He starting wearing those glasses his sophomore year after having played in regular glasses since high school. He tried to go without glasses, but that didn’t work because he couldn’t see well and reacted slowly. He tried contact lenses but was never comfortable with them.
And he had to protect himself. He was always getting hit in the face with elbows. In high school, he even had his glasses split off his face a couple of times.
Hogue bristles a little at the notion he was UC’s intimidating presence.
“I never bothered anybody,” the MVP of the 1962 national championship game said. “I played physical; I would never tell anybody that I was a finesse ballplayer. I worked hard at rebounding and playing defense, and if you had to bump people around, you did that, too. And if you fooled with somebody on our team, you might have to come by me.”
Said former teammate Carl Bouldin: “He was menacing to other teams. He had glasses that had tape all over them. It looked intimidating. You could see them while they were warming up, looking over their shoulders. I know Hogue was intimidating to other teams.”
NEW RULES, ROOMIE
When Hogue was a freshman and sophomore, he was assigned to room with Robertson, who was in his final two years at UC. They were the only African-American players on the team who lived on campus.
“Oscar wouldn’t let it be intimidating,” Hogue said. “Oscar was never the kind of guy, until you got on the court, that would make you uncomfortable.”
It was typical for upperclassmen to take the bottom bunk. But Robertson took one look at Hogue and decided he didn’t want that big body coming down on him. So the “Big O” opted for the top.
5
ED JUCKER ERA (1960-1965)
NEW COACH, NEW APPROACH
The 1960-61 season saw some significant changes in the University of Cincinnati program. Oscar Robertson, the best player in college basketball for three consecutive years, had graduated and gone on to the NBA as the No. 1 overall draft choice. Coach George Smith resigned as coach, became Athletic Director and was succeeded by assistant Ed Jucker.
Under Smith and with Robertson, the Bearcats had been a running, up-tempo team. But UC had lost two straight years in the NCAA Tournament to California, which was more deliberate in its offensive approach.
When Jucker took over, he slowed down the Bearcats and tried to put in place a system more like California’s.
The players struggled early. After a 3-0 start, UC dropped three of its next five. Following a December 23 defeat at Bradley, the Bearcats were 5-3—a season after which they lost only two games total.
The Bearcats, led by new coach Ed Jucker, celebrate their 1961 NCAA championship. They defeated Ohio State 70-65 in overtime in the title game. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)
After a 57-40 loss at St. Louis on December 16, Cincinnati had an emotional team meeting at its hotel. Jucker pleaded with the players to stick with him. “I know this is going to work,” he told them. “We’ve just got to do it better.” His voice cracked as he spoke.
The players told their coach they were with him all the way.
“After that, guys did seem to come together better,” team captain Carl Bouldin said. “That was a factor in bringing us together.”
After the Bradley defeat, the Bearcats would win 22 games in a row, including the national championship game over Ohio State.
FRIENDSHIP BUILT TO LAST
Bouldin and Bob Wiesenhahn, co-captains of UC’s 1961 national championship team, began their friendship before they arrived in Clifton.
Bouldin went to Norwood High School. Wiesenhahn was from McNicholas. They met at a high school all-star game, went out for a malt afterward and remained friends, rooming together for four years at UC.
Wiesenhahn was a bigger guy, around 6-4, 220 pounds. Bouldin was 6-2, 175, and could barely eat after three hours of practice. Wiesenhahn did not have such a problem. One night, he told his roomie that he would have to learn to eat faster because he was making everybody wait for him to finish dinner.
So Wiesenhahn gave a lesson in quick consumption in the student union.
“He talked about peaches and he talked about peas,” Bouldin said. “He said, ‘You’ve got to smash some of the food with your tongue and get down closer to the plate and shovel it in there.’ That was my lesson on how to eat faster. He just wanted me to hurry up.”
DOUBLE DIPPING
One of the reasons Bouldin attended UC is because he could play basketball and baseball there. In fact, here’s a good trivia question: Who played on an NCAA basketball championship team and pitched in the major leagues in the same year?
