April 1, 2005

By John Maher - AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Fifty years ago -- and less than one year after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that mandated school desegregation -- an unlikely group of college basketball players made history on several fronts.

In 1955, the San Francisco Dons won the first of their back-to-back national titles and started a winning streak that eventually stretched to a record 60 games. The Dons also ushered in a new era in college basketball by starting three black players -- including Bill Russell and Taylor native K.C. Jones -- in the days when playing even one was enough to anger some crowds.

The Dons were a team without a home, practicing in a high school gym and playing home games at several sites. They were a California team playing what was then thought to be an East Coast game. They were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, a rare team on which even the stars were known more for their defense than offense. And they featured two future Hall of Famers, Jones and Russell, who were barely recruited coming out of nearby high schools.

Jones was a superb athlete in basketball and football at San Francisco's Commerce High School, but his plans beyond graduation were nothing grander than landing a job at the post office and maybe scrounging together enough money for a car.

"I had only one scholarship offer. I didn't know it at the time, but my history teacher, Mildred Smith, arranged it," Jones said. "Being from the ghetto, college was not very familiar to me."

Jones and his four siblings had been raised by his mother, who was on welfare. She'd moved to San Francisco without Jones' father after the family had bounced around Taylor (where Jones lived as a child), Corpus Christi and Dallas.

Jones' college scholarship was to the University of San Francisco, a small Jesuit school where basketball coach Phil Woolpert had arrived in 1950 from next-door prep school St. Ignatius High School.

In the early 1950s, basketball was experiencing a golden age of offense. In 1954, two players, Frank Selvy of Furman and Bevo Francis of Rio Grande College, had scored 100 points by themselves in a game. Woolpert, however, was obsessed with defense. The coach nicknamed Socrates didn't spend any time drawing up zones or trick traps, but he made basic man-to-man defense a science.

"I don't think he ever played a zone in his life," said son Paul Woolpert, now a coach with the Continental Basketball Association team in Yakima, Wash. "But I remember sitting down and talking defense with him. It was intricate and complex. The placement of the hands and the feet, the percentage of the weight that was supposed to be on the balls of your feet."

The skinny kid

Woolpert's results the first few years at San Francisco, however, were as modest as the team's surroundings. Games were played at nearby Kezar Pavilion or the Cow Palace across town. Practices were down the hill at St. Ignatius, at Kezar or even the Boys Club's Page Street Gym.

The Dons' fortunes changed when one of Woolpert's players, Dick Lawless, had a bad day playing pickup basketball. A pencil-thin kid with no shot of his own blocked one of Lawless' attempts. And another. And another.

"Everything I tried to put up, he'd slam it down my throat," Lawless recalled.

Lawless told Woolpert to keep an eye on that skinny kid, the backup center at Oakland McClymonds High School who had grown three or four inches in the past year. That kid was Bill Russell.

"He would have been very difficult for anybody to find. He only played a few games that year because he was a mid-term graduate," Lawless said.

Woolpert sent Hal DeJulio, a local businessman, for a look, and DeJulio was given credit for "discovering" and recruiting Russell.

Russell has written that when he arrived at San Francisco, it was about a month before the shy Jones actually talked to him. And Jones was his roommate.

"He was a quiet leader," said teammate Hal Perry. "He'd say, I'm not going to tell you to do anything. I'm just going to ask you to do what you do best."

'I have an announcement'

The Dons had some hopes for the 1953-54 season, but those were undone when Jones had appendicitis and wound up missing most of the season. When the 1954-55 season began, the Dons didn't know what to expect and feared the worst when one of their peers, Santa Clara, was destroyed by UCLA, which San Francisco then played on Dec. 3.

"We were scared," Jones admitted.

The Dons lost 47-40 to John Wooden's team but were encouraged that the game was close and that a rematch was only a week away. Then, two days before a second game with UCLA, guard Bill Bush stood up in the locker room after practice.

"Teammates. I have an announcement," Bush said. "I'm first string. But I believe if you put Hal Perry in my spot we will be a better team."

The unselfish announcement stunned the team. It also carried historical and social weight: Perry would be a third black starter, joining Russell and Jones and white players Jerry Mullen and Stan Buchanan.

City College of New York had three black players on its squad when it won a national title in 1950. But the Dons now had three starters who would account for almost 60 percent of the team's points. That raised eyebrows even in California, let alone places that were rocked by the Earl Warren Supreme Court decision that separate schools were inherently unequal.

