Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

  Hopson went on to play at Ohio State, where he became the Buckeyes’ all-time leading scorer with 2,096 points. He was the Big Ten Conference most valuable player in 1987 and was the No. 3 overall pick in the 1987 NBA draft by the New Jersey Nets.

  “Actually, the reason I came to Ohio State was because of Coach Machock,” Hopson said. “Great gift of gab, man. He was a great recruiter. I never even paid attention to Ohio State until (Badger was fired). Then I started searching around.”

  That would be UC alum Chuck Machock, who was an assistant coach on Bob Huggins’s staff when the Bearcats went to the Final Four in 1992.

  IF ONLY ‬ PART II

  Hopson wasn’t the only star player who may have come to UC if Badger had remained coach.

  A year behind Hopson was Danny Manning, who also crossed the Bearcats off his list after Badger’s firing.

  “He loved Cincinnati,” Derrick McMillan said. “He loved the school.”

  True, says Manning, who confirms that UC was “absolutely a possibility” had Badger stayed. “They were on my list until he was no longer there,” he said. “They were definitely in my top four (joining North Carolina, North Carolina State and Kansas, where he ended up).”

  Ron Grinker, the same Cincinnati attorney who encouraged Badger to take the UC job, represented Manning’s father, Ed, who played in the NBA and ABA from 1967-76. Ed Manning was with the Bulls when Badger was an assistant coach.

  Every summer, Grinker would gather the players he represented in Cincinnati. For several years, Danny Manning would tag along and spend time in Cincinnati. He got to know the city and attended five basketball camps at UC. He became fond of Cincinnati staples like Graeter’s ice cream and Montgomery Inn ribs, which to this day he orders online and has shipped to him. He also liked Skyline Chili.

  “We understood that on a scale of one to 10, it was a nine he was coming to UC,” McMillan said.

  “From everything that we knew, Danny was coming,” Hughes echoed.

  In 1986, Grinker told The Cincinnati Enquirer the same thing.

  Well, you probably know the rest. Manning became the all-time leading scorer and rebounder at Kansas, was named the consensus national player of the year in 1988, led the Jayhawks to an NCAA title, and was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1988 NBA draft.

  CLEARING OUT

  Badger said he never did get along with Mike McGee, hired as UC’s Athletic Director in May 1980.

  By end of the 1982-83 season, Badger’s fifth, the coach knew his days were numbered. The day after the Bearcats lost to Tulane in their first Metro Conference tournament game at Riverfront Coliseum, Badger went to the UC campus and cleaned out his office. It was a Sunday afternoon.

  When Badger came into the office Monday morning, he said, his secretary was crying.

  “Coach, we’ve been robbed,” she said. “Somebody robbed your office.”

  Badger thought it was funny. Then he went to meet with McGee, who told Badger what he expected to hear—that he was making a coaching change. Their meeting lasted all of three minutes.

  Three months later, the Cleveland Cavaliers hired Badger as their top assistant coach.

  “Cincinnati was a good move for my family,” Badger said. “My wife liked it. Our two sons are still there. Cincinnati was my second favorite place (behind Charlotte).”

  9

  TONY YATES ERA (1983-1989)

  ONCE A BEARCAT ‬

  Tony Yates was a Bearcat during three consecutive decades. He played in the 1960s. He was an assistant coach for Tay Baker, then Gale Catlett, in the ’70s. And he returned to his alma mater as head coach in 1983.

  Yates had been an assistant coach at the University of Illinois for nine years—one under Gene Bartow and eight under Lou Henson.

  In the back of his mind, he always hoped to one day coach the Bearcats. He said he interviewed for the job in 1972 when Baker resigned, but Athletic Director George Smith went with Catlett. Yates tried again when Catlett left in 1978, but Athletic Director Bill Jenike chose Ed Badger.

  Toward the end of the 1982-83 season, with growing disenchantment with Badger, some UC alums contacted Yates to see if he was still interested in the job at UC.

