Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

  “I know you’re all set at Duquesne,” Skorich said. “But would you go to Cincinnati for a tryout?”

  What the heck, Twyman thought.

  He took an all-night bus ride and arrived in Cincinnati at 8 a.m. on a Saturday. Head coach John Wiethe picked him up at the bus station and took him straight to the Men’s Gym, where UC players Joe Luchi, Bob Frith, and Jim Holstein were waiting for him.

  “Wiethe wanted to see what I had—or what I didn’t have,” Twyman said. “After about 10 minutes, it was obvious they were instructed to beat me up and see if I could take it. About 30 minutes into the two-on-two scrimmage, I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I’m all set at Duquesne. I’m going back to Pittsburgh. But before I go, I’m going to let these guys know that I’ve been here.’

  “So I started knocking heads myself. And I guess that impressed Wiethe.”

  The coach took Twyman out for a big steak lunch. Players showed him around campus. Everyone urged Twyman to become a Bearcat.

  “I liked the city,” Twyman said. “It was close enough to get home to Pittsburgh.”

  I think I’m going to Cincinnati, he decided.

  Just like that, a Hall of Fame career was born.

  Oh, and Twyman’s mother was none too happy about his change of heart. Her boy would be leaving home.

  TONY TRABERT

  Tony Trabert has been faced with this question a few times: Did you really have a tough decision to make, whether to play basketball or tennis professionally?

  Trabert laughs. “Not even close,” he said.

  The Cincinnati native did play basketball for the Bearcats, but his accomplishments as a pro athlete came on the tennis court. Trabert was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1970.

  “The reason I played basketball really, is because we had no indoor tennis facilities in Cincinnati,” Trabert said. “And in the winter time, you couldn’t play much. I wanted to stay in shape and help my hand-eye coordination.

  “Was I good? I was not a very good shooter. I was a good defender and I was a good floor general.”

  Trabert played four years of basketball at Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills High School and was team co-captain as a senior. When he went to UC in 1948, he tried out for the freshman basketball team.

  To that point, Trabert had not won any national tennis titles. The national junior indoor championships were in St. Louis that December, and Trabert dropped off the basketball team in order to compete in the tennis event.

  He ended up winning singles and doubles titles there, then returned to school. In the spring 1950, Cincinnati native Bill Talbert—also a future tennis Hall of Famer—called Trabert and asked him to go to Europe with him to play doubles. Trabert accepted.

  Trabert rejoined the UC basketball team for the 1950-51 season. He was the sixth man until Larry Imburgia suffered a serious knee injury early in the season. Trabert then moved into the starting lineup.

  “I wish I hadn’t been starting because he was such a good player,” Trabert said of Imburgia.

  “We were just a bunch of hustling guys. No superstars. We played full-court press and fast break—which suited what I was trying to accomplish. (Coach John) Wiethe worked us hard in practice so games were easy.

  “I love sports. When I was growing up, we had no money. We lived by a playground in Bond Hill. My dad said, ‘I want to keep you kids occupied in sports so you don’t have time to be a drugstore cowboy.’ So I played tennis, baseball, and basketball and I swam. I was a catcher in Knothole baseball. Maybe at 13, my dad said, ‘If you want to try to excel in a sport, you should give up one or another.’ So I gave up baseball.

  Guard Tony Trabert (33) moved into the Bearcats’ starting lineup in 1950-51 after Larry Imburgia was injured. Trabert averaged seven points a game, and the team finished 18-4 after losing to St. Bonaventure 70-67 in double-overtime in the NIT. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  “I like team sports. I didn’t have to be the guy to make the last basket, but I wanted somebody from our team to do it. And I like the idea of the teamwork. On the other hand, I like the idea of being out there on an island by yourself, where if you do well you get credit for it and if you don’t, you take the blame.”

  Trabert averaged 7.0 points for UC in 1950-51, then won the NCAA tennis title that spring.

  In September 1951, he joined the navy. That summer, a commanding officer told Trabert not to worry about reporting to the reserves, just to keep in touch until the summer tennis season was over.

