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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4623160, member: 289"] 1976-77 The obvious replacement for Roy Danforth seemed to be Jim Boeheim. After he graduated, Jim played in the Eastern League. The Bulls might have given him a shot at the NBA but he thought better of it and started his coaching career instead. (It must have been exciting to see his son Buddy later sign a contract with the Pistons). Danforth gave him a job coaching the SU freshmen – Roy’s old job. Jim coached them from 1969-72, during which they won 50 games and lost 4, (can’t we add that to his won-lost record to help fill the void left by the NCAA?). Among his charges were the Lee Brothers, Dennis DuVal and Rudy Hackett. He then became Danforth’s leading assistant on the varsity. He was the logical choice to replace him – if we were going to promote from within. But Jim was only 31 at the time, (DOB 11/17/44) and would be the youngest coach in America. Did the university want to turn over a successful program to such an unknown quantity? It took a while for them to decide and Jim got the news in Rochester, where he was interviewing for a job with the University there. I recall him at the airport being asked about finally getting the Syracuse offer and laughing that he’d just as soon be the Syracuse coach. He’s now the oldest coach in the country, in fact the oldest college basketball coach ever. Just think – Rochester could have had a coach who played for the national championship three times and won it once. Actually, that’s what they got – in Mike Neer, who coached there for 34 years and won 563 games. But Jim Boeheim went on to Syracuse. The program he inherited had regained its respect, putting the disaster of the early 60’s and the disappointment of the late 60’s behind them. They’d sent off some flairs to tell America that we were here, especially the trip to the Final Four. In those days, whenever this burg got mentioned in the national media, we were referred to as ‘Syracuse, New York’, to distinguish us from small towns in Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and Utah as well as the original Syracuse, the one in Sicily. In the Jim Boeheim Era, we would morph into “the Cuse”, who was “in the house”. Everybody would know who we were and wish they had a team as admirable and exciting as ours to root for. Jim would be able to recruit players from as far away as California and Europe to come play before us. He didn’t do it alone. Not only did he assemble a fine staff, (including his first hire, Rick Pitino), but New York Governor Hugh Carey broke a log-jam in trying at last to get a replacement for Archbold Stadium by pledging $25 million in state money to get what became the Carrier Dome, (now the JMA Wireless Dome), built. As with Manley Field House, the building was built for the football program but benefited the basketball program, giving us the biggest on-campus arena in the country and allowing us to break records for the largest crowd over and over again. Games and highlights from the Dome became a staple across the country. Meanwhile, Dave Gavitt, the head basketball coach at Providence got his fellow coaches and athletic directors to form the Big East Basketball conference, which during the 1980’s, may have been the best basketball conference there ever was. It had nine teams, which meant that everybody played everybody else, home and away. They got a TV contract that put them on at ideal time slots. All boats rose with the tide. Four of the nine schools eventually won national championships. Another played for one. Two more made it to the Final Four, another to the elite 8 and the other school, (Pittsburgh) had several Top 10 teams. In turn, the Big East and the Dome and Jim Boeheim’s teams benefited from Bill Rasmussen’s great idea. Bill was fired from his job as the communications director of the New England Whalers hockey team in 1978. He decided he’d form a cable TV network that showed nothing but sporting events taking place in the state of Connecticut. He called it ESP – the Entertainment and Sports network. Eventually Bill and his son Scott expanded their concept to a 24 hour cable network that would use satellites to broadcast all kinds of sports now to be called ESPN. ESPN and the Big East were made for each other and the two of them served like a flood-light, beaming the image of each school to the clouds. And the school with the biggest arena showed the brightest. But none of that had happened yet when Jim took over the helm of SU basketball. We were, at best, a regional power: a respected program in our region that had trouble competing with the elite programs of the country. We had that amazing win over North Carolina but we were 0-4 against Louisville and 0-3 against Lefty Driesell’s Maryland teams. We were 0-3 vs. Kentucky, 1-1 vs. North Carolina (we’d lost to them