'HHS to the TOC!' Underdog Farmers Take On the World
Part 2 of The Public School Boys of Hayward: A Story of Joy, Heartbreak, and Healing
Hello, and welcome to Issue #2 of Tilting West. Last week in The Public School Boys of Hayward we learned about the coming together of the Hayward High basketball team at the start of what turned out to be a season of great fun and drama. This week we pick up the story as the underdog Farmers grow as a team and steadily realize that their dreams of playing in and even winning the TOC really could come true. All right then, let’s jump it up and get it going—Kevin
The Preseason
Surprising people is one of the best feelings you can have in sports. You’re underrated. Your opponents and their fans don’t think much of you or your chances. Then, defying the consensus, you start winning games. Your confidence builds, you go on a roll, and suddenly you’re ready to take on the world.
So it was for a high school basketball team I played on 50 years ago. Fifty years may seem like a long time, and it is. But in certain moods it feels to me as if all those years have passed as fast as the snap of your fingers. Too fast. For this series I have talked to people, studied photographs and memorabilia from that time, and scoured faded scrapbook newspaper clippings. My memory has also served as a resource, so admittedly these recollections may have a rosy nostalgic hue to them.
But we did have some pretty good fun (and some pretty good stupid fun) in those days, and when I think back to that time my mind goes straight to my senior year and that team of six Black boys and six white boys led by a passionate young coach who looked sharp in a suit and whose father fought in the Battle of the Bulge. We opened the season that year with three straight road game wins—the first two against private Catholic programs, Bellarmine of San Jose and Moreau, and the third against Alameda, a public school like us. When you go on the road and lay a beating on good teams in their houses, you know something is up.
A newspaper report said we “surprised” Moreau in our game against them, and I suppose we did. Playing Coach Joe Fuccy’s style of high octane fast break offense coupled with pressure D, we came at them and everybody else with energy and fire. After a bucket of ours, Dave or Craig or Donnie or me picked up the man with the ball and drove him towards either of the corners formed by the intersection of the half court line and the out-of-bounds line. That area was no-man’s land. Once he picked up his dribble we were on him in a heartbeat, with a double-team waving four hands in his face and flicking at the ball. As often as not the ball came loose and we grabbed it and broke away for an easy lay-in. Two more points for the Black and Gold.
Due to the city of Hayward’s agricultural heritage dating back to the 1800s, our team name was the Farmers. But we were not slow or plodding as you might imagine farm boys to be in a game of hoops. And now, in the fourth game of the season, we were about to find out how good we really were. Bishop O’Dowd of Oakland is one of the great prep basketball programs in Bay Area and California history. Also a private Catholic school, the Dragons came into the game undefeated same as us, and hundreds of their screaming fans packed into the bleachers of their old tin can of a gym.
It was a shoot-out. They got up early, we came back late. Our best player, guard Donnie Schroer, scored 23 points with hard drives to the hoop. “He was our money player,” said Fuccy. “When we’re in trouble the ball just finds its way to him.” The ball found its way to me in that game too. I matched Donnie’s point total mainly with long-range jumpers from the corners and around the top of the key. (This was before the advent of the 3-point line.) O’Dowd nipped us in the final minute, 83-79.
Even in defeat we were surprising people, including ourselves. How good were we? We were still figuring it out by the time of the Christmas Hayward Area Athletic League pre-season tournament, featuring the eight teams in our league. San Lorenzo High and defending champion Arroyo were the early favorites to win the HAAL crown that year. So much for that. We clobbered San Lorenzo in the title game and rolled into the regular season on a high.
