Once they were the Cinderella Kids.
Now they're the Golden Boys.The Cinderella Kids were the Utah basketball team that became part of the state's folklore when they won the NCAA championship in 1944. The Golden Boys are that same bunch, now retired senior citizens and grandfathers who went from unknown also-rans to the top of the basketball heap in a week. The story of what they accomplished 50 years ago reads more like fiction than fact.
They will be honored Friday night at a gala dinner sponsored by the University's Crimson Club.
To begin with, the team wasn't even supposed to be in the NCAA tournament. They had turned it down in favor of the National Invitation tournament in New York. A tragic automobile accident got them into the NCAA after they had been eliminated from the NIT.
Every player was from a nearby high school. Seven were freshmen, just waiting until they turned 18 and were eligible for the wartime draft. They were Arnie Ferrin from Ogden, Dick Smuin from Cyprus, Herb Wilkinson and the Lewis twins, Bob and Fred from East, Ray Kingston from Murray Jim Nance from Jordan, and Wat Misaka from Weber junior college. None had been recruited. Ferrin hadn't started school until after Christmas, and Misaka decided to try out when he saw a notice of tryouts on a campus bulletin board.
The "old man" of the team was Fred Sheffield from Davis High, who was a junior and had won the NCAA high jump title the year before.
Not many colleges were playing basketball in those wartime years, so the young Utes played all but three of their games against service and semi-pro teams in the area. The Ute field house had been converted into the "world's largest bedroom" for student Army trainees, so their home games were played in the old Deseret Gym. They won 17 and lost only three games to service teams that had former college players.
While the young teammates were piling up their record, graduate manager Keith C. Brown began a campaign to get them invited to the NIT. At first he sent clippings to Ned Irish, president of Madison Square Garden. Then he began using the telephone. Finally the invitation came, along with an invite to the NCAA western region tournament in Kansas City. "Only two on the team had ever been to New York, so we took the NIT," Brown explained.
After a two-day, three-night train trip to the big town, the Utes met Kentucky in the first round of the NIT and lost 46-38. End of the season - a couple of days seeing the sights and then back to Utah.
Then the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction started. At 2 a.m. coach Vadal Peterson got a call from Kansas City. The Arkansas team, which had been invited to the NCAA when Utah turned it down, had been in an auto accident in which a player and an assistant coach had been killed. They invited Utah to replace Arkansas.
"Vadal was inclined to turn it down," said Brown, "but decided to leave it up to the team, and of course they were enthusiastic about getting another chance."
Before leaving that evening for Kansas City, the Utes scrimmaged against Oklahoma A&M, which had won its game in the NIT. Sheffield sprained an ankle in the scrimmage and was able to play only a few minutes in the rest of the games. This meant that four freshmen, Ferrin, Smuin, Bob Lewis, Wilkinson and sophomore Misaka played virtually every minute of the next four games.
After a two-night train trip to Kansas City, the Utes met Missouri in the western semifinals and won 45-35. Then it was Iowa State for the trip back to New York.
In the afternoon preceding the final game, Reaves Peters, director the tournament came to Brown, and after hemming and hawing, explained that the winning team would have to catch a midnight train for New York where the final was scheduled for the next Tuesday.
To save money he had the Iowa team check out of their hotel rooms and wanted to know if they could put their bags in Utah's rooms.
Knowing that they were expected to lose gave the Utes more incentive for their 40-31 win. The Iowa team slept in Utah's beds that night.
Utah's opponent in the final was Dartmouth, a team that was loaded with college players who were stationed there in a Navy training program. They included Aud Brindley who had played at Ohio State, Harry Leggat from NYU, Bob Gale from Cornell, Dick McGuire from St John's, and Joe Vancisin, who later was head coach at Yale. It looked like a classic mismatch - kids just out of high school against a team of seasoned college players.
Some of the Dartmouth players must have thought so, too. In the hotel dining room the morning of the game, Pete Couch, Utah's assistant coach, overheard some of the Dartmouth players talking about how they should play an intersquad scrimmage before the game to give fans their money's worth.
They got their money's worth that night. The young Utes played the game of their lives and with a minute to go led by four points, 36-32. Coach Peterson had devised a defense that kept superstar Brindley pretty well bottled up. He scored only five baskets out of 24 shots. Gale made five out of 18.
A last-second basket by Dick McGuire tied the game at 36 and sent the game into overtime. In those days the rules did not permit teams to come to the bench during time-outs, so in the minute between regulation and overtime both teams sat on the floor near the foul circles to plot their own strategies.
Ferrin had been the star of the game, scoring 18 points, half of Utah's total. In the overtime he made four foul shots and drove in for a basket in the final seconds. The ball bounced off into the hands of Herb Wilkinson who tossed it in just before the gun.
The Utes were champs!
Ferrin was named the tournament's most valuable player. His 22 points matched the number on his jersey. Until Pervis Ellison of Louisville won the MVP in 1986 Ferrin was the only freshmen ever to have won the honor.
New York sportswriters outdid themselves in describing the Cinderella story of the young Utes. How they had lost in the NIT, how they got into the NCAA through an unfortunate accident, and how they had surprised everyone by winning.
But there was one more chapter to the improbable story. Several months before NCAA and NIT, officials had arranged for a Red Cross benefit between the two tournament winners. But Navy brass had refused permission for the Dartmouth team to stay in New York for two extra days, should they win. So Utah knew they would be playing St. John's, the NIT winner, whether they won or lost to Dartmouth.
St. John's had won the NIT two years in a row and were local favorites, but the Utes had won the hearts of the blase New York fans and as many of the 18,125 crowd that filled the Garden were cheering for the kids from the West as for their local favorites.
It was another classic game. The halftime score was 19-19 and the Utes pulled away in the final minutes to win 43-36. With a minute to go, Joe Lapchick, the St. John's coach, walked over to the Utah bench, put his arm around Vadal Peterson, and the two sat together watching the final seconds tick away.
To say that Utah fans were excited about the victories would be an understatement. On the final leg of the trip home from Denver to Salt Lake City, the team rode in the private car of Utahn Wilson McCarthy, president of the Rio Grande railroad.
There was a parade from the station to the campus, where an overflow crowd in Kingsbury Hall awaited. There were more dinner and luncheon invitations then they could accept and the team and coaches were made lifetime members of the Chamber of Commerce.
Within a few months they were all in the service. Misaka was decorated for his service with a Japanese-American division in Italy Three years later he returned to the U. and played with Ferrin and Smuin on the team that won the 1947 NIT by beating Kentucky in another surprising upset. But that's another story.
Sorensen, a retired Professor of Communications at the University of Utah, was present for the three games in New York.