in the Elite 8 in ’57), 1-1 vs. Duke (we beat a 14-12 Blue Devil team in the Holiday Festival loser’s bracket in 1971), 0-1 vs. Kansas and had yet to play Indiana or UCLA. The most consistently successful team in the East was St. John’s. We’d lost 17 of our first 20 games against them but turned the series around with five straight wins by a total of 28 points, (none more than 10). Then Danforth’s last team was swatted down 78-100. The trip to San Diego was great but it was obvious that we were the least talented team there by a significant margin. We typically lacked the size and depth to compete with the top teams in the country. That was about to change. Stories in the paper started to talk about SU’s incoming freshmen class. 6-0 175 Hal Cohen came from the small town of Canton, New York, up near the St. Lawrence River, had made headlines when he closed a practice session by making all 25 of his required free throws and decided to go on until he missed, which didn’t happen for 595 straight shots. (This gave Hal the reputation of an ‘automatic’ free throw shooter, which he actually wasn’t – he shot 74% from the line in his four years at SU. He averaged 35 points a game for his team, with a high of 53 points. I don’t recall any Boeheim recruit averaging that many until Joe Girard, 40 years later. That was another thing Hal didn’t quite do here, where he averaged 5.6 ppg. 6-5 Cliff Warwell came from a small town with a similar name, Candor NY, near the Pennsylvania border. He’d averaged 31 points and 21 rebounds a game against small-town competition. He had an explosive style but mostly demonstrated it when he had the ball in his hands, as opposed to when the opposition had it. The big prize, in more ways than one, was 6-11 198, (eventually 235) Roosevelt Bouie from still another upstate small town, Kendall, New York, northwest of Rochester on the southern bank of Lake Ontario. Rosey was the athletic, shot blocking big man we’d never had. He wasn’t the scorer Bill Smith was and also didn’t rebound as well. But he allowed SU to build a defense around him that kept us in games and allowed us to fast break and beat the other team downcourt. From “Color Him Orange” by Scott Pitoniak: “Though Bouie was 6-11 and a graceful athlete who could run the floor, the college basketball powerhouses shied away from him because he played at a small high school against inferior competition. “I did go against a lot of 6-2 and 6-3 centers in high school, which helped me dominate offensively. But Coach Boeheim saw how well I was able to move and recognized that I would fill out some in college and work hard to maximize my potential.” It was between Jim Boeheim and Syracuse and Jim Satalin and St. Bonaventure. Bouie: I was stuck. I was in a stalemate for a long time.” Mike Waters in “Legends of Syracuse Basketball”: When Syracuse coach Roy Danforth resigned to take a job at Tulane University. Bouie went from stalemate to limbo. He had formed a relationship with Syracuse assistant Jim Boeheim, who was being considered for Danforth’s old job. Bouie: “My high school coach, Dick Reynolds, came in and said ‘Your problem’s solved.’” He handed Rosey a newspaper showing that Boeheim had been appointed the Syracuse coach. JB: “I felt that if I could get the job right away, we could get him. That’s how I put it to the committee. It wasn’t an idle threat. It worked out… Roosevelt was a dominant high school player but he was a kid from a small upstate New York town, Kendall, and he didn’t want the bright lights. I was confident we could get him. Syracuse had more bright lights than St. Bonaventure, but they weren’t all that bright….” In his memoir, Jim notes that Satalin, every time he meets Roosevelt, tells him “You broke my heart.” He wonders: “One player can be extremely important to a program and who knows what could’ve happened with the Bonnies had they gotten Bouie?” “He was a big, intimidating, shot-blocking center. He made everybody else better, particularly on defense, because he was quite a presence in the middle. If you got past one of our defenders, you still have to face Roosevelt and that was like driving against a brick wall…He was the key. We didn’t have any center at all for the next year. Without Roosevelt, we were a mediocre NIT team at best. He got us four straight NCAA tournament bids.” Mike Waters: “He was an athletic big man who possessed incredible strength. He could rise up above opponents and snatch a rebound or yank it away from an opponent. He could run the floor and never seemed to tire. A seven-footer [Probably closer to 6-10] with extraordinary talent, Bouie dominated the game and intimidated opponents.” Hal Cohen: “I was the tallest guy on my high school team and the tallest guy in our league was 6-4, so he [Bouie] was the tallest guy I’d ever seen.” Bouie broke SU’s career blocked shot record, [not an official NCAA stat yet but the university