  Tony Yates’s tenure as head coach of Cincinnati did not bring the championship success of his playing days. Nevertheless, Yates brought many memorable moments to Bearcats fans, including the infamous slow-down game against Kentucky in 1983, the Bearcats’ first postseason appearance (NIT, 1985) in more than eight years, the snapping of UC’s 17-game losing streak to Louisville, and the recruitment of three 1,000-point scorers: Roger McClendon, Louis Banks, and Levertis Robinson. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  There was no question about it.

  Badger was out of work soon after the season ended. UC Athletic Director Mike McGee flew to Champaign, Illinois, to interview Yates at his home.

  The other primary candidates were Lou Campanelli from James Madison and Ron Greene from Murray State. It came down to Yates and Greene after Campanelli withdrew from consideration.

  Yates came to campus for a formal interview with the selection committee, which included Oscar Robertson.

  On April 1, McGee called Yates at his home in Champaign and offered him the job.

  “Now Mike, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke is it?” Yates asked.

  “It was a very happy moment,” Yates said. “I was going home.”

  When he was announced as head coach at the Alumni Center, more than 200 friends, former teammates, UC officials and supporters gave him a standing ovation. Yates had to wipe away tears.

  Robertson told The Cincinnati Enquirer: “Am I happy? You bet. He knows the game. He knows how to recruit. He’s just what we need.”

  BOOT CAMP

  It did not necessarily please all the UC players that Yates brought with him a military background of regimen and discipline. The transition from the mostly laid-back Badger to Yates was eye-opening. Some players were certain Yates, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was trying to run everyone out of the program.

  “It was a miniature boot camp,” Yates said. “We wanted the kids who really wanted to be there and who would conform to what we wanted.

  “We weeded out the guys who didn’t really want to work. They began to leave one by one. A few we asked to leave. The guys who hung in there are the guys who really wanted to be there. Attitudes changed.”

  Yates set strict in-season and off-season curfews. (“My junior year, you had to be in your room at 10; I can remember me and Joe Niemann sitting across from each other in the doorways talking because we weren’t allowed out of our rooms,” Doug Kecman said.) Yates required players to sign in at the basketball office by 7:30 a.m. each school day—if not they would have to run five miles at 5 a.m. the next day.

  And he was relentless in practice. “We were in a military regime when he came in,” Kecman said. “We practiced for four hours every day.”

  Sometimes longer.

  “He had a lot of rules,” Derrick McMillan said. “A lot of rules.”

  ICY START

  This was Myron Hughes’s introduction to Yates.

  Hughes had just finished his sophomore season at UC and was rehabilitating an injured knee. Yates called a 3 p.m. meeting, but Hughes had not finished icing his knee. He walked into the meeting a few minutes late and Yates jumped all over him. The two had never met.

  “If anybody was always on time, it was me,” Hughes said. “My teammates knew I was always on time for everything. At that point, I told myself I was transferring. I didn’t want to take the opportunity to get to know him.”

  Hughes contacted Tennessee and Virginia Tech and was getting ready to leave UC. But he decided that wasn’t what he wanted, that he had met so many great people at the university. So he decided to give Yates a chance.

  After sitting out the 1983-84 season following knee surgery, Hughes played two seasons for Yates and grew to look at him as a father figure and confidant.


  More than 17 years after his UC career ended, Hughes remained close with Yates, phoning him almost monthly.

  “If I need advice, he’s one of the first people I call,” Hughes said.

  PRACTICE ’TIL YOU DROP

  Yates allowed his players to go home for Christmas in 1983, but they were all to return and get right back to work after the holiday. Back in Cincinnati, it was a cold, cold winter. And when the players returned to town, they found there were no lights and no heat in Dabney Hall, where they lived. There was also no heat in the Armory Fieldhouse, site of the first practice after the break. The players could see steam coming out of their mouths when they breathed.

  When it was time for practice to start at 7 p.m., only four players were on hand: Kecman, Niemann, Mike McNally and Marty Campbell. Yates had them play two-on-two full court while they waited for the other players to trickle in. “Practice” continued until after 10 p.m. Derrick McMillan still was not there; he was involved in a car accident in Chicago heading to the airport. Neither was Mark Dorris, who had gotten married during the break. Eventually Yates told the players to head back to the dorm and he’d see them at 7 a.m. the next day.

