True Sons: Undaunted, Undefeated

Garris, a freshman, had been sensational—he scored thirty-one points in the game—but he had never been in such a spot. He stepped to the line, the lane vacant, the other players reduced to spectators. Garris entered the game shooting 94 percent from the line, but as he stood there, nerves shot and legs spent, the basket might as well have been fifty feet away. He focused on the hoop. He breathed in and out. He put up his first shot. It hit the rim and bounced away. There were shrieks, moans, cheers. And then all of the air was sucked out of the building as Garris prepared to shoot again, feeling pressure like never before. He squared up and released. But after so much fight, the radar was gone. The ball bounced away harmlessly. On to a third overtime.

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True Sons: Season on the Brink

There has never been another season like it, none that flirted so closely with triumph and tragedy, none in which such intense pressure collided with such ferocious play. The 1988–89 Tigers played for their own pride, for the integrity of the institution, and for the coach they nearly lost along the way.

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True Sons: The Arrival

Read about the birth of a Big Eight dynasty here.

The first call came from St. Louis, the second from Kansas City. By the time Norm Stewart put down the phone, he knew his program was about to take a giant leap forward, but he did his best to contain his joy. "We're very pleased with both Steve and Jon," he said in an act of staggering understatement. He had just received commitments that would change the course of Missouri basketball.

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True Sons: The Magic Show

Willie Smith put up gaudy numbers throughout his career at Missouri, but he was never motivated by individual glory. He scored for the good of the team. Smith and his teammates came from diverse backgrounds, but they shared a blinding desire to win. Even more than he loved to win, though, Mr. Magic hated to be embarrassed. One of the proudest players ever to wear the black and gold, Smith took defeat personally. Late into the night before the Kansas State game, Smith and roommate Jeff Currie talked about the mission that faced them. K-State's guards Chuckie Williams and Mike Evans formed one of the nation's best backcourts, and they had humiliated the Tigers a month earlier by leaving the Hearnes Center with a win, the only time Smith ever tasted defeat in Columbia. Already keyed up for the challenge, Smith found further motivation during the walk from Mizzou's hotel to the field house. Kansas State's fans were out in force, taunting the Tigers along the way. Smith was incensed, but managed to keep a cool exterior. "Just wait till you get inside," he thought to himself.

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True Sons: The Legend of John Brown

Today's excerpt takes us back to the 1972-73 season when the Tigers moved into the Hearnes Center and big farewell to John Brown, the first superstar of the Norm Stewart era.

The new building featured a space-age Tartan floor, an exotic gray court that the players loathed. The rubbery surface prevented them from sliding, and it dampened sound such that they could not hear the ball bounce, a disorienting experience for players who grew up on hardwood. Despite the new environment and crowds often well below the 12,600 capacity, the Tigers maintained the home-court edge that had become a hallmark of the Stewart era and rode it to the best start in half a century. Against Ohio, before a packed house, John Brown christened the building with a midrange jumper, and he and five other Tigers—Al Eberhard, Mike Jeffries, Orv Salmon, Gary Link, and sophomore Felix Jerman—tallied double figures. Attendance dropped sharply after opening night. Only 7,714 fans saw Brown collect thirty-five points and fifteen rebounds in a win over Purdue that moved the Tigers to 4–0.

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True Sons: Enter Norm Stewart

Columbia was football crazy in the 1960s, so much so that basketball was an afterthought on campus. In his first nine years at Missouri, coach Dan Devine had presided over nine winning seasons and had taken the Tigers to three New Year's Day bowl games. As such, mediocrity by the hoops squad might have been tolerated. Humiliation, however, was something different. And so it came as no surprise when a pair of football legends accepted Bob Vanatta's resignation. That was the easy part for Don Faurot and Devine, who was set to succeed the retiring Faurot as athletic director. The hard part was to find the right man to revive the program. They made their choice just four days after the end of the 1966–67 season. Missouri would wait thirty-two years to hire another men's basketball coach.

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True Sons: Breaking the Barrier

Today's excerpt takes us back a half century, to when Al Abram stepped on to the basketball court and and forever changed the University of Missouri.

It was the start of a long, slow fade for Sparky Stalcup. In his first ten years at Missouri, his teams finished second in the conference five times. But after Norm Stewart's graduation, they would never again place higher than fourth. Though his clubs were not devoid of talent, Stalcup could not match the enormous firepower that found its way to Lawrence and Manhattan. Part of that was due to his personal fabric. When it came to recruiting, Stalcup was ethical to a fault and even a bit naïve to the way the game was changing. He believed to his core that basketball should be just one piece of the university experience. He believed in students who played basketball, not basketball players who dabbled in education. "A school like Missouri will not relax its educational requirements for the sake of getting an exceptional athlete," he said. "The era of the dumb athlete is fast drawing to a close." He abhorred the corrupt recruiting practices that became more prevalent in the 1950s and railed against them. He believed that under-the-table payments were being made to the best big men, the kinds of players that were changing the game. He blamed alumni for brokering deals and blamed coaches for turning a blind eye. He feared for the integrity of the game.

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True Sons: War and Glory

Today's excerpt: 1943-44 and the arrival of Jumpin' Dan Pippin.

In 1938, enrollment at MU had surged past five thousand. By 1943 it was down to fifteen hundred as men went off to war. But even as other activities around campus and the country were curtailed, college athletics—including Big Six basketball—carried on to help boost morale on the home front. Even so, Kansas coach Phog Allen undoubtedly was right in his assessment that "not many people will take a wartime championship seriously. With us here athletics are simply incidental to the war effort."