  Trabert said he was able to make it to Boston to play in a tennis tournament, and his father called to tell him: “You’re going to be drafted.”

  “Some parents wrote poison-pen letters saying, ‘My kid’s in Korea, why is he playing tennis?’ So they said, ‘We’ll just draft him,’” Trabert recalled.

  He went to Bainbridge, Maryland, for boot camp, then on to Norfolk, Virginia. The next day, he went to an aircraft carrier and spent 16 months on the Coral Sea. He spent three months in North Island Coronado off the coast of San Diego. Trabert was out of the navy by June 1953.

  He returned to UC and played the final eight basketball games of the 1953-54 season. He played tennis that spring, left school without a degree in June 1954 and did not return to the classroom.

  “At that stage of my life, I knew tennis was going to be my career,” he said.

  “I did the best I could do in basketball. I had no illusions. They’re all good memories for me. But I certainly had more ability as a tennis player.”

  He would go on to win 10 Grand Slam titles—five singles and five doubles. After Trabert captured the French Championships in 1955, the next American to win in Paris would be Michael Chang—a mere 34 years later.

  Trabert’s 1955 season is considered one of the greatest in men’s tennis history. That year, Trabert won singles titles at Wimbledon, the French Championships, and the U.S. Championships. He also won U.S. Clay Court and U.S. Indoor championships. In all, he won 30 titles (18 singles, 12 doubles) and finished the year with a 106-7 record in singles matches, at one point winning 36 in a row.

  SANDY KOUFAX

  You may have heard or read that Sandy Koufax was a scholarship basketball player at the University of Cincinnati. Or, that Koufax surprised UC coaches and walked on to the Bearcats basketball team in the fall 1953. “He just showed up,” assistant coach Ed Jucker was quoted as saying in Jane Leavy’s book Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. “I didn’t know him from anything.”

  Neither account is exactly true, according to Koufax.

  “I was invited to walk on,” he said.

  Koufax, from Brooklyn, New York, was captain of his basketball team as a senior at Lafayette High School. He said he knew two guys in New York who had played at UC—he can’t recall their names—and they recommended him to Bearcats coach George Smith. They also told Koufax it would be a good place for him.

  Koufax liked the idea of UC’s co-op program. “Being out of school half the time sounded good to me,” he said with a laugh. Koufax started as a liberal arts major and had designs on transferring into architecture.

  He ended up making the UC freshman basketball team and received some form of financial aid. Koufax started and averaged 9.7 points a game.

  “Sandy was a great basketball player,” said Jack Twyman, who was a junior when Koufax was a freshman. “He was not very tall, but he was a great leaper. He was the first guy who could really go up over people and dunk. I was amazed at how high he could jump. He wasn’t a great shooter, but just very aggressive, a very good athlete.”

  Born Sanford Braun, former UC basketball and baseball player Sandy Koufax (standing second from the right) went on to a Hall of Fame baseball career. In 12 years in the major leagues, Koufax went 165-87 with a 2.76 career earned-run average. He was a six-time All-Star dubbed “The Man with the Golden Arm.” (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  “Sandy was real fluent,” basketball
and baseball teammate Danny Gilbert said. “He was graceful on the basketball court.”

  In the spring 1954, UC’s baseball and tennis teams were going to take a joint trip to Florida and New Orleans. (Trabert was going to be on that trip, too, to play a match against Tulane’s Ham Richardson.) Koufax had never been to New Orleans and was eager to go.

  “Basically, it sounded like a great road trip,” he said.

  Koufax had planned to go out for the baseball team anyway, he said, but the prospects of the trip “made up my mind definitely. I kind of knew I was going to be a baseball player, I think.”

  Jucker, who coached UC’s freshman basketball team, was in his first year as the varsity baseball coach.

  “I told Jucker I wanted to play baseball,” Koufax said.

  Koufax attended team tryouts in Schmidlapp Gym. Gilbert and Koufax were the only freshmen basketball players to walk on to the baseball team, too. As it turns out, Koufax was a pitcher and Gilbert a catcher.

  “He could really bring the ball, but he was so wild,” Gilbert said. “If he could get it over the plate, nobody at the college level could really hit him. But he would have to ease up to try to get it over.

