Jimmy Jones, Steve Jones, Red Robbins, Gerald Govan, Larry Brown and Doug Moe were key players for the New Orleans Buccaneers of the American Basketball Association in the late 1960s. When visiting Dallas to play my beloved Chaparrals, they too often prevailed. They had an advantage in that James Harrison “Babe” McCarthy served as their coach. In the pages of the Morning News or Times-Herald, or when being interviewed by the Chaps’ radio man, Terry Stembridge, he was accorded an unusual degree of respect. And why not, since he was two-time ABA coach of the year (once with the Bucs and once with the Kentucky Colonels)?
There were other reasons for this Baldwyn, Mississippi native to be held in such high regard. He matriculated at Mississippi State but was not a member of the basketball team. I surmise that McCarthy had some kind of assistant role there because he was soon the coach at Baldwyn High School which won the 1948 state championship. He coached in the military, served as a referee for Southeastern Conference games and was hired at his alma mater prior to the 1956 season. McCarthy scored a major coup by convincing Bailey Howell of Middleton, Tennessee to come to MSU and not the University of Kentucky—coached by Adolph Rupp. (UK had at that time won national championships in 1948, 1949 and 1951.) The Baron must have rued letting the 6′7″ Howell get away because he went on to average 27 points and 17 rebounds per game. The Bulldogs beat the Wildcats two of the three times they met during Howell’s years in Starkville, going 17-8 in 1957, 20-5 in 1958 and 24-1 in 1959—a very nice upward progression.
Winners of the 1959 SEC title, they did not participate in the NCAAs due to the mentality of that era in the Deep South. Many, although by no means all, White Mississippians viewed the idea of sharing the court with integrated teams as repulsive, although MSU had done just that in a road game against the University of Denver early in Howell’s sophomore year. It goes without saying that the Bulldogs roster was all White and so it would remain until Larry Fry and Jerry Jenkins joined the program in 1972. McCarthy’s ’59 team might have won the national crown. They had the studly Howell, did they not? It merits pointing out that three of the teams in that year’s Final Four (Louisville, West Virginia and the winner, California) were all White; only Cincinnati had black players.
Although Howell had begun his NBA career—12 seasons, 17,770 points, 9,383 rebounds and 2 rings—McCarthy’s teams kept winning. They were SEC co-champs, with Kentucky, in 1961 and put together another sparkling 24-1 mark in ’62 to win the conference title outright; the final AP poll had the Bulldogs at No. 4. But the same infuriating thing happened; Jim Crow politicians dictated matters, and MSU played in no post-season games. Rupp may have been a notorious racist, but he never shied away from playing integrated teams.
(A momentary diversion, if you do not mind. The 1961 college basketball season was marred by a point-shaving scandal. Some of the players caught, kicked out of school and barred from the NBA were Connie Hawkins of Iowa [later allowed into the league], the aforementioned Doug Moe of North Carolina and Jerry Graves, a two-time all-Southeastern Conference forward at MSU.)
The 1963 Mississippi State team won the Southeastern Conference crown, going 22-5. With the civil rights movement at its peak, every American with his or her eyes open knew that social and political life was changing. McCarthy, MSU president Dean W. Colvard, athletic director Wade Walker and sports information director Bob Hartley decided they would take a stronger stance. The Board of Regents, perhaps aware of the negative repercussions of keeping the SEC champions at home once again, softened a bit. Nevertheless, injunctions were issued to preclude the horror of interracial hoops. Before they could be served, though, the coach, the players, the president, the AD, the SID, the trainer and a few others fled the Magnolia State—to such cities as Birmingham, Memphis and Nashville. They convened in Nashville, chartered a 44-seat plane and flew to East Lansing, Michigan, site of the Mideast Regional. McCarthy’s team received a hero’s welcome there.
The Bulldogs got a first-round bye before meeting Loyola of Chicago on March 15, 1963. It has since come to be called, rather melodramatically, the “game of change.” Coach George Ireland started four black guys (Jerry Harkness, Les “Big Game” Hunter, Ron Miller and Vic Rouse) and one White guy (John Egan), which some people found upsetting. The media gave considerable play to a handshake between Harkness and MSU’s Joe Dan Gold just before tip-off. The Ramblers won easily, 61-51, and there were no problems of any kind as good sportsmanship carried the day. Loyola proceeded to claim the 1963 national championship. Two years later, Mississippi State did what had once seemed unthinkable by enrolling a black student, Richard Holmes.
McCarthy’s final two seasons with the maroon and white were not good, as the team went 9-17 and 10-16. He lost considerable support when news leaked that he had been romancing another man’s wife. Whether he quit to save face or was given a nudge toward the door, his tenure in Starkville was over. But with the ABA starting up, he soon found another job.
I am told by my friend Bo Carter (former assistant SID at Mississippi State and director of media relations in the Southwest Conference and Big 12) that McCarthy did not have a bigoted bone in his body and that he got along with all of his players in college and in the pros, both White and black. They played hard because he was straight-up with them and knew the game. One of the ABA’s most colorful characters, McCarthy motivated them with such phrases as “Boys, you gotta come at ’em like a bitin’ sow,” “My old pappy used to tell me the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s butt every day” and “Why panic at five in the morning when it’s still dark out?”
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