had been keeping track unofficially] with 91 in his freshman season. Bernie Fine: “He wasn’t a great jumper but he was a quick jumper. You’d jump first but he’d get to the ball first because he’d get up quick.” Louis Orr: “Roosevelt started from the beginning because of his defense. He allowed Dale Shackelford to play his natural position, and Marty Byrnes, too. Roosevelt was a force in the middle. He freed up everyone to get out and pressure defensively. He was a presence, a big-time presence.” The sleeper was Louis Orr, (6-8, 160, eventually 175) a smooth and smart kid from Cincinnati who, to use a favorite Boeheim expression, ”understood the game”. Jim had learned about Louis from an SU alum in the area, Ron Grinker, who called him and said “Jim, you don’t know me, but I have a player who I think would be good for you. He will be a pro, I can tell you that right now. He’s 6-8, 6-9 but a little skinny.” Bouie: “I only weighed 198 with four rocks in my pocket but nobody noticed because I looked big strong and husky next to Louis. We had to run a mile in six minutes. I’m running behind Louis and I’m thinking, he’ll fall down soon and I’ll pass him. After six minutes, he was still in front. He’s tougher than everyone thinks… He always knew the tendencies of the guys on the other team and he always had a newspaper in his hands. I was with him in Italy and he was reading this paper. I knew he wouldn’t understand a word of it.” Jim may have seen a little of himself in Orr, as skinny guys people didn’t see much in when they first looked at him. “I really liked him. He might have looked frail but he could shoot and drive the ball to the basket and he had tremendous desire…I think his body actually worked to his advantage. People looked at him and thought they were going to have an easy night. They quickly discovered that appearances can be deceiving.” Eddie Moss: “Because of his physique, he was always underestimated. But he had the inner drive to make it work. When he came on the court, he came to play.” Hal Cohen: “At the beginning of his freshman year, what were his chances of making the NBA? He made himself into a great player.” Tony Bruin: “Louis Orr is probably the best player I ever played with. He had no weaknesses. He could shoot, he could rebound, he could play defense.” Louis: “Coach Boeheim has a way of viewing a recruit and visualizing, based on the kid’s abilities and work ethic, how the young man is going to be like two, three and four years into his college career. Some kids peak athletically their senior year of high school. Others haven’t even reached the surface of their abilities. Coach usually is able to figure that out ahead of time and know how a kid is going to develop and fit into Syracuse’s style of play.” Louis scored 32 points against a touring Russian junior team and interest had heated up. That’s when Jim hired Rick Pitino from his honeymoon and sent him out to Cincinnati to close the deal. Actually, he called on his wedding night. “I’d gotten the job on a Friday and on Sunday I drove to New York to convince Rick to come to Syracuse.” Rick told him “I’ve married a nice Italian girl and, well, it’s a pretty big deal.” JB: “A more patient and considerate man might have given him a day or two but I was neither back then and our two key recruits waited in the balance so…” Rick agreed to come to the lobby to discuss it. “We sat and talked for two or three hours. The bellboy came down every 45 minutes or so, telling him “Your wife wants you.” But Rick wanted the job. They agreed on a salary of $17,000. Jim was making $25,000. That’s when Jim told Rick he wasn’t going to be able to go on his honeymoon because he had to go to Cincinnati to nail down Louis Orr. “Oh, my wife’s gonna love this” was the reply. So Rick went to Cincinnati and talked to Louis’ father, who told him “I’m sorry Coach Pitino, but it doesn’t look good for Louis to come to Syracuse now.” JB: “Rick is almost ready to faint when Mr. Orr slaps him on the back and says, “Nah, I’m just bustin’ you. Louis is coming.” Many years later, Jim Boeheim had just married Julie and they were honeymooning Bermuda. The phone rang. “It’s Joanne Pitino. I waited years to get you back!” Together they became the ‘Louie and Bouie Show’, although the name didn’t stick until after they’d played Tennessee’s ‘Ernie and Bernie Show’ in the NCAA tournament. (Orr much preferred being called ‘Louis’ but the ‘Louis and Bouis Show’ doesn’t really work, as Bernie Fine laughingly pointed out). Together, they gave us two good big men who could overpower lesser option and compete with the Louisvilles, Marylands and St. John’s of the college basketball world. JB: “They were the two that got the ball rolling for us in the late 1970’s. As far as my head-coaching career, it all goes back to them. They helped me get off to a great beginning. He and Roosevelt were the two keys to the whole