Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room Read online

  “I played 68 minutes,” Johnson said. “I played the last 40 with four fouls. Every pass, every dribble, every single thing was so intense. That’s what you live for. I was mentally and physically drained, but you’re just working off adrenaline.”

  The Bearcats were 7-1 after their final game before Christmas. Bradley would go on to win the 1982 National Invitation Tournament.

  “I would say that was one of the highlights of an otherwise pretty mediocre career,” Schloemer said with a laugh.

  KENTUCKY 24, UC 11 DECEMBER 20, 1983

  Shortly after Tony Yates was hired as UC’s head coach in April 1983, he had a meeting with Athletic Director Mike McGee to review the upcoming schedule.

  McGee told Yates he had worked out a three-game contract to play perennial power Kentucky—and the series would begin that December in what would be Yates’s eighth game as a Division I head coach.

  “That day I told Mike I was going to hold the ball against them,” Yates said. “I don’t think he took me seriously.”

  The Bearcats came into the game at Riverfront Coliseum with a 1-6 record, a starting center (Mark Dorris) who was just six foot six and only one player (Dorris) who would average in double figures that season.

  Unbeaten Kentucky came in ranked No. 2 in the country and had a front line that consisted of future NBA players Melvin Turpin (6-11), Sam Bowie (7-1) and Kenny Walker (6-8). The Wildcats were favored by 18 points. The game was nationally televised on ESPN.

  “I thought the only way we had a chance to win, was to do what we did,” Yates said.

  Cincinnati had worked on its “delay” game a little in practice, but there was no hint of Yates’s strategy until game day. It was then, in the locker room, he told the players his plan: The Bearcats would hold the ball on every possession until they had a chance for a layup. At the time, there was no shot clock forcing teams to shoot within a certain number of seconds.

  “We just kind of looked around at each other (and thought), ‘You’ve got to be kidding?’” Luther Tiggs said. “We’re going to freeze the ball on national television? This man has lost his mind.”

  Yates wasn’t sure how his players felt about his strategy, but he knew they’d carry it out as best they could.

  “And they did it to the letter,” he said.

  Kentucky won the opening tipoff and immediately lobbed an alley-oop pass to Bowie near the basket. He was fouled. He missed the first free throw and made the second.

  The Bearcats then passed the ball 22 times on their first possession. By the seventh pass, there were boos from the crowd. Dorris hit a jumper just above the foul line for a 2-1 UC lead. Kentucky missed its next shot, and UC went into a four-corner spread, normally used to run time off the clock at the end of games.

  UC took only five first-half shots and trailed 11-7 at intermission. At one point, the Bearcats held the ball for seven minutes, 22 seconds.

  Kentucky ended up winning 24-11.

  Yates could hear fans booing throughout the game. The crowd would start chanting: “Bor-ing.” Though Wildcats coach Joe B. Hall never said anything to Yates, he did tell the media afterward that he’d never consider such a strategy.

  “I would not have the guts to do that before our home fans,” Hall said that night. “The real feeling I have is that our fans were somewhat exploited. Some of them bought Cincinnati season tickets to see this game.”

  Cincinnati scored its fewest amount of points since 1930; Kentucky totaled its fewest since 1937. Hall made it clear he would not favor resuming the series with the Bearcats after the three-game contract expired.

  “We would like to continue this series,” McGee was quoted as saying in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “But we’re not going to go begging. And if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

  Yates said he got several letters from all over the country after that game, almost all in support. Some coaches wrote and told him, “You did what you had to do to win the game.”

  A year later, in December 1984, the Bearcats went to Lexington to play in the University of Kentucky Invitational. The day before the tournament started, there was a banquet attended by fans.

  All the coaches spoke. When it was Yates’s turn, he stood up and said: “Folks, I just want to prepare you for tomorrow night and get you warmed up. So on the count of three, I want you all to stand up and boo me right now.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . . ”

  Sure enough, the crowd booed. Yates laughed.

  “I just kind of tried to take the edge off,” he said.

