of a sudden it was boom. An offensive explosion as UCLA with all that speed went around Duke like they were nailed to the floor. Suddenly it was 43-30 and John Wooden was on his way to his first of 10 national titles.

I could go on and on. From 1963 on, I remember a little of some and a lot of other championship games. I saw my first game on a color TV set in 1966. My great aunt had one and my dad and I went to her house to watch the Texas-Western against Kentucky. This was the historic game in which Texas-Western started five black players against Kentucky's all-white team.

I'm afraid that I wasn't mature enough to recognize the significance of that, but I will tell you that I wanted desperately for Texas-Western to win because several of my friends were very annoying Kentucky fans and I, being an ACC fan, didn't want to have to listen to them gloat for the rest of the year. I remember the Miners' Bobby Joe Hill making back-to-back steals in the first half and Sports Illustrated having on their cover the following week, "Go Go with Bobby Joe."

It's never as much fun when a team from the Triangle isn't in the Final Four. It wasn't back then, and it's not now. We've been very much spoiled around here. In the 1960's, Wake Forest played in the 1962 Final Four. Duke was there in 1963, 1964 and 1966. Carolina went in 1967, 1968 and 1969.

I went to work at WRAL in June of 1971, working for Ray Reeve, truly one of the radio legends of our state. When I was growing up, Ray and Bill Currie were on almost every night calling ACC games. Currie called Mr. Reeve the Squire of Wake County. To work with him, even if it was just for a year, and to hear his stories, is something I will always treasure. He was a part of the ACC back when I was a kid. Back when I loved it more than anything else.

There is no North Carolina team in this year's championship game and that is the bad news. The good news is that since I've been at WRAL, the longest stretch that we've had without a Carolina, Duke or N.C. State making the Final Four has been just two years. That's pretty incredible. So what that means is that next season it's almost a guarantee that one of three will be there.