Yep, it was Bouldin.
After UC’s 1961 title run, Bouldin went unselected in the basketball and baseball drafts. The Cincinnati Royals, Chicago Bulls and Detroit Pistons offered tryouts. But he thought he had a better chance to play professional baseball. That summer, he got a call from the Washington Senators, who expressed some interest. Bouldin said he was scheduled for a tryout with the Cleveland Indians. Washington upped its offer and gave Bouldin $20,000 to sign a contract.
He went to Rookie League, then to Pensacola. In September, the Senators called up Bouldin to the big leagues when rosters were expanded. He pitched in two games, starting one of them.
In 1963, he played in the Winter League in Caracas, Venezuela, on the same team as Pete Rose and against Matty, Felipe and Jesus Alou. In 1964, Bouldin went to Puerto Rico and had a locker right next to Roberto Clemente, who was there for two weeks to try to get in shape.
While in Puerto Rico, Bouldin injured his rotator cuff, ending his baseball career. In four years in the major leagues, Bouldin went 3-8 with 36 strikeouts and 30 walks.
WHATEVER IT TAKES
Tony Yates was born September 15, 1937. His birthday is relevant because shortly after he turned four years old, all his neighborhood playmates in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, where he was born, started kindergarten. They were a year older. Yates would follow them to school, then his mother would have to drag him home crying. This went on every day for a week until Yates’s mom decided to enroll her son in the school. The family had no birth certificate, because the office of the doctor who delivered Yates caught on fire and his records were burned.
In his three years as a player, Tony Yates averaged 7.4 points (1960-61), 8.2 points (1961-62) and 7.6 points (1962-63). In ’63, he was selected third-team All-America by The Associated Press. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)
Mrs. Yates told school officials her son would turn five on December 15. The school accepted him with his “new” birthday.
Because he started school early, he was only 16 when he graduated from Lockland Wayne High School, a small, all-black school in Lockland, in 1954.
He had partial scholarship offers to UC and Xavier, but Yates turned them down. He was captain of a local high school all-star game his senior year and all his teammates were getting full scholarship offers to schools like XU, UC, Dayton, and Miami.
“I felt sad about that,” Yates said.
He opted to wait a year—when he worked odd jobs and played on a barnstorming basketball team with older players—and then joined the U.S. Air Force.
Basic training was in Geneva, N.Y. After three months, he was assigned to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota.
“GRAMPS”
Yates was in the air force until 1959. While in the military, he played basketball, baseball, fast-pitch softball, handball, and racquetball. He knew when he got out, he wanted a full scholarship to play basketball in college.
The University of Cincinnati, however, was still only offering a partial scholarship. Yates had better offers from a few smaller schools, but he wanted to live in Cincinnati, his hometown. He was 22 years old and had gotten married in 1958 while still in the air force. And, of course, the Bearcats had Oscar Robertson, whose mere presence made UC more attractive to Yates. “Who wouldn’t want to be associated with him?” Yates s
aid.
In 1959-60, Yates played on UC’s freshman team. He was older than his teammates. He was stronger mentally and physically and had a high confidence level and understanding of the game. “It was a definite advantage,” he said.
He was an immediate leader.
His first season on the varsity, 1960-61, Yates was a starting guard alongside Bouldin, a senior. The players called him “Gramps,” and he was Jucker’s coach on the floor. If Yates felt a teammate was not playing hard or wasn’t performing well, he’d dribble the ball past the bench and tell Jucker to get the guy out of the game. Didn’t matter if it was a friend or fellow starter. And Jucker would listen.
“When we’d have a timeout, they’d want to get back in the game and come to me and say, ‘I’ll play harder,’” Yates said.
GETTING PSYCHED UP
It was the day of the 1961 national championship game. No. 1 Ohio State vs. No. 2 Cincinnati. The first time in NCAA history two teams from the same state met in the title game.