program. They launched the ship.” Jim was able to unite this group with an all-senior backcourt of 5-10 Jimmy Williams and 6-0 Larry Kelley, (who, at best, were closer to 5-9 and 5-11), 6-6 200 forward Dale Shackleford of Utica, (the original ‘Shack’ to SU fans), who had been the gem of the previous year’s recruiting class, having played all five positions at some point during the season, a 6-7 215 forward named Marty Byrnes from Pittsford, a suburb to the southwest of Rochester, and a 6-2 guard from New Jersey named Ross Kindell. We suddenly had a big, athletic front line, a veteran backcourt and good depth. Bouie started immediately. Orr was behind Byrnes and Shackelford but still had a substantial role. “I just tried to earn my stripes. I backed up Roosevelt at the five and I was the first forward sub.” Pitoniak: “By the time he became head coach in April 1976, Jim Boeheim already had established himself as an outstanding recruiter, especially in Upstate New York. High school coaches respected his knowledge of the game and his work ethic and prospective players and their parents liked his no-nonsense, honest approach. With the exception of Larry Kelley, who hailed from Connecticut, Boeheim’s first starting line-up hailed from across the state. Center Roosevelt Bouie was from Kendall, forward Marty Byrnes from Rochester, guard Jim Williams from Buffalo and guard/forward Dale Shackleford from Utica. “Coach Boeheim”, joked Bouie, “was pretty good at finding kids who wouldn’t be intimidated by Syracuse winters”. He also was pretty good at finding players who were over-looked by other coaches and would develop and flourish in his up-tempo offensive system. “Jimmy Boeheim has always had a good eye for identifying talent”, said ESPN basketball guru Dick Vitale. “Yes, he’s had some McDonald’s and Parade All-Americans over the years, but he’s more times than not been able to enjoy great success with players other coaches didn’t think would amount to much.” Jim wanted his teams to get out and run. From his memoir, “Bleeding Orange”: “We had prescribed times for running the mile. We made the players run a hill near Campus called Skytop. We devised a full-court lay-up drill, in which you had to make 120 in three minutes. The next day it was 123. Then it was 126. We did two-on-one defensive drills in which the ‘one’ didn’t get off defense until he made a stop. There were no chairs in the gym; players didn’t sit down and neither did the coaches…These days we can make it rough on players with running drills but not like the old days. We stopped the Skytop run…we still do the lay-up drills but now we shoot for 120 in four minutes. We can’t reach the numbers we did years ago because we have more walk-ons who are not quite as skilled athletically – back in Rosie’s day, we could sometimes get to 130. We still don’t sit down at practice but there is a chair for me, the consequence of bad knees, spells of plantar fasciitis and age…I could go as deep as 12 players, which was necessary, because we pressured all over the place and asked our guys to go full tilt on defense on every possession. In many ways, my teams are polar opposites from that first one. These days, my formula is more like seven rotation players and an eighth who can give me minutes here and there. “ “Finally, we had Manley Field House, our sixth man. It was first used as a basketball facility, so it felt like home to me. To visiting teams, it felt like jail. Students began lining up for tickets ten hours before the game and maybe – just maybe – they had drunk some beer. They barked at the opposition and threw dog biscuits. The Zoo…the Kennel…take you pick. Both were unnerving to opponents. There’s always a fine line between school spirit and going off the deep end and at Manley the only lines they cared about were drawn on the court. But any coach will tell you that his favorite home arena has one prevailing characteristic. He wins there. So, to me, Manley Field House was the beating heart of Syracuse athletics.” Jim Satalin: I’d say the Zoo was worth an 8-10 point advantage. There were teams that were frightened to play there because the fans were so intimidating….There was one game when my assistant, Billy Kalbaugh, got plunked with a softball on the shoulder. We laugh about it now but it wasn’t so funny then. That could be a tough crowd. They could take your mind off the game…Plus, Syracuse always seemed to play with supreme confidence there. It was the toughest place I ever brought a team to.” Gene Monje, a long-time official: “there’s no comparison. Manley was ten times rougher to work than the Dome. At Manley, people were close enough that they could touch you if they wanted to.” (Monje once ejected a priest for giving him the choke sign.) Bouie: “The Dome is a spacious country club by comparison.” He added: “It was a pride thing with us. We didn’t want anybody coming into our house and