Shocker stars from historic 1964-65 season will speak at Wichita State

One of them remembers the racial tensions that year.

The team bus had to pull up almost flush against the rear door of the arena in Tulsa so they could avoid being pelted by rocks when they exited the bus.

That was one of the problems during that 1964-65 Wichita State University basketball season.

Another was the loss of their two best big men at the semester break — two future first-round NBA draft picks, including a consensus All-American and probably the best Shocker basketball player ever.

To have any title hopes, the remaining Shockers, who had rolled to a 13-3 record and a No. 3 ranking behind the two stars, would have to win the Missouri Valley Conference title without them, then win the NCAA regional tournament without them, and go to the Final Four without them.

And they did.

The starting players who were left, while short, were smart about the game, fundamentally sound, cohesive and well conditioned. And they could shoot. All five came from within 45 miles of Wichita

“We worked together, and that’s how we won.” said Mohamad Sharif, the former Kelly Pete, a rugged guard from Wichita East High School and the team’s top defender. “You have to think. That’s the key. It’s a thinking game.”

Sharif, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., said he still meets guys from teams he played against that year who wonder how they kept winning after 6-7 Dave Stallworth and 6-10 Nate Bowman departed the team.

“It blew their minds” Sharif said. “That’s why I’m so proud of my teammates. We believed in ourselves. We utilized what we had. We didn’t worry about what we didn’t have.”

Sharif is one of four members of that team who will return to the campus for the WSU Distinguished Alumni Speaker Series on Tuesday at the Marcus Welcome Center. Stallworth, Bob Powers and John Criss also are scheduled to appear.

The former players will discuss that Final Four season as the current Shocker team prepares for the NCAA Tournament with the potential to make a run at the Final Four.

Sharif likes their chances.

“I think they have the size, the diversity, a lot of flexibility and a good bench, so they not only have an opportunity to go to the Final Four, they have an opportunity to win it,” he said.

The 1964-65 team remains the only Shocker team to reach the Final Four. They also achieved a No. 1 ranking on Dec. 14 with Stallworth and Bowman, a pair of Texas recruits, on board. It’s the only No. 1 ranking in Shocker history.

But Stallworth had to leave at the semester break after his eligibility expired, and Bowman was lost because of grades. Until then, they didn’t see a team in America that could beat them.

“We knew we were as good as anybody,” said Stallworth, who spent eight seasons in the NBA after his Shocker career, and lives in Wichita. “We played Loyola of Chicago in Chicago and they were Number One at the time and we beat them. That’s when we really knew we had the team to beat.”

The Shockers who didn’t play much accepted their roles. Their job was to toughen the starters to play in a conference dubbed the “Valley of Death.”

“The main objective for the guys that weren’t starting was to really make the starters work hard every day in practice,” said Powers, of Powers & Associates in Wichita, who was a reserve on the team. “Guys that practiced against them every day, we actually worked harder than they did.”

Going against Stallworth and Bowman every day was a chore.

“They were awesome players. Oh my goodness, just to be in practice with them,” Powers said. ”They could do things on a basketball floor that was against gravity and everything else. And the desire to play and win in those guys was unbelievable. They would not quit.”

The head coach was Gary Thompson, who had taken over from the man who built the team, Ralph Miller , after Miller left for Iowa the previous year. Thompson did not show favoritism towards his stars, Powers said.

“The coach did not treat Dave Stallworth any better than he treated Bob Powers,” Powers said.

That created a cohesive group that ate together and roomed together, black players and white players.

“We were one,” Powers said.

That cohesiveness was important on the road, where racial tensions were high at some locations. At a game at Louisville that WSU was losing, Thompson told the team at halftime he would start five black players for the second half. This was a year before Texas Western started five black players against all-white Kentucky in the national championship game and changed college basketball.

“He didn’t know how the crowd would respond,” Powers said. “He told us, ‘No matter what happens, you guys stand still. Don’t get away from each other.’ There were no incidents. But that actually happened.”

