GAMES BOND
New Ramblers rekindle special memories for pioneering champs
ATLANTA — It wasn’t just that the oldtimers were charmed by the kids. That’s happened before. It had been 33 years since the Loyola of Chicago Ramblers had qualified for the NCAA Tournament, after all, and though there were some mediocre (and worse) basketball teams that occupied that void, many of the players themselves had been perfectly lovely.
“These guys are different,” Jerry Harkness told his old friend, John Egan, last fall. “You feel it too, eh?” Egan replied. Harkness and Egan were two-fifths of the greatest team Loyola has ever known, the 1962-63 squad that not only won one of the most stunning championships in the history of the tournament — beating twotime defending champ Cincinnati in the title game — but did it with four African-Americans in the starting lineup, until then an unheard-of bit of racial audacity.
For years now, the old champions would be welcomed by the newest edition of the Ramblers early each season, to swap stories and eat lunch and share in the generational bond of playing Ramblers basketball. It is always an enjoyable afternoon for the older men.
“You could see these kids: They were close and they enjoyed each other,” says Harkness, whose journey to Loyola began at DeWitt Clinton High in The Bronx and at the Harlem Y. “And, heck, we all usually enjoy playing basketball. But the key here was you could tell they enjoyed playing basketball with each other. And this was before they’d played a single game.”
Harkness and Egan noticed something else, too: The whole time they ate lunch, the players had put that ’63 championship game — Loyola 60, Cincinnati 58 — on continuous loop on the large-screen TV. It was a cour- tesy. And also a message.
“They knew exactly what they wanted to do,” Harkness says. “They wanted to do what we did. And so far, they’ve done everything they could to make that happen.”
Thursday night at Philips Arena, the Ramblers (30-5) will face Nevada in the Slipper Division portion of the South Regional, the half of the draw that will ensure that one midmajor power will advance to Saturday’s Elite Eight (Kentucky and Kansas State will square off in the other Sweet 16 game).
Loyola has become one of these tournament darlings, partly because of their two nail-biting victories, partly because as an 11-seed, they’ve already knocked off a 6-seed (Miami) and a 3 (Tennessee), two wins by a total of three points. And, of course, there is the team’s highestprofile star, 98-year-old Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the team chaplain.
“It warms my heart to see what these guys have done for the school,” Harkness says. “Makes you so proud to be an alumnus.”
Of course, 55 years ago this month, it was Harkness’ team that captured the country’s imagination, not long after it helped alter its conscience. The Ramblers were a terrific mix of Chicago kids and New York City kids, and if it was a point of interest for some that Egan was the only white kid among Harkness (the team’s leading scorer, at 21.7 points per game), Les Hunter, Vic Rouse and Ron Miller, it barely caused a ripple on the North Side campus.
But after Loyola beat Tennessee Tech, 111-42, in their NCAA opener, the Ramblers didn’t know if there would be a secondround game. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and state Sen. Billy Mitts obtained an injunction forbidding Mississippi State from playing an integrated game. The Bulldogs defied the order, showed up in East Lansing, Mich., anyway.
“A game with two winners,” Harkness says, though in the end his third-ranked Ramblers won the game, 61-51. A powerful photograph just before tip-off of Harkness shaking hands with MSU’s Joe Dan Gold made newspapers across the country the next morning.
Harkness calls it “the beginning of the end of segregation,” and the two men became close friends. When Gold died a few years ago, Harkness attended the service and was greeted warmly and emotionally by Gold’s entire family.
Harkness’ own journey to Loyola had its interesting set of twists and turns. A fine high-school track star at Clinton, he’d taken up basketball only as a senior and never much thought about that as a viable possibility until one day after a hard run at the Harlem Y, a stranger tapped him on the shoulder.
“You’re not that bad a player,” Jackie Robinson said.
“And I was off,” Harkness says with a laugh. “It’s been quite a life.”
Thursday, that road will take him to Atlanta, in the company of old teammates, cheering on a brigade of kids they all adopted months ago. These kids are where the old men have been. And what a ride for both.