March 25, 1961: Cincinnati Basketball Triumphant

March 25, 1961: Ohio State University, which won the National Championship of college basketball the year before with super sophomores Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek, is dethroned in the Final but a cross-State rival, the University of Cincinnati, 70-65 at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium.

Coached by Ed Jucker, the Bearcats reached what the NCAA now calls the Final Four in 1959 and 1960, with guard Oscar Robertson playing as well, all-around, as any basketball player ever has. Jucker reloaded, and won the title in 1961, and again in 1962, with Paul Hogue, Bob Wiesenhahn, and Tom Thacker.

Ed Jucker

Despite Cincinnati being a border-on-the-South city, and segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jucker was able to bring in black players like Robertson, Hogue and Thacker. Hogue was a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of the principal of his all-black high school, who was not recruited by major Southern schools because he was black.

Paul Hogue

Hogue's pro career was undistinguished: He played 2 seasons in the NBA, for the Knicks and the Baltimore Bullets (the team now known as the Washington Wizards), and in a minor league for Delaware's Wilmington Blue Bombers. He later became an official in the U.S. Postal Service, and served on the Village Council in the Cincinnati suburb where he lived. He died in 2009, and is buried at the same Cincinnati cemetery as Yankee legends Miller Huggins (a Cincinnati native) and Waite Hoyt (who broadcast for the Reds).

The Bearcats would win the title again the next year, before losing the 1963 Final to Loyola of Chicago. (Sister Jean was just 43 at the time.) They have reached the Final Four only once since, in 1992.

The Queen City of the Midwest got an NBA team in 1957, the Cincinnati Royals. That team would have Hall-of-Famers Robertson, Lucas, Jack Twyman (another University of Cincinnati star) and Maurice Stokes. Despite all that talent, they could never seem to get past the Boston Celtics, getting as far as the Eastern Division Finals in 1963 and 1964, but never into the Finals. In 1972, they moved to Kansas City. Since that city already had a team called the Royals, the NBA team became the Kansas City Kings. In 1985, they moved again, becoming the Sacramento Kings.

Thacker would win a title with the Celtics, in 1968.

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March 25, 1961 was a Saturday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 2 games in the NBA. The Boston Celtics beat the Syracuse Nationals, 120-107 at the Onondaga County War Memorial, now called the Upstate Medical University Arena, in Syracuse, New York.

And the St. Louis Hawks beat the Los Angeles Lakers, at the gymnasium of what was then Los Angeles City College. In 1972, it became California State University at Los Angeles. The Forum in Inglewood wasn't built until 1967. Apparently, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, where the Lakers had been playing home games that 1st season in California, wasn't available. And using another college site was out: UCLA's pre-Pauley Pavilion Men's Gym seated only 2,400 people, while USC didn't have an on-campus gym, using the Shrine and Pan-Pacific Auditoriums, neither of which was very suitable to basketball.

There was 1 game in the NHL, a Stanley Cup Playoffs game: The Detroit Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 4-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

And in English soccer, East London team West Ham United crossed town, to play Arsenal, at the Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, named for its neighborhood in North London. They played to a 0-0 draw.