Plus One
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.
SU again bolted out of the gate, going 5-0 against lesser opposition. After the previous year, nobody was getting too excited. Still, it was a surprise when a supposedly mediocre Fordham team blew the Orange away, 75-98. Led by Charlie Yelverton and Kenny Charles and a young coach named Digger Phelps, Fordham would go 26-3 that year, but no one knew it that night. SU lost three of the next four and it seemed like another collapse was imminent. Then a strange thing didn’t happen. SU didn’t collapse.
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 45), 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).
In those days, exams were in January and there was a break in the schedule of two weeks to allow players to study for them and take them. This was sort of an all-star break and there was a tendency to look at a teams record, multiply by two and…. Well, SU had already played 14 of 25 games by that point but the Orange found themselves at 10-4 at the break. They had been 8-5 the year before, having lost five of seven. This time they had won four in a row. Had this team turned the corner?
Well, they started the second half losing to Temple by a point. But then a six game winning streak, including a televised win over nationally ranked LaSalle had SU riding high at 16-5. Then they traveled to Massachusetts, an unheralded team with some kid named Julius Erving. Dr. “J” danced around and jumped over SU defenders for an incredible 36 points and 32 rebounds, (still easily the most ever against a Syracuse team), in a 71-86 SU loss.
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.
SU was paired with Michigan in the first round of the NIT and lost 76-82. It was anti-climactic. We’d had our first winning record in four long seasons. (Four years is a long time if you are a teenager.) We were a tournament team again, (in those days there were far fewer post season teams- 40- than there are NCAA teams today). We were back on the right track and quite a track it was. We’ve had a winning season every year since and been out of post season play only once, when we were on probation.(Now twice, unfortunately.) The bad old days were long gone.