leaving with a smile. We wanted it to be a House of Horrors for them and we had the best sixth man advantage in the country because our student cheering section was absolutely wild. They’d be getting on the other team the minute they got off the bus.” Orr: “It was a great homecourt. You felt invincible. The fans were right on top of you. They throw oranges and toilet paper. They were into it. I know it had to be an intimidating environment for opponents, but it was great.” And this from a Christian gentleman! A confession: I had season tickets to the football and basketball games as a student at SU, (1971-75), but after I got my job with the government, I only bought a season ticket for football: I took the bus to my job downtown and avoided winter driving. I didn’t feel like driving to basketball games on bad roads. In 1980, when the Dome opened, I was at Manley buying a reason ticket for football and they asked me if I wanted one for basketball and, on a whim, I bought one for each. I’ve been driving up there ever since so long as the roads are good. But I never saw the Louie and Bouie show in person. I followed them through TV, radio and the local paper, plus some national magazine articles. The Louie and Bouie Show – and the Jim Boeheim Era - opened with the Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Mass. The first opponent weas Harvard, with the winner to face either West Virginia or Massachusetts. I have no memory of these games at all but found this 2016 Syracuse.com article about them: [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.syracuse.com/vintage/2016/11/throwback_thursday_the_jim_boe.html[/URL] Up only 35-33 at the half, a 23-4 run finally broke the game open and we won 75-48. JB: “We had a good team, with smart players and all I instructed them to do was to fully execute our set offense, a brilliant strategy that produced a one point lead at halftime. So in the second half I junked the plays and ordered them to loosen up and we won, 75-48. Valuable lesson learned early: Adapt if you have to and don’t be so structured, particularly if your talent is superior to theirs.” Then came loss #1 as West Virginia took advantage of 26 SU turnovers to beat us 78-83, (so much for the senior backcourt). Jim complained "We got outhustled for loose balls". [You can hear him saying it.] One of the Mountaineers was a fellow named Bob Huggins, who reminds JB of this game every time they meet. Bouie had 10 points and 7 blocks against the Crimson and 21 points, 8 rebs and 6 blocks against the ‘Neers. Orr had 7 points and 9 rebs vs. Harvard. But Larry Kelley led in scoring with 12. The article doesn’t say what he did in the second game. Then came a home blow-out of Colgate, 109-63, which I also don’t recall. Per OrangeHoops, Shack led with 14 points, (talk about balanced scoring: 109 for the team, 14 for the highest scorer). The game I remember was the fourth game. We went to 7th ranked Louisville to take on the national power we’d never quite been able to measure up to. I remember listening to Joel Mareiness on the radio describe this game, especially the ending. Cliff Warwell slithered through the defense to make a twisting lay-up in traffic to give the Orange a 76-75 lead. Louisville’s super freshman, Darrell Griffith, missed an 18 footer with 3 seconds left and the Cardinals never got another shot off. Arnie Burdick called it “The biggest modern victory on a Orange court for the Orange”. Marty Byrnes had 17 points and 12 rebounds while Jim Williams scored 16 points but Warwell was the hero. (Those details came from the Newspaper.com archives of a Herald-Journal article – it’s a subscription service. What’s interesting is that the information was part of an Associated press release describing all the big games that night. The paper didn’t have its own people there.) The big takeaway was that we were now powerful enough to go anywhere and beat anybody. We’d been to the Final Four two years before with a team that didn’t have what it took to really compete for the national title: this team could. Louis Orr remembered the game for another reason: he was still wearing braces at this time and “Wesley Cox elbowed me in the mouth and my lips stuck to my braces. I came out and showed them to Syracuse trainer Don Lowe and he pulled them off.” Ouch! “I learned that this is a man’s game.” The Orange kept rolling, whipping Boston College in Boston 67-54, Biscayne at home 87-63, at Canisius, (we never go to Buffalo anymore) 74-59 and then blowing out Penn State in Manley 101-63. Williams began quite a scoring run with the Canisius game, back in his hometown: 17, 20, 30 and 20 points in consecutive games, each one a team high. BC would become a regular rival when the Big East got formed. Penn State had been a rival in the 60’s. I remember we once broke a long home court winning streak they had. In those days the whole schedule was like