Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

  He had originally come to UC when Ray Farnham was the coach. When Baker returned in 1947, John Wiethe had taken over the program. Baker played for three years and was one of the top reserves on Cincinnati’s first 20-win teams (23-5, 1949; 20-6, 1950).

  Tay Baker was UC’s coach for seven seasons. As a player, he averaged 3.8 points off the bench in 1948-49 and 4.2 points as a reserve in 1949-50. Both those seasons, the Bearcats won the Mid-American Conference. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  After graduating from UC, Baker coached at Lebanon, Miamisburg and Wyoming High Schools. In 1959, Cincinnati decided to add a third coach to its staff. George Smith was the head coach. Ed Jucker was the assistant and head baseball coach. Baker came aboard as a varsity assistant, the freshman coach, track and cross country coach and a physical education teacher. For all that, he said, he earned about $6,300 a year.

  During Baker’s first four years on the Bearcats staff, the team went a combined 110-9, advanced to three Final Fours and won two NCAA titles. When Jucker was named head coach in 1960, Baker became the top assistant.

  When Jucker left in ’65, it was only natural that Baker would succeed him.

  SIGN OF THE TIMES

  Baker coached UC during what he calls “a different time” in U.S. history. There were protests and riots on college campuses all over the country. The Vietnam War. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Kent State. Long hair. Drugs.

  “It was a harder job,” Baker said. “There was a revolution going on. It kind of detracted from athletics and from basketball.

  “There was a line prior to that. There was the coach and there were the players, and whatever the coach said, the players responded to it. In the late ’60s, students would question the authority of a coach. Students wanted their opinions to be heard. They wanted to be counted. There was a psychological change in coaching. Players weren’t challenging me; they were challenging the system, the methods of education and participation, and the whole realm of the college experience. The drug scene became an issue. Discipline became an issue.”

  Not to mention the fact that other basketball teams in the country started catching up to Cincinnati, which was a national powerhouse in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The Bearcats were still a top-10 team during parts of 1965-66, Baker’s first season as head coach. And they were in the top 20 during parts of 1968-69 and 1969-70.

  But in Baker’s final two seasons, UC went a combined 31-21. His team won 10 of its last 12 games in 1972, but Baker felt a growing dissatisfaction with his performance, so he announced February 16, the night UC was playing Xavier at the Cincinnati Gardens, that he was resigning at the end of the season.

  He was criticized by some for being too nice.

  “Some people thought I shouldn’t be there,” he said. “I probably could have stayed. I think the best thing to do was to get out of there and let somebody else have the opportunity to have it.

  “If I had it all to do again, I’d probably do a few things differently. But I really feel like I had success as a player on good teams at UC. I feel like I was part of basketball history there. And I feel like the years I was there coaching we were respectable.”

  MEMORIES IMPROVE WITH TIME

  Before Jim Ard was inducted into UC’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1996, he was informed that he had to make a speech. Say some good things about your time at the university, he was told.

  That was a challenge for Ard, who scored 1,256 career points, was an honorable mention All-American in 1970, and went on to win an NBA championship with the Boston Celtics in 1976.

  He had kind of forgotten he played on a UC team that went 21-6 and earned a National Invitation Tournament berth his senior year.

  Like his coach, what he remembered mostly was the era.

  “There were an awful lot of distractions,” Ard said. “I arrived in ’66 and left in ’70; you can’t believe what went on during that time. Nobody was happy.

  “There were a lot of things changing in this country. All I can tell you was it was not conducive to concentrating on ball.”

  After Ard led Thornton High School to an Illinois high school state championship as a senior, he said he had more than 100 scholarship offers. But he had already narrowed his choices to Cincinnati and Wisconsin.

  Freshmen were ineligible in 1966-67. In Ard’s three seasons on the “varsity,” UC went 56-23. He averaged 13.9 points, 16 points and 19.2 points, and he was fifth on UC’s career scoring chart when he finished (he is now 26th). As a senior, he also averaged 15.2 rebounds.

