A few years ago i wrote a mini-memoir about the first decade of my SU basketball fandom called "Through the Mists of Time". Here some excerpts about Calvin Murphy:
"The most popular games of the 1966-67 season, outside of the St. John’s confrontation, had been the freshman games that preceded the varsity encounters. For years I have been an advocate of having double headers in the Dome with the men’s and women’s teams or of having a junior varsity for players not good enough or not ready for the varsity. It was always fascinating to come into Manley and see a game already going on while the stands filled up, especially when the stars of that team might be the stars of next year’s varsity. In 1966-67, we had a freshman team that might have beaten the varsity. It featured a smooth 6-8 center, Wayne Ward, who would be our answer to the Sonny Doves and Mel Daniels of the world. There was also Ernie Austin, a high scoring guard from Washington DC who was a cousin of former BC All-American John Austin. Ward averaged 20 points and 20 rebounds a game, (actually 19.8/16.1) while Austin averaged 30.0 points a game for the freshman who won all 16 games they played. The two biggest games were against the Niagara freshmen, who were led by Calvin Murphy who was producing an incredible 50 points a game, (48.9) as a frosh. These games were so anticipated that people were actually seen leaving after them and skipping the varsity game. SU won both of them, with the combined weight of Ward’s and Austin’s numbers overcoming the incredible scoring of Murphy.
(I’ve since been able to look up the newspaper articles on those games. SU won the one in Manley Field House 108-96, before a record crowd of 7,105, holding Murphy to a season-low 38 points, (he had scored between 43-66 points in every game), while Austin scored 32 and Ward had 21 points and 19 rebounds. 6-4 Bill Case also had a big game for SU with 25 points and 16 rebounds. A 6-5 lefty named Steve Schaefer scored 28 and had 22 rebounds for Niagara. In the return match, SU won again, 106-101. Murphy scored 46 but Ward had 36, (they didn’t note the rebounds), and Austin 28. Case had only 15 and Schaeffer didn’t play for some reason. In both games Niagara led at halftime, 48-45 and 49-48. SU caught them and pulled away down the stretch, overcoming a 71-83 deficit with a 35-18 run in the second one. We now have entire games that wind up with the half-time scores of those games. They scored the ball in those days.)
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Then a seven game losing streak crushed SU’s season, including another loss to LaSalle and a 20 point blow-out at the hands of Bob Knight’s first really good Army team. But the most notable of these losses was the first confrontation with Niagara with Calvin Murphy on the varsity. It figured that with the SU varsity having 3 starters remaining from a 20-6 team and Ward and Austin having beaten Murphy’s Niagara frosh twice that SU would be able to win this game, which was the first one I recall televised by a local station, with its own announcers. (I think Carl Eilenberg did the play-by-play.) Murphy got his 50, which is still the Manley Field house record but this time his team outscored SU, 107-116.
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The team wound up losing 13 of its last 20. The penultimate game was another loss to Niagara. Things had gotten so bad that Lewis had decided we had to stall to hold the score down. We succeed in holding Murphy to a career-low, (I think it was 16), and won the game 50-49. But had it come to this? Did the team that almost scored 100 a game have to stall and score half that to win? Yes, it had.
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On top of that, somebody had scheduled 10 of the first 11 games on the road, (wouldn’t Dick Vitale love that!). In the second game, SU played at Niagara. Danforth must have been in a macho mood because he junked the stall concept and decided to run with the Eagles. When the smoke had cleared, Calvin Murphy had scored more points than any player had ever scored against a major college team, 68. (Pistol Pete Maravich had 69 vs. Alabama later that year and that record stood for a generation- why LSU and Niagara never scheduled a game in this period is difficult to understand, unless Murphy was the wrong color for the Bayou Bengals). Niagara won, 110-118."
(We also lost to Murphy's team 2/26/69, 92-103 but I didn't write about that game or the next one specifically. I looked those games up on the Post Standard Archive and the article says that Bill Smith actually out-scored Murphy in that one, 33-32 but Niagara was able to pull away at the end by making free throw after free throw: they scored 18 of their last 20 points that way. The teams played once in the 1969-70 season, Niagara winning 83-91. It was Calvin's last home game. We held him to 24 points but Mike Samuel scored 28 and the Purple Eagles were never headed after over-coming an early SU spurt. But help was on the way as Jim Boeheim's 14-1 freshman team beat Niagara's frosh, who had been 16-0, 98-87 behind 29 points by Chuck Wichman, 16 from Mark Wadach and 12 from Mike Lee.