The Story Behind The Story Of The Game That Changed College Basketball

Pity the writer with a story to tell that everybody but him is telling. This story dates back to March of 1963, when the lily-white Mississippi State Bulldogs sneaked out of their state—in defiance of its governor and a court order—to play an integrated Loyola of Chicago team in the regional semifinals of the NCAA tournament. Mississippi State lost. So did jim crow.

Four years earlier Lenehan had decided the ’63 Loyola Ramblers were a book begging to be written. Before 1963, a few schools dominated college basketball. Cincinnati, the school Loyola defeated in the NCAA finals, had won the championship the previous two years; Ohio State, the school Cincinnati beat in the finals both those years, had won the title the year before that. And in 1964 UCLA began its run of ten titles in 12 years. But in 1963 the Ramblers came out of (and would soon return to) nowhere. They played in an exhilarating fast-break style that broke other teams down and wore them out—even though it was Loyola that had no bench to speak of. And Loyola started four African-Americans. They were a team about which a book could plausibly claim on its cover: “Loyola-Chicago 1963—the team that changed the color of college basketball.” That book is Lenehan’s Ramblers, finally released, just in time for March Madness.

Well, we certainly told ourselves that, I said.

Treating his readers as literate grown-ups, Lenehan wrote a foreword to Ramblers that makes fun of the breathless claim on the cover. He confessed: “I don’t really believe that the Loyola Ramblers singlehandedly ‘changed the color of college basketball,’ any more than I think the Texas Western-Kentucky game in 1966 ‘changed America forever’ (Don Haskins, Glory Road), or that the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird championship of 1979 ‘transformed basketball’ (Seth Davis, When March Went Mad), or that North Carolina’s 1957 victory over Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas ‘revolutionized college basketball’ (Adam Lucas, The Best Game Ever). A book like this is obliged to make such a claim on its cover, but we all know better.”