The League Season
Meantime the Hayward High student body was taking notice. Before our first Friday night game at home, the twelve of us—Schroer, me, Frank Volasgis, Joe Rucker, Jim Langenstein, Dave Falkowski, Craig Fry, John Forbes, Jay Hughes, Mark Cooley, Mark Jackson, and Calvin Goward—got dressed in the locker room of the gym tucked down into the campus at 1633 East Avenue. Our uniform consisted of a gold warm-up jacket, white home jersey and shorts, black, nearly knee-high stirrup socks with gold stripes, white gym socks, and white Converse. My Black teammates groomed their Afros with picks. Schroer, my basketball brother from freshman year on, made sure his smoothed-back look had nary a hair out of place. After the coach’s pep talk we came running out onto the court and that building came…ALIVE!!!! The band rocked, cheerleaders kicked their legs, the student cheering section stamped their feet as we did our pregame lay-ups and warm-up shoot around. In a very real sense the celebration kept going all season long. Our big Friday night home games were nearly always SRO, explosions of joyful noise followed our every bucket, and Hayward rooters chanted in unison one raucous chant:
“HHS TO THE TOC! HHS TO THE TOC!”
Everybody who attended the game—the students and cheerleaders and players anyhow—met up afterwards at Round Table Pizza Parlor in a strip mall in downtown Hayward. It was a wild scene there too. Cars all over the parking lot, kids outside smoking weed and sipping from bottles or cans they “scored” from R&H Liquor or some other establishment willing to sell to baby-faced teenagers with fake IDs. Or maybe you found a grown-up on his way into the liquor store who was willing to buy for you. Inside the restaurant was a mob scene. Boys and girls in a raging fever dream of teen hormonal heat standing close together in the aisles, clustered around tables, and paired off.
Being on the team I met a cute and fun cheerleader named Mary, and we began dating. She was a junior. We would get together at Round Table after a game, sit in her father’s 1957 Bel Air Chevrolet, and talk. Yes, talk. Mary sat in the driver’s seat. She had a nervous habit of fiddling with the steering wheel and one night one of her fingers accidentally got stuck in it. The steering wheel had cross-bars with slots in the center. The opening in a slot was big enough to get her finger in but not out. She tried in vain to wiggle it free. All that did was make her finger swell up.
It was late at night. Round Table and the other stores in the mall were closed. Everybody but us had left, the lot was deserted. One thing Mary absolutely refused to do was call home and ask her father to come down and rescue his daughter trapped in his beloved Bel-Air. Finally we got hold of the Hayward Fire Department. They sent a ladder truck down to help us and here, I am embarrassed to admit, my mind goes blank.
The firefighters came in their big red truck with the flashing lights. I am sure of that. What happened next is not so clear. Did they detach the wheel from the steering column as a means of freeing Mary? That seems unlikely. What must have happened is that they produced some sort of lubricant from their first aid kit and stood by with barely disguised merriment as Mary oiled up her digit and eased it out.
Clearly my research for this piece should have included searching out Mary on Facebook or somewhere to get her version of events. In any event the Bel Air did indeed release her from its stranglehold, her dad never found out, she want back to cheerleading, and we went back to romping through the league.
The TOC
That season we even had a televised sit-down with a future Hall of Famer. Hayward High graduate Jon Miller was studying broadcasting at College of San Mateo across the bay. His night-time “Sportscope” program on CSM Channel 14 featured interviews with local sports figures. Coach Fuccy, Donnie and myself appeared on the program. Jon of course went on to a Hall of Fame broadcasting career and remains the mellifluous-toned lead play-by-play announcer of the San Francisco Giants.
The interview with Jon occurred in late January; by the next month we had clinched the HAAL title with only one league loss. Our overall record was a sparkling 21-2 and the polls ranked us as one of the top teams in the Bay Area. Donnie, 6-foot-6-inch center Jim Langenstein, and I made all-league. Forward Joe Rucker—and Sunset High guard Manny Silva, who appeared in last week’s piece and will appear again next week—was an honorable mention. But everybody on the roster contributed to achieving the goal we had all aspired to since our first practice in November: Making the TOC.
The Tournament of Champions was the ultimate test for high school basketball in Northern California at that time, drawing the best teams from the Bay Area and pockets of the Central Valley. Competitive basketball then was almost exclusively a boys’ affair in California, there were no girls teams to speak of. Nor were there state-wide tournaments as there are today. Similarly, the seeding brackets were organized differently. Today schools in tournament play are grouped according to the size of their enrollments and the prowess of their athletic programs. Back then everybody suited up against everybody else: rich and poor, private and public, big and small.