  Yates was obviously not in a good mood. After a four-hour practice in Laurence Hall (which did have heat), he had the Bearcats line up for sprints. Lots of them. The players were dropping out one at a time, vomiting on the sideline, unable to continue.

  There were six players still running when Luther Tiggs passed out in the middle of the court from dehydration.

  “Coach Yates really believed in conditioning,” Tiggs said. “It was one of those typical days. As we started our conditioning, one sprint led to another. And that just wasn’t enough. He never got satisfied.

  “I practiced extremely hard. I didn’t believe in saving anything. It just seemed like it was never going to stop. The teammates were encouraging each other. The coaches were really pushing us. I was out of gas. I remember getting extremely light-headed. I looked at the coaches and they indicated we needed to get back on the line. I was totally exhausted. The only thing I remember after that was I was in the student medical center and I had an IV in my arm and a couple of the guys were giving me a hard time because they thought I was bailing out.”

  After Tiggs went down, Kecman looked at Niemann and said, “We’ve got to be done.”

  As soon as Tiggs was taken out of the building, Yates said, “Get back on the line.”

  They ran some more, then had to come back for a 4 p.m. practice.

  ONE ON ONE

  That wasn’t the last time Tiggs got a hard time from his teammates. Or Yates.

  He missed two games during the 1983-84 season when he suffered a broken finger playing against . . . a girl!

  OK, to be fair, Tiggs wasn’t playing just any female when he got hurt. He was in the Armory Fieldhouse playing one on one against Cheryl Cook, the greatest player in UC women’s basketball history whose jersey number is retired and hangs in Shoemaker Center.

  “She was the best women’s player I ever saw,” Tiggs said. “She was extremely competitive. She always wanted to play with the guys. They called her a few names, but nobody gave her an out. That’s what she wanted.

  “One day, she wanted to play one on one at a side basket. She had the ball and she made a move toward the baseline and my hand went across the body because I wanted to strip her of the ball. I pulled it back. When I looked up, my index finger was completely severed. I ran to the trainer, and my finger was just hanging there. They had to stitch it up. The guys were really on me about that. Coach didn’t want to believe it.”

  As for Cook, Tiggs said she felt badly.

  “She was real sweet about it,” he said. “She didn’t want to make (the men’s team) mad.”

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Cook said. “Now that you brought it up, I still feel bad about it.”

  COOKIE MONSTER

  Since Tiggs brought up the subject, it’s appropriate to take a timeout from the men’s program to talk about Cheryl Cook, AKA the Cookie Monster.

  In Shoemaker Center hangs the retired jersey numbers of Oscar Robertson, Jack Twyman, Kenyon Martin and . . . Cook, No. 24.

  A native of Indianapolis, Cook was second in the country in scoring (27.5 ppg) and second-team All-America as a senior in 1984-85, and she remains the women’s all-time leading scorer at Cincinnati with 2,367 career points. (That was the seventh best total in NCAA history at the time.)

  The five-foot-nine guard was a two-time Metro Conference Player of the Year. She played on the 1983 gold-medal-winning U.S. team in the Pan American Games and on the silver-medal-winning U.S. team in the 1985 World University Games.

  Cook was Indiana’s Miss Basketball in 1981 as a senior at Indianapolis Washington High School. She said she had 375 scholarship offers from colleges and narrowed her choices to USC, UCLA, Hawaii and Cincinnati.

  She wanted to leave the state of Indiana but stay close enough to home so her parents could see her play.

  “Plus the (UC) coaching staff was just awesome,” Cook said. “They were real people-oriented. It was a close-knit family within the team, and that’s what I was looking for.

  “I was going there to try to make some noise and get us national recognition.”

  She would play two years for coach Ceal Barry, then two for coach Sandy Smith.

  During her career, the Bearcats went a combined 70-45. Cook’s only regret was that UC never went to the NCAA Tournament when she was there.

