Snake
12-21-2007, 01:24 AM
MCGUIRE MYSTIQUE
As some of USC’s greatest-ever players return to campus, thoughts of their old coach come to mind
http://media.thestate.com/smedia/2007/12/20/23/730-Frank_McGuire.embedded.prod_affiliate.74.jpg (http://media.thestate.com/smedia/2007/12/20/23/508-Frank_McGuire.standalone.prod_affiliate.74.jpg)
Tom Owens #24 usc basketball vs Temple 1/6/1971 with coach Frank McGuire
Their names are Harlicka and Thompson and Gregor and Standard and Cremins, and they set the stage for South Carolina’s finest hour in basketball.
Yet these guys, called the Four Horseman and the Kid, are often forgotten, or at least overlooked, in chronicles of the Frank McGuire Era.
They played in a gone-with-the-wind snake pit called the Carolina Field House, a relic of a home-court gym on Sumter Street, and their contributions sometimes disappear amid the glitter of names, teams and fancy new arena that followed.
That should never happen.
This bunch, the four seniors and the sophomore, showed what could be.
They showed that the Gamecocks could earn a seat at college basketball’s head table.
“We held the fort for South Carolina basketball,” says Bobby Cremins, a sophomore in the 1968 season.
Really, they built the fort, constructing the foundation for a decade of excellence, a time when every day was a holiday and every meal a feast in the world of Carolina basketball.
Jack Thompson, Skip Harlicka and Frank Standard were in McGuire’s first recruiting class. They arrived to find Gary Gregor, brought in by former coach Chuck Noe, on the shelf with a knee injury. Cremins followed a couple of years later.
“We fit perfectly, like a hand in a glove,” Thompson says. “We can talk about individual performances, but this is all about being a team.
“(South Carolina) has had more talented teams, but no more exciting teams. We were showtime. We played much bigger (opponents) with a 6-foot-6 center (Gregor) and a 6-4 forward (Standard) and three guards, and we beat them all.”
Indeed, they could win at a snail’s pace in those pre-shot clock days, and they could play a racehorse game and outrun the best.
Never forget them and their achievements. They were special.
Start of the future. The old gang will be honored at the Colonial Center on Saturday, part of Carolina’s celebrating its 100th year of basketball.
The date is appropriate; Cremins will have his College of Charleston Cougars in town to battle the Gamecocks.
Cremins remains the most well known and most beloved. In addition to playing on the Roche-Owens powerhouse teams, he coached championship teams at Georgia Tech and Appalachian State and once accepted, then rejected, the opportunity to return to USC.
Thompson and Gregor live in Columbia, and Harlicka makes his home in Raleigh. Standard is deceased.
Harlicka came from New Jersey on what he calls a “two-fer” deal, basketball and baseball. Gregor had been lured from West Virginia by Noe, and McGuire found the others in his fertile recruiting ground of New York City.
“Coach McGuire would not have recruited me,” says Gregor, who at 6-5½ played in the pivot and still led the Atlantic Coast Conference in rebounding. “I got here weighing 195 pounds, then went to 235 and lost a half-inch off my waist my first year.
“I got bigger and stronger. I was fortunate, getting hurt. That kept me out for a year and a half, and it was a blessing to play with those guys.”
Cremins looks back with a coach’s eye to analyze the 1968 team and sees the ideal fit that Thompson describes.
“Gregor was an animal inside, a really incredible rebounder, one of the most athletic big men anywhere,” he says. “Jack was the best passer ever at Carolina, and Skip could shoot like nobody’s business. Frank was street-smart and an incredible basketball player. He had a nose for the ball.”
Thompson calls Standard “a Dennis Rodman before Dennis Rodman.”
And the kid, Cremins?
“A scrounger,” Gregor says. “We needed a guy like him. He was pure hustle.”
Dave Odom, Carolina’s coach and the driving force behind bringing back former players to the program, remembers that team that whipped Duke and North Carolina — both nationally ranked and on hot streaks — on the road in a five-day stretch.
“They played so well together,” he says. “Thompson and Harlicka ... you mention them in the same breath with the ACC’s best backcourts, right there with (Bob) Verga and (Steve) Vacendak at Duke.”
Verga and Vacendak? That is a good place to start in calling the old gang’s roll of achievement.
Sowing seeds of tomorrow. McGuire had built powerful programs at St. John’s and North Carolina before coming to Columbia, and his first season, 1964-65, hardly suggested the same. The Gamecocks had some quality players, but an injury to Gregor helped torpedo a season that ended with a 6-17 record.
