» Before Phi Slama Jama, the Cougars had the ‘Big E’ and the ‘Game of the Century.’
Final Four run brings to mind legendary UH teams of the ’60s
Elvin Hayes looks back in neither sadness nor anger. His University of Houston Cougars of the late 1960s didn’t need championship rings to prove their merit, their historic greatness. After all, who’s to say they weren’t the second best college basketball team of all time?
Because the only team to defeat them in games that truly mattered over Hayes’ final two seasons was UCLA, led on the court by Lew Alcindor and coached by John Wooden. Those Bruins, of course, were arguably the best team ever, winning 88 of 90 games during the Alcindor era. Where, Hayes asks, is the shame in losing to such an outfit?
“I’m proud we got to play them twice in a row (in consecutive national semifinal games),” he said. “But we had some injuries (most significantly in the 1968 rematch). We were missing people, people we needed, so we came up a little short.”
And, Hayes is quick to add, hadn’t the Cougars beaten the Bruins in what was, without any doubt, the most important college basketball game ever? Right, “The Game of Century” in the Astrodome on Jan. 20, 1968. UH’s 71-69 victory, accounting for Wooden’s only defeat from mid-February 1966 until early March 1969, was played before a crowd of 52,693 in the first nationally televised prime-time basketball game,
pro or college.
The sport would never be the same.
“That made us known around the world,” Hayes said. “Everybody knew about UH basketball after that. It made college basketball a marketable sport and brought a lot of people into the Houston family. I wouldn’t trade that win, even the national championship.”
Nonetheless, Hayes admits having some jewelry to show off today would be nice. And now, the way he sees it, Kelvin Sampson’s 2021 Cougars, playing in a national semifinal of their own Saturday against another team of formidable bruins — Baylor’s Bears — have positioned themselves to offer a satisfying measure of atonement, to finish what he and Guy V., and later the Phi Slama Jama fraternity, started so many seasons ago.
“These kids can put rings on the fingers of everybody who was ever a Cougar,” Hayes said. “They can do what we didn’t. They’re building something special out there, like we did, and they’re bringing some happiness to Houston. Man, we need it.”
Do we ever. No need to bring the reeling Rockets or the tattered Texans into this happy conversation, and the Astros are still months away being able to put lasting smiles back on our faces. The 28-3 Cougars, however, are on the clock. Hayes can relate to that. His Cougars, 58-6 over his final two seasons, were easily the best show in town, too, during the late 1960s.
The 1967 Oilers lost the only playoff game the franchise experienced over a span of more than a decade by a 40-7 score. The nascent Astros, having made their debut in 1962, would place no higher than eighth in the 10-team National League through their first seven seasons and, in 1968, remained more than a decade away from their first postseason appearance. The Rockets? They were still in San Diego — fortunately, considering how bad they were. (Yep, history repeats.)
It’s worth noting how the current Cougars already settled one score for the Big E when they took out Oregon State 67-61 Monday night, booking the school’s first Final Four reservation since 1984. Late in his sophomore season (1965-66), Hayes’ Cougars went on a 12-1 tear that made them nominal favorites in the West Region. But the Beavers pulled off a 63-60 upset in the semifinals, depriving Hayes of what would have been the first of three consecutive Final Four appearances — and a possible showdown against the eventual national champions from Texas Western College.
The Miners remain the lone Texas team to prevail since the NCAA Tournament began in 1939, and they were the only one besides UCLA to cut down the nets between 1964 and 1973.
What an intriguing matchup that would have been, pitting Hayes against David Lattin, who had been Houston’s first consensus high school All-American and the player Guy Lewis had long targeted to be the first Black Cougar. But Lattin graduated from Worthing, not far from the UH campus, a couple years too soon for the university’s integration timetable — it had decided the football program would go first in 1964 — and Lattin rejected Lewis’ entreaties to bide his time in a junior college program.
As a result, it would be Hayes and the lanky 6-5 guard Don Chaney, another NBA star-in-the-making and a future Rockets coach, who broke the Cougars’ color barrier together. Interestingly, though, Lewis declined to let them room together. Instead, he had Chaney bunk with John Tracy, a little-used reserve. Hayes moved in with Howie Lorch, the student manager.
Hayes admits transitioning from Rayville, a tiny, hardscrabble town in northeastern Louisiana, to the big city wasn’t easy. Being uncomfortable in his new surroundings made him a downright unpleasant fellow at times. But during a much needed heartto-heart early on with Lewis, he recalled “Coach looking me in the eye and asking me, ‘What did I ever do to you, Elvin? All I’m trying to do is help you.’ That changed everything. After that conversation, I was all in.”