The Bearcat players were getting taped and dressing in the hotel across the street from the arena in Kansas City. A radio was turned on, and the team was listening to an Ohio State broadcaster breaking down the game’s matchups. It was pretty much even, they decided, except for one position: That was UC’s Wiesenhahn against OSU’s John Havlicek.
“They thought he was going to whip me,” Wiesenhahn said.
Now understand, Wiesenhahn was the kind of player who preferred to play on the road and loved to get booed. It made him play harder. He was, well, an emotional guy.
Getting knocked on the radio? “That’s all I needed,” he said. “I was a psycho. I got fired up real easy.”
“Weise’s face just got red because (the announcer) called him a hatchet man,” Bouldin remembers. “He said, ‘I’m going to kill him.’”
Wiesenhahn outscored Havlicek 17-4 and outrebounded him 9-4. The Bearcats won their first NCAA title, 70-65 in overtime. Wiesenhahn mostly tried to keep Havlicek, who finished one-of-five shooting from the field, from touching the ball.
“That was the greatest feeling that you could have,” Wiesenhahn said. “That was very satisfying.”
OVERCOMING SUPERSTITION
The Bearcats won their first national championship despite having to wear their white uniforms.
According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, there was a coin flip the morning of the NCAA final won by Ohio State coach Fred Taylor, who opted for the Buckeyes to be the “visiting team.” UC was forced to wear white, even though the team considered their black uniforms “lucky.”
SORRY, COACH HALAS
Wiesenhahn played one year of pro basketball with the Cincinnati Royals, then he played in the American Basketball Association/American Basketball League, which folded midway through the season. When he returned to Cincinnati, he got a strange phone call one day.
It was legendary Chicago Bears coach George Halas. Halas wanted to offer Wiesenhahn a tryout at tight end even though Wiesenhahn never played football at UC.
There was no guarantee of money or that he’d make the team. Wiesenhahn had a wife and two children at the time.
“If I would’ve been single, I would’ve tried it,” Wiesenhahn said, “but you can’t do that when you have a family to support.”
The Bears went on to win the 1963 NFL Championship with a 14-10 victory over the New York Giants.
GOOD-BYE PURDUE, HELLO UC
Ron Bonham was getting pressure to stay in state. A star at Muncie (Indiana) Central High School, his team won 29 straight games before losing to East Chicago Washington in the Indiana high school state finals.
Naturally, Purdue and Indiana pursued him hard. Bonham picked Purdue, but was not thrilled with the choice. He went to West Lafayette, stayed a few days, then went back home and told his family he wanted to attend the University of Cincinnati.
“UC is where my heart was all along,” he said.
In 1960-61, he played on UC’s freshman team, which played an up-tempo style of basketball, just as Bonham’s high school team did. That season, however, the “varsity” was slowing down their play under first-year coach Jucker, and they went on to win the NCAA title.
When his sophomore season started, Bonham was coming off the bench.
“I have to admit, I played very little defense when I was in high school,” he said. “We pressed the whole time. I didn’t know how I was going to fit in at UC. I had to get acclimated to playing defense, and that took a while. That helped me later on.”
Bonham was soon a starter and was second on the team in scoring (14.3 ppg). In the 1962 national championship game against Ohio State, Bonham was matched against John Havlicek of the Buckeyes. Bonham scored just 10 points in the final, but UC won 71-59. Havlicek scored 11 points on five-of-14 shooting.
“We had scouted each other so much, I’d come off a pick and Havlicek would be waiting on me,” Bonham said. “Jucker’s strategy for me was to be a decoy. I just ran around and kept Havlicek right on me, and that helped them in starting the fast break.”
As a junior, Bonham averaged 21 points, was UC’s top scorer and a consensus first-team All-American after leading the Bearcats to the 1963 NCAA final, where they lost to Loyola (Illinois) in overtime.
He averaged 24.4 points and was second-team All-America as a senior, when the Bearcats went 17-9. Bonham left as UC’s No. 2 scorer behind Robertson. Today, he still is eighth.
NO “I” IN TEAM
George Wilson was one of those guys who set a standard for role-playing when he was a Bearcat. Wilson was a high school All-American coming out of John Marshall High School in Chicago. He was a big-time scorer who continued that trend on UC’s freshman team.
