By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald Reporter
BECKLEY —
On a teeth-rattling night in mid-March, half a century ago, two high school basketball teams with unblemished marks tipped off in arguably the most memorable championship tilt in West Virginia history.
Outside the old Mountaineer Field House in Morgantown, winds howled with a vengeance. Inside, the arena was fairly hopping with 6,500 rabid, warm-blooded fans, raising the rafters as top-ranked Woodrow Wilson High clashed with No. 2 Weirton.
For most of the battle, Weirton clearly was in control in the finale of that 1962 championship game.
As the final, eight-minute quarter began, the Red Riders popped in another quick goal, giving them what seemed to be an insurmountable, 15-point lead, and it appeared the Flying Eagles would be once again relegated to the same role of the previous campaign, state runners-up.
Except for one of those intangibles that never appear in the record books.
A year earlier, Beckley had succumbed 83-80 to Huntington East in the finals behind the hot hand of Ricky Ray, prompting a resolve the Eagle squad devoutly kept, “never again.”
“We did say, ‘We’re not going to be sitting in this losing locker room next year,” recalled backup guard Pat Fragile.
Methodically, the Eagles cut the deficit, and then, right when one of those fantastic comebacks was about to appear like the rabbit out of the magician’s top hat, reality set in. But only for a moment.
At the far end of the court, Beckley fans sat glumly with the score knotted at 69, less than a minute left, and the seemingly invincible Ron “Fritz” Williams moved the ball downcourt for the inevitable last shot before the clock withered.
Magic touch?
And then, the wheels came off for the Red Riders.
Eighteen years later, sportscaster Al Michaels would deliver his memorable line at the 1980 Olympics, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes.”
One was about to unfold for Beckley.
Uncharacteristically, Williams dribbled the ball off his foot, the carom taking it off the hardwood court, and on the sideline. In the packed Beckley stands, the emotional pendulum instantly swung from despair to jubilation.
“Weirton had the ball, and a player kicked the ball out of bounds — directly at me,” recalled Beckley cheerleader Joan Mills.
“I picked it up, blessed it, and gave it to the official. We scored, the buzzer sounded, and then chaos. In the aftermath of a come-from-behind victory, our players and fans went wild, storming the floor.”
Flying Eagle players sliced the nets for souvenirs.
Among the Beckley faithful, the universal thought was to simply feed the ball to center Bane Sarrett for one of his patented jumpers and that would do it. After all, he had anchored the team to perfection in this historic campaign. At a regional game, he had ripped the nets for a torrid 43 points against East Bank, a tooth-and-nail battle that ended with an 81-80 triumph.
Even his teammates were on the identical page. Just give it to the Big Man and let him do his thing, as he had done on so many a winter night.
Near disaster
In one frightful moment, one that continues to haunt starting guard Dave Barksdale to this day, Beckley’s last-second heroics were nearly dashed.
Weirton laid back in a zone defense, while Barksdale tossed the in-bounds pass to his fellow guard, Billy Karbonit, who promptly returned the favor after driving past halfcourt.
“I was a little bit of a hotdog, I guess,” Barksdale said. “I never did anything but lead the team in assists. Never scored much.”
So, as the clock inched its way to the zero mark, Barksdale stood there, the ball on his hip, looking for a way to get it into Sarrett.
“I just stood there, like I knew what I was doing, looking all around there,” he remembers.
“About the time it got down to 20 seconds, I thought, ‘Barksdale, you better do something with the ball, get it into Bane, let him win the game,’ but they were playing a zone. So I looked at Bane. He had people around him. I said, ‘Shoot, I can’t do anything with it.’ I threw it back to Billy.”
Had he let it fly a split second sooner, likely the ball would have been intercepted by a Weirton defender.
“That kid from Weirton shot through the gap,” he said. “And if I had thrown it then, as fast as Billy was, he still couldn’t have caught that kid before he laid it in and won the game, and we would have lost it. I still think that ball was out of my hands.”
Barksdale managed his grip, nearly dropping it, and believes to this day the ball was momentarily out of his hands, in mid-air, just hanging for what seemed an eternity in reflection, until he fed it to Karbonit at just the right moment.