Only a 62-60 loss to 10th-ranked Duke in the ACC tournament offered hope.
In those days before freshman eligibility, the Thompson-Harlicka-Standard class watched and waited.
Joining Al Salvadori and John Schroeder in the starting lineup, they faced third-ranked Duke in their third varsity game.
“I didn’t have total comprehension of what (beating Duke) would mean,” Harlicka says in reflecting on the Gamecocks’ stunning 73-71 victory.
“After that game, I realized we could play at a very high level.”
They showed on that night of Dec. 6, 1965, the toughness and heart that would characterize their careers. Down six points in the second half, they fought back, foiled Duke’s stall tactic and scored in the clutch.
Thompson fed Salvadori for a three-point play that put Carolina in front, then slipped Standard a pass for the winning points with 20 seconds remaining.
The Blue Devils failed in an attempt to tie, and the Field House turned into a sea of frenzy. Fans stormed the sunken court to celebrate the first step into the future.
“The last two minutes were unbelievable, then the stands erupted,” Harlicka says. “There was such an emotional outpouring. The coaches had been there, but I never experienced anything like that.”
Typical of college arenas of the time, only 3,200 could shoehorn into the gym and, until then, the demand for seats seldom outweighed the supply of tickets.
That changed.
“(Coach McGuire) told us more than once that our beating Duke was the real beginning of the appropriations for funds for the Carolina Coliseum,” Thompson says. “Our winning was so improbable and everybody got excited. We needed a bigger building, and that game was the start.”
The Gamecocks beat Pennsylvania in their next game and vaulted temporarily into the top 10. Opponents figured out ways to slow the express and losses piled up, but the seeds for tomorrow had been planted.
A special camaraderie. The sophomores grew, and Gregor joined them for two seasons and Cremins for one. They prospered, yet they wonder what might have been.
The Mike Grosso saga unfolded, leaving a sore that festers 40 years later. ACC officials ruled the big center ineligible, and Carolina went on probation for recruiting violations.
“(Grosso) was a gentle giant, such a great player,” Cremins says. “I came in and would play with them (in pre-practice scrimmages) and thought, ‘I’m at the wrong school; I’m over my head here.’
“Jack was such a great ball-handler, Skip could shoot and Mike was the best. I hoped to be the seventh or eighth man.”
Cremins calls the scenario “ugly, bad” and says the program had reached a crossroad. Then, the team came together with an us-against-the-world outlook and prospered.
They prospered, but they never forgot.
“I love those guys and that team,” Cremins says. “What they did was to hold the program together. That team deserves a lot of credit for the future.”
They went 16-7 their junior season, drilling a Final Four North Carolina team in the Field House and notching a victory against seventh-ranked Cincinnati at Kentucky’s holiday tournament.
“We were the ‘other’ team in the UK tournament, the throw-in” with Cincinnati, Dayton and Kentucky, Gregor says.
That tournament also produced one of the most repeated and memorable stories about the old gang.
Standard, ever the free spirit, breezed into the Carolina locker room well after the others had changed into their uniforms to play Kentucky in the title game. McGuire stared daggers at the offender.
“Sorry, coach, but I ran into a guy who claimed (Kentucky’s) Adolph Rupp is a better coach than you, and it took time to change his mind,” Standard said.
“True story,” Harlicka says. “Coach just shook his head and laughed.”
That team laughed a lot. The players had a camaraderie that cannot be manufactured.
“I lived in Skip and Jack’s room,” Cremins says. “I probably drove them crazy, but they took me in like a brother.
“That was great for basketball but not great for academics.”
In terms of basketball, though, the mentors were ideal.
Magic of McGuire. They played many memorable games. Thompson recalls their junior year, in which the Gamecocks blew out a North Carolina team that came to town with an eye on clinching the top seed in the ACC tournament.
“They had beaten us badly (80-55) a couple of weeks early in Charlotte,” he says. “Coach took Skip and me out and told us, ‘I hope you are as embarrassed by this as I am.’
“Then, in the locker room before we played at the Field House, he told us you guys ought to score at will against (Dean Smith’s) Mickey Mouse defenses. That was the magic of McGuire, talking about what we could do against a team that had embarrassed us.”
The real magic showed in those never-to-be-forgotten wins at Durham and Chapel Hill during their 15-7 senior season. They whipped Duke in a slow-down game and North Carolina in a run-and-gun spectacular.
Press reports from the time note that Thompson played in that 56-50 victory against Duke “on medication for a foot injury.”
The real story?
“I had such a badly infected foot I could hardly walk,” says Thompson, who had played much of his senior season with a hamstring injury. “I thought it was a blister and went to (trainer) Jim Price’s room and asked him to lance it. He did and I saw stars. I thought his scalpel had slipped.”
