2 years before I was old enough to remember, but I know he is in the pantheon of our goods.
I read all of SWC's stuff for the old timey insight.
Excerpts from my history of my early years of SU basketball rooting, "From the Mists of Time", involving Bill Smith:
"Reading Bud Poliquin’s book, “Tales from the Syracuse Hardwood”, I was reminded of my own early days of rooting for Syracuse University basketball and decided to write up some of my personal memories from that period. One of the players from that period, Bill Smith, says that he has been “lost in the mists of time”. Not to me, he isn’t. But the last part of what he said makes a pretty good title."
" Meanwhile, another great class had been recruited by Fred Lewis and his chief assistant, Roy Danforth. It contained a true “aircraft carrier”, 6-11 Bill Smith, who, according to Sports Illustrated, Lewis “compared favorably to (Lew) Alcindor”, (now known as Kareem Abdul Jabbar). Beside him was a high scoring 6-7 forward, Bob McDaniel and another good prospect, 6-5 Bill Finney. The frosh backcourt contained 6-0 distributor Tom Green and a local product, John Unger, from our high school in North Syracuse. This team averaged 98 points a game, losing only to nationally ranked junior college Broome Tech. Smith scored 21.0 a game and got 13.6 rebounds. McDaniel topped that with 24.8 a game and 16.1 rebs. Finney scored 18.3 with 7.4 rebs. Green averaged 14.0, (I don’t have the assists but they must have been considerable.) Unger averaged 9.0.
Harper, Hicker and Cornwall were seniors but SU was looking at a line-up of Smith at center, surrounded by Ward and McDaniel, with Austin and Green in the backcourt for 1968-69. This was an era when the average center was about 6-7 and the average forward 6-4. We were going to go 6-8, 6-11, 6-7. Take that, Sonny Dove! Our team was going to look like a church, with the large steeple supported by flying buttresses. All you had to do was open the doors of Manley and see all the people who would come to see them. "
"Roy Danforth inherited a mess. Harper, Hicker and Cornwall were gone now. Wayne Ward who had had a decent sophomore season, averaging 13 points and 6 rebounds and shooting 58%, was lost due to academic and legal problems. Ernie Austin who had a poor sophomore season, shooting 37%, was academically ineligible for the first half of the season. Bob McDaniel aced that by flunking out of school, (although he returned for the next season). There were rumors about Bill Smith’s status but he managed to stay eligible. SU’s media guide for 1968-69 says, truthfully, “At the pre-season stage, it is hard to pinpoint a genuine strength.”
"The next year, things were looking up. Smith was back, Austin was available for the whole season and McDaniel had worked his way back into school and was ready to take his place next to Smith. Ward, unfortunately, was gone for good and SU never did adequately fill the other forward position. Tom Green never scored much as a point guard but Smith averaged 20.2 points and 12.4 rebounds, McDaniel 17.8 and 10.6 and Austin 19.3 points a game. SU scored 86.5 for the season. They ripped off wins in their first six games and it looked like the storm clouds were gone. I remember feeling giddy with the 6-0 record, (11 wins in 13 dating back to the end of the previous season) feeling like things were where they belonged. The fever had broken! Bring on the world!
Then the world fell on us. It started with a loss at American U., coached by future Rutgers coach and Boeheim rival Tom Young. SU went on to lose 12 of their final 18 games to finish 12-12. The problem was, this team played no defense. Six different teams scored 100 points vs. SU. Bob McDaniel scored 36 on 18 for 22 shooting and Smith had 28 points and 21 rebounds against LaSalle but we still lost, 101-108. The defensive nadir in SU history was a game vs. Pittsburgh, a team that had been averaging 65 points a game. SU scored 71 points in one half against them- and lost 108-127, the most point s a Syracuse team has ever surrendered in a game. The season ended with a dismal 77-106 loss to Bowling Green.
Bill Smith didn’t play in that game, having slugged a referee, (on Valentine’s Day), in the West Virginia game:
http://www.wvusports.com/page.cfm?section=4945
(From Bud Poliquin’s book, “Tales of the Syracuse Hardwood”: “With 61 seconds left in the game, with Smith having been called for a questionable fifth foul and with Smith insisting that he’d just been slapped in the face by official Herb Young, who’d been offended by the complaining Orangeman’s salty tongue, Smith hauled off an punched the referee. And the joint went up for grabs. “Immediately, there are these two cops, one on each of my arm”, Smith recalled, “But I shake them off and when I do a fan grabs me by my feet and tackles me to the ground. And just like that there must have been 500 people on the court with fistfights like you wouldn’t believe. My mother, father sister and fiancé were there. My dad got the guy who tackled me and was punching him in the face My sister was out there, swinging her purse. Somebody had ripped off my sneaker and was hitting me over the head with it. Greg ‘Kid’ Kohl, who everybody always thought was so mild-mannered, uppercutted one guy once and then he uppercutted him again before the guy decided he’d had enough. It was wild. It was a melee. You really had to see it to believe it.“
I thought he had ended his a career, (Per Bud, Danforth had advised him to leave school and join the Army), but it turned out only to be the end of his season. At the end of the year Bob McDaniel left again, having played only one full year with the varsity. (He played in one game the next year and scored 14 points with rebounds against Buffalo before deciding not to show up for practice and being suspended for good- what a waste!) With both he and Ward gone, the team would be called “Roy’s Runts plus one” the next year. And after Smith graduated, they were only “Roy’s Runts”. That beautiful church steeple with the flying buttresses had collapsed. But we kept the faith and it paid off. We’ve had nothing but winning seasons ever since."