  “I knew once he was able to get his control, he could be a very dominating pitcher. For a time, he was probably the hardest pitcher to hit in the history of the major leagues.”

  Koufax pitched just one season for the Bearcats, going 3-1 with a 2.81 ERA. He struck out 51 batters and walked 30. He never even told his family he was playing on the baseball team.

  That was the only year Koufax attended the University of Cincinnati. The Brooklyn Dodgers signed Koufax, who started his major league baseball career in 1955 and went on to be arguably the greatest left-handed pitcher in history. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

  Koufax returned to the UC campus in February 2000, when the 83-year-old Jucker was honored at halftime of a UC-DePaul basketball game. “Ed was just a nice guy,” Koufax said. “It was fun to play for him. He was so intense. If somebody cares that much, it’s hard not to like him and not to want to play for him.”

  Asked if he considers himself a Bearcat, Koufax said, “I still root for them.”

  2

  FIVE UNFORGETTABLE GAMES

  LOYOLA 60, UC 58 (OT) MARCH 23, 1963, NCAA FINAL

  The University of Cincinnati had won back-to-back national championships and was going for three in a row. UC was playing in its fifth consecutive Final Four, something no school had done to that point. The Bearcats blasted seventh-ranked Oregon 80-46 in the semifinals to set up their meeting with No. 3 Loyola (Illinois), the highest-scoring team in the country, in the 1963 NCAA title game.

  No. 1-ranked UC was 26-1—its only loss coming at Wichita State, 65-64, in February.

  The coaches stayed up until 4 a.m. preparing for Loyola. Tony Yates, the team captain and starting guard, became sick the afternoon of the game and was taken to Methodist Hospital in Louisville for treatment. About 15 minutes before tipoff, Yates joined his teammates on the court.

  Still, it didn’t look like coach Ed Jucker’s team was going to have to sweat it out. The Bearcats were ahead 45-30 with 14 minutes remaining.

  “At that point, I was hoping we would lose respectably,” Loyola All-American Jerry Harkness told The Cincinnati Post in 1987.

  But UC players George Wilson and Tom Thacker got in foul trouble, and Loyola managed to crawl back into the game, which was played at Louisville’s Freedom Hall. In the final 10 minutes, UC went into a controlled offense and tried to run time off the clock.

  The strategy seemed to backfire. The Bearcats had just one field goal in the final 14 minutes of regulation. Yates got in foul trouble. So did leading scorer Ron Bonham.

  Cincinnati was ahead by one point when Harkness fouled Larry Shingleton with 12 seconds left in regulation. Loyola called a timeout. Jucker had plenty to tell his players, too.

  “To this day, I couldn’t tell you one word he said,” Shingleton said. “I was on the bench praying.”

  Shingleton swished the first free throw. He turned around and looked at Yates, who had a big grin on his face. UC led 54-52.

  But Shingleton missed the next foul shot; the ball bounced off the rim to the right. Loyola’s Vic Rouse rebounded it, threw the ball to Ron Miller, who took several steps according to players from both teams (but wasn’t called for traveling) and passed the ball to Harkness, who went in for a layup that sent the game into overtime.

  Loyola then won 60-58 on a rebound basket by the six-foot-six Rouse with one second left in the extra period. The Ramblers only shot 27.4 percent from the field; UC shot 49 percent.

  “At halftime, we had Loyola completely under control,” Bonham said. “The guy guarding me said, ‘You’ve got one helluva team.’ It just wasn’t to be. You never get over that. We could’ve played them another 50 times and beaten them. I had 22 points and I don’t think I took a shot the last 10 minutes of the game.”

  The 1963 NCAA runner-up trophy came home to Cincinnati by bus without much fanfare. The trophy is now proudly displayed in the Richard E. Lindner Center, the centerpiece of the University’s $105 million Varsity Village, which opened in 2006. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  More than 35 years later, Shingleton was at a hardware store, signing a credit card slip at the cash register when the woman checking him out noticed the NCAA championship ring he was wearing and asked what it was for. Shingleton told her.