The trainer said the obvious: Thompson cannot play.
But neither the player nor the trainer nor assistant coach Bill Loving had the nerve to inform McGuire. Thompson limped onto the team bus, thinking surely the coach would notice.
“He played the monkey — hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil,” Thompson says. laughing again.
Thompson remembered a painkiller he had received for a toothache and slipped some of the medication from the trainer’s bag. He took what amounted to an overdose, felt no pain and played perhaps the game of his life.
“Coach went to his grave without knowing how I played that night,” he says.
Thompson made 10 of 12 shots from the, leading the Gamecocks from behind in the second half.
A day later, the trainer performed what amounted to out-patient surgery on the infected foot. Three days after that, with a surgical sponge covering the raw area, Thompson played again, and the Gamecocks beat North Carolina.
“I won the (Duke) game,” he says, “and they won the North Carolina game.”
That’s the kind of team they were.
Legacy to cherish. By beating the Tar Heels — in Chapel Hill, on Senior Night, after trailing by 13 points in the second half — the Gamecocks reached a plateau few do. They defeated two of the nation’s most decorated programs, both in the top 10 at the time, on the road within a five-day span.
The North Carolina game might as well be called the Cremins Game. The sophomore scored 23 points, grabbed 15 rebounds and helped the injured Thompson handle the ball against a pressing defense in a 87-86 triumph.
“If he got 15 rebounds, I bet four bounced before he got them,” Gregor says and laughs.
A week later, the teams forged another classic in the ACC tournament
semifinals. The Tar Heels won 82-79 in overtime, and an official’s call still rankles the Gamecocks.
With UNC leading by three in overtime, Gregor scored and drew a foul. But rather than a three-point play opportunity that could have tied the game, the official ruled the foul came before the shot and waved off the basket.
“We should have won some games that we didn’t,” Gregor says with a touch of diplomacy. “We were on probation and couldn’t go anywhere (in the NCAA tournament, which then limited each conference to one representative).
“But we had a great time. That was a great time to be at South Carolina.”
Yes, and never forget them. Carolina teams that followed achieved more, but this gang set the table and demonstrated what could be. Theirs is a legacy to cherish.
http://www.thestate.com/gamecocks/story/263820.html
As some of USC’s greatest-ever players return to campus, thoughts of their old coach come to mind
http://media.thestate.com/smedia/2007/12/20/23/730-Frank_McGuire.embedded.prod_affiliate.74.jpg (http://media.thestate.com/smedia/2007/12/20/23/508-Frank_McGuire.standalone.prod_affiliate.74.jpg)
Tom Owens #24 usc basketball vs Temple 1/6/1971 with coach Frank McGuire
Their names are Harlicka and Thompson and Gregor and Standard and Cremins, and they set the stage for South Carolina’s finest hour in basketball.
Yet these guys, called the Four Horseman and the Kid, are often forgotten, or at least overlooked, in chronicles of the Frank McGuire Era.
They played in a gone-with-the-wind snake pit called the Carolina Field House, a relic of a home-court gym on Sumter Street, and their contributions sometimes disappear amid the glitter of names, teams and fancy new arena that followed.
That should never happen.
This bunch, the four seniors and the sophomore, showed what could be.
They showed that the Gamecocks could earn a seat at college basketball’s head table.
“We held the fort for South Carolina basketball,” says Bobby Cremins, a sophomore in the 1968 season.
Really, they built the fort, constructing the foundation for a decade of excellence, a time when every day was a holiday and every meal a feast in the world of Carolina basketball.
Jack Thompson, Skip Harlicka and Frank Standard were in McGuire’s first recruiting class. They arrived to find Gary Gregor, brought in by former coach Chuck Noe, on the shelf with a knee injury. Cremins followed a couple of years later.
“We fit perfectly, like a hand in a glove,” Thompson says. “We can talk about individual performances, but this is all about being a team.
“(South Carolina) has had more talented teams, but no more exciting teams. We were showtime. We played much bigger (opponents) with a 6-foot-6 center (Gregor) and a 6-4 forward (Standard) and three guards, and we beat them all.”
Indeed, they could win at a snail’s pace in those pre-shot clock days, and they could play a racehorse game and outrun the best.
Never forget them and their achievements. They were special.
Start of the future. The old gang will be honored at the Colonial Center on Saturday, part of Carolina’s celebrating its 100th year of basketball.
The date is appropriate; Cremins will have his College of Charleston Cougars in town to battle the Gamecocks.