But when it came time to join the varsity as a sophomore, the Bearcats were not in need of a scorer. They had Paul Hogue, Tom Thacker, and Bonham. Coach Jucker told Wilson that he needed him to rebound and play defense. And so it was that Wilson became the defender always assigned to stop UC’s toughest opponent.
Wilson accepted the role and took it seriously, reading about his opponent and watching film so he knew what to do in games. All of this is why he calls a two-point, one-rebound performance the best of his sophomore year and one of the best in his career.
Cincinnati was facing Creighton in its first NCAA Tournament game in 1962, and Wilson was going to be matched up with Paul Silas, who led the country in rebounding and was among the nation’s top scorers.
Silas finished with just eight points and five rebounds, and UC won 66-46.
“Everybody had to do their part, and that was my role,” Wilson said. “Everybody gets a ring when you win a championship. When I speak to kids, they always ask, ‘How many points did you score?’ I didn’t worry about scoring. I set picks. I did what I had to do.”
George Wilson shared UC team MVP honors with Ron Bonham in 1963-64, then went on to play in the NBA from 1964-71 with six different teams. When Wilson left UC, he was the school’s career leader with 121 blocked shots. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)
GOOD TIMING
Tom Thacker had not hit a shot all night. He was zero of six from the field. And with the score tied in the final seconds of the 1962 NCAA semifinals against UCLA, the plan was for Thacker to give up the ball to Bonham, who would take the potential game-winning shot. Thacker dribbled to the right side, but Bonham was covered. “He couldn’t get free,” Thacker said. “I think everybody in the world knew Ron was going to get the ball.”
Time was running out. Thacker knew he had to get off a shot quickly. So, he fired away from about 12 feet out with three seconds left.
“As soon as I let it go, I felt good,” Thacker said. “It hit all net.”
The Bearcats won 72-70. They would go on to the title game and defeat Ohio State 71-59 for their second consecutive national championship.
When it came to winning championships, nobody was better than Tom Thacker.
After winning two titles at UC, he won a North
American Basketball League title with the 1967 Muskegon (Michigan) Panthers, an NBA title with the 1968 Boston Celtics and an ABA title with the 1971 Indiana Pacers.
Thacker, from William Grant High School in Covington, Kentucky, would also become the first African-American head coach at the University of Cincinnati, leading the women’s basketball program from 1974-77.
WHAT’S IN THAT DRINK?
Thacker claims to be a naïve country kid from Covington, Kentucky. And to support that, he offers this story from one of UC’s trips to New York.
Two of the stalwarts from the Jucker championship era still rank high on the Bearcats’ all-time lists. Paul Hogue (left in white, 1,391 points) and Tom Thacker (right, 1,152 points) are members of the school’s 1,000 Point Club. Hogue is still the Bearcats’ No. 3 all-time leading rebounder with 1,088. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)
An alum took the team to Club 21 for dinner. There were fans, players, coaches. And when it came time to order beverages, Thacker asked for a Tom Collins, a lemon-lime drink that was his favorite soda pop.
“I thought he was going to bring me a Tom Collins soft drink,” Thacker said. “He brought me the glass, and I took a big sip because I was thirsty.”
“WOW!” yelled Thacker. It was a Tom Collins mixed drink with gin.
“I couldn’t really talk,” Thacker said. “There was alcohol in there! That stuff burned the heck out of me. Everybody was laughing at me. That was the first time I had alcohol in my life. It went straight to my head. I thought I was spitting fire out of my mouth.”
6
TAY BAKER ERA (1965-1972)
CLIMBING THE LADDER TO THE TOP
When Tay Baker became the Bearcats’ head coach in 1965, it was roughly 20 years after he began his playing career at the University of Cincinnati.
The 1945 Hamilton High School graduate played three games as a freshman at UC before beginning an 18-month stint in the U.S. Army, where he was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, then Fort Benning in Georgia.
Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room Page 7
