College Hoops: Stumbling Upon the 1975-76 Rutgers Final Four Squad

The homework was done. The chores weren’t, but for the teen-aged sports junkie in the pre-cable television era, priorities tended to come in second to the possibility of finding a live sporting event on a slow night. As I began my search for the rare live sporting event, I had no idea I would stumble upon an eventual nationally-ranked, FInal Four College Basketball team I knew nothing about.

Look What I Found!

The details are as fuzzy as the television reception back then, but one night while casually flipping (manually – no remote control) through the UHF channels (14 and up) looking for a signal of any kind that would reach our apartment building in Brooklyn, I struck gold by landing on a station based out of New Jersey. It’s now killing me that I can’t remember the exact channel – though I do remember it starting with 50 – so I’ll just call it Channel 50-something, which is ironic on several fronts.

Perhaps one of my two readers can remember the exact channel.

I believe it was a New Jersey Public Television channel, and as my own conditioning would have it, I became frozen by the sound of a play-by-play announcer,  squeaking sneakers and a roaring crowd. It was basketball – college basketball – but the reception was so bad and the sound so distorted, it took awhile to figure out the participants.

It was like watching a basketball game through a blizzard.

A Classic College Basketball Venue

I do remember seeing the benches of both teams, separated by the scorer’s table. Behind them was just a wall. The crowd on the other three sides of the cozy gym was raucous and totally partisan, and the place was packed. This was a good, old-fashioned college gymnasium. The home team in white was fast –  they’d grab a rebound and all five players would streak down the floor as if running an Olympic sprint. There was no three-point line back then, so they were bent on finishing a fast break with a layup or dunk.

The home team was winning by a comfortable margin; I was captivated by the style of play and (being a teenager) immediately took on a rooting interest. This all took about five minutes.

After watching and listening for several more minutes, it became clear that the home team was the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University, and the announcer referred to the gym as “The Barn”, located in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  It was about midway through the 1975-76 season, the team was still undefeated and was about to beat Bucknell University.

I didn’t know much about Rutgers University. I’d heard of it, knew they had an athletics program and were in the metropolitan area, but not much beyond that.

The Talent

I don’t remember the entire roster, but this Rutgers team got by playing only seven or eight guys, and I remember the main characters. At the time, I had no idea that I was watching several future NBA players. They had a skinny, high-flying freshman center named (Jammin’) James Bailey who would eventually play for the New York Knicks and Seattle Supersonics in the NBA. They had another athletic wing named Hollis Copeland who would also spend some time with the Knicks. They had a cat-quick point guard named Eddie Jordan who would later play for the New Jersey Nets and several other teams before coaching at the professional level and eventually back at his alma mater. Their best player and leading scorer was a no-nonsense cat from Brooklyn named Phil Sellers who later played for the Detroit Pistons. Abdel Anderson was hitting the corner jumpers, Mike Dabney was finishing fast breaks and menacing folks on defense.

The coach was Tom Young who, fashion-wise, was true to his era, sporting the printed shirt and bell-bottomed slacks.

Spreading The Word

I was so excited after watching the game, I called a couple of friends to tell them of my “discovery”. The next game was a few days later, and they both managed to catch a glimpse on their equally reception-challenged black-and-white televisions. They were hooked. Before too long it became difficult for us to have a conversation without discussing Rutgers’ (one of the guys would pronounce it “Ruckers”) next game on television.

The season progressed with Rutgers steamrolling through their schedule and they’d reached their final regular-season game at home against St. Bonaventure. I invited my two buddies to my apartment to watch the game, praying I’d be able to get a decent reception.

Thankfully, there’d be no television blizzard that evening – more like a few flurries –  and we sweated out a surprisingly close game as the Scarlet Knights finished the regular season with a 25-0 record.

The now nationally-ranked 1975-76 Rutgers Men’s Basketball team was no longer a secret.

National Coverage

Next was the NCAA Tournament, which, thankfully, was televised on a local station. The first-round opponent was Princeton, who back in the seventies were every bit the headache to play and coach against as they are now, and I’d managed to catch a couple of their games during the season on that same Channel 50-something. Coached by the legendary Pete Carrill, and led by another Brooklynite, guard Armond Hill (who would eventually play for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and is now an assistant with the Los Angeles Clippers) and a dead-eye shooter named Frank Sowinski, they methodically lulled opposing defenses to sleep with patient ball movement and would backdoor teams with low defensive attention spans into oblivion. And there was no shot clock back then, so they didn’t mind playing games with finals scores in the 40’s and 50’s.

Rutgers escaped with a one-point victory, and after wins over the University of Connecticut and the Virginia Military Academy, the Scarlet Knights had advanced to the Final Four.

The Final Four

The three bandwagon, johnny-come-lately teenagers gathered around the television on that Saturday afternoon to watch the  still undefeated Rutgers squad challenge Michigan on NBC in the opening Final Four contest (UCLA and Indiana were the other participants), which was never really close. Phil Sellers finally struggled to make a shot, Michigan had a future NBA-er named Ricky Green who was every bit as fast as Eddie Jordan, and he gave Rutgers fits as the Wolverines cruised to a 16-point victory.

The room was quiet. It was as if the Knicks had lost a playoff series or the next day was the first day of school. The day was ruined.

But we had already won. We were the first kids on our block to see the 1975-76 Final Four Rutgers Scarlet Knights play on television. I doubt anyone else in the neighborhood cared, but we did.

For at least a couple of months during the winter of 1976, we were Rutgers, too.