  UC 66, MINNESOTA 64 NOVEMBER 25, 1989

  Steve Sanders was a wide receiver from Cleveland, Ohio, who played four years for the University of Cincinnati football team. But that’s not how he will forever be remembered on the UC campus.

  This is what made Sanders part of Bearcats basketball history: It was his three-pointer from the corner as time ran out that gave Cincinnati a 66-64 victory over 20th-ranked Minnesota in the first regular-season game at Shoemaker Center—and the first game of the Bob Huggins era.

  Here is what led up to November 25, 1989 . . .

  Sanders’s last football season was 1988. He knew he was coming back to UC for a fifth year to try to complete requirements for his degree. In the spring 1989, Sanders was playing intramural basketball and caught the eye of assistant basketball coach Larry Harrison. Harrison, who was on the lookout for players, asked News Record reporter Branson Wright about Sanders and another football player, Roosevelt Mukes. “Steve was our nemesis in intramural basketball,” Wright says now. Sanders played pickup games every off season with UC basketball players, felt he held his own, and often wondered whether he could play Division I basketball.

  The next fall, Sanders joined the basketball team for preseason conditioning, then had second thoughts.

  “That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” Sanders said. “I talked to Coach Harrison and said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ We just ran so much. I actually stopped for about two weeks.”

  When practices officially started, UC held walk-on tryouts. The six-foot-two Sanders and the five-foot-ten Mukes, who at the time was the school’s all-time leading wide receiver, both showed up.

  “Coming in, I didn’t really expect to play a lot,” Sanders said. “I thought maybe I could play five or 10 minutes a game and just enjoy the experience. But as time went on, I started feeling more and more comfortable.”

  Huggins was beginning to assert himself as the Bearcats coach and certainly grabbed the attention of the players.

  “He was a maniac,” Sanders said. “The yelling and the screaming didn’t bother me. I came from a football background, and that’s all football coaches do is yell and scream. But practice was so intense for three-and-a-half hours. He never let us cheat ourselves. I was in the best shape of my life playing basketball.”

  The Bearcats only had eight scholarship players. By the first game, Sanders was in the starting backcourt with Andre Tate.

  “The whole time leading up to the Minnesota game, he never let us think that we weren’t good enough to win,” Sanders said of Huggins. “We had an awful lot of confidence, which he gave us. And the coaching staff did a great job with the scouting report. Everything he said that they would do during the game, they did.”

  Sanders, who would average 7.0 points and 2.5 rebounds for the season, had four points all game. Until the very end.

  UC led by one with 30 seconds left. Lou Banks fouled Willie Burton off the ball on an inbounds pass, and Burton made two free throws.

  Minnesota was ahead 64-63—its first lead in the second half. The Bearcats brought the ball up past midcourt and called their final timeout.

  Cincinnati worked the ball around, but when Keith Starks tried to hit Tate cutting across the foul line, the ball was stolen by Minnesota’s Kevin Lynch, who dribbled down the sideline in front of the scorer’s table. Lynch picked up his dribble right in the front of the Minnesota bench and started falli
ng out of bounds. He tried to throw the ball off Tate and missed, and it bounced all the way back toward the UC basket and went out of bounds on the baseline with eight-tenths of a second remaining.

  The Golden Gophers called a timeout.

  The first thing Huggins told his players was, “You guys are going to win this basketball game.”

  As the huddle broke, Huggins grabbed Sanders by the arm and said, “Steve, if they can’t get it inside, you have to break around, because Andre’s going to throw you the ball.”

  Tate had to inbound the ball against seven-footer Bob Martin. The play was designed for Tate to lob it toward the basket. Banks was covered when he cut inside. By the time Levertis Robinson broke free into the middle of the paint, Tate was looking toward his last option.

  Sanders had broken toward the ball, faked back, then went to the corner in front of the UC bench. Tate delivered a short bounce pass. Sanders caught it and shot it from about 20 feet out over Martin, his first three-point attempt of the night and the Bearcats’ only three-point field goal in the game.

  Swish.

  The arena erupted.

