“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.
CSU went 30-0 and won the NAIA championship.
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.”
Turbulent times
Growing up on Xenia’s East End, Ted Day was a sports star first at all-black East High and then, following integration, at Xenia High School, where he scored 1,267 points and twice won All-Ohio honors.
Although recruited by several schools around the country, he said his high school coach suggested “with the way things are around the country, a place like Tennessee State would be good for you.”
The coach was referring to civil rights confrontations across the nation and he thought Day would be in good hands with legendary Tennessee State coach John McLendon, the three-time NAIA coach of the Year.
Day signed with Tennessee State, but before he got on campus McLendon left to coach in the pros.
“With the new coach, I ended up being redshirted,” he said. “I was just going to class while the rest of the team was tearing it up every night on the court.”
Disheartened, he decided to come back home and that’s when Lucas found a scholarship for him.
Other players came from other schools. Darius “Pete” Cunningham left Illinois and Anderson shelved his plans with Wisconsin and came to CSU.
In the meantime Lucas, who lived part time in Michigan, began to mine that area and signed prep stars like Ken Wilburn, who would end up the MVP of the NAIA tournament and a fourth-round draft pick of the Philadelphia 76ers, and the late Jerome Tillman, whose son, also Jerome, starred at Beavercreek High and Ohio University and has been playing professionally overseas for years.
Lucas also got some exceptional in-state talent like Ed “Bee” Bryant from Sandusky, Avery Godfrey and Ed Waller from Columbus and Tim Avery from Cleveland, and a powerhouse team began to take shape.
Although they were ensconced in rural Greene County and immersed in basketball, that didn’t mean the players weren’t tuned in to what was happening in the nation, said Anderson, who, like Cunningham, had prepped at Carver High in Chicago.
“There were a lot of protests in Yellow Springs back them and a lot of us attended,” he said. “We were very aware. Our team traveled mostly by bus and we went through some towns in West Virginia and Kentucky that were kind of frightening.
“At a couple of places I know our coach had to go to the back door of restaurants to get sandwiches for us. We saw it all.”
While they may have been treated as second-class citizens at some stops on the way to games, the Marauders showed they were true roundball royalty once they took the court.
The guiding force, of course, was Lucas, who Anderson said “wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type, but we all respected him. And as years go by, you realize what a great, great coach he was to be able to blend all of us into a team.”
A team that was in top shape, said the players.
“He wanted us all running cross country,” Day said. “At first he wanted eight-minute miles. Then Wilburn got here and ran a six-minute mile so we all had to run six-minute miles before we could touch a ball.”
But once on the court, the Marauders were almost untouchable. The one exception was Lincoln University.
“They had a team that was equally talented and they had one guy, Arvestra Kelly, who could put 50 on you,” Day said. “We played against Walt Frazier and he had nothing on Kelly.”
In the teams’ first meeting at Wilberforce, the Jefferson, Missouri school had the Marauders down by five with just over two minutes left, But thanks to a three-point play by Tillman in the final seconds, CSU managed to squeak by for a one-point victory.
Later in the season at Lincoln, Day — who finished with 21 points — scored the basket that sent the game to overtime and enabled CSU to grab another one-point win.
Coming into the 32-team national tournament, CSU was the No. 1 seed, and when Lincoln was beaten in the opening round, Day said he and his teammates felt invincible.
Playing five nights in a row, the Marauders routed Jacksonville and then Midwestern University — Wilburn had 37 points and 24 rebounds that game — before coming from behind in the second half to topple Augsburg by nine and finally thump Fairmont State.
That put CSU in the final against Oklahoma Baptist, which was led by the talented Tucker brothers who had starred at Jefferson High. Al then had gone to Knoxville College and Gerald spent a season at Central State before they both transferred to OBU.
Al, who had averaged 27.5 points over his first four games, was one of the tournament’s real stars, as were guys like Winston Salem State’s Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Southern’s Bob “Butterbean” Love. All three would go on to stardom in the pros.
But in the title game Oklahoma Baptist never had a chance. It trailed 41-24 at the break and the margin doubled in the second half.
Although Tucker would finish as the tournament’s high scorer, Wilburn would be the top rebounder (he averaged 18 a game), win the Chuck Taylor MVP award and share all-tournament first-team honors with the high-scoring Day.
The following year OBU would win the crown and Al Tucker would be the MVP, but in March 1965 the NAIA basketball world belonged to Central State.
“Coach Lucas wanted to make a statement out there,” Day said. “He wanted no doubt that we were the best in the country.”
’Refused to lose’
Six days after returning from Kansas City, Day married his CSU sweetheart, Carolyn “Bunny” Fairfax.
Next month they will celebrate their Golden Anniversary and Ted’s old teammate and pal, Bee Bryant, is coming in from Denver to serve as his best man at the ceremony at St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church.
Asked the secret to a 50-year marriage, Ted — glancing up from his easy chair and seeing his wife was still back in another part of the house — grinned: “It’s being able to take salt with the grain.”
Kidding aside, he admitted: “I loved that woman and I still do. I gotta say we were just meant for each other.”
The same could be said of those Marauder teammates from 50 years ago. They came from all across the Midwest mostly. All were black, except for Bob Hunt, who was white, and each of them, Anderson said, had one thing in common:
“We just loved playing basketball … and we loved each other. And because of it we just refused to lose.”
CSU athletics director Jahan Culbreath said the ‘65 team gave a valuable gift to the school and its athletic programs:
“They helped set the tone for Central State athletics. They set a true standard of excellence for us and brought a lot of pride to the school.”
Three years later, the 1967-68 Marauders again won the NAIA title, this time with a 29-4 record.
Plaques of those two title teams are mounted on the lobby wall at Beacom-Lewis Gym. The championship trophies each team won are in the nearby Hall of Fame Room and a banner commemorating the ‘65 team hangs from the rafters above the basketball court.
On Oct. 9, at the football homecoming game that is the centerpiece of the school’s Hall of Fame weekend, the 1965 team will be honored as will the 1990 football team that won the NAIA title.
When the ‘65 team was enshrined in the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008, Anderson said several of the old teammates reconnected for the first time in years:
“We promised each other then we’d get together each year at Homecoming and we’ve tried to do that since. Each year I try to get sweatshirts made up for the guys that tell what we did.”
The group often congregates at Ted and Bunny’s place.
“I’ll cook for ‘em — ribs, chicken, greens, macaroni and cheese, whatever, and we’ll tell stories,” he said with a growing grin. “I usually try to turn on the tape recorder, so I can catch ‘em in lies and stuff.”
Yet, regardless how the stories grow and twist with time, one thing remains unchangingly true:
The 1964-65 Central State Marauders remain one of the greatest college basketball teams Ohio has ever known.
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