the November-December we have now: a combination of occasion important games, some games against fairly good teams that might beat us on a bad night and some games against teams we know weren’t going beat badly enough that everybody will get to play. Then came another one of those important games. We traveled to the Maryland Invitational, where we crushed Norm Nixon’s Duquesne team 116-86 in the opening round, behind Williams’ 30-point game. That set us up at 8-1, with an average margin of victory of 19.1. We were ranked #18 in the country and Maryland, 8-1 was #16. It was our second chance to prove that we would now be one of the elite. Unfortunately, we didn’t. The Terps beat us, like always 85-96. The Newspaper.com article is entitled “Terps Burst SU’s Bubble”. This article is by Bob Snyder: “SU is coming closer to playing Lefty Driesell’s team on even terms – but not yet, at least not in Cole Field House. A 2-13 run broke up a 16-16 tie and the Orange were down by between 9 and 18 points for the rest of the game. Jimmy got ‘T” when the refs failed to call a ‘T’ when Maryland’s Steve Sheppard hung on the rim. It was the 10th of 13 straight home games for the Terps to start the season. A feisty JB said “I’d like to start with 14 straight home games. You know when we’ll find out how good they are? When they play their 15th game- on the road! I’d like to see them come to Syracuse right now!” We never did beat Lefty Driesell, (whose team also won the 1980 Carrier Classic, 73-83 – in Syracuse). That 1972 NIT game was the only time we got within single digits of his teams. We didn’t beat Maryland until the 2004 NCAAs. Jimmy Williams and Ross Kindel both scored 20 points. For Kindel it was a career high while Jimmy was the tourney’s leading scorer with 50 points. Ross played that much because Kelley had four first half fouls. Our front line produced three double-doubles – but barely: Shack 13/11, Byrnes 11/12 and Bouie 10/10. Louis Orr hardly played. Sheppard scored 26 and Bill Bryant 21 for Maryland. Snyder said that Driesell was “as universally admired as a social disease”. Lefty told reporters: “We were mean, the way I wanted them to be.” Then Syracuse was mean, defeating 11 opponents in a row by a combined 1015-765 (92.3-69.5). Typically in the L&B era, we were among the nation’s best teams in margin of victory, (5th, 3rd, 1st and 2nd, in fact). It was because we had very strong teams playing rather weak schedule – the sort we’d been playing for years, full of New York teams mostly in the northeast. We also had one of the toughest places for an opposing team to win in, putting together a 57 game home court winning streak until Georgetown “closed the Dome“ in 1980. Our victims were Cornell, Fordham, American U., Penn State again, a rematch with West Virginia, Pittsburgh, (in a down period), Buffalo, Temple, Buffalo State, Northeastern and Bentley. But five of those games were on the road. We played 30 games that year: 12 at home, 10 on the road and 8 on neutral courts. Shack dropped 30 on Cornell. He also led us with 18 against Pitt and 21 against Buffalo. Orr made his presence felt with 15 points and 20 rebounds against American U. and 20/11 vs. West Virginia. Bouie had 19 rebounds in that game. Kelley scored 26 against Penn State. Then came a trip to St. Bonaventure and an 84-91 loss. The Bonnies, coached by Jim Satalin, actually became our primary rival in these years. We’d beaten them twice in 1974-75 and once the next year but this time he got us. I could not find an article with the details but we all known what Jim Boeheim thought of going to the Reilly Center, where the Bonnies once won 99 games in a row- 99! The capacity was 5,480 people and all of them seemed to be sitting behind the opponent’s bench. The Bonnies would go on to beat Houston for the NIT title that year. St. Bonaventure had been Roosevelt Bouie’s second choice for a school and the Bonnie fans knew it. They threw coins at him. On one play he fell out of bounds and heard curse words being hurled at him. He turned to the source and it was “a pretty little cheerleader. That stunned me.” Orr: “That was rough. That was a rowdy environment.” [And Manley was “a great homecourt”.] After a 70-47 win at Rhode Island came the St. John’s game at Manley. This one was televised, and it was a revelation. We’d been blowing people out by scoring a lot of points. In this game, we strangled the Johnnies with our defense, 79-55. Williams scored 21, Byrnes 16 and Bouie 13. “The Orange moved their fast break perfectly to settle the issue early in the second half, they played their zone defenses very well to keep St. John's off the boards most of the time, and they got an excellent performance from little Jim Williams, one of the quickest guards around.” (New York Times) We’d only beaten the Johnnies ten times in history to this point and never by more than 10 points. But in this one the