  “It felt perfect,” Sanders said. “It felt like I just placed the ball into the basket. It had to go in. I saw it and when it went in, I was so happy. There was so much energy flowing through my body I cannot explain. I jumped up and down and ran, and they chased me and caught me. They dived on top of me. They picked me up and then I got down and ran across the court and up into the stands. Everybody was off the court but me. I was still running around in the stands. Then I ran down back through the court again. When I finally got in the locker room, I was so hyped and excited, I just had to go lay down on the floor in the shower. . . . It was truly amazing.”

  Later, Sanders was talking to Harrison.

  “You know, you just went down in UC basketball history,” the assistant coach said.

  “Coach, in two weeks, no one will remember this shot,” Sanders told him.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  UC 77, DUKE 75 NOVEMBER 28, 1998

  There had been so many heartaches for the University of Cincinnati during Melvin Levett’s career.

  Miles Simon’s buzzer-beating 65-foot bank shot that handed No. 13 Arizona a 79-76 victory in February 1996. Lenny Brown’s last-second jumper that gave Xavier a 71-69 upset over the No. 1-ranked Bearcats in November 1996. Top-ranked Kansas coming back from 16 points down to beat UC 72-65 in Chicago just over a week later. The 1998 NCAA Tournament loss to West Virginia on Jarrod West’s halfcourt heave with 0.8 seconds to play.

  That is the context of the championship game of the 1998 Great Alaska Shootout.

  No. 1 Duke vs. No. 15 Cincinnati. National TV. Midnight tipoff.

  Fast forward to the end.

  The Bearcats were ahead 74-73 when Pete Mickeal went to the foul line with 42 seconds left, but Mickeal missed both free throws. Duke missed two shots on its possession, and UC rebounded. Alvin Mitchell was quickly fouled with 13 seconds remaining. Mitchell missed his first foul shot, then made the second. UC led 75-73.

  After a UC timeout, Duke guard William Avery hit a running jumper from the baseline over Kenyon Martin to tie the game with three seconds to play.

  “We were always in that position, playing a big school, and somehow, someway, we always let it slip away,” Levett said. “We knew this was our moment.”

  Melvin Levett (21) and Alvin Mitchell (14) leap in celebration of Levett’s game-winning dunk against Duke in the 1998 Great Alaska Shootout. Levett was named by Slam magazine in 2001 as one of the 50 greatest dunkers of all time. (Jim Lavrakas/ Anchorage Daily News)

  The Bearcats called a timeout, and without hesitation Huggins drew up a play that the team had gone over in practice—though not often with success.

  “Sometimes you’d think, ‘What are we doing this for?’ Because when we ran it in practice, it didn’t go smoothly, or we didn’t beat the buzzer,” Levett said. “But this time it was like destiny.”

  Ryan Fletcher took the ball out of bounds from under Duke’s basket. He sailed a long pass to Martin, standing at the top of the three-point arc near UC’s basket. Martin jumped, caught the ball, immediately turned to his left, and—before he landed back on the ground—passed to Levett, who was streaking toward the basket on the right side. Levett snagged the ball on the run and went straight up.

  “I didn’t want to lay it up because you’ve seen guys in those situations blow the layup,” Levett said. “I wanted to leave no doubt.”

  He jumped . . . and dunked (hard) . . . to complete one of the most memorable baskets in Bearcats history.

  “Everything flowed. It was unbelievable,” Levett said.

  “You’d pray sometimes . . . that maybe you could have that moment. I just burst into tears. I had to be calmed down during the timeout before they came out and ran their last play. I was losing it. I kind of got caught up in the moment.”

  What is almost forgotten is that Duke, with one second on the clock, almost tied it again. Shane Battier threw a full-court pass that got knocked back to Avery, who nailed a 14-foot bank shot—clearly after the final buzzer sounded.

  “It was more than just us winning that game,” Levett said. “It was for Cincinnati, for our school, and for all the teams that didn’t win before.”

  3

  JOHN WIETHE ERA (1946-1952)

  We begin now in the 1940s.

