Bob Lutz: Shockers’ first Final Four team on display this weekend

Everybody has reunions.

Families, high school classes, sorority sisters, office workers.

But there’s nothing like a Final Four reunion, especially one like Wichita State’s 1964-65 basketball team is celebrating this weekend in Wichita.

That team upset Oklahoma State in the Midwest Regional championship game at Ahearn Field House in Manhattan to make it to the school’s first – and for 48 years, only – Final Four. They’re ready to party.

“I was a bench guy,” said Jerry Reimond, one of three Pennsylvanians on the Shockers’ first Final Four team. “I got my game time in practice every day against (Dave) Stallworth and (Nate) Bowman.”

That couldn’t have been a lot of fun. But Reimond, who has lived in Lawrence the past 10 years, values his role on the team and is thankful he had one of the best seats to watch an amazing season.

Some of the former Shockers remember the 6-foot-10 Bowman’s strength and the way his elbows swung during practices and games, so much that it was probably better to stay out of his way.

Others remember the athleticism of Mohamed Sharif, then Kelly Pete, who some of his teammates believe could have played free safety in the NFL.

Some think about the way segregation kept players such as Stallworth and Bowman, Texas natives, from playing college basketball in their home state or anywhere else in the South.

Everyone, of course, remembers Stallworth, the All-America forward who had to depart after 16 games of the 1964-65 season because he had used up his eligibility.

Bowman was declared academically ineligible after 14 games.

Without them, UCLA trounced the Shockers 108-89 in the national semifinals in Portland, Ore. WSU was beaten by Princeton 118-82 in the third-place game as Bill Bradley scored 58 points.

But the former Shockers aren’t here this weekend to lament what might have been.

“My most vivid memory is us beating Oklahoma State and Henry Iba in Manhattan,” former guard John Criss said. “Our five starters played the entire game.”

Just a season earlier, the Shockers had been upset by Kansas State in the regional finals at the Roundhouse. It was a bitter loss because that team did have Stallworth and Bowman and was within one win of the Final Four in Kansas City, Mo.

WSU was 13-3 when Stallworth departed a season later, but most expected a slide. Instead, the Shockers banded together to survive a 6-4 stretch the rest of the regular season. Without a starter taller than 6-foot-5, they won the Missouri Valley Conference championship by two games over Bradley and beat SMU in the regional semifinals before defeating Oklahoma State.

“There’s an old saying about what makes a team really gel,” Criss said. “But I don’t think anyone really knows. Sometimes it’s adversity and sometimes it’s success.”

These Shockers have had reunions before, including 10 years ago.

But players such as Al Trope and Melvin Reed were unable to attend. Reed, who became the Shockers’ sixth man as a sophomore on the Final Four team, is attending his first reunion.

“I haven’t seen Melvin in 50 years,” said Leach, a forward with such a deadly baseline shot that an area of the floor at the Roundhouse was known as “Leach’s Corner.”

As several of the players milled around in the lobby of the Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview on Friday afternoon, awaiting a banquet in the evening, they talked about the experience of playing basketball together.

Larry Nosich, who was a 26-year-old senior on the Final Four team, had to be cajoled into coming this weekend by Wichita State coach Gregg Marshall.

Nosich prodded Sharif to go for a walk in downtown Wichita.

Leach visited with Gerald Davis, a backup center, and reserve guard Manny Zafiros, who lives in Florida but took his family – his wife and two kids – to Los Angeles two years ago to see the Shockers beat Ohio State and get to the Final Four in Atlanta.

“The moment that final horn went off, I literally cried,” Zafiros said. “I hugged my daughter because never in my lifetime did I think we would get to another Final Four.”

Marshall will speak to the team during Friday night’s banquet and the 1964-65 players will get to watch the Shockers’ shootaround Saturday before their game against Missouri State. The Final Four team will be honored at halftime.

The credit for organizing this event goes to Bob Powers, another Pennsylvanian and a sophomore backup center. Powers has been in Wichita since graduating from WSU.

He’s been working on this reunion for months and was adamant that everybody who could be in town made it.

The widows of the 1964-65 coaches – coach Gary Thompson and assistants Ron Heller and Verlyn Anderson – are here. So is Jamie Thompson’s son, David Nelson.

Thompson, who became such an integral part of the team after Stallworth’s departure and scored 36 points in the semifinal loss to UCLA, died in 2010.

Bowman died in 1984 at the age of 41.

They will be remembered this weekend.

“I’m sure we’ve all harkened back to some great lessons learned,” said Leach, a McPherson native. “Athletics was my way of getting a really good education and sort of launching me into the things I’ve done.”

Leach is a former basketball coach, having worked on Ralph Miller’s staff at Oregon State for 10 seasons before becoming head coach at Boise State.

These Shockers fanned out all across America when their college careers were over. But they would forever be joined as part of an historic Wichita State team.

Basketball was big in this city before that Final Four run. But the packed crowds and love of the Shockers can be traced back to an incredible, who-would-have-thunk-it season 50 years ago.

A team without its best two players, with no player taller than 6-5, with a starting lineup consisting of five guys from within a 60-mile radius of Wichita, made it to the Final Four.

The Shockers proved that miracles do happen. And that miracle will be celebrated all weekend.

This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: Shockers’ first Final Four team on display this weekend."