Ron Loneski’s pass to Wilt Chamberlain was batted away by North Carolina’s Joe Quigg. The ball went to Quigg’s teammate Tommy Kearns, who thought quickly. The best place to put the ball out of reach of the desperate Kansas players was in the air, so Kearns let it fly toward the Municipal Auditorium ceiling. When it returned, the clock read zero and the scoreboard told a remarkable story: North Carolina 54, Kansas 53.
The 1957 national championship game was the longest in the event’s 68 years, lasting three overtimes. But the reverberations from that night in Kansas City lasted a half-century. In one region, college basketball changed direction, as the game’s pre-eminent program and conference were created.
At the same time, a coaching career was ruined and college basketball’s brightest star was dimmed in a loss that would haunt him for a lifetime.
This season, the Tar Heels and Jayhawks came up two games short in their anniversary game quests. But the programs already know each other well, a relationship started that night with Dean Smith rooting hard for his Jayhawks. Things would soon change for Smith, just as they did for many others that night because the pass to Chamberlain didn’t have quite enough air.
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Kansas assistant coach Jerry Waugh had never seen a locker room in this much pain. Although North Carolina was the nation’s top-ranked team, No. 2 Kansas was considered a strong favorite. Municipal Auditorium wasn’t Allen Fieldhouse, but you couldn’t tell by the big banner stretched across the wall of the upper seats “NCAA — Jayhawks all the way.” Plus, there was Chamberlain, the most dominant force college hoops had ever seen.
“I never for a moment thought we’d lose that game,” said Waugh, a first-year assistant coach in 1957. But there were signs of trouble even before the 9 p.m. tipoff. North Carolina had taken the wrong bench when it came out to warm up, and the manager even moved some of the Jayhawks’ gear to the other bench.
When Kansas coach Dick Harp saw this, he complained to tournament director and Big Seven commissioner Reaves Peters but was told to be the good host and let it ride. “Dick went ballistic,” Waugh said. “He got all fruitcake and went off on Reeves.”
North Carolina coach Frank McGuire knew exactly what he was doing. The Tar Heels had won their semifinal game over Michigan State in triple overtime on that bench, and McGuire wasn’t about to change his luck. Harp saw it as a tacky act of gamesmanship from a city-slicker coach from New York City, but McGuire won this round.
And the next one, when he sent out the 5-foot-11 Kearns to jump center against the 7-foot Chamberlain. No opponent was going to win the center jump against Wilt, so why try? The Tar Heels were loose, and Harp’s nerves were even more frayed. “He was tighter than a two-dollar banjo,” Waugh said.
Harp had been criticized over the years for his second-half strategy that night. Kansas had overcome a seven-point halftime deficit and owned a 40-37 lead with about 7 minutes remaining. North Carolina’s legs were spent after the Michigan State marathon. But instead of Kansas continuing to press the issue, Harp ordered a slowdown, and for 2 minutes the Jayhawks held the ball.
“It was exactly what we needed,” North Carolina All-American Lennie Rosenbluth said. “It let us catch our breath.” Waugh said Harp’s idea was to get the ball to Chamberlain in that set, but the Tar Heels’ sagging zone was making that impossible. Harp believed maintaining possession was better than a turnover, but the strategy backfired. North Carolina caught Kansas and forced overtime.
The Jayhawks had lost twice that season to teams that used slowdown tactics. But as long as Kansas had Chamberlain, who in his first varsity game scored 52 points and grabbed 31 rebounds, the team felt invincible.
Chamberlain led all scorers that night with 23 points and was chosen the tournament’s most outstanding player. But the Jayhawks didn’t get him the ball enough in the extra periods, and the final attempt never reached his outstretched fingers. The loss scarred Chamberlain for life.
“I got the tag of being a loser because of that game,” Chamberlain said in a 1998 interview in Lawrence, a year before he died. “It was hard for me take because I was a young man everybody expected so much from me. “It was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me in sports.”
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Chamberlain got stuck with the loser tag, but Harp fared worse. Thrust into a job he never asked for, Harp would become the coach who couldn’t win with the game’s greatest player, and he’d be driven out of the game after eight years as the least successful of all Kansas coaches.
Harp was appointed coach for the 1956-57 season when Kansas forced out legendary Phog Allen, who had reached the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70. Chamberlain was crushed. “I never thought I’d play for anybody but Dr. Allen,” Chamberlain said. Instead, this most promising season would be led by Harp, a starting guard on the Kansas team that fell to Indiana in the 1940 NCAA title game.
Harp had been a head coach at William Jewell before taking a job on the Kansas bench in 1948. One of his first duties was to recruit the foundation of the team that would win the 1952 national championship. “The players who worked with Dick when he was an assistant held him in the highest esteem,” said Monte Johnson, a player on the 1957 team and later the school’s athletic director.
Especially Smith, who remained fiercely devoted to Harp through the years. Smith added Harp to his Tar Heels staff in the 1980s, and it was there that Harp got to know a North Carolina assistant named Roy Williams. Harp’s recommendation helped Williams get the Kansas job. But as a head coach, Harp was overmatched. “When I became his assistant, I sensed a change in him,” said Waugh, a Kansas guard in the early 1950s. “Players no longer responded to Dick the way they used to.”