Like a hungry panther moving in for the kill, Karbonit wheeled his way past the Weirton zone, cruised to the board and dropped in the Layup of the Century. Game over. Beckley wins 71-69. A lasting memory for a generation on the cusp of the civil rights turmoil and the angst of Vietnam, a carefree time, perhaps the last one the country will ever witness, somewhere between “American Graffiti” and “Happy Days.”
Putting the ball — indeed, the trophy, the season itself — in Sarrett’s hands was Plan A, Karbonit recalled.
“We were looking for an opening to get it to him,” he said. “It just didn’t work out. I’m looking at the clock and Barksdale almost dropped the ball.”
Sarrett was surrounded by an octopus of taller, long-armed Red Riders, and the clock was rapidly running out of ticks.
“I looked at the clock and said, ‘Shoot, he’s not going to get open. I’ve got to do something,’” Karbonit said.
“I just started down the lane. There was nobody in front of me to the basket. I said, ‘Shoot, fire, this is going to be easy.’”
And it was.
In that brief moment, Karbonit felt a kinship with the Old Testament prophet Moses.
“I just started down the lane,” he said. “It almost parted like the Red Sea.”
Almost unnoticed in the raucous cheering, even among the Beckley crowd, was one last, desperate gasp by Weirton to pull it off. A Red Rider grabbed the inbounds pass with Karbonit in hot pursuit, reached midcourt and let fly a long heave back in the days before Roger Staubach made “Hail Mary” an everyday term in pro football. The shot fell harmlessly, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Of all the memories of the season and, in particular, the epic title game, the one that comes more often to Barksdale’s mind is his near-gaffe.
“I still wake up thinking of how close I came to being the biggest goat in Woodrow history,” Barksdale said, laughing.
In a jocular mood, Barksdale surmised he might never have been hired as WWHS’ head coach if he had blown the big game. As it turned out, he led the Flying Eagles to five state titles before taking on his current task, assistant coach at Mountain State University.
At the moment Karbonit penetrated the Red Rider zone, Fragile had one thought: Please don’t let the glass explode.
“If you ever get to see it (on tape), look how he put it up,” Fragile said. “He hit it with a lot of speed and a lot of force.”
‘Keep sawin’ wood’
Against all odds, and Weirton threatening to turn the championship game into an embarrassing rout, coach Lawrence “Preach” Wiseman never panicked.
“A lot of coaches would have started saying, ‘You damn guys are blowing the whole season,’” Fragile recalled.
“And he never did any of that. He kept it positive. We weren’t going to change anything. We were pressing. We were running. Doing what we did.”
Wiseman had a simple philosophy which he defined in an even simpler statement: “Keep sawin’ wood.”
Put simply, it meant to stick to the game plan, keep pressing, keep after the enemy, dance the same way you did all season to reach the big ball.
Even with about four minutes left, Beckley was staring at a 14-point deficit, one that began to telescope into an eventual tie — a tribute to the team’s grit and well-honed skills when all the marbles were in the ring for the taking. And from that point on, the Eagles began to whittle the wood down until the dramatic moment at the end.
“It was typical Beckley — wiping out a big deficit,” recalled Dan Hose, former sports editor for United Press International in West Virginia, who covered the game for The Charleston Daily Mail.
“It was a great game, regardless, but to make it to the state championship and both teams were undefeated. The old Mountaineer Field House was rocking.”
Five decades later, Hose reeled off the names of all five Beckley starters without missing a beat. The lineup was one he couldn’t forget. Not from that outing.
Wiseman’s three-word advice obviously had made the rounds.
In a tournament he covered for UPI one year, the wire service’s regional executive in the state, Bill Barrett, handed him an envelope with instructions to deliver it to Wiseman. All it said was, well, you guessed it.
“Beckley had great teams through the years, and won all those championships, but they really didn’t have the Jerry Wests, the Hot Rod Hundleys or Rod Thorns. They had winners with guys like Hindsley, Karbonit, Barksdale and Cimala. Not very big. But they always had that coaching with Van Meter and Wiseman, and Barksdale later. Beckley didn’t have the real superstars. It was the team concept that carried them through the years.”
Perhaps, Fragile suggested, the game wouldn’t have been as close, nor the thriller the night before, when the Flying Eagles outlasted another feathered outfit, the Black Eagles of South Charleston, had it not been for a pre-tournament injury Sarrett sustained.
