Ask BYU fans about the school's all-time basketball highlights and they're likely to mention Danny Ainge's drive to beat Notre Dame in the 1981 NCAA Tournament or perhaps Dick Nemelka and Jeff Congdon leading the Cougs to the 1966 NIT title.
A lot of folks might forget about, or just may not be old enough to remember, probably the biggest accomplishment in BYU basketball history — the NIT championship of 1951.
It's been 50 years since the Cougar basketball team took New York City by storm, capturing the NIT championship when it was a big deal and winning every game by double-figure margins. Back in those days, the National Invitational Tournament was on par with the NCAA Tournament, if not more important.
A special group of players competed on that championship team coached by Stan Watts, and most of the members of that heralded team will be back in Provo Saturday for a reunion. They also will be honored at halftime of the BYU-San Diego State game Saturday afternoon at the Marriott Center.
"I think we regard that as quite an accomplishment all these years later," said Harold Christensen, one of the starters on the '51 team. "We were not very well-known back then, and we played some outstanding teams."
Christensen, a consulting engineer who lives in Salt Lake, is helping organize the reunion, which includes 13 players from the championship team. Each of the five starters from that team, Roland Minson, Mel Hutchins, Joe Richey, Jerry Romney and Christensen, was drafted by the NBA when they completed college. Richey passed away six years ago, one of two deceased players from the team.
Before they went back to New York that March, the Cougars weren't expected to compete with the best teams in the country. They had earned some national attention three months earlier when they played CCNY, the defending NIT and NCAA champion, to a two-point game in Madison Square Garden. Then they had won the Rocky Mountain Conference title to earn an NIT berth.
"We felt we had a good team, but it was an unknown," Christensen said. "There were no polls back them, but we felt, based on our season up to that point, we would do well. But we really didn't know how well we'd do."
The Cougars started with a 75-58 win over St. Louis University, one of the pre-tournament favorites, in the first round as Minson scored 28 points, Richey 16 and Hutchins 13.
The upset came a few days after Utahn Rex Layne upset Bob Satterfield in a big heavyweight boxing match at Madison Square Garden. As Hack Miller wrote in the Deseret News, "The two blasts have Manhattan mumbling about the Mormons from the mountains. Utah is almost a sacred word here right now.'"
Three days later, the Cougars defeated Seton Hall 69-59 in the semifinals behind 26 points from Minson, 16 from Romney and 14 from Richey.
Miller gave credit to the Cougars' defense, writing, "It was a defense which bewildered, befuddled and bewitched the New Jersey five. It was defense that kept the famous Walter Dukes . . . completely in hand and gave the BYU prairie fire the chance to break out all over."
The hometown St. John's team was the favorite to win the other semifinal but was upset by Dayton in overtime.
As the Deseret News reported, the Cougars won the final "in a walk" 62-43. The headline in the March 18, 1951, Deseret News proclaimed, "Golden Cougars win NIT Crown."
Actually it was just 28-26 at halftime, before the Cougars got going and coach Watts was able to clear the bench and let players such as Leon Heaps, Dick Jones, Jimmy Thorne, Bob Craig, Boyd Jarman and Ralph Olsen see action in the title game. Again Minson led the way with 26 points, followed by Christensen with 9 and Russ Hillman with 8.
Minson was named most valuable player in the tournament for what Miller called "the greatest three-day performance we've ever witnessed in our years playing and covering the game."
Christensen points out that all of the 13 team members who will be at Saturday's reunion are still married to their original wives. The all-Mormon team also has reached the highest heights in their religion with nine becoming bishops, six serving in stake presidencies, two becoming mission presidents and one, Elder Loren C. Dunn, serving as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.
Watts passed away just last year, but the trainer for the '51 team, Rod Kimball, is still alive. He might be the only person in the world with this triple-90 distinction — not only is Kimball 90 years old, he has 90 grandchildren and 90 great-grandchildren.
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