Ted Day 2

Fifty years ago, Central State basketball was king

Posted: 5:48 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015

By Tom Archdeacon - columnist Dayton Daily News

WILBERFORCE —

Folks in Xenia realized it long before the rest of the nation:

They had greatness three miles away.

“Tennessee State (then known as Tennessee A&I) used to beat us every year,” said William “Cody” Anderson, a former Central State guard who now hosts a weekly radio show and runs a marketing business in Philadelphia. “They were known for their warm-up lines and the way they dunked. Then we started to dominate them and everybody got caught up in it.

“When we were gonna be on the court, they closed Xenia down. Everybody wanted to come out for the game. Every player but maybe one could dunk and people wanted to see it. Everybody wanted to see the show.”

And what a show it was exactly 50 years ago in Wilberforce.

The 1964-65 Central State Marauders remain one of the greatest college basketball teams Ohio has known.

A season prior, Xavier added the Marauders to its schedule as a fill-in game and then got knocked off, 76-69. While the Musketeers couldn’t handle CSU that year, they did go on to beat Dayton twice, Louisville, Marquette, Tennessee, Saint Joseph’s, Miami, Tulsa and Detroit twice.

That next year Xavier — and a lot of other teams — wanted nothing to do with the Marauders. And no wonder. Only a handful of opponents got within 10 points of them and no one could beat them.

In the 78 years the NAIA tournament has been played, CSU remains one of two teams to win the national crown with a perfect record. In the history of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament, seven teams have finished the season unbeaten, Indiana the last in 1976.

To claim that 1965 title, the Marauders had to win five games in five days at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City.

Flying back into Cox Municipal Airport in Dayton a day after that, the team was met by over 1,000 well-wishers that included the Xenia mayor and the CSU band. According to newspaper accounts, a caravan of 500 cars escorted the team back to campus.

By then everyone knew of the greatness.

The Marauders’ 85-51 victory over Oklahoma Baptist — a team led by Daytonians “Airplane” Al Tucker and his brother, Gerald — remains the largest margin of victory in the history of the NAIA title game.

“Our toughest games back then were in practice, the first five against the second five,” said Anderson, who was an integral part of previous years but graduated two months before the end of the championship season. “We never faced any competition stronger than we did in practice, so come game time we were never intimidated.”

And it wasn’t just fans who were enamored of the Marauders.

UCLA coach John Wooden, a former NAIA standard bearer himself, is often credited with originating the 1-3-1 zone offense, but he came to watch the version of it that CSU coach William Lucas had perfected.

Ohio State coach Fred Taylor was another admirer of the Marauders.

“He said he just wished he had our SECOND team,” said Ted Day, one of the star guards from ’65 who now lives in Jefferson Township with Bunny, his wife of 50 years.

Besides Taylor, another fellow from Columbus embraced the national champion Marauders.

Ohio governor James A. Rhodes showed up at the team’s victory convocation at Beacom Gym and, caught up in the moment, told the crowd and the newspaper reporters who recorded his exaltations:

“This is one of the proudest moments in the history of Ohio.”