  Then the man standing next to Shingleton in line blurted out, “Yeah, if he’d have made that damn free throw in ’63, we would’ve won three in a row.”

  “Invariably, somewhere every year, somebody will say, ‘Are you the guy who missed the free throw?’ People often become infamous, if you will, on the basis of what they fail to do, not what they did do,” Shingleton said.

  “I know one thing: I didn’t choke. I didn’t freeze. I swished the first one. The reason I missed, the ball rolled off the wrong fingers on my left hand. I’ve never said (the loss) was my fault. I always said, ‘Boy, I had a hell of an opportunity to be the youngest senator from the state of Ohio.’ If I had made that free throw, we would’ve been the only team in history—at that point—to win three in a row.”

  That was Shingleton’s last organized basketball game.

  There is a picture of Shingleton missing the foul shot, with the scoreboard partially visible. Since 1964, he has sent out roughly 50 cards, often including a copy of the photo, to what he calls members of the “Woulda/Coulda/Shoulda Been a Hero Club.”

  Georgetown guard Fred Brown got one of Shingleton’s notes of encouragement after he threw a pass right to North Carolina’s James Worthy at the end of the 1982 NCAA championship basketball game. Michigan’s Chris Webber got one after he called a timeout at the end of the 1993 NCAA final against North Carolina (the Wolverines were out of timeouts and were called for a technical foul). Florida State kicker Xavier Beitia got one in 2002 after missing a 43-yard field goal (wide left) as time expired in a 28-27 loss to rival Miami (Florida).

  “What I always say is there’s life after missed free throws, missed field goals or whatever,” Shingleton said.

  In 2003, he was with his mother and grandson having lunch at a Ruby Tuesday in Cincinnati. On the television, as part of Black History Month, was a replay of the 1963 NCAA final between UC and Loyola.

  Shingleton couldn’t help but watch. “You know,” he said, “I missed that free throw again on the instant replay.”

  When he got home that day, he called Yates.

  “All these years I’ve been taking the flak for losing the game,” he told his former teammate. “But damn it, Thacker didn’t box out!”

  UC 75, BRADLEY 73 (7OT) DECEMBER 21, 1981

  No Division I game in NCAA history has lasted longer. Seven overtimes. Seventy-five minutes of playing time. Three hours, 15 minutes of high drama.

  “My heart was racing the entire game,” UC’s Jelly Jones said afterward
.

  There was no shot clock, so in the overtime periods, the teams mostly held the ball. During the third overtime, neither team scored. No team got more than four points in any overtime period.

  The unlikely hero would turn out to be Doug Schloemer, a senior reserve and former Mr. Basketball in Kentucky who averaged 4.8 points that season.

  Schloemer had a key offensive rebound in the sixth OT, then hit a jumper to tie the game at 73 and send it to a seventh extra period.

  Neither team had scored in the seventh OT. UC had the ball in the final seconds and called timeout. Point guard Junior Johnson was supposed to penetrate to the basket. If nobody picked him up, he was going to go all the way to the goal. If the defense collapsed on him, he was expected to pitch the ball out to one of the wings. Bobby Austin would be on the right side, Schloemer on the left.

  Well, Johnson was swarmed and Austin was being shadowed. The ball came out to Schloemer, who was about 18 feet out, foul line extended. He caught it and launched the shot with defender Voise Winters running at him hard.

  “I don’t know how he missed it,” Schloemer said. “He came crashing by me. It’s one of those things, when you let a shot go, you know it’s in. It felt good.”

  There was one second left. After a timeout, Bradley inbounded the ball and got off a 20-foot attempt that bounced off the rim.

  “My body’s tired,” Bearcats forward Kevin Gaffney said after the game. “I feel like an old man. I don’t know how old people feel, but if it’s like this, it’s a terrible feeling.”

  The six-foot-five Schloemer, from Holmes High School in Covington, Kentucky, finished with just six points but was three of three from the field.

  “I was soaking wet,” UC coach Ed Badger recalled. “I was exhausted. I was getting tired of climbing up and down on that (raised) floor (at old Bradley Arena). It was a long, long game. It was really fun when you think about it now.”