score in the second half just kept mounting until re really crushed them. Lou Carnesecca: “They just beat us in all areas. I couldn't point to one thing we did. They are a good team, a deep team and we couldn't do anything.” We were the best team in New York State and the northeast, 21-3 and ranked #13, (why not higher, we wondered?). We closed the regular season by crushing former rival Niagara 106-82 and then beating a new rival, Tom Young’s Rutgers team, 82-72. Williams had 24 points and Bouie 17 rebounds against the Scarlett Knight’s 6-9, 220 All-American James Bailey. Rutgers had steamed into the 1976 Final Four with a 31-0 record hoping to take on 30-0 Indiana in the final but they lost to Michigan by 16 in the semi and had no heart for the consey where they lost to Gene Bartow’s UCLA team by the same margin. They had enough left in 1976-77 to go 18-10 so it was a good win. Young had beaten us the three previous years and would the next but we wouldn’t lose to Rutgers again until 1998. Syracuse was somehow 23-3 at the end of the regular season but still under most people’s radar. Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post wrote “So Boeheim has his team of sleepers, a team so quiet it doesn’t even have footprints in the snow.” Syracuse blew by the Bonnies in an ECAC rematch, 85-72 and then scraped by upstart Old Dominion, 67-64. Playing the first game in Manley, SU fell behind by 8. Per the New York Times, “Roosevelt Soule, the 6‐foot‐11‐inch freshman for Syracuse, was not holding the rebounds.” But ‘Soule’ and Marty Byrnes turned that around. And got the fast break going. “Trailing by 19‐11 with 8:40 gone in the game. Syracuse came back to outscore St. Bonaventure, 35‐16, in the remainder of the half.” Essie Hollis, the Bonnies’ star, got in foul trouble and scored 12 points, 10 under his average. Greg Sanders tried to make up for it with 22 points of his own. Bouie wound up with 24 points and Byrnes 18 rebounds. Syracuse was now 25-3 and ranked 9th by the coaches, 10 by the writers, but still unrecognized by some. They moved on to the NCAAs, which was now a 32 team tournament, (which I always felt was the best size – it’s supposed to be the best teams in the country going head-to-head, not David vs. Goliath upsets). There were no seedings yet and the regionals were still dominated by geography, although some teams would be shifted around to balance things out. (I much preferred it when the regionals established a champion team for each region and the final four was a battle of champions). We were shipped out to the Mideast region to play Tennessee in Baton Rouge, even though we were the highest ranked northeastern team. All I remember about this game is that everybody was talking about it at work all day, few people thought we had a chance against the #7, SEC champion Vols but that we were all hopeful something exciting and important could happen that night. People remember this as the night the Louie and Bouie Show beat the Ernie and Bernie Show but that was no contest. Rosey and Louis got 14 points, 13 rebounds and 3 blocks but shot just 5 for 14 from the field. Ernie and Bernie scored 49 points and had 24 rebounds between them on 18 for 35 shooting. All four of them fouled out, as did Jim Williams and Tennessee guard Mike Jackson as the refs decided to call 50 fouls, 27 on the Vols. The game was even uglier than that: the two teams totaled 51 turnovers, 15 of them by Bernie and Ernie. Kelley led us in scoring with 22 and Byrnes had 11 rebounds. We scored 7 more points from the foul line and our bench out-scored theirs 25-4, which allowed us to win the overtime, 15-10. Tennessee got out to a 16-26 lead but it was 35-38 by halftime and ‘Cuse led 78-74 with 1:20 left. A missed free throw and two turnovers allowed the Vols to tie it but Orr made a big block of a King turn-around jumper and Larry Kelley missed a long jumper at the buzzer. Orr: “I blocked Bernard’s shot on his turn-around. I timed it just right. I blocked another shot and they called me for a foul. After the game, Bernard was talking about how physical it was and I remember thinking, as skinny as I was, how could you call it physical?” Both teams played the OT with three starters out but we had more left than they did. JB; “As much as anything, it was our depth that won the day. I was able to reach down into the bench and get five points in overtime from Billy Drew, a junior swingman.” NY Times: “Boeheim admitted the game was “sluggish.” He attributed that to two factors: “It was a tournament game and each team used a zone defense so much it slowed down the normal fast breaks.” 