Harp didn’t like what recruiting had become. Inducements were common. Alumni kept players happy with monthly payments. Harp railed against it all, believing wearing the Kansas uniform should be reward enough. It wasn’t for Chamberlain.
“He wanted a new car after his junior year, and Dick said absolutely not, because Dick knew it wouldn’t be right,” Waugh said. “Dick told him to do that Look magazine story (for pay) and move on. We had fought so hard to get him, and that’s how it ended.” In the Look story, Chamberlain said he was leaving the college game and joining the Globetrotters for $50,000 because of the constant double- and triple-team defense and the slow-down tactics, and Chamberlain hated those games.
But Waugh is convinced Chamberlain would have returned as a senior if he had been allowed to replace his Oldsmobile. “Dick wanted his kids to be All-American boys, he wanted them to be students, and he thought he could transform people,” Waugh said. “He could never accept what the game was becoming.” And the game passed him by.
Kansas, which posted one losing season between 1929 and 1958, suffered three in the next five years. Harp was fired after the 1964 season, and even his moment of appreciation at the team’s annual banquet became a nightmare when Allen decided to use the moment to announce Harp wasn’t his choice to replace him. He would have selected Ralph Miller, a teammate of Harp’s who was coaching at Wichita State.
“You could have heard a pin drop,” Johnson said. “I was sitting next to Dick, and you could see the hurt on his face. He had been so loyal to Doc as an assistant coach, and this was his thanks.” Harp went on to become director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes for 13 years. After serving on Smith’s North Carolina staff for three seasons until 1989, Harp returned to Lawrence, where he died in 2000.
“The sad thing was he was where he always wanted to be, and it was not a fulfilling experience for him,” Waugh said. “And it started because he was given an impossible assignment.”
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Rosenbluth remembers being corrected when telling his New York friends that he had received a scholarship to North Carolina. “ ‘You mean North Carolina State,’ they said,” Rosenbluth said. “No, University of. Nobody knew about them.”
The region’s premier program was 30 miles from Chapel Hill in Raleigh. Coach Everett Case took over at North Carolina State just after World War II and built a powerhouse, winning nine of 10 conference tournaments in the old Southern Conference and new Atlantic Coast Conference. Case had been a successful high school coach in Indiana and brought the state’s fast-break approach along with several of its stars to the South.
After years of regular beatings, North Carolina counterpunched by hiring McGuire from St. John’s. His recruiting connections in New York and New Jersey soon loaded the Tar Heel rosters with standouts such as Rosenbluth. By 1957, the Tar Heels had risen to the top. North Carolina brought a 30-0 record to Kansas City, beat Michigan State but was as much as a 10-point underdog against the Jayhawks.
“At our pregame meal, McGuire looks at Tommy, our smallest starter, and asks him, ‘Are you afraid of Chamberlain?’ ” Rosenbluth said. “And Tommy says he isn’t. ‘OK, then you’re jumping center.’ ”
Three hours after Chamberlain dwarfed Kearns at the center jump, the North Carolina guard flung the ball toward the sky, and the Tar Heels owned their first national championship. North Carolina celebrated into the evening, and the players wound up in McGuire’s hotel suite. Later, the coach would get a $58 bill from the school for ordering Roquefort dressing. The school had deemed it an unnecessary expense. Twenty-five years later, North Carolina wrote McGuire a check for the amount. It was the least the school could do.
That night galvanized basketball in the region and became the bookend for the ACC as the nation’s pre-eminent league power. Not only did the Tar Heels score a monumental triumph, but fans in North Carolina witnessed it thanks to a television executive named Castleman D. Chesley from Philadelphia. Chesley saw the passion growing for college basketball in North Carolina. He hastily assembled a network of three stations in the state and called a young Kansas City announcer named Bill Grigsby to do the broadcast.
“He was going to pay me $350, which might as well have been a million,” Grigsby said. “A few days before the game I came down with laryngitis. Now, I can’t miss that kind of payday. We talk the day before the game and I tried to hide my raspy voice. I must have did a good job, because I called the game.”
The broadcast proved so popular that Chesley started a weekly basketball package the next year, and the ACC became the first conference to regularly televise its game to a region.
“So now all of a sudden, the ACC has a recruiting tool other conferences don’t have,” said CBS analyst and former Wake Forest guard Billy Packer. “It put the conference so far ahead of everybody else in that part of the country.
“That game started it all.”
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It was the mid-1990s, and Rosenbluth heard Chamberlain was at a nightclub he owned in Boca Raton, Fla. Rosenbluth, living in Fort Myers, and a few of his old teammates who also lived in the South, went to the club and asked for Chamberlain. They were told he wasn’t in.
“Tell him it’s Lennie Rosenbluth.”
A few minutes later, Chamberlain emerged, and the old adversaries passed the night away.
“Sure we talked about the game, and I remember him telling us how disappointed he was, that he thought Kansas played one of its worst games of the year, especially him.
“Here was a guy who won two NBA championships, set all these scoring records, played in every all-star game, and that one night stayed with him all those years. It had to have been difficult.”
Only for a lifetime.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think of that game,” Waugh said. “I’ve never gotten over it.”