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David Mitchell
Miracle Men
* I found this Dispatch article from March 12, 2008 (retold from 1958)
A bit detailed, but interesting if you're into this stuff.
This is Not the end of my story
An aging mind holds only so many memories, leaving recent experiences -- what did we eat for dinner last night? -- to spill out like water from an overfilled glass.
Only the remarkable recollections remain, deep in the glass, endlessly swirling, occasionally rising toward the brim but never escaping completely. When these deep stirrings do surface, it is as if champagne has replaced the water, tickling the senses.
Details don’t always dovetail in the euphoria of those distant moments. Facts get fuzzy. One man recalls that six seconds remained on the scoreboard clock when the winning shot was made. Another remembers it as three. The devil can be in the details -- and a bitter Lucifer still lurks there for Middletown, 50 years after the Middies went through hell in St. John Arena. But for those on the side of Columbus North, the memories are like a slice of heaven.
Eddie Clark still considers it a miracle -- the shot, not the victory over Middletown, which ended the Middies’ 76-game winning streak that spanned three seasons. Knocking off Jerry Lucas and Middletown 63-62 in a 1958 state tournament semifinal was amazing, but no player or coach from North ever thought it an impossible task.
“I didn’t know anything about Middletown, about those giants,” said Clark, 67, whose winning layup with six seconds left -- some say five, others four or three -- is the miracle that still plays out in his mind.
Quite simply, Clark struggled to make layups even when no one was guarding him, much less when Lucas filled the lane.
“I would go down a lot of times and embarrass myself because I’d go up and put the ball off the bankboard and it would be like a rocket coming off the other side,” said the former guard, now an assistant girls basketball coach at Independence.
By the time Clark dribbled past Lucas, however, North already had shown itself to be in the miracle business, having taken mighty Middletown to the wire.
Impossible task?
The Middies couldn’t be beaten, so it was said. Never mind that North was 24-0 despite playing in the brutal Columbus City League; Middletown was 76-0. The two-time defending state champions had the 6-foot-8 Lucas, generally considered the best high school player in the nation, plus four other starters who went 6-6, 6-5, 6-4 and 6-3. North’s tallest player stood 6-4.
Tickets were hard to come by for the two state tournament games, which featured North against Middletown and Zanesville against Cleveland East Tech. The semifinals featured several firsts, including four teams reaching the state tournament with spotless records (24-0) and the first time the tournament was televised in Columbus.
But mostly the crowd of 13,872 came to watch Lucas, the Ohio State recruit who owned a 44-point career average in state tournament play. Lucas was expected to put on a show, maybe even break his tournament scoring record, set in 1956 when he totaled 97 points in wins over East Tech (53 points) and Canton McKinley (44), which had defeated North in a semifinal that year.
“I would say that was the greatest high school team I ever saw, when (Lucas) was a sophomore,” said Charles Rossiaky, 68, of Pataskala, whose defensive assignment in ’58 was to front Lucas while teammate Jim Doughty guarded from behind.
But North coach Frank Truitt made sure his players understood these were the 1957-58 Middies, not the 1955-56 version.
* * Didn't Frank Truitt become Fred Taylor's assistant coach? Fred?
“It wasn’t like the night before the game I gave them a pep talk,” said Truitt, 82, who lives in Upper Arlington. “I told them in practice one day, ‘Somebody is going to beat Middletown this year and I’ll tell you what kind of team it will be -- good on defense, a good shooting team that can make its foul shots.’
“I said there was only one team in Ohio who could do that. ‘And that’s you guys.’ It got their attention.”
Clark doesn’t remember it quite that way -- details, details -- recalling that Truitt purposely did not talk about Middletown, except during the week of the semifinal game when he coached the players to slow the tempo.
Credit Truitt for knowing the character of his team. The Polar Bears had won 19 of their games by five points or fewer, so he knew North could win if it could keep the score close through three quarters.
North did, trailing 48-43 entering the fourth quarter and then rallying for a 59-54 lead when Rossiaky converted a three-point play with 1:02 to play.
“Our starting guard, J.T. Landes, sent me a tape of the game in black and white about 10 years ago, and as I sat and watched it I thought, ‘Darn, we were good,’ ” Rossiaky said. “We didn’t make turnovers. That was one thing Frank was obsessed with. No turnovers.”
Oops. Middletown guard Tom Sizer trimmed North’s lead to one point with a steal and layup and then made two free throws to give the Middies a 62-61 lead with 10 seconds left, setting up Clark’s heroics.
After Lucas deflected a pass out of bounds, senior captain Dan Wherry inbounded to Clark, who slashed past Lucas for the go-ahead basket with six seconds left. Or was it three?
Details are sketchy
More mental fuzziness: Truitt remembered Middletown forward Larry Emrick taking the last shot from about half-court rather than passing to an open Lucas for a short jumper or possible layup. Emrick remembers it differently.
“I looked for Lucas and he hadn’t crossed the half-court line yet,” said Emrick, who for years shouldered the disappointment of “letting the whole town down.”
The town was down, but also dubious. Middletown fans swore something was wrong with Lucas. It’s not that he scored only 25 points, well below his average, but that he had only 17 attempts.
“Lucas wasn’t shooting. It could have been the defense, but he was passing up shots,” said Jerry Nardiello, the retired sports editor of the Middletown Journal who covered the game.
“Lucas was always unselfish,” Emrick said. “But this was different. Something happened. Something hurt his feelings.”
Those seeking an explanation have had a devil of a time getting the details in the past 50 years. One suspicion is that Sizer’s mother chose the week of the state tournament to complain that Lucas was receiving too much attention, and when Lucas found out he shut down his game.
Lucas and Sizer repeatedly have denied anything happened, but Middletown still cannot accept that their monstrous Middies finally lost.
“North had a pretty good team,” Nardiello said. “But whether they were good enough to beat a Middletown ... ”
One thing is for certain: North wasn’t good enough to beat East Tech the next day in the state final, losing 50-48 in sudden-death overtime -- another detail that becomes muddled in many minds.
“Frank tells me that people would come up to congratulate him on winning the state championship and he would say, ‘No, we didn’t win it.’ Now, he just overlooks it and doesn’t say anything about it,” Rossiaky said, chuckling.
In the championship game, East Tech’s Jim Stone hit a half-court shot to force overtime, which lasted three minutes and ended without either team scoring. Under rules of the day, amended soon after the 1958 tournament, games that remained tied after the first overtime went to sudden death. The winner was the first team to score two points, either by a basket or foul shots.
North got the tip in sudden death but turned the ball over near the East Tech basket. East Tech ended it quickly on a 10-foot jumper by Gerald Warfield, giving the Scarabs the first of back-to-back state titles.
The loss is one memory Clark would rather forget.
“We never once thought we were going to lose that game,” he said.
North’s fans probably thought the Polar Bears would be back, but the school never again advanced as far as the semifinals. North closed in 1979 and today serves as a temporary home for East, which is being renovated.
The stunning loss to North -- it still ranks as the biggest upset in state tournament history -- also foreshadowed the end of the Middies’ dynasty. They also lost in the state semifinals the next season.
“Fans stopped going to the games” after the loss to North, Nardiello said. “We had those 76 wins and got another 10 straight the following year. We would have had about 90 wins in a row.”
North fondly remembers why they didn’t.
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