From my history of the decade before Boeheim became coach "From the Mists of Time":
Roy’s Runts
Bill Smith then left for a brief NBA career. At this point the team really became a bunch of runts. Bob Dooms, a 6-5 220 pounder, took over at center. He was a triple threat. He didn’t score much, didn’t rebound much, (at least not like Bill Smith), and couldn’t pass. But he hustled for 40 minutes and got in the way on defense, (kind of like McForth but without the blocks). Mike Lee and Mark Wadach had as many rebounds as Dooms. Lee, a smooth player who had a knack for finding weaknesses in the defense, dropped in 18 points a game. A newcomer, Dennis “Sweet D” Duval, joined Greg Kohls in a wonderful backcourt. Sweet D put on a globetrotters routine before the game and continued it after the opening tip, scoring 16 a game. But “Kid” Kohls was the star of the team. He was dead-eye shooter, (43%, mostly from long range) and scored 748 points in 1971-72, 26.7 per game, behind only Bing’s 28.4 in 1965-66 in the SU record book. Everybody on the team was between 6-1 and 6-5. Everybody hit the boards. Everybody handled the ball. Everybody hustled after it. Everybody scored some, (even Dooms averaged 8ppg). Nobody on the bench averaged even three points a game. Amazingly, Roy’s Runts turned out to be better than Roy’s Runts plus one.
Another 6-0 start was again ended by American U, the team from Washington DC that SU feared most in those days. Then came another encounter with the Louisville Cardinals, who had just hired John Wooden’s top assistant, Denny Crum. SU went down hard, 81-103, in the opening round of the Holiday festival in New York. In the consolation round we beat a mediocre Duke team, 74-72, one of those scores that looks better on the resume now than it did then. The Orange was 11-3 at the break, then played three overtime games of four when play resumed. The third of these three games is the one I will never forget.
Digger Phelps used his one 26-3 year to get the Notre Dame job. But he left behind most of the players who had created that record for new coach Hal Wissel. It was big test for SU, which still was trying to capture national attention. This was my freshman year at SU and I had gotten an early indication of the struggle our community had for recognition. I lived on the seventh floor of Booth Hall. One Saturday morning, I was in the lobby of our floor, looking out over the seeming vast expanse of Syracuse NY. A friend from New York City wandered by and asked me how I was going to spend my day. I told him I might go down city. He asked what flight I was taking. In those days, we weren’t “the ‘Cuse”. We were Syracuse, New York, the state being necessary to designate us from the Syracuses in Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Utah, and, I suppose, Sicily. Beating Fordham would put a small dent in that perception and I walked the mile down to Manley to see if we could do it.
SU led almost the entire game, just had they had in that first game I’d seen five years before against St. John’s. And, just as happened in that game, the big bad team from New York City pulled ahead in the final minute. The Rams had no Sonny Dove but it sure looked like they were going to win. In the grand tradition, SU fans got up in droves to leave. I admit I did too, but I lingered at the door, starring back at the court, which in those days was constructed right on top of the dirt floor the football team used for indoor practice sessions. The vibrations of the players and heat generated by the fans sent fine particles of dirt and dust flowing up to the rafters. The lights illuminated this and created something approximating a dream sequence. SU had somehow gotten back within a single point but there were only a couple of seconds left and a Fordham player was at the line for a one-and-one. He missed. Somebody ripped the ball down for SU and rifled it to midcourt, where a pass was made to a driving Chuck Wichman- the “scrub” who had destroyed Niagara the year before. Wichman made a running lay-up at the buzzer and what was left of the crowd stormed the court. I ran out into the parking lot shouting “WE WON!!! WE WON!!!!”. People looked at me as if I were crazy. They were right but so was I. Chuck Wichman never scored more than 6 points in a game in his career but no one who remembers that era will ever forget him.
SU immediately lost the next game at Pitt but won its last 8 regular season games to finish at 21-5. But in those restrictive days, that just sent them back to the NIT. There they beat Davidson in the opener, 81-77. The Wildcats had been a national power under Lefty Driesell in the late 60’s. His assistant, Terry Holland, kept the tradition going for a couple of years before moving onto the ACC at Virginia. After that, the Davidson program faded into obscurity. (Until Steph Curry showed up.) But it was a good win back then. Then came the great challenge of the season.
Driesell had moved onto Maryland, where he vowed to turn the program into “The UCLA of the East”, (this was news to Dean Smith). He had used his confidence and charm to recruit a large, talented and deep class, including 6-11 Tom McMillen, 6-9 Len Elmore, 6-8 Jim O’Brien, with 7-0 Mark Cartwright coming off the bench. The Terps front line averaged 6-10, ours 6-3. SU’s only chance was to hit a high percentage of its outside shots. Instead, we proceeded to miss 30 of our first 33 shots. But Maryland wasn’t very sharp either and the best they could mange was 20-35 halftime lead.