  Ard said he channeled his anger at the world around him onto the court. He shared top billing with teammate Rick Roberson, who was UC’s No. 6 all-time scorer when his career ended.

  All Ard could think about was finishing his eligibility and moving on, away from UC, away from Cincinnati, away from the college environment, away from the 1960s.

  “When I look back on it now, it was just growth,” Ard said. “But it took me almost 20 years to realize it wasn’t UC, it wasn’t Cincinnati, and it wasn’t Tay Baker. Those were turbulent times. I think any coach at that time was under a big disadvantage. I have to give him credit—the older I get, the smarter he becomes. He had a whole lot of stuff he had to deal with. I have to give him a lot of respect now.”

  BAKING WITH MOM

  Ard was home for Christmas in 1966, his freshman year at the University of Cincinnati. One day, assistant coach Lee Rose called Ard’s home in Harvey, Illinois, to check in with one of his players.

  Aline Ard, Jim’s mother, answered the phone.

  “May I talk to Jim, please?”

  “He can’t come to the phone right now.”

  “This is Lee Rose, the freshman coach at Cincinnati. Jim’s doing very well down here. Can I talk to him, please?”

  “No, he’s making cookies with me.”

  James Ard, Jim’s father, all but fell out of his chair. “You can’t say that!” he shouted.

  It was a tradition. For roughly 10 years, Jim Ard had helped his mom bake Christmas cookies. He just didn’t want the UC coaches and his teammates to know about it.

  “Did I catch a bunch of crap on that one,” Jim said laughing. “My father even gave my mother a hard time. Lee was very nice about it. He said, ‘You’ve got to be a good guy if you’re home making Christmas cookies with your mother.’”

  THE CRUTCH

  Raleigh Wynn came to UC from the same Knoxville, Tennessee, high school (Austin) as former Bearcat great Paul Hogue. He was recruited by several colleges in Tennessee and could have played football at Indiana University.

  But he settled on Cincinnati. And he’s part of Bearcat folklore all because of one game.

  It gets brought up before most Crosstown Shootouts. There have been a lot of heated moments when Xavier and Cincinnati played, but March 3, 1967 is one of those that gets singled out.

  That was the night Xavier’s Joe Pangrazio threw a crutch at Wynn. “Oh yeah,” Wynn said, “I had a big fight in that game.”

  To say the 54th meeting between the teams was heated would be stating the obvious. That’s the way it always is when the Bearcats and Musketeers square off.

  UC came in to its final game 16-9. Xavier had lost six of its past seven and was 13-12. It was Xavier’s only game of the season at the Cincinnati Gardens; it was UC’s second.

  The game went into overtime. The play was physical. Wynn was bringing the ball upcourt against Pangrazio.

  “I was dribbling the ball and he was hitting me in the back with his fist,” Wynn said. “I said, ‘Take it easy.’ He hit me in the back again. I dropped the ball and turned around and slugged him. That’s the way it was. I hit him, and bam. He ran up in the stands and got a crutch, and the place just went wild.”

  According to a 1988 Cincinnati Post article, while chasing after a loose ball, Pangrazio felt Wynn deliberately threw him into the crowd. Pangrazio picked up a crutch belonging to a fan and went after Wy
nn.

  “I was ready to fight at the time,” Wynn said. “I didn’t run or anything. Somebody grabbed him.”

  When a policeman stopped Pangrazio, he threw the crutch at Wynn. Both players were ejected from the game.

  “After a basketball game was over, I never, ever held a grudge,” Wynn said. “If I would see him today, we’d be friends. I wasn’t mad about that. We were just playing a tough game. Several guys would get into it in that game.

  “It’s funny now. I laugh about it. The place just went wild.”

  IT’S “THE JUICE”

  During Ard’s junior season, the Bearcats headed to the West Coast for games against Southern Cal, California, and Stanford. Ard averaged 16.7 points and 13 rebounds over the three games, but that isn’t what he most recalls about the road trip.

  The Bearcats were on the USC campus and headed for a workout when one of the players yelled, “Hey, that’s O.J. Simpson.” Simpson was the Trojans’ star running back who went on to, well, you know the rest of the story.