No, Lewis never claimed a championship. But only one of his five Final Four losses was to a lesser team, North Carolina State in 1983. And the role he played in affecting social change in the South can’t be overstated. Hayes, now 75, entered the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990 immediately upon becoming eligible. But as the years passed and Lewis kept being snubbed by the Hall’s voters, the Big E began boycotting its events. Guy V. wouldn’t finally get his due until 2013, two years before he died at 93.
“He was one of the greatest coaches I ever had the opportunity to play for,” Hayes said. “And he was a good man. He opened doors for a lot of people. Coach Sampson is here because of people like coach Lewis.”
That first Hayes team stayed largely under the radar, going unranked all season, but by the middle of his junior year the Cougars had climbed to No. 3, good enough for Sports Illustrated to feature them in a story by Curry Kirkpatrick that ran under the headline “Elvin, Melvin and the Duck” (Hayes, Melvin “The Savage” Bell and Chaney, respectively). Kirkpatrick portrayed Lewis’ team as a rollicking, brawling bunch with rough edges but plenty of fire in its belly and boundless confidence.
He quoted Hayes saying, “(Wilt) Chamberlain, (Bill) Russell — I think I’m as good as any of them. And I’ll always think so until they come down here, put on some shoes and show they can whup me good.”
The Big E, of course, backed up his brash talk through the years, twice earning consensus firstteam All-America honors, then appearing in 12 NBA All-Star games and being named one of the top 50 players ever as part of the NBA’s 50th Anniversary celebration. He finally won a championship, too, as a Washington Bullet in 1978.
“Life is not all fun and games with the strong and tough Cougars,” Kirkpatrick wrote, noting how 10 of them stood at least 6-5. “Their practices are, in a word, murderous — no place for faint hearts. Stories about the workouts are rapidly passing into exaggerated legends, but it is true that last year Hayes beat bloody one teammate who first badgered him and then made the mistake of challenging The Big E.
“Another player, Bob Hayward, a 6-foot-6, 225-pound veteran of four years in the Navy, is said to have put Elvin up against the wall in practice one day, threatening to punch him out. ‘That was no fight,’ says Howie Lorch with disgust. ‘We have those kind several times a week. I don’t consider it a fight until a man is cut or until I see blood. And I’ve seen plenty of that around here. Coach doesn’t mind it. ‘Wipe it off. Let’s go,’ he says.”
The Cougars were 9-1 when the story appeared. Citing UH’s erratic shooting — Lewis: “It’s our offense that worries me” — and its frenetic but sometimes flawed zone-trapping defensive scheme, Kirkpatrick suggested that one defeat (86-75 at Michigan despite the Cougars taking 100 shots and grabbing 80 rebounds) should, but won’t be, the only one they will lose, “a forecourt on the high side of 700 pounds notwithstanding.”
He was right. Two defeats followed in the next three games. But then the Cougars reeled off nine W’s in a row before their 7358 semifinal loss to UCLA, a game in which they hit only 26 of 75 shots. They wouldn’t lose again, going 32-0 until they again faced off against the Bruins in the national semis the next year. Had the NCAA used seedings for the pairings rather than geography in those days — No. 1-ranked UH had won the Midwest Regional, No. 2ranked UCLA the West Regional — they likely would have played for the title.
In what became a revenge-driven 101-69 UCLA rout, the Cougars outdid themselves in the brick department, making only 22 of 78 shots. But as Hayes noted earlier, the Cougars didn’t have their ace sixth man, George Reynolds, and a hobbled Theodis Lee stayed on the court for only 21 minutes, going 2-for-15 from the field.
Hayes, who had dropped 39 points on the Bruins in the Astrodome victory, with Alcindor playing despite a severely scratched cornea that had rendered him half-blind, would be flummoxed by a “triangle and two” defense devised by Wooden, who not for nothing was called “The Wizard of Westwood.” With Alcindor to his rear and Lynn Shackleford fronting him, Hayes managed just 10 shots and made only three, finishing with 10 points. All five of the Bruins’ starters outscored him.
But again, the Big E long has since made his peace with how things played out for him and the Cougars. He harbors no regrets.
“There’s nothing but happiness in my heart,” he said. “We gave ourselves two great opportunities. We had a really terrific basketball team.”
So, he added, does Sampson. “I enjoy being around these kids, watching how they’ve bought into what he’s teaching,” said Hayes, who stays connected by being part of the radio team. “They’ve given themselves a great opportunity. They deserve to be where they are, like we did. I’m proud of them.”