  Though the University of Cincinnati basketball program officially started in 1901, it was in the latter part of the ’40s that the Bearcats first won 20 games, first averaged more than 50 points a game, first achieved a national ranking, first hired a full-time coach, and first had a 1,000-point scorer.

  Most important, however, expectations were forever changed.

  FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

  More than 40 years before a driven and intense 35-year-old coach named Bob Huggins arrived in Clifton, the Bearcats were led by a man named John “Socko” Wiethe, who was equally known for his intensity and hatred of losing.

  John Wiethe (center) led UC to a 106-47 record in six seasons. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  Wiethe, a Xavier University graduate who attended UC’s College of Law, had a football background, having been an All-NFL guard for the Detroit Lions. He also played semi-pro baseball, pro basketball in Fort Wayne, and was an American Association umpire one year. Wiethe was a UC football team assistant coach before he took over the basketball team in 1946.

  He had what could be considered an unusual way of expressing his dissatisfaction with losing to his players. He hit them where it counted—in their stomachs.

  When UC played on the road and won, Wiethe would take his players out for steak dinner. When they lost? He’d give the student manager a five-dollar bill and tell him to go get 10 half-dollars. Then he’d give each player 50 cents to go buy a hamburger.

  That went on until Athletic Director Chick Mileham went on a few road trips with the team, saw what was happening, and put an end to it.

  SWITCHING SPORTS

  Ray Penno started his athletic career at UC as a basketball player but ended up in another sport.

  How did that happen?

  Mileham saw Penno when he led Western Hills High School past Elder for the 1944 city league championship in Cincinnati. Mileham asked Penno if he wanted to play basketball at UC.

  “Not really,” Penno told him.

  “All my friends were going into the service,” he said. “It sounds corny, but I wanted to get in as soon as I could. But I was only 17.”

  Mileham told Penno that he could play one year with the Bearcats, then join the military. Which is what he did. He started every game of the 1944-45 season and was the team’s No. 4 scorer with a 4.0 average.

  UC closed its season with a 65-35 loss to Kentucky. The day after the game, Penno signed up with the U.S. Army and spent the next two years in The Philippines.

  He returned to Cincinnati just in time for the end of the 1946-47 se
ason. By then, the Bearcats had a new basketball coach: John Wiethe. Just before the final game of the season, Penno showed up on campus and introduced himself to Wiethe.

  “Go down and get a uniform,” the coach said.

  Penno didn’t want to, but he relented. He played maybe a minute in a 61-51 victory over Butler. In the locker room afterward, Wiethe introduced Penno to Ray Nolting, UC’s football coach. “We’d like you to come out and play end on the football team,” Nolting said.

  Penno weighed over 200 pounds, about 30 more than when he first played basketball at UC. But, he had not played a down of high school football.

  “I wouldn’t even know how to put on the uniform,” he told Nolting.

  He got the hang of it quickly and played three years for the football team, including on the 1949 Glass Bowl team for coach Sid Gillman. He started five games in his football career.

  “I just fell in love with football,” Penno said.

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF START

  Dick Dallmer was the second player in University of Cincinnati history to score 1,000 points—Bill Westerfeld was the first—and when Dallmer graduated in 1950, he was the Bearcats’ all-time leading scorer. He was also the first Bearcat to earn All-America honors. All of which are some pretty nice accomplishments for a guy who never played high school basketball—and, in fact, was cut from his team as a sophomore and junior.

  Dallmer grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, and graduated from high school in 1942. Like many of his peers, he immediately reported to the military, joining the U.S. Army.

  Dallmer was among the soldiers who landed on Normandy in France in June 1944 during World War II. Two months later, he was moved to the port city of LeHavre, France. At about 8 o’clock one night, he was walking through a path of rubble—the streets had been blown up—when he saw a large building with a hole in the roof. He noticed the lights were on and thought he heard balls bouncing.

  Sure enough, some GIs were playing basketball and invited Dallmer to join in. He took off his boots and played in stocking feet. He went back the next night. And the next. After the fourth night of playing, he was approached by the master sergeant, who told Dallmer he was being transferred to headquarters in Lille, France, in the morning.