  If first looks mean anything, Ard wasn’t overly impressed.

  “Everybody had heard of the guy,” Ard said. “But he was so little, I thought, ‘He’s never going to make it.’”

  Oops. Simpson won the 1968 Heisman Trophy, was the National Football League’s MVP in 1975, and is one of the greatest running backs ever. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

  SCARY MOMENT

  Another interesting fact about the West Coast trip was that UC’s game at Stanford was called by mutual agreement with 38 seconds left. According to Cincinnati Enquirer reports, Bearcats sophomore Don Hess fell under the UC basket and hit his head on the floor. He started to swallow his tongue, suffered a severe cut on the inside of his mouth and went into convulsions on the court. Two people in the stands—one man and one woman—who witnessed the incident collapsed. Hess, from Trenton, N.J., was taken to Stanford Hospital. He received 12 stitches in his mouth and lip and was released the next morning complaining only of a headache. Sixth-ranked UC won the game 60-49.

  TIMING IS EVERYTHING

  Ard did not think much of his chances to have a pro basketball career—until early in his senior season, that is.

  Cincinnati was playing host to Iowa and “Downtown” Freddie Brown at the Armory Fieldhouse. Ard scored a career-high 41 points in a 114-105 Bearcats victory and found out later a Seattle SuperSonics scout was at the game.

  It was soon after that Ron Grinker, a Cincinnati attorney, told Ard, “I think you’re a first-round draft choice.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Ard said. “There’s no way I can play with Elgin Baylor and John Havlicek.”

  Grinker was one of the pioneers in representing NBA players and was well respected throughout the league. Turns out, he was absolutely right.

  Seattle drafted Ard in the first round of the 1970 NBA draft.

  ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

  Rick Roberson grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, roughly five miles from where Elvis Presley lived, but on “the other side of the tracks.” Roberson said he had a chance to become the first African-American basketball player at Memphis State, but he thought the University of Cincinnati had more to offer him on and off the court.

  A self-described “boy from the country,” Roberson came to UC in 1967, played freshman ball, then led the Bearcats in scoring three consecutive seasons. He held the career blocked shots record for about 30 years, until Kenyon Martin came along and shattered it.

  “I didn’t read very much about myself,” Roberson said. “I didn’t like to read criticism, so I opted to read magazines. My younger brother knows more about what I did in basketball than I do. I don’t come with a lot of stories. I played hard; I worked hard.

  “Those were the best days of my life. I loved what I was doing and I loved where I was. It was all good to me.”

  Roberson is one of only five players in UC history to collect a triple-double, joining Oscar Robertson, Martin, Kenny Satterfield, and Eric Hicks. After Roberson tallied 16 points, 10 rebounds and 10 blocks against Bradley on January 17, 1967, it would be 30 years and one month before another Bearcat had a triple-double. That came when Martin had 24 points, 23 rebounds and 10 blocks against DePaul in February 1997.

  In 1969, Roberson was a first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Lakers, and he played professionally from 1969-76. None of which was all that surprising.

  In his Mitchell High School yearbook, Roberson said he is quoted as saying he wanted to be an NBA player.

  “Rick’s main purpose was that he was going to the pros,” former teammate Raleigh Wynn said. “That’s all he ever talked about. That was his main objective. Rick was always fun loving, always laughing. He always had something funny going on.”

  “I played and I played,” Roberson said. “I just wanted to be drafted. I knew I could make it if I was drafted.”

  THOSE DARNED BUGS

  Lloyd Batts was a high school star from Phoenix, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago, who said he received more than 250 college scholarship offers, including one from the University of Cincinnati. Baker and assistant coach John Bryant were recruiting him for the Bearcats in 1970. Batts attended the same high school as Ard.

  Understand, this wasn’t just any player. Check the UC record books carefully, and you’ll see that Batts has the second-highest career scoring average in school history behind only Oscar Robertson.

  Batts could score. He played inside and could shoot long jumpers. Driving to the basket was his forte. He played small forward for two years, then was a guard his senior year.

