The Best Game Ever

     Just finished reading The Best Game Ever, a book we came across 3 1/2 months ago the day before the men's NCAA Tournament basketball championship game.

      North Carolina vs. Kansas, remember?

      The 2022 final matchup was the same as the 1957 championship game that was the subject of my April 3 Facebook/e-mail post ... and this book.

      That '57 game was a classic, the only NCAA title game to go three overtimes. A classic matchup, too -- an undefeated North Carolina team vs. a Kansas team featuring the incomparable, imposing, awesome 7-foot giant, Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain. 

     The book's subtitle: "How Frank McGuire's '57 Tar Heels beat Wilt and revolutionized college basketball."

     No national TV coverage then,  scant newspaper coverage. But, as I wrote in my April 3 post, it was the first college basketball game I remember. (Reading about it then, when I was 9 and had never seen a game in person, it made an impression ... and a memory).

     Looking for a photo to go with my April post, I found a copy of this book cover. Soon, we had the book ... and there is a reason. 

      First, though, a summation: Published in 2006, this was written by Adam Lucas (billed then as publisher of the newsletter Tar Heel Monthly, author of books on North Carolina basketball and still today writer of the blog page goheels.com). 

     So, yes, this book is written from a North Carolina view, about its 1956-57 team, and the covers have Carolina blue ink on black backgrounds.

       It is a good read, an interesting history lesson ... and I am not, never have been, a North Carolina or Kansas fan. But basketball and Wilt, yes.

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     George Barclay was our friend here at Trinity Terrace, our seniors residency in Fort Worth. He was always in our media/computer/copy machine room, spent much of his waking days there, helpful to anyone who needed to work the machines. He had a long, successful career in banking and financial institutions, he had traveled the country, and he was very interested and very knowledgeable -- and very opinionated -- about athletics. Particular interests: horse racing (he was an owner), track and field (he ran in high school and college) and -- aha! -- basketball.

     So we spent many hours -- as I worked on books and blogs in that room -- discussing sports. And George had many stories about his life, his work, and his sports involvement.

      Many stories. He was from Philadelphia, he had seen the young Wilt Chamberlain -- a high school phenom -- play pickup games on the Philly hardcourts. George had attended, he counted, 11 colleges/universities, and one of the early ones, in the mid-1950s, was North Carolina (where he ran track, as a quartermiler). So he was there as coach Frank McGuire recruited the half-dozen New York City kids who were the nucleus of this Tar Heels program.

    When I mentioned my North Carolina-Kansas post and finding this book, George took note.

     We watched the April 4 NCAA final together, stunned -- as many were -- by Kansas' quick comeback from a 15-point halftime deficit and the Jayhawks' eventual 72-69 victory. 

     It was a get-even outcome, 65 years later, for Carolina's 54-53 3-OT title victory against Wilt & Co.

      A day or two later, George had a surprise for me: He had gone online and ordered the book. Paid $9 for it, plus shipping cost.

      "You want to read it when I'm done?" he asked. Sure.

      A week later, April 15, our friend George Barclay, 86, collapsed at lunch in our dining room. MedStar medics came quickly, and rushed him -- unconscious -- to a nearby hospital. I didn't see the collapse, but knew there was an emergency. A couple of hours later, I learned it was George.

      Called the hospital twice the next morning to check on him. No record of a George Barclay. Huh?

       An hour later, someone downstairs told me: George had died. 

      Next day I happened to see his daughter, son and spouses as they came to his apartment. They told me it was a brain aneurysm that ruptured. He went as he had desired: quickly.

      Helped them find his storage area in one of our parking garages. In the apartment, he had every detail written for them -- financial records, what to do with his belongings (a car donated to kids who care), request for cremation, no funeral, just a memorial dinner for family and friends.

     I told them about the book. It was on a table next to his couch. They graciously gave it to me.

      George's bookmark was on page 42. It is still there.

---

       There are many familiar names and connections in this book, including -- of course -- a couple to Louisiana. 

       I did not know much of the history of college basketball in North Carolina. Did not realize that the Tar Heels only had occasional basketball success -- an NCAA Tournament title-game loss in 1946. But the NCAAs had only a limited field and limited interest through the 1940s and much of the 1950s.

     The big event in that time was the Christmas-time Dixie Classic, an eight-team, three-day tournament that always included the four "Tobacco Road" schools (Duke, Wake Forest, North Carolina and North Carolina State) and four "outside" schools from around the country. That was the tournament to win.