Slowly, SU chipped away at that lead, and improbably, was still in the game at the end. Here SU’s strengths- quickness, ball handling, taking and making good shots, came into play. I think we got it down to one and had the ball at one point. Friends had advised me to stop listening to that old geezer, Joel Mareiness, and tune into WAER to listen to the hotshot young announcer they had there. I remember Bob Costas shouting into the mike “Make a good pass, Bobby-PLEASE!!!!” when Dooms wound up with the ball. Unfortunately, it all slipped away and Maryland pulled away to win, 65-71. They went onto crush Jacksonville and Niagara to win the tournament. SU was easily its closest call. We’d beaten the Purple Eagles easily during the regular season. Not for the first time, it seemed we were in the wrong bracket. I ran into my New York City friend, (one of many at SU), and found him muttering “The NIT! We could have WON the NIT”. That was as high as our ambitions could reasonably rise in those days. /
Plus Another One
One of the great teams in the history of High School basketball was the Mount Vernon, NY team of 1970-71, which had Gus Williams, (an NBA star), Ray Williams, (an NBA starter), Robbie Young, (started for Manhattan), Earl Tatum, (Marquette star), and Rudy Hackett who became the latest “plus one” for Roy’s Runts. Rudy was a tall, long-armed 6-8 with wiry strength. He could hit short jumpers and hooks and pound the boards inside. (Not unlike Rakeem Christmas.) He was on SU’s last freshman team with Jimmy Lee, Mike’s younger brother. Coached by Jim Boeheim, they went 17-1. Rudy averaged 18 points and 13 rebounds. Jimmy scored 19 a game. For 1972-73 they moved up to the varsity to join Mike Lee, Dennis Duval, Mark Wadach and Bob Dooms. Together they made for SU’s best team between the Bing and Louis-Bouie years, (yes, better than the ’75 final four team).
In the third game, SU traveled to Tennessee, which was a noted power at the time. I remember Coach Ray Mears being interviewed as to what he thought of Syracuse he said “Hell, everybody wanted that Hackett kid!” He was not able to name any of our other players. Rudy helped put us on the map. We lost that one, 83-87 but I’m sure Mears knew who our players were after that. But in those days, the standards against which SU measured itself were Louisville, and Maryland, two national powers whose paths seemed to cross ours several times. The Terps were waiting in the Maryland Invitational and they got us a second time in the title game, 76-91. Later losses to Temple and (Ugh!) Penn State brought SU’s record to a still respectable 13-4.
Then the Orange put it into overdrive, winning 10 straight, including wins over traditional eastern rivals LaSalle, Fordham, St. John’s, West Virginia, Niagara and Rutgers. This was good enough to get SU into the NCAAs for the third time in its history and a first round win over a tall Furman team gave us a sparkling 23-4 record. Then SU looked up and saw Lefty Driesell staring them in the face again. This time, it was 75-91. The Terps lost to Providence, which was the Northeast’s best program during this era, (and did not deign to play lowly Syracuse), in the regional finals. The Northeast’s best two chances to win a national title between the Tom Gola and Patrick Ewing eras were St. Bonaventure in 1971 and Providence in 1973 but in both cases their big men, Bob Lanier and Marvin Barnes, respectively, went down to injury at exactly the wrong time and they came up short in the Final Four.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the 1972-73 season for Syracuse was the way it ended. They still had regional and national consolation games in those days and SU faced off against Pennsylvania in the Eastern consy. The Quakers had been a national power in that era under coaches Dick Harter and Chuck Daly, going 78-6 the previous three years. They’d been 28-0 in 1971 when they lost to Villanova in the Eastern Regional Finals. This year they were 21-6 going into this game to SU’s 23-5 and it was close throughout. The Orange was down, 65-68 with a few seconds left when they stole two consecutive inbound passes and scored after each to pull out an incredible 69-68 victory over the shocked Quakers. Syracuse would not end a season with a victory again for 30 years.
The next year, Mike Lee and Mark Wadach graduated. To help replace them, SU did something rare. They took a transfer from Southwestern Louisiana, (doesn’t that sound better than “Louisiana-Lafayette”?), which had risen from the small college ranks led by the nation’s leading scorer in Dwight “Bo” Lamar, only to fall victim to NCAA probation. Lamar escaped to the NBA. Two of his teammates came to upstate New York. One was Larry Fogle, who would lead the nation in scoring in 1973-74. Unfortunately, he would do it for Canisius. We got Fred Saunders a 6-7 forward who could score and rebound, (9.8 of each- round it off and he averaged a double-double) and made a good partner for Rudy Hackett, (17 and 12) on the other side of Bob Dooms, (5 and 5). Sweet “D” DuVal had an All-American year with 21 per game in the backcourt and Jimmy Lee popped his jumpers for 14 from the other position in another great backcourt.
This team was potentially better than the previous year’s team, (it was certainly bigger, with Saunders replacing Mike Lee and Mark Wadach), but the whole was somehow less than the sum its parts. The season started out with the usual 6 game winning streak and once more ended in a holiday tournament. SU won no tournaments of any kind between the 1964 Hurricane Classic, (when they won the summit between Dave Bing, Rick Barry and Bill Bradley), and something called the “ECAC Playoffs” in 1975 on the way to the final four.
(I decided to make a list of the tournaments we failed to win over that period and found that this statement wasn’t quite true: We won something called the “Connecticut Classic” on 12/22-23/72, but that’s one of the years for which I have a yearbook and the schedule indicates this was not really a tournament. It was a pair of double-headers with SU scheduled to meet Yale and then Connecticut while the Huskies played Harvard on the first night and Yale played Harvard on the second nigh: they just called it a “Classic”. From 1964-74 we lost three times in the Holiday Festival, twice in the Quaker City Classic and the Charlotte Invitational, once each in the Bruin Classic, the Boston Christmas Tournament, the Far West Classic, the Volunteer Classic, the Maryland Invitational and the Kodak Classic, along with three NCAA tournaments and 4 NITs. That’s 0 for 20.We’ve won 45 tournaments since.)
This time, an inexplicable 22 point loss to Miami- of Ohio, not Florida- beat us in the first round. It was the first of three losses in four games. Five straight wins were followed by another three losses in five games. The teams we were losing to were not Maryland or Louisville but Rutgers, UCONN, Penn State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, the sort of games SU won in a good year. Five more wins and we were able to sneak into the NCAAs through the back door, where we were paired with Oral Roberts, like Southwestern Louisiana a small college that had moved into the major college ranks. An 82-86 overtime loss left us at 19-7, which was a disappointment after 24-5. We were not quite ready for prime time.