  “But we came a long way as a program,” she said. “It opened a lot of doors for other women to come in and try to take it to the next level.”

  Two memories stand out for Cook.

  One was when the Bearcats went to Tennessee in the third game of her senior season and upset the 12th-ranked Volunteers. Cook scored 34 points.

  The other is how she sometimes practiced with the UC men’s team and competed against guys in pick-up games on campus.

  “I grew up with six brothers, so I was accustomed to being the only girl, being knocked down,” Cook said. “I played AAU with the boys when I was younger. I wanted to show them at UC that I was capable of playing with them. Some of the guys at the beginning underestimated me—until I got out there and played.

  “I grew up with that drive to be better than the next person. I lived in the gym. As far as a personal life and hanging out with friends, I didn’t have all that because I was dedicated to the sport.”

  Cook was one of the top college players in the nation and went on to play four years in Spain and two years in Italy after leaving Cincinnati.

  “I feel privileged,” she said. “I wish there were more (women’s numbers retired), but I’m thankful for every opportunity UC gave me.”

  SO MUCH FOR THAT IDEA

  Seven games into his junior season, Doug Kecman had a great shooting night, scoring 10 points in a 55-50 loss to Miami University at Riverfront Coliseum. He scored the Bearcats’ last eight points and hit five jumpers from the corner that would have all been three-pointers if the three-point arc existed then, which it didn’t.

  The 1-6 Bearcats’ next game was against No. 2-ranked Kentucky at Riverfront. At practice the day before meeting the Wildcats, Yates told Kecman that he was going to be in the starting lineup and that with Kentucky playing a 1-3-1 defense, he could get open for that shot in the corner all night. During practice, Kecman said, “I was bangin’ them home. I was hitting every corner shot you can imagine.”

  I’m gonna have a career game against Kentucky, he thought.

  Kecman was fired up. He got on the phone that night and called his friends back home in the Pittsburgh area.

  “We’re playing on ESPN tomorrow night and I’m going to get 20 (points) against Kentucky,” he told them. “I’ve got the green light to shoot everything from the corner.”

  Well, most UC fans know how this story turns out. Yates told the Bearcat players just before they went out for the tipoff that they were going to hold the ball. All
game.

  That blows the 20 I’m going to get, Kecman thought,but I’m still starting on national TV.

  “I played 39 minutes that night and didn’t break a sweat,” he said. “I did grab a rebound over Sam Bowie—he kind of slipped and fell.”

  He took one shot all night—and missed. Kecman was scoreless.

  The final: Kentucky 24, UC 11.

  CINDERELLA STORY

  Tony Wilson came to UC from Toledo on a track scholarship (he was one of Ohio’s top high school hurdlers), but as a freshman he also was interested in playing basketball. He tried to walk on to UC’s team but did not make it.

  Derrick McMillan, at Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship, was also on the track team as a freshman and got to know Wilson. The night before walk-on tryouts in the fall of 1982, McMillan said he saw Wilson at a party. Wilson said he wasn’t going to try out again. McMillan had seen Wilson play pick-up games, and he liked guys who wanted to play defense and played with a lot of heart. Wilson was also pretty quick, like McMillan.

  “It’s like 2 a.m.,” McMillan said. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to come try out. You’re going to practice at 8 o’clock in the morning. I’ll be there personally.’ I asked (the coaches) to give him a fair shot as a walk-on. The rest is history.”

  Wilson made the team, impressed coaches with his hustle and determination and was a starter by January of his sophomore year. He is probably best remembered for his 49-foot shot that upset 17th-ranked Alabama-Birmingham at Riverfront Coliseum (69-67) on December 12, 1984.

  After UAB tied the score with five seconds left, Wilson got the ball, dribbled once and looked at the clock. “It read :02, and I let it go,” he said afterward. “I knew I had the distance.”

  “I remember the circumstances real well because I wanted the ball so bad,” McMillan said. “It was something I practiced every day. Tony reaches out and gets the ball and sends it up, Cinderella style. It was the shot heard ’round the world.”

  JEKYLL AND HYDE