The Oakland Coliseum Arena (now the Oakland Arena) was only five years old. It was the home of the Golden State Warriors and next to the Forum in Inglewood, the premiere basketball arena in the state. The chance to play there was, for Donnie, “a dream come true. I’ve always been looking forward to playing in the Coliseum,” he told a reporter, speaking for all of us. “Every time I’d go to see the Warriors play, I’d spend half the time dreaming of playing there.”
The dream began fabulously. We drew Amador Valley of Pleasanton in the first round and with Schroer and Langenstein logging sterling performances, we beat them handily.
Next up in the semifinals was a much bigger test, Castlemont High. Castlemont had edged out traditional power McClymonds to win the Oakland Athletic League, in those days one of the strongest athletic leagues in all of California. The Knights ranked above us in the polls and carried an added incentive into the game: Joe Rucker lining up in our uniform. Sweet, easy-going Joe had played for Castlemont before transferring to Hayward for his senior season, and nobody on Castlemont let him forget this fact. They let loose a non-stop stream of smack at him all game long, which may have caused them to lose track of Langenstein and me. Jim led us with 17 points and 10 rebounds while I broke down their zone with 7 for 10 shooting from the outside. Good night, Knights.
Now to the finals, one step away from claiming a championship that Hayward in its long and celebrated basketball history, had never won. Only one problem, though: the Hoover Dam-sized obstacle in our path.
Berkeley High was the No. 2 ranked team in California, behind only Verbum Dei of Los Angeles. Its enrollment was 3,300 students, nearly double that of Hayward’s. The Yellowjackets had won nine games in a row. Their top scorer and rebounder was 6-foot-11-inch center John Lambert, who went on to star for the University of Southern California and become the first round pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 1975 NBA Draft, the 15th overall pick. His NBA career extended seven years.
The other future pro athlete on the Yellowjackets was Ruppert Jones, a sophomore guard who, upon graduating from Berkeley, turned down scholarship offers from numerous colleges to play pro baseball. His 11-year major league career as an outfielder featured stints with the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels.
But reputations do not win games, players do. And we came out after them the same way we always did, pressing hard on defense and pushing the ball up the floor when an opening presented itself. Rucker, bouncing back from an off game against his old mates the night before, poured in 12 points as we broke out to an early lead. The Yellowjackets came back, however, and the reason for their comeback can be summed up in two words: John Lambert. It’s truly amazing to try to shoot against someone that tall with the wingspan of a giant condor. He went on a tear and singlehandedly lifted his squad to a comfortable lead, 62-50, with only 5:37 left in the game.
But we weren’t done yet. Donnie fed Jim for a score inside, followed with two baskets of his own, followed by a driving lay-in by Dave Falkowski who caused misery for Jones and the other Yellowjacket guards all game long. One more bucket from the relentless Schroer to complete our 10-0 blitz and suddenly we were only two points down, 62-60, with two minutes remaining.
With the student sections and many of the nearly 10,000 spectators on their feet and yelling, the finals turned into a furious game of teeter-totter. Berkeley came back to life, scored, and went up by four points again. We answered and brought the margin back down to two. They replied and up it went once more to four. Back to us and down it went to two.
The stage was set.
Berkeley 66, Hayward 64. Fifteen seconds left to play. There wasn’t much time but it was enough. A Berkeley player had been whistled for traveling. We had the ball near our half court line. Dave took the ball out and bounced it to me.
It was all so simple, really. I had done similar things a thousand times before. All I had to do was move the ball up the court and get it to Langenstein or Schroer. They’d know what to do with it. They’d take care of us. Either one of them could sink a shot to tie the game and send it into overtime.
I turned up court and started forward.
Our three-part series on The Public School Boys of Hayward concludes next week with a look at the final seconds of that climactic game. Here is Part Three: A Burden Shared is a Burden Lifted.
And if you would like to go back to Part One, here it is: The Public School Boys of Hayward
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