In 1947, the last time the University of Texas men’s basketball team was in the Final Four, that accomplishment meant a trip to New York City and Madison Square Garden. The trip brought a wide-eyed Texas team a brush with big-city fame. It also brought brushes with athletes who later became infamous in betting scandals that rocked the sports world.
An innocent era didn’t end on that giddy March weekend, but in retrospect, you can see the demise coming, along with some of the forces that would keep Texas from returning to the Final Four for decades.
In the late fall of 1946, money didn’t drive college basketball, not at Texas, anyway. Townsfolk were told to save their money, to forget about being able to buy tickets to home games for the upcoming season, because expectations were sky high for the team. That meant all 8,000 seats in Gregory Gym would be filled by Texas students, who’d paid the pittance of a blanket tax for their seats.
“The war was over, and UT was bulging at the seams. There was temporary housing and temporary living quarters with all the servicemen returning,” recalled Vilbry White, a retired Houston dentist who is one of two surviving lettermen from that team. The other is Slater Martin, also of Houston.
The war veterans swelled Texas’ student population to 15,000 and brought reinforcements for the basketball team. Of the eight players who would letter that year, seven had been in the service, including John Langdon, an Army veteran of the Battle of the Bulge.
Coach Jack Gray was a Navy man, a lieutenant commander. In his playing days at Texas (1933-35), Gray introduced the one-handed set shot to these parts and was the first consensus All-American from the Southwest Conference. In the 1937 season, he became Texas’ boy wonder basketball coach at age 25.
“He was a disciplinarian. If he told us to go butt our our heads against the wall, that’s what we’d do,” White said.
By 1939, Gray had Texas in the eight-team NCAA field. In 1943, Gray was in the Navy, but the Texas team, under interim coach Bully Gilstrap, reached what today would be called the Final Four.
John Hargis, the high-scoring star of that 1943 team, was back and eligible again for the 1946-47 season. Martin, a speedster who’d left midway in the 1944-45 season for the Navy, also was returning.
“In his time he was just as good as T.J. is now, and he was good on defense, too. If the other team had a stud, Slater would guard him,” White said of Martin, who would later win five NBA championships.
From his days coaching at Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, Gray brought tenacious Al Madsen from Wisconsin. Madsen, Martin and Roy Cox were 5 feet, 10 inches or under and nicknamed the “Mighty Mice.”
The team cruised through its early games at Gregory Gym, which was a far harder place for opponents to play than the Erwin Center has ever been.
“The crowd was right down on the floor. It was loud, but there wasn’t any hooliganism. It wasn’t like fans could just reach out and grab an opponent, they had to stand up to do it,” White said.
After four wins at Gregory, Texas had a 10-day, 4,000-mile road trip. According to White, the team had its own railroad car on trips. It was arranged so that the car could be unhooked and switched to a side rail when the team wanted to get off and practice at a nearby gym and then later rehooked to another train.
In Buffalo, N.Y., Texas beat Canisius and then continued on to New York and a scheduled match with coach Clair Bee’s Long Island University Blackbirds. While in New York, the Longhorns were able to go out to the Polo Grounds and watch the National Football League championship game between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears. Giants fullback Merle Hapes was suspended before the game for not reporting a bribe attempt, and Giants quarterback Frank Filchock threw six interceptions as the Bears won, 24-14.
Gray’s team played Long Island as part of a doubleheader at the Garden. Since 1931, college basketball doubleheaders at the Garden had proved to be a huge draw, so much so that the National Invitational Tournament was started there in 1938. Yet, at least as early as 1945, college coaches had complained about some of the patrons, hard-core gamblers who were attracted by the action.
The atmosphere was even reflected in the game story of Austin sportswriter Wilbur Evans, who wrote, “Doped (handicapped) to lose by eight points and up, the Longhorns achieved victory as they came from behind five times.”
After beating Long Island, 47-46, Texas then took a train to Chicago and beat Ray Meyer’s DePaul team. The Longhorns returned to Texas and breezed through the rest of the season, losing only once, by a single point, to Oklahoma A&M.
With a 12-0 league record and a nation’s-best overall mark at 24-1, Texas earned the right to face Wyoming, the 1943 NCAA champion, in the NCAA’s Western Regional in Kansas City. It was a $37.50 train ride for the fans who traveled from Austin to see the game. Texas was behind much of the game, but Martin and Madsen wouldn’t let the Longhorns lose. Martin drilled a long shot with 35 seconds left for a 42-40 win.
That set up a meeting with Oklahoma for the right to be in the NCAA championship game in Madison Square Garden. Texas had beaten the Sooners by 12 points earlier in the year and looked like it had the big game won. Then Oklahoma’s Ken Pryor threw up a 40-foot shot near the end of the game and Oklahoma escaped 55-54.
“We were the better team and they knew it,” White said.
To compound the pain for the Longhorns, they rode on the same train to New York with the Sooners for the NCAA showcase.
In the NCAA’s third-place game, before 18,445 fans, Texas beat the City College of New York 54-40 behind Hargis’ 17 points. Irwin Dambrot led CCNY with 13. Holy Cross then claimed the NCAA championship by topping Oklahoma 58-47.
A week later gambling was in the news as the NFL banned the Giants’ Hapes and Filchock, who hadn’t reported a bribe attempt.
Three years later, stories about game fixing in college basketball began to emerge. In July 1951, seven CCNY players, including Dambrot, pleaded guilty to fixing games, shaving points or losing outright, in a period that began around 1949. Six Long Island University players, including one who’d played against Texas in 1947, also pleaded guilty to similar chargers.
Then came a bigger bombshell. In October 1951, three Kentucky players admitted to throwing a 1949 NIT game in New York. At the time both were first team All-NBA players. Both were banned for life from the sport.
Previously Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp had boasted, “Gamblers couldn’t reach my boys with a 10-foot pole.”
College basketball had been badly tarnished. College administrators urged that games be kept out of the Garden and soon the NCAA championship was staged in places such as Kansas City, Louisville and Seattle.
In 1951, Jack Gray was on a special committee of college basketball coaches who blamed the schools for the scandals.
“Entirely too much emphasis has been placed by the school and coaches on income and winning the game. We have found vicious and often illegal recruiting practices and over-emphasis on winning teams and the income there-from,” said John Bunn, the Springfield, Mass., coach who headed the committee.
Gray’s team had slipped by then, as he had tired of the pressures of recruiting. Texas Athletic Director D.X. Bible was a former football coach and notorious for being tight with a dollar. Gray couldn’t get the salary he wanted and in March 1951 quit coaching to enter the oil pipeline business.
A few years later other schools began benefiting from the influx of black players in the game, stars like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and Elgin Baylor.
Texas stopped playing in the Garden, a staple during Gray’s years, and drifted into basketball backwater. It completely emerged only this year, behind a player, T.J. Ford, that old-timers liken to Martin.