Cremins remains the most well known and most beloved. In addition to playing on the Roche-Owens powerhouse teams, he coached championship teams at Georgia Tech and Appalachian State and once accepted, then rejected, the opportunity to return to USC.
Thompson and Gregor live in Columbia, and Harlicka makes his home in Raleigh. Standard is deceased.
Harlicka came from New Jersey on what he calls a “two-fer” deal, basketball and baseball. Gregor had been lured from West Virginia by Noe, and McGuire found the others in his fertile recruiting ground of New York City.
“Coach McGuire would not have recruited me,” says Gregor, who at 6-5½ played in the pivot and still led the Atlantic Coast Conference in rebounding. “I got here weighing 195 pounds, then went to 235 and lost a half-inch off my waist my first year.
“I got bigger and stronger. I was fortunate, getting hurt. That kept me out for a year and a half, and it was a blessing to play with those guys.”
Cremins looks back with a coach’s eye to analyze the 1968 team and sees the ideal fit that Thompson describes.
“Gregor was an animal inside, a really incredible rebounder, one of the most athletic big men anywhere,” he says. “Jack was the best passer ever at Carolina, and Skip could shoot like nobody’s business. Frank was street-smart and an incredible basketball player. He had a nose for the ball.”
Thompson calls Standard “a Dennis Rodman before Dennis Rodman.”
And the kid, Cremins?
“A scrounger,” Gregor says. “We needed a guy like him. He was pure hustle.”
Dave Odom, Carolina’s coach and the driving force behind bringing back former players to the program, remembers that team that whipped Duke and North Carolina — both nationally ranked and on hot streaks — on the road in a five-day stretch.
“They played so well together,” he says. “Thompson and Harlicka ... you mention them in the same breath with the ACC’s best backcourts, right there with (Bob) Verga and (Steve) Vacendak at Duke.”
Verga and Vacendak? That is a good place to start in calling the old gang’s roll of achievement.
Sowing seeds of tomorrow. McGuire had built powerful programs at St. John’s and North Carolina before coming to Columbia, and his first season, 1964-65, hardly suggested the same. The Gamecocks had some quality players, but an injury to Gregor helped torpedo a season that ended with a 6-17 record.
Only a 62-60 loss to 10th-ranked Duke in the ACC tournament offered hope.
In those days before freshman eligibility, the Thompson-Harlicka-Standard class watched and waited.
Joining Al Salvadori and John Schroeder in the starting lineup, they faced third-ranked Duke in their third varsity game.
“I didn’t have total comprehension of what (beating Duke) would mean,” Harlicka says in reflecting on the Gamecocks’ stunning 73-71 victory.
“After that game, I realized we could play at a very high level.”
They showed on that night of Dec. 6, 1965, the toughness and heart that would characterize their careers. Down six points in the second half, they fought back, foiled Duke’s stall tactic and scored in the clutch.
Thompson fed Salvadori for a three-point play that put Carolina in front, then slipped Standard a pass for the winning points with 20 seconds remaining.
The Blue Devils failed in an attempt to tie, and the Field House turned into a sea of frenzy. Fans stormed the sunken court to celebrate the first step into the future.
“The last two minutes were unbelievable, then the stands erupted,” Harlicka says. “There was such an emotional outpouring. The coaches had been there, but I never experienced anything like that.”
Typical of college arenas of the time, only 3,200 could shoehorn into the gym and, until then, the demand for seats seldom outweighed the supply of tickets.
That changed.
“(Coach McGuire) told us more than once that our beating Duke was the real beginning of the appropriations for funds for the Carolina Coliseum,” Thompson says. “Our winning was so improbable and everybody got excited. We needed a bigger building, and that game was the start.”
The Gamecocks beat Pennsylvania in their next game and vaulted temporarily into the top 10. Opponents figured out ways to slow the express and losses piled up, but the seeds for tomorrow had been planted.
A special camaraderie. The sophomores grew, and Gregor joined them for two seasons and Cremins for one. They prospered, yet they wonder what might have been.
The Mike Grosso saga unfolded, leaving a sore that festers 40 years later. ACC officials ruled the big center ineligible, and Carolina went on probation for recruiting violations.
“(Grosso) was a gentle giant, such a great player,” Cremins says. “I came in and would play with them (in pre-practice scrimmages) and thought, ‘I’m at the wrong school; I’m over my head here.’
“Jack was such a great ball-handler, Skip could shoot and Mike was the best. I hoped to be the seventh or eighth man.”
Cremins calls the scenario “ugly, bad” and says the program had reached a crossroad. Then, the team came together with an us-against-the-world outlook and prospered.