Unknown to nearly all beyond the close-knit team, Sarrett had hurt his ankle heading into the tournament.
“He was hampered,” Fragile said. “Personally, I think that’s why in the last game we struggled. We didn’t have a 100 percent Bane either night. He didn’t have great ankles, anyway.”
An oiled machine
That this team did what none other did before or since — win all games — can be partly explained by the fact that most of the players were together from the seventh grade forward, starting out in the old Beckley Junior High School.
That means the Class AAA finale climaxed a six-year run together, giving them time to learn one another’s moves, their inclinations in a game situation, and know just where each teammate would be at any given moment. A well-oiled machine that always clicked on all cylinders.
Doubtless, this was an advantage.
In fact, Fragile and some eventual Flying Eagle teammates — Barksdale, Sarrett, Ronald Cimala, David Huffman and Roger Burns — were the first and only seventh-grade team to ever win the eighth-grade tournament, so named since many elementary schools in that era included the eighth grade.
Two years later, the lads captured the ninth-grade tournament, going unbeaten in the process.
On three occasions in the championship season, the Eagles faced opponents back-to-back on Friday and Saturday nights. There is one other milestone the only perfect team in history notched — it was the first one to beat the alumni, 96-95, with the graduates boasting such stalwarts as Jitterbug Gilbert, Sam Cohn and Buddy Bailes.
“That win to us was big,” Fragile recalled.
For Williams, the misstep in the last minute certainly didn’t hamper his career either as a collegiate player or a professional.
In the mid-1960s, as one of the initial blacks to suit up for West Virginia University, the 6-foot-3 guard set the stage for a career in the NBA. In the 1968 draft, he was chosen ninth by the San Francisco Warriors and played eight seasons for them, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Once his career ended, Williams accepted a number of basketball coaching jobs, including stints as an assistant at the University of California and Iona College. Seven years ago, he died after suffering a heart attack.
One last honor
On the day after the game, the Beckley team and fans completed another hours-long journey in an era devoid of Interstates to find a newspaper headline in the old combined Post-Herald and Raleigh Register, proclaiming, “Whatta Comeback! Whatta Team.”
At the armory, inaugurated by the Beckley team only weeks earlier, a massive celebration was planned.
“It was total gridlock,” Mills recalled. “Seems like everyone in Beckley was trying to get to the armory. We listened on the radio, which was covering the event.”
Gene Morehouse, a popular sports announcer who handled play-by-play for the Flying Eagles, and who would die eight years later in the Marshall University airplane disaster, called for the cheerleaders to appear.
Unfortunately, Mills and her fellow cheerleaders — Susan File, Martha Phipps, Lana Houchins, Sally Sotak and Vicki Wender — were two miles away, and traffic was at a standstill.
Come Jan. 28, WWHS is handing the 1962 edition of its cagers one final honor — induction into the Hall of Fame.
“We want to put the whole ’62 team in,” says athletic director Eric Dillon. “It’s the only undefeated team we have in school history. And this will be the 50th anniversary. We don’t have any other members going in. It will be a great game and attendance.”
For the record, Wiseman’s team had 13 members — and managers Mike Minter and Charles “Skip” Garten.
The other senior on the squad was Robert Earl Wood, his dedication underscored by the fact he had to thumb rides in from Whitesville but never missed a practice.
Besides Karbonit, the other juniors were Jerry Gallaher and Mike Jackson. Rudy Coleman and Buddy Gravely were sophomores.
A sign that blossomed decades ago hailed Beckley as “The City of Champions,” and with good reason.
Bearing the name of the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson was the first public high school to open its doors in Beckley, back in 1917. Over the years, the Flying Eagles became the class of high school basketball, notching a record 16 state titles, finishing second in eight playoffs, appearing in a record 12 straight tournaments and winning 65 sectional titles.
“All glory is fleeting,” actor George C. Scott observed in the final minute of the film “Patton.”
And so it is.
Fragile put this in perspective as he mused about the short-lived fame that comes with winning a title as a high schooler.
“Winning a state championship in high school is as good a goal for high school as you can have,” he reflected.
“But if that’s your goal in life, then you haven’t accomplished much. I think all these guys, pretty much all of them, went on to reasonable success, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think athletics should teach us some lessons you don’t learn in the classroom. And I think they do.”
— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com
