The loftiest moment came two games earlier, after UD had come from 10 points down late in the game to beat Virginia Tech in overtime of the regional final at Northwestern University’s McGaw Hall.
That victory not only sent the Flyers to the Final Four — though they didn’t call it that back then — but it set in motion a series of events that would forever change the UD basketball program and, in some ways, the university itself.
When the final buzzer sounded, Flyers fans swarmed the court and that’s when Jack Hoeft, the student who wore the costume of UD mascot Freddie the Flyer — he wasn’t called Rudy yet — ended up on the shoulders of the celebrating throng beneath one of the baskets.
“High Flying Hoeft,” Don Donoher recalled with bemusement. “He ended up at the top of the arena.”
Hoeft, according to the newspaper accounts, had grabbed hold of the rim to cut down the net when maintenance workers began raising the goal to prevent such an occurrence. But Hoeft hung on with one hand — he had a knife in the other to snip the nylon — and ended up dangling some 30 feet in the air like “a circus performer.”
People convinced the workers to reverse course and soon Hoeft — after cutting down his souvenir — returned to terra firma.
A few days later, at a campus pep rally before the Flyers headed to Louisville, star guard Bobby Joe Hooper took the stage and announced: “Most of all I’d like to thank Jack for getting the net for us.”
“Jack ended up on the board of trustees at the university,” Donoher said with a grin the other day as he sat in the Sports Room at the back of Hickory Bar-B-Q on Brown Street.
The Hall of Fame coach was recalling his team’s 14-day effort in March of 1967 that electrified the Miami Valley. He and his underdog team made a run through the NCAA Tournament, knocking off No. 6 Western Kentucky, No. 8 