They prospered, but they never forgot.
“I love those guys and that team,” Cremins says. “What they did was to hold the program together. That team deserves a lot of credit for the future.”
They went 16-7 their junior season, drilling a Final Four North Carolina team in the Field House and notching a victory against seventh-ranked Cincinnati at Kentucky’s holiday tournament.
“We were the ‘other’ team in the UK tournament, the throw-in” with Cincinnati, Dayton and Kentucky, Gregor says.
That tournament also produced one of the most repeated and memorable stories about the old gang.
Standard, ever the free spirit, breezed into the Carolina locker room well after the others had changed into their uniforms to play Kentucky in the title game. McGuire stared daggers at the offender.
“Sorry, coach, but I ran into a guy who claimed (Kentucky’s) Adolph Rupp is a better coach than you, and it took time to change his mind,” Standard said.
“True story,” Harlicka says. “Coach just shook his head and laughed.”
That team laughed a lot. The players had a camaraderie that cannot be manufactured.
“I lived in Skip and Jack’s room,” Cremins says. “I probably drove them crazy, but they took me in like a brother.
“That was great for basketball but not great for academics.”
In terms of basketball, though, the mentors were ideal.
Magic of McGuire. They played many memorable games. Thompson recalls their junior year, in which the Gamecocks blew out a North Carolina team that came to town with an eye on clinching the top seed in the ACC tournament.
“They had beaten us badly (80-55) a couple of weeks early in Charlotte,” he says. “Coach took Skip and me out and told us, ‘I hope you are as embarrassed by this as I am.’
“Then, in the locker room before we played at the Field House, he told us you guys ought to score at will against (Dean Smith’s) Mickey Mouse defenses. That was the magic of McGuire, talking about what we could do against a team that had embarrassed us.”
The real magic showed in those never-to-be-forgotten wins at Durham and Chapel Hill during their 15-7 senior season. They whipped Duke in a slow-down game and North Carolina in a run-and-gun spectacular.
Press reports from the time note that Thompson played in that 56-50 victory against Duke “on medication for a foot injury.”
The real story?
“I had such a badly infected foot I could hardly walk,” says Thompson, who had played much of his senior season with a hamstring injury. “I thought it was a blister and went to (trainer) Jim Price’s room and asked him to lance it. He did and I saw stars. I thought his scalpel had slipped.”
The trainer said the obvious: Thompson cannot play.
But neither the player nor the trainer nor assistant coach Bill Loving had the nerve to inform McGuire. Thompson limped onto the team bus, thinking surely the coach would notice.
“He played the monkey — hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil,” Thompson says. laughing again.
Thompson remembered a painkiller he had received for a toothache and slipped some of the medication from the trainer’s bag. He took what amounted to an overdose, felt no pain and played perhaps the game of his life.
“Coach went to his grave without knowing how I played that night,” he says.
Thompson made 10 of 12 shots from the, leading the Gamecocks from behind in the second half.
A day later, the trainer performed what amounted to out-patient surgery on the infected foot. Three days after that, with a surgical sponge covering the raw area, Thompson played again, and the Gamecocks beat North Carolina.
“I won the (Duke) game,” he says, “and they won the North Carolina game.”
That’s the kind of team they were.
Legacy to cherish. By beating the Tar Heels — in Chapel Hill, on Senior Night, after trailing by 13 points in the second half — the Gamecocks reached a plateau few do. They defeated two of the nation’s most decorated programs, both in the top 10 at the time, on the road within a five-day span.
The North Carolina game might as well be called the Cremins Game. The sophomore scored 23 points, grabbed 15 rebounds and helped the injured Thompson handle the ball against a pressing defense in a 87-86 triumph.
“If he got 15 rebounds, I bet four bounced before he got them,” Gregor says and laughs.
A week later, the teams forged another classic in the ACC tournament
semifinals. The Tar Heels won 82-79 in overtime, and an official’s call still rankles the Gamecocks.
With UNC leading by three in overtime, Gregor scored and drew a foul. But rather than a three-point play opportunity that could have tied the game, the official ruled the foul came before the shot and waved off the basket.
“We should have won some games that we didn’t,” Gregor says with a touch of diplomacy. “We were on probation and couldn’t go anywhere (in the NCAA tournament, which then limited each conference to one representative).
“But we had a great time. That was a great time to be at South Carolina.”
Yes, and never forget them. Carolina teams that followed achieved more, but this gang set the table and demonstrated what could be. Theirs is a legacy to cherish.
http://www.thestate.com/gamecocks/story/263820.html