That effort had decimated the Tigers. Thornton Jenkins, Pleasant Smith, and others should have led Missouri's fight for a Big Six title. Instead, they were engaged in a fight of infinitely greater consequence. And with a dwindling student population, George Edwards's immediate challenge was not to win the conference; it was simply to field a team.

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True Sons: Meanwell Arrives

Today's excerpt takes us back to the 1917-18 season, when a charter member of the Basketball Hall of Fame arrived in Columbia and laid a foundation that would help make the Tigers the nation's best team over the ensuing six-year span.

Few athletes are as largely forgotten as those who played basketball before World War II. Everyone knows legends from other fields of play: Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Joe Louis. But ask even a knowledgeable basketball fan to name a handful of great pre-war players and you're likely to receive a blank stare.

There are good reasons for this, not the least of which is basketball was a second-tier game in those days, far less popular than baseball, college football, or boxing. It also lacked a national stage, with the NIT and the NCAA Tournament coming into existence only in 1938 and 1939, respectively. Finally, and no less important, players from that era have been eradicated from the record books. Slower play, shorter seasons, and freshman ineligibility guaranteed this. Players simply could not score enough points during games, seasons, or careers to compete with more recent athletes, and statistics like rebounds and assists were not officially kept. This amnesia is unfortunate, especially for Missouri basketball loyalists, because the Tiger players of that era rank among the most accomplished in school history.

Yet more anonymous than the players of that era are its coaches, even the great ones. As evidence, try asking Missouri fans to name a coach who took over the Tiger program in his early thirties. Some will pick Quin Snyder, who arrived in Columbia in 1999 after serving as an assistant at Duke. Others might choose Norm Stewart, who returned to his alma mater in 1967 after six years as head coach at the State College of Iowa. But few—probably none—will mention Walter Meanwell, who became Missouri's coach in 1917 at age thirty-three. That is more than a little ironic because while Snyder and Stewart came to Columbia looking to build legacies at a major program, Meanwell arrived already established as the finest coach in the brief history of college basketball.

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True Sons Excerpt: The First Tigers

Beginning today and extending over the next two weeks, PowerMizzou.com will run ten excerpts from True Sons, A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball. We start, appropriately enough, at the beginning, with the first team to don the black and gold. We continue tomorrow with the birth of a long-forgotten dynasty. Click on the intro below to go straight to the first excerpt.

From modest beginnings came magical things. Inside a little gymnasium on the edge of campus, a few young men formed a team and founded a tradition that would provide a century's worth of thrills. The rich history of Missouri Tigers basketball begins with them, players who toiled for little more than the pride of their school and a love of the game, but whose efforts would come to mean more than they could ever have imagined.

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Quick Hits

One of the world’s worst-kept secrets was confirmed this week, when it was announced that Glen Dandridge has left Mizzou’s basketball team. As much as you can be happy for someone in a situation like this, I’m happy for Glen, who by all accounts is a great kid, and (as a basketball player, at least) needs a change of scenery as much as anyone I can remember. After Dandridge signed with Mizzou, a prominent recruiting analyst raved to me about Glen’s shooting range, and people inside the program have long been impressed with his play in off-season workouts and pre-season practices. But it just never happened for him at game time. In three seasons in Columbia, Dandridge never got hot from three-point range. And that’s not hyperbole. It just never happened, not even once, which is amazing (if you need evidence, I can produce the numbers). Here’s hoping he can find a place where he can relax, finish his degree, make a lot of shots, and be at home and happy.

Dandridge’s departure opens a scholarship and raises the question of how, if at all, the Tigers fill it. Suffice it to say, it’s hard to find impact players come late April (there are a few rumors, ranging from credible to less so, about who the staff might be pursuing), but given the fact that six more scholarships open up a year from now, it sure would be nice to find a player now. That said, there’s no point in committing to a player with only slight prospects of helping the team. If the staff can’t find the right player, I hope they’ll consider rewarding senior walk-on Nick Berardini with a scholarship in his final season. Berardini gives maximum effort for minimum glory, and he may be the most enthusiastic guy I’ve ever seen on Missouri’s bench.

Noted without comment: “[Brandon Rush] said over the weekend the classes he takes now are ‘easy,’ but he has run out of easy ones.”

I had a great time speaking to the Cass County Alumni Chapter last night, and the event reaffirmed to me the obligation I had to be accurate with Missouri’s basketball history in the book. People remember. One gentleman wanted to talk about Redford Reichert, who played for the Tigers in the middle 1950s. Another recalled the injury that Mizzou center Bob Allen suffered in 1971. Yet another remembered watching Missouri teams coached by George Edwards. Edwards, for the uninitiated, retired in 1946.

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Late Night Hoops Talk on KMOX

I'll be on the Mark Reardon Show on KMOX (1120 AM in St. Louis) on Wednesday night at 11:15 p.m. to talk Mizzou hoops history on the eve of the Big 12 Tournament. You can listen over the air or on-line at kmox.com.

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Shameless Plug Alert

I'll be selling and signing copies of True Sons on Tuesday, March 6, at the Kansas City Tiger Club's final regular meeting of the spring. It's at noon at Lidia's in the Freighthouse District near Crown Center (roughly 22nd and Baltimore).

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