     That, and the postseason tournament in the widespread Southern Conference and, beginning in 1953-54, the new eight-team Atlantic Coast Conference. The tradition was that only the tournament winner -- not the regular-season champion -- would go to the NCAA Tournament.

    The postseason tournament for years was played at North Carolina State because (1) it was the league powerhouse team; (2) its coach, Everett Case, was the dominant figure, one of the earliest proponents of fast-break, running offenses and an innovator (such as cutting down the nets after significant victories and having a pep band play at games); and (3) NC State's Reynolds Coliseum was the first modern and sizeable (12,400 seats) arena in that area.

     But slick Frank McGuire -- smooth talker, fancy dresser, dynamic motivator, explosive manner -- came to Chapel Hill in 1953 and in a couple of years had a program to match Case's.

        And Case's program was never the same after 1957 and an NCAA penalty for recruiting violations. And here is a Louisiana connection (some of my friends will know this -- think Minden High School, mid-1950s, and a 6-7 superstar player ...)

    From page 37: "The NCAA Tournament was growing in popularity, and to gain notoriety teams had to succeed on the national stage. Case struggled to do that. Soon, he would find his program embroiled in a recruiting scandal. Jackie Moreland, a Louisiana native, originally had signed a letter of intent with Texas A&M but  also had committed to Kentucky. He showed up somewhat unexpectedly at NC State in 1956 and immediately landed the program in trouble. The [Wolf]Pack had just finished a one-year probation for holding illegal tryouts when reports of cash gifts to Moreland and scholarship offers to his girlfriend hit the papers. The ramifications were serious: The NCAA leveled State with a five-year probation deemed 'the most severe ever assessed' by the athletic association."

     (Another Case connection to Louisiana: He coached through two games in the 1964-65 season when cancer forced his retirement. He was succeeded by his assistant coach ... Press Maravich.

    Similarly, when McGuire's program was hit by recruiting violations in 1961 and he was forced to resign, he was succeeded by his assistant, Dean Smith. You might have heard of him.

     Smith, incidentally, was not rooting for North Carolina in the 1957 title game. He was an assistant coach at Air Force then and attended the national semifinals and finals -- not yet known as "The Final Four" -- in Kansas City with a couple of friends of McGuire. But he made it clear he was rooting for his alma mater, Kansas. He had been a little-used guard on the Jayhawks' 1952 NCAA championship team.

      But when McGuire, impressed with the young man, offered his assistant's job a year later, Smith became a Tar Heel ... for life.

---

     Amazing thing about North Carolina's 32-0 season in 1956-57 is that four of its victories went overtime, and its last two games (Michigan State and Kansas) were triple overtimes.

      Also amazing: The Tar Heels played the last 1:45 of regulation and all three OTs vs. Kansas without their star player and leading scorer, 6-5 forward Lennie Rosenbluth, who fouled out with 20 points.

      And yet, they held off the mighty Wilt, who finished with 29 points and 13 rebounds. Of course, they surrounded him whenever they could, but at the end, Wilt's foul led to Carolina's decisive two free throws.

     Chamberlain, already a future NBA "territorial" draft pick by his hometown Philadelphia Warriors, wound up at Kansas when recruited by legendary coach Phog Allen and -- secretly -- cash payments by KU boosters.

    As a freshman, not eligible for varsity play, he had 42 points and 29 rebounds to lead the freshmen to a 10-point victory over the varsity.

     A year later in his varsity debut against Northwestern, Wilt shattered KU and Big Seven Conference records with 52 points and 31 rebounds. He was a record-setter in many ways, always.

     But as throughout his NBA career -- which began after he left Kansas after the one varsity year and title-game loss, and a year with the Harlem Globetrotters -- Wilt could be difficult. He was his own man, a super-strong force.

    "Wilt was politely disobedient," a Kansas assistant coach said. "He was a prodigy long before his time. He was well beyond his years physicially, but he still had so much he could learn. Most people learn to accept that they have to be patient with change. Wilt could not be patient with change because he had so much pride in being able to do something well. He had taught himself to shoot the ball, and he had pride in that. That could make him difficult to coach."

    (Funny, I always rooted for Wilt.)

     Kansas lost road games at Iowa State and Oklahoma State -- both times Wilt was stymied by physical play -- and that is why it lost the No. 1 ranking to North Carolina. But Jayhawks' fans were convinced that Wilt would lead them to the national championship.

     Didn't happen. The Best Game Ever tells us why.

       Thanks for the book, George Barclay. Miss you.