  Freshmen were ineligible to play in 1970-71 when Batts arrived in Clifton, so he only played three years for UC. If he had played four, he might very well have ended up the No. 2 all-time scorer.

  Lloyd Batts (31) led the Bearcats in scoring three straight seasons and twice was the team’s most valuable player. Batts (20.1 ppg) and Oscar Robertson (33.8 ppg) are the only members of the school’s 1,000 Point Club to average more than 20 points a game. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  On his recruiting visit, Batts met Robertson. That had a big impact on him and would’ve made choosing a college easy—if not for the darned bugs. You see, Batts came to Cincinnati at the same time as the 17-year cicadas.

  “I decided when I left the campus I was not coming back,” Batts said. “They were freaking me out. I’m not too fond of bugs, period, especially flying bugs. And they were flying all around me. I had never seen anything like that in my entire life. I wouldn’t care if they had offered me a million dollars, I wasn’t coming.”

  Before Batts boarded his airplane back to Chicago, Bryant asked about his visit. “I don’t think this is the place for me,” Batts said.

  “Why?” Bryant asked.

  Batts explained. He liked UC, thought it would be a great place to go to school, but he didn’t think he could handle the bugs.

  Then it was Bryant’s turn to explain. He said they’d be gone before he showed up the next fall, and he’d be out of school by the time they came back.

  That was all it took. Batts committed. Oscar beat out the bugs, after all.

  GOING TO THE “OTHER SIDE”

  Tay Baker remained at the University of Cincinnati as a physical education teacher for one year after resigning as basketball coach in 1972.

  Then, a funny thing happened.

  The head coaching position opened at Xavier University, the rival school across town. Baker’s name ended up in the mix, and he received a call from XU Athletic Director Jim McCafferty, who wanted to talk to him.

  “I had no inclination to go there at all,” Baker said. “It was a tough decision to make. I don’t care who you are, if you’re from UC and you go to Xavier, some people are not going to like it. Or vice versa. I still wanted to coach, but I didn’t want to leave town. My kids were all in school. My wife went to UC and was from Cincinnati.

  “It was a tug of war in my mind. I thought, ‘God
, you’re from UC and you’re talking about going to Xavier.’ There was even one guy on their selection committee who flat out told me, ‘I want you to know you’re not a unanimous choice for this position.’”

  Xavier’s program had hit rock bottom under coach Dick Campbell in 1972-73, going 3-23—that remains the worst season in XU history.

  Baker decided to take the job. His former UC players were supportive, he said. Still, overall he received a “mixed reaction.”

  “Some people said, ‘You’re nuts,’ and some said, ‘Well, it’s an opportunity,’” Baker said. “I really loved UC and wanted to pay attention to what they were doing and hoped they were winning. Well, the people at Xavier, they want them to lose every game. It was strange. It worked out for me. The people there were great to me. Mr. McCafferty was great to me.”

  Fans were another story. It is no wonder Baker’s the only man to be head basketball coach at UC and Xavier.

  “I’d be driving down (Interstate) 75 in a blue station wagon with Xavier on it and a guy would go by and give me the finger,” Baker said. “You expect that with UC and Xavier. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. They don’t like each other and they want to beat each other, and that’s the way it should be.”

  Baker’s teams went 70-89 in six seasons at XU. He had two winning seasons (14-12, 14-13). But he had an impact on the Musketeers that went beyond wins and losses.

  Baker said he was the one who encouraged and prodded McCafferty to get Xavier in a conference. The Musketeers were an independent until 1979-80.

  “The schedule was a mess,” Baker said. “You’d play Marquette and Notre Dame and then Wheeling.”

  McCafferty took Baker seriously and worked with Loyola, Butler, Evansville, Oral Roberts and Oklahoma City to form what would become the Midwestern City Conference. Baker would never get to coach in the MCC. Just like at the end of his UC tenure, he felt a faction of Xavier people wanted him out, so he resigned as head coach in 1979 and gave way to Bob Staak.