"I think it was an unwritten rule that there was a quota in basketball," Paul Woolpert said, adding about his father, "but he never cared a thing about color. He was an extremely intelligent man, and he didn't care what anyone thought."

Perry recently told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "He deserved as much respect as any coach, but even more than that, as much as any person in any phase of the civil rights movement. . . . He went through hell."

Separate, not equal

Racial problems surfaced shortly after the Dons beat the sixth-ranked Bruins. At the All-College Tournament in Oklahoma City, the team learned that the school's black players would not be allowed to stay in any downtown hotels.

The team called a players-only meeting with Perry presiding. He suggested that everyone, whites and blacks, stay in the vacant college dorms and win the tournament.

According to Perry, one of the white players, Rudy Zannini, spoke up: "I move that we stay here, that we win and that we talk about it (their poor treatment) when we get back to San Francisco."

The entire squad bunked in a dorm that had emptied for the holidays, but that didn't solve all the problems.

"When we were practicing, they were throwing coins at us," Jones recalled. "I guess that was their way of saying they didn't appreciate us very much. Russell went out and picked up the coins. I thought that was awesome."

By that time, Russell's play was startling foes and fans.

"They'd never seen anything like him," Jones said. "He was a shot-blocker and rebounder and skinny, with determination and an intelligence for the game."

Russell was a world-class high jumper and might have been the first man to break seven feet if he'd concentrated on that sport. In basketball, under the rules of the day, Russell could get his hands above the rim and guide teammates' shots into the hoop, a move that would now be whistled as offensive goaltending. His patented move of driving beyond the basket and dunking backwards over his head would still be a legal highlight.

Jump ball

The Dons entered the NCAA tournament as the country's No. 1 team, but they looked all too vulnerable in their regional final against Oregon State. The Dons had their lead cut to 57-55 when Oregon State's 7-foot-3-inch center, Swede Halbrook, made a basket. With 13 seconds left, Woolpert called a timeout.

On the way back to the court, an Oregon State player sprawled onto the floor and the refs ruled that it was from contact with Jones. Oregon State got a technical foul shot, which it made, and the ball. A potentially winning shot bounced a few times on the rim before coming out. Halbrook got the rebound but was tied up by Jones. The two then had a jump ball with Jones at more than a foot disadvantage. But he deflected Halbrook's tip and Perry wound up with the ball as he and the Dons hung on for a win.

In the NCAA championship game, La Salle entered as the defending champion and had what many considered to be the best player in the country in 6-7 Tom Gola, a three-time first-team All-American. Everyone was expecting a showdown between Russell and Gola. Everyone except Woolpert. Before the game he told the 6-1 Jones he was drawing that assignment and letting Russell stay closer to the basket.

"The thinking was I'd bother him handling the ball," Jones said.

Jones scored 24 points and held Gola to 16.

"Jones did things they have never seen in the middle west," Woolpert said afterward. "His blocks, his leaps to wrest the ball from Gola -- you'd say they were impossible, but K.C. did them with the greatest game of his life."

Russell had 25 rebounds and scored 23 points in the 77-63 win, the 26th straight for the Dons. University of Kansas coaching legend Phog Allen called Russell's play the most exciting performance he had seen in 45 years.

The Dons went on to win their 55th straight game in the 1956 NCAA championship, beating Iowa to become only the third team to that time to win back-to-back NCAA titles.

New era in hoops

The Dons eventually won 60 straight. In 1957, Woolpert's team, without Russell or Jones, made it to the Final Four before losing to Kansas and its black star, Wilt Chamberlain. The next year it was Elgin Baylor of Seattle who hit a long jumper to knock San Francisco out of the 1958 tournament.

A new era in basketball had begun. Integrated teams such as Cincinnati and Loyola of Chicago claimed NCAA titles. In 1966, Texas Western (now known as Texas-El Paso) won the NCAA title with all black starters, defeating all-white Kentucky.

Jones and Russell went on to play for the Boston Celtics. Jones played nine years in his Hall of Fame career while Russell played 13, winning 11 titles. Russell became the first black coach in the NBA, and Jones also went on to a successful coaching career that included two NBA titles with the Larry Bird-era Celtics.

Back in San Francisco, Woolpert, citing nerves, resigned in 1959. He was 44. He later took some other coaching jobs but met with nowhere near the success he had at San Francisco.

"I still claim he was forced out," Perry said. "Since I've left college, I've heard many stories about some alumni. They couldn't do anything when we were winning, but they did as soon as they got their chance."