“The guys on our team, we had great unity,” Sharif said. “We had each other’s back. We still stick together because we know what we went through.”

Of the starting five after Stallworth and Bowman left — Sharif, Dave Leach from McPherson, Jamie Thompson from East High, John Criss from Southeast, and Vernon Smith from Newton — the tallest was Leach at 6-5. Criss said the only player athletic enough to belong at that level was Sharif. The others were slow and/or couldn’t jump, he said.

But all could shoot, all were in top condition and all knew how to play the game. They managed to win the conference title by two games.

Only 23 teams were in the NCAA field that year. To reach the Final Four, Wichita State defeated Southern Methodist, 86-81, in the semifinals of the Midwest Regional in Manhattan, and beat Hank Iba’s Oklahoma State team in a 54-46 chess match for the championship.

The starters played all 40 minutes of the title game.

Criss said his biggest thrill of the season was defeating Iba, a coaching legend even then.

In the Shockers’ first game at the Final Four in Portland, Ore., John Wooden’s defending NCAA champion UCLA Bruins exposed their lack of depth. The Shockers were tough for the first eight minutes and the score was tied 13-13. But UCLA made adjustments to take the Shockers out of their game, Sharif said. The Bruins started piling up points behind their star senior guard, Gail Goodrich, and moved out to an 11-point lead over the next three minutes. They won, 108-89.

“They had 12 they could run in and out, we had five,” Sharif said. “The mathematics didn’t really work. And we weren’t able to stay within what we had the capacity to do.”

In the third-place game, WSU lost to Princeton, 118-82, as the Tigers’ Bill Bradley, later an NBA star and a U.S. senator, scored a then-tournament record 58 points.

Sharif, an all-conference pick that year who always guarded the other team’s most prolific scorer, was 6-2 to Bradley’s 6-5, and his head wasn’t in the game. Leach, Thompson, and Smith tried to stop Bradley, too, but nothing worked.

“The Bradley game didn’t even exist,” Sharif said. “I was in a daze. It was like we were just walking around. You don’t go to the Final Four to get third place.”

Stallworth listened to their games on the radio back in Wichita, feeling low.

“I hated it,” he said.

He had entered the university as a freshman at the semester break because of a freak accident as a child. He’d slipped and fallen into a bathtub full of scalding water at his home in Dallas when he was in elementary school, suffering near-fatal burns to his left hand and stomach. The injuries, he said, forced him to start at mid-term throughout his schooling.

Stallworth said he tried to talk Miller into holding him out a semester so he could play in the postseason.

“I thought Ralph would hold me out, but he didn’t,” Stallworth said. “We talked about it. He thought he could win with me.”

When he left the team, Stallworth was averaging 25 points and 12 rebounds a game.

He’d scored 45 and 40 points in his last two games, but he was playing AAU basketball for the Arkansas City May Builders when the Shockers were in the Final Four.

The team was braced for Stallworth’s departure.

“We knew that was going to happen, and felt like we could continue to run the same offense and the same defense we had,” Criss said. “We still had Nate in the middle.”

Then they lost Bowman.

“Basically, we went back to the drawing board and developed an entire new offense,” Criss said.

Criss, who works for a crane company in Kansas City, Mo., said the team’s best chance to win it all had come the previous year, when they still had Stallworth and Bowman and some other key players. The road to the championship seemed paved just for them. The regionals were on their home court in Wichita, and the Final Four was in Kansas City.

But they lost in the regional final to Big Eight champion Kansas State, in spite of Stallworth’s 37 points and 16 rebounds.

“We just didn’t play well. It was just one of those things,” Criss said. “Maybe in the back of our minds we thought we just couldn’t lose here. We had 10,000 fans. But we just didn’t play well.”

Stallworth is convinced the Shockers would have won the national championship in 1965 if he and Bowman had remained with the team..

”I thought we were as good as anybody at the end of the year,” he said. “But we never had the opportunity to do it. It was tough.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Shocker stars from historic 1964-65 season will speak at Wichita State."