Horizon League Links

Butler
Detroit
Illinois-Chicago
Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Wright State
Youngstown State
Horizon Connection

Editorial 6/20/03

6/20/03
by John C. Thomas
Loyola Old Timers will tug on your shirt and tell you either loudly or quietly: "This university used to be something very special."

They're right. As chronicled in the Forty Years Ago Today feature on this Web site, Loyola did something daring and provocative for the time by ignoring the "Gentleman's Agreement" that fixed the number of black basketball players on college teams. The result was a national championship by Loyola in 1963, and opposing coaches scurrying to adjust to the new landscape of college basketball in the ensuing years.

Loyola haters (there are plenty) will charge that the championship was insignificant, because it occurred several years before the NCAA National Basketball Championship was a big deal. Oh, yeah? What do you think made the NCAA National Basketball Championship a big deal?

Over and above the 1963 Championship, Loyola appeared in the NIT Finals in 1949 and 1939. In 1962, Loyola won third place in the NIT.

But Loyola's biggest success in college sports also portended its downfall. Loyola's riveting 1963 championship win on an amazing comeback and last-second tip-in in overtime was the first nationally-televised NCAA Final. Five years later, a January 1968 regular season game between #2 Houston and #1 UCLA at the Astrodome attracted a crowd of 52,693 and a national television audience for the duel between Lew Alcindor and Elvin Hayes. Houston won the game, 71-69, on the strength of Hayes' 37 points. It was the first nationally-televised regular season college basketball game.

But five years earlier, when Loyola played at the University of Houston on February 23, 1963, the all-white students at the state-supported University of Houston showered the Loyola players-white and black alike-- with debris and epithets. The University of Houston didn't admit its first black student until the 1963-64 school year, the same year that two black players-- Elvin Hayes and Don Cheney-- were recruited to play on the basketball team.

When college basketball became big money, the traditional football powers thought they would give the round ball a try. The huge revenues from football afforded great facilities and recruiting budgets. As college basketball became a revenue sport, schools like Texas, Arkansas, and Florida developed their previously dormant basketball programs.

Thanks to the fact that Loyola won a championship with a majority of African-American players, Southern schools that used to eschew black players suddenly began to court the players that grew up in their back yard. Vanderbilt signed the first black player in the SEC in 1966, from the same high school as Loyola's Vic Rouse and Les Hunter. Even so, Mississippi State didn't sign their first black basketball player until 1973.

In the late 1970's, hyphenated state schools started joining Division I, based on the success of North Carolina-Charlotte's appearance in the 1977 Final Four. From the mid-1970s to 2002, the number of Division I basketball schools nearly doubled.

Meanwhile, NCAA rules were gradually amended to even the playing field between the most aggressive and wealthy recruiters. Unfortunately, the same rules applied to schools at Loyola's level, having the unintended consequences of steering more kids to bigger schools and leaving the schools with lesser facilities to fight for the crumbs of recruits and seeking the occasional diamond in the rough.

Compounding all of this was an eligibility scandal at Loyola, a series of failed attempts at building an on-campus facility, and severe conference mismanagement. The MCC basically flopped in a pointless standoff with DePaul in 1989, and the Blue Demons swiped St. Louis and Marquette from the conference to form the Great Midwest.

It didn't help that the Loyola Athletic Director at the time, Chuck Schwarz, had less imagination or positive thinking than Laura Bush at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday nights. OK, for you Republicans, he had less imagination or positive thinking than Hillary Clinton on a tax vote.

So this leaves Loyola as a fading flower that has no personal institutional history except managing its inevitable decline.

The problem, I thought, with Chuck Schwarz, was that he was a nice guy but couldn't envision what was possible. I'm getting the feeling from John Planek that he can envision the future, but he's not comfortable with success or progress if it's not perfectly designed. Chuck Schwarz is well rid of this university because our only hope is using imagination to succeed. John Planek needs to take some chances on good ideas that aren't necessarily well fashioned if he wants to succeed here.