93-88 in 45 minutes was ‘sluggish’ in those days. We also heard from the coach of Detroit, who was to meet #1 ranked Michigan in the opposite side of the Sweet 16 bracket the next week while Syracuse played unranked UNC Charlotte. Dick Vitale announced that it didn’t matter who won the Syracuse- Charlotte game because the regional would be won by the winner of the Michigan-Detroit game. There were no regional consolation games anymore so the only hope to get at Vitale and shut that loud-mouth up was to beat the 49ers and hope Detroit upset Michigan. The first seemed like the easy part. Who’d ever heard of UNC-Charlotte? They didn’t even have a basketball team until 1965 and had only been a major college team since 1972. Well, they’d made it to the NIT championship game the previous year, thanks to a colorful forward named Cedric ‘Cornbread’ Maxwell, who was their tallest player at 6-8. He’d had a big year with 22 points and 12 rebounds a game against a light schedule of mostly mid- and lower majors. They’d lost to Tennessee by 2 points on December 4th, to Wake Forest by 2 on January 22nd and had beaten Florida State 85-76 a week later. They’d beaten Central Michigan in overtime to make it to the Sweet 16. The best thing they had going for them turned out to be their backcourt, which was in prime position to exploit a hidden SU weakness. I never knew until this game that height mattered in the backcourt. Obviously, it matters a lot up front where height allows you to obstruct shots and grab rebounds as well as score over people. We had the advantage there. But Williams and Kelley were 5-9 and 5-11, (oh, sorry, 5-10 and 6-0). The 49ers had Melvin Watkins, (6-3) and Chad Kinch (6-4). Jimmy and Larry could neither shoot or pass over those two while Watkins and Kinch could do both over our guys. Maxwell got the ball whenever and wherever he wanted it with plenty of room to operate, as did his fellow forwards Kevin King and Lew Massey, (they didn’t have a real center), while our front line was taken out of the game by our inability to get them the ball. I and all SU fans watched, stunned as the score just mounted and mounted. We were down 22-38 at halftime and the deficit got to 26 points before settling for a 59-81 final. We had expected to win by that much! Charlotte’s entire starting line-up all scored at least 13 points, led by Maxwell with 19. The Niners shot 57% from the field to our 43%. We got called for 21 fouls to their 12, mostly because we were trying to defend easy passes and they were trying to defend hard ones. Marty Byrnes and Dale Shackelford managed 16 points each and Rosey Bouie had 12 But Louis Orr had 2 in 29 minutes and Williams and Kelley scored only 4 points, with Kelley being shut out. Our backcourt was 2 for 15. The first year of the Louie and Bouie show ended with a whimper, instead of a bang. The fact that Vitale’s Detroit team also lost that night, 81-86 was of little solace, although I did enjoy seeing Charlotte upset #1 Michigan 75-68 to get to the Final Four, where they lost on a buzzer shot eventual champion Marquette. Still of the four teams in that regional, we had certainly been the worst. You’ll note that Jim Boeheim has had a preference for big guards to front his zone ever since. He remembers…. The year’s stats can be found here: [URL unfurl="true"]http://orangehoops.org/1976-1977.htm[/URL] We don’t have complete information on minutes, steals or blocks and nothing on turnovers, so I don’t have all the elements of the ‘net points formula. Using the information we have: Rosie Bouie started all 30 games and averaged 25.1 minutes per game. Converted to 40 minutes, he averaged 17.3 points, 12.9 rebounds, 0.8 assists, 4.8 blocks, 6.3 missed field goals, 0.5 missed free throws and 4.8 fouls per game. If you add the positives and subtract the negatives you get 24.2. His net points would have been that plus steals or turnovers, which means it probably would not have been much different from that. That’s quite a potent year for a freshman center. He was also a good free throw shooter at 83.6%, unusual for a big man – and for this one: he never shot above 65% again. Louis Orr only started two games but played in all 30. Dale Shackelford and Marty Byrnes were ahead of him at forward and both had good years. Louis averaged 18.2 minutes and per 40 minutes he averaged 20.7 points, 14.2 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 5.9 missed field goals, 1.8 missed free throws, and 5.5 fouls for a net total of 25.5, (we don’t have his blocked shots, steals, or turnovers). That’s also a heck of a year for a freshman. You can see the impact these two had on the team. Cliff Warwell’s impact ended after 20 games. He shot poorly, (36.6% from the field, 65.6% from the foul line) and didn’t play a lot of defense. He transferred to NE Louisiana but never played there and wound up playing 6 games for Ithaca college. But that great lay-up at Louisville will always be remembered. Hal Cohen only averaged 2.4 points and shot a good but hardly historical 72.2 from the line. He would stay and play a lot more in future seasons. Tomorrow: 1977-78 [/QUOTE]

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