NOSTALGIA SPIRIT FROM ST. LOUIS

THERE WAS NEVER any serious thought given to changing the SMU fight song from Peruna to The Missouri Waltz,but for three years during the mid-Fifties, it might not have been a bad idea. A band of Missourians from the St. Louis area converged on the Hilltop and focused national attention on what, until then, had been a basketball wasteland.

Before the Missouri influx, the Ponies were patsies-just a breather on the schedule for any team that took the game seriously. But in 1956 and again in 1957, the Mustangs made a hard run at the national championship, racking up a total of 43 regular season wins against only five losses. This was a historic era for SMU. Here was the school that had been having its hands full with Hardin-Simmons and Texas Wesleyan and was now playing elbow-to-elbow with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain.

It wouldn’t have happened if Lide Spragins hadn’t been the dean of women at SMU. Lide’s brother, Henry Spragins, was working for the Cotton Belt Railroad in St. Louis, and because of Lide he took an interest in SMU. Henry Spragins talked Carl Scharffenberger into going to SMU, which was the beginning of an underground railroad from St. Louis to Dallas that was to bring Harold Alcorn, Jim Krebs, Bobby Mills, Don Carter, Rick Herrscher, Herschel O’Kelly, Ellis Min-ton, Jerry Wolff, Wilbur Marsh and Carter Creech. All contributed to the Pony basketball cause, but Krebs, Mills and Herrscher were the picks of the litter, even though Mills was something of a runt.

Krebs wasn’t a runt, but when he enrolled at SMU he wasn’t much of a basketball player, either. At Webster Groves High School outside St. Louis, he had been too busy growing to waste time on coordination; it wasn’t until his senior year that the 6-foot-8-inch, 225-pounder made the high school varsity.

“He was so much bigger than everybody else in high school that he didn’t have to do much more than run up and down the court,” says Rick Herrscher, who still lives in Dallas. “Doc Hayes made him great.”

Elmore Onslow “Doc” Hayes coached at Pilot Point, Texas, in the late Twenties and then moved to Crozier Tech in Dallas. During his tenure at Tech, Hayes won nine city championships; the other five Dallas high school coaches combined won eight. After moving to SMU, Hayes had been only moderately successful, but he could see his fortune beginning to change when he saw Krebs duck as he entered the door of the dressing room. But there was still one problem -Krebs, who came from a well-heeled family in Webster Groves, was about as mean as Sesame Street’s Big Bird.

Hayes’ antidote for Krebs’ timidity was a 6-foot-5-inch scrapper named Tom Miller from Sunset High School. Hayes pitted Krebs and Miller in one-on-one combat and instructed Miller to show no mercy. Miller bumped, knocked, scratched and elbowed Krebs until Big Jim got mad enough to make All-America.

Bobby Mills posed in a crouching position in front of Krebs for the 1955 team picture, but he really didn’t need to. Though barely 6 feet tall, Mills was a superb ballhandler who could thwart the most tenacious full-court press. He also had a deadly jump shot from short range and played defense like a mongoose. His habit of knocking the ball out of an opponent’s hands and driving for a layup made Mills the most despised Mustang. Anybody north of the Red River was suspect, and opposing fans considered these Missourians to be Yankees in the rawest sense.

Rick Herrscher grew up in St. Louis in what he affectionately refers to as a “tough neighborhood.” Herrscher and Mills played on the same team at Cleveland High School, where they won the state championship during Mills’ senior year. Herrscher was the best athlete in the bunch, equally at home playing inside or outside on the basketball court -or for that matter, outside on the baseball diamond.

The supporting cast for the St. Louis contingent included Joel Krog, a master rebounder, and Larry Showalter, a former Dallas high school star who made a gradual but successful transition from inside player in high school to long-range bomber in college. Also on hand was Ronnie Morris, who was something of a basketball dinosaur. While everyone else was taking up the newfangled jump shot, Morris was popping in two-handed set shots that would be worth three points in the NBA nowadays. Ronnie had another shot, tagged by local sportswriters as the “dying swan,” in which he would suspend himself in midair and loft an underhanded granny shot into the basket.

The 1955 team won the conference championship -the first for an SMU basketball team since the Great Depression – but it was a struggle all the way. Krebs and Mills were just sophomores then and Herrscher was still on the freshman team. But by 1956, it was a different story. That was the year Krebs stepped into a 7-foot phone booth and emerged as Son of Doak Walker. The immortal Doaker had been largely responsible for a 30,000-seat expansion at the Cotton Bowl, and Krebs was doing the same thing for basketball. While Jim was swishing hook shots in record numbers at tiny Joe Perkins Gym, carpenters and floor sanders were frantically putting the finishing touches on the magnificent new 8,000-seat Moody Coliseum.

The Mustangs were unstoppable in 1956, rolling over Southwest Conference opponents in a manner never before witnessed. Krebs scored 50 points in a game against Texas to break the Southwest Conference single-game record. The conference schools tried everything -the zone, man-for-man – TCU even tried keep-away. SMU had demolished the Horned Frogs in Dallas 105-64, and when the Mustangs journeyed to Fort Worth for a repeat engagement, they found that TCU coach Buster Brannon had planned a surprise. Brannon had instructed his players to pass at least 25 times, preferably more, before each shot.

At half time, Brannon’s nerve-shattering strategy appeared to be working; TCU led 12-11. The shaken Ponies, 17-2 for the year and eighth in the nation, came out for the second half with a full-court press. With 12 minutes left in the game, the Ponies led 25-20. Then a strange thing happened -the game died. SMU held the ball, and TCU just stood there and watched. Television station KFJZ had made the unfortunate decision to broadcast the local grudge match, and the producer was forced to run up and down the sidelines in search of something to televise. After growing tired of focusing on fans throwing pennies onto the court or on the players gathering up the coins and handing them to the referee, the producer went back to the script and zeroed in on the player who was holding the ball.

“We hadn’t been on TV much, and everybody wanted to hold the ball,” Mills recalls. Mills made the mistake of passing to Showalter, who wouldn’t give the ball back. He stationed himself at midcourt, resting the ball on his stomach with his arms folded around it defiantly, and he stood there for seven minutes. With two minutes to go, each team let loose with a flurry of errant shots, and SMU eked out a 26-22 victory.

The Ponies stormed through the Southwest Conference undefeated, posting a 21-2 record for the season, then breezed through the Regionals to meet the mighty San Francisco Dons as one of the Final Four in the NCAA Tournament. The Dons, led by the great Bill Russell, had won 52 straight games and were considered by many to be the greatest team in college basketball history. But Hayes thought he had spotted a chink in the San Francisco armor. According to his scouting reports, Mike Farmer, the Dons’ big forward, couldn’t hit from outside, so Hayes decided to drop off Farmer and double up on Russell. The strategy had mixed results. Russell was held to a subpar 17 points, but Farmer scored 26 to doom the Ponies 86-68.

It was a bad year to be in the Final Four. “If we had played them 10 times that year, we might have beaten them once,” says Showaiter, “if we caught them on an off night.”

It was generally agreed that 1957 was to be the year. Though Krog and Morris had graduated, the St. Louis Three were back, as was Showalter, the local boy. The Mustangs destroyed McMurry 113-36 in the opener and went on to post a 21-3 record for the season, winding up fourth in the national rankings.

As children, the boys from St. Louis had spent many an hour on schoolyard basketball courts in mythical combat with their mortal enemies: the despicable Kansas Jayhawks from across the border. The only difference was that in those days the boys pretended to represent the beloved Billikens of St. Louis University. Well, there was one other difference -Kansas didn’t have Wilt Chamberlain then.

SMU’s farsighted athletic director, Matty Bell, had arranged for the NCAA Re-gionals to be held at Moody Coliseum, giving SMU the home-court advantage against the Kansas Jayhawks, their first-round opponent. This advantage was, of course, offset by the awesome presence in the Kansas lineup of Wilt the Stilt. Still, SMU had the better team, and if Krebs could break-even with his towering adversary, justice would prevail.

The local fans were ecstatic as SMU held tenaciously to a three-point lead with five minutes to go, but then the unthinkable happened – Krebs fouled out, and SMU lost.

“We were rooked out of it,” says Show-alter, referring to some very questionable fouls called on Krebs during the encounter. Mills agrees, as did the fans, who threw coins, paper and even a few cushions at the court in protest. The editors of the 1957 SMU Rotunda described Chamberlain as “a 7-foot giant who showed little skill in playing basketball.” For the record, however, it should be noted that Chamberlain did manage to haul down 22 rebounds and score 36 points against the Ponies.

Consolation games usually don’t mean much, but this one did. The battle for third place in the Western Regional Playoffs pitted SMU against St. Louis University. St. Louis has always been big on basketball and on the St. Louis Billikens in particular. Krebs, Mills and Herrscher had to prove they hadn’t made a mistake in choosing SMU.

The Billikens were led by Harold Al-corn, who turned out to be a double agent, defecting to SMU and then going back to St. Louis after getting homesick. But Krebs, Mills and Herrscher were not about to be shown up, scoring 62 points between them as the Ponies easily handled the Billikens. Alcorn was also superb, scoring 17 points for St. Louis and contributing several assists. If Alcorn had stayed at SMU and had played on that ’57 team with Krebs, Mills, Herrscher and Showalter….

“We could have gone all the way,” says Herrscher.

Jim Krebs played for six years with the LA Lakers, on the great teams with Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. He then became a loan officer for a Beverly Hills bank. In May 1965, he dropped by a neighbor’s house to bum a ride to work the next morning. The neighbor was cutting down a tree, and Krebs offered to help. The tree fell the wrong way, and Krebs was killed.

Rick Herrscher signed a professional baseball contract with the Milwaukee Braves, spent a couple of years in the minors, then became a “player to be named later” in a deal with the Mets. He played on what may have been the worst baseball team in history: the 1962 Mets, losers of 120 games.

“I had studied premed in college,” he says, “so after the season I decided to take a hard look at the future.” He asked Mets manager Casey Stengel for his advice.

“Herrschner,” said Stengel, who always had trouble with Rick’s name, “go to dental school.” Herrscher is now a Dallas orthodontist.

Bobby Mills is now vice president ofTransport Life Insurance Company inDallas. “The game’s changed,” he says.”Everybody’s bigger and faster now. Idon’t know how we’d do today, but wewouldn’t be embarrassed.”