'A MAGICAL PLACE'
Dwight "Bo" Lamar was lighting up the scoreboards for Southwestern Louisiana, the nation's ninth-ranked major college team.
Mike Green of Louisiana Tech was the nation's leading scorer and small college Player of the Year.
Dale Brown was coaching his first season - and earning Coach of the Year accolades - at LSU.
Twenty years ago, Louisiana was a showcase of basketball artistry.
"It was a magical time, and a magical place," said Dale Valdery of the inconspicuous arena where some of the best basketball in Louisiana was being played - Xavier University's "Barn," a ramshackle wooden structure, tucked just off Interstate 10 in the urban spiral of Carrollton Ave., where as many as 1,200 fans could watch one of the finest teams ever assembled in New Orleans.
"It was an incredible team, not only because there was a lot of talent," said Valdery, now the head coach of the Gold Rush and then Xavier's defensive specialist, "but because it was made up of talented individuals with clearly defined roles and the will to play those roles."
That team and that will was fused together by Coach Bob Hopkins, a superior tactician.
"If ever there was a team with what you might call 'charisma,' that team was it," said Dr. Norman C. Francis, president of Xavier. "They had style to match their talent."
And no player had more style than Don "Slick" Watts. Bald because of a childhood accident, he played with eye-catching bands around his head.
But sophomore forward Bruce Seals, a first-team All-American, was the catalyst of the '72-73 team, leading the Gold Rush in scoring (25.6) and rebounding (13.1). Watts, later an All-Pro with the Seattle SuperSonics, averaged 17.4 points and directed the Xavier up-tempo offense.
Xavier was 21-6 that season, losing two of its first three games, then going on a tear that culminated in its 21st victory, against the NAIA's No. 1-ranked team, 28-0 Sam Houston State, in the national tournament at Kansas City. That stunning 67-60 victory had Sports Illustrated calling Xavier 'the NAIA team of the future."
But Maryland-Eastern Shore upset Xavier the next afternoon to eliminate the Gold Rush from the tournament, and despite a wealth of returning players, Xavier wasn't able to get back to the Kansas City tournament until 1982.
Perhaps that's why, despite having had successful seasons since then, Valdery and Francis admit that the special aura surrounding Gold Rush basketball and The Barn has been largely absent.
"Maybe because it was new then," Valdery said. Xavier had been a black athletic power in the 1930s and 1940s, but the school gave up athletics in 1959 and did not revive them until 1968.
So to those Xavier students and fans, basketball was relatively new, and so was all that success. "That, and the fact almost all of us were from New Orleans, so people who followed sports knew us from high school athletics, and the fact that we were playing a lot of natural rivals - Grambling, Southern, Dillard, Tulane, later UNO. That all helped," Valdery said.
Felix "Zoo" James, a highly successful former high school coach and now the athletic director at Xavier, believes the Gold Rush of 20 years ago and some others since are an extension of the Xavier pedigree.
James, who was a freshman at Xavier in 1937 when The Barn was built, said the basketball floor is the same one put in 55 years ago, and the gym is all that remains of an athletic complex (football field, track and gym) known as "Gloryland."
"We were like a black Notre Dame," James said. "We excelled across the board."
Famed Olympian Ralph Metcalf began to coach track and field at Xavier immediately after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and at one time 12 of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference 16 track and field records were held by Xavier.
The basketball team was perennial champions, winning 45 straight at one point in the 1940s. Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, the first black in the NBA, played at Xavier before World War II intervened.
A group of Xavier students, working on their degrees after exhausting their eligibility, formed a team known as the "Ambassadors" and played throughout the region.
One of the school's proudest moments came in 1941 when the Ambassadors played the famed New York Renaissance, billed as the World's Colored Champions. The Rens came barnstorming into New Orleans and into The Barn.
It took a half-court steal and layup in the final seconds for the Rens to beat the Ambassadors.
Francis said he has heard of that game since he was a freshman in 1948. "The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who founded Xavier, always had a saying that if we did something, we should do it well," Francis said. "We certainly did with academics, and I think we did with athletics."
Francis remembered with a smile how the team would often change uniforms at the half because the sisters wanted them to look a little neater than they did in their sweaty jerseys.
There was no catchy name when the gym was constructed in 1937. "It was known as 'Xavier gym,' and we were mighty proud of it," James said.
It was rare for a black school to have its own facility at the time, most playing in high school gyms or auditoriums.
"We were a little special," James said.
The Barn was used for intramurals in the decade that Xavier was without basketball. When the school was considering reviving the sport, and administrators were inspecting the facility, school vice president Anthony Rachal said, "This place looks like a barn."
The name has stuck ever since.
But The Barn has changed. It is now bedecked with a bricked facade.
When Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1987, he visited Xavier and said mass in the Xavier quadrangle, adjacent to The Barn.
It was scheduled for a facelift anyway, James said, but the renovation of The Barn came just in time for the pope's visit.
"We had to spruce it up a little," James said. "The Barn, after all, is Xavier."
The Barn has been renovated in 1987, just in time for the visit by Pope John Paul II.
December 10, 1992
Times-Picayune
MARTY MULE' Staff writer
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Originally Posted by DestinCajun