"At the beginning of the 1970-71 season, Bill Smith found himself surrounded by Mike Lee, who was 6-3 and Mark Wadach, who was 6-1. They were the forwards. Tom Green, 5-11, was back at the point. The shooting guard was Greg “Kid” Kohls, 6-1, who had played behind Austin the previous season, averaging only 2.2 points per game. Green had averaged 4.5. Lee and Wadach had been on the freshman team. It wasn’t very promising. But Kohls could shoot. Lee was a good all-around player who averaged 16.7 points and 7.6 rebounds for the frosh. Wadach was a rebounding savant who averaged 12.4/8.6. He’d played on the greatest high school basketball team this area had ever seen, the “Green Machine” of Bishop Ludden, who’d won the state championship poll after going 21-0 in 1968-69. The frosh also supplied Chuck Wichman, a 6-3 160 string bean from Indiana, (I remember people saying that if he’s from Indiana, he must be good). who had averaged 13.7/6/9.
An overtime win over Bob Knight’s last Army team helped but the game I remember was against Lafayette, a troublesome team led by Tracy Tripucka, one of several sons of an athletic family, (Frank Tripucka had been a quarterback at Notre Dame and in the early AFL and Tracy’s brother Kelly was later a star at Notre Dame). Tracy did something I’ve never seen before or since. He scored 7 points in 10 seconds. He drove in for a lay-up, was fouled but scored and went to the line. Roy Danforth drew a bench technical, which was one shot in those days. Tripucka made both free throws for a four-point play and the Leopards inbounded. The ball went to Tripucka who drove to the basket, was fouled and scored. He then made that free throw, (they are free throws when they go in and foul shots when they don’t). This time Danforth kept his mouth shut. Seven points in ten seconds. That’s 42 points a minute and 1,680 points per 40 minutes. Tracy didn’t keep that rate up but he did score 41 while his team got 92 points. But he was the second highest scorer in that game. Bill Smith broke SU’s single game scoring record, topping Dave Bing’s performance vs. Vanderbilt in the Bruin Classic by one with 47 points. More than 30 years later, (now 48), that’s still the SU record.
Smitty was a tall, Ichabod Crane type guy, (6-11 220) who could run the court, hit short jumpers and was able to consistently score over the shorter people that were always guarding him. I think he could play today with another 20-30 pounds on him. He averaged 22.7 as a senior along with 14.5 rebounds. But he’d been doing that for three years. The big revelation was Kid Kohls, who proved a dead-eye long range shooter (46%, along- almost all from outside), and added an extra “zero” to his scoring average, going from 2.2 to 22.0. Mike Lee proved to be an interesting find, scoring 13.5 and getting 8 rebounds a game despite being only 6-3. He was our “power” forward. Wadach, meanwhile was not much of a scorer at 7.1 but he could jump and hustled for 40 minutes, getting 7.1 rebs/game. Green got 5.4 assists a game. There was no depth, so those guys played entire games, (without TV time outs)."
"Two more wins and SU went into the final game vs. Niagara’s Purple Eagles, their big rivalry game at the time, with an 18-6 record. It was rumored that the winner of this game would go to the NIT, which seemed like a pipe dream after what had happened the previous three seasons. Calvin Murphy was gone but Niagara still had an All-America candidate in Marshall Wingate. The two teams battled back and forth for 40 minutes, with the lead changing hands many times. Niagara led 58-59 with about 3 minutes left. Then came an agonizing stretch in which both teams had the ball six straight times without scoring a point. Then, with 20 seconds left, the rarely used reserve from Indiana, Chuck Wichman, who averaged just 3.5 points per game, got the ball and forked his way through the defense for a twisting lay-up that even Joel Mareiness couldn’t find words to describe. Somewhere around here I have a gnarled old audio cassette tape I made off the radio broadcast. I remember Joel describing the very end of the game, when Wingate missed and Smith pulled down the rebound. The fans stormed the court “They’re mobbing the Giant…” I played it over and over so many times it became the family joke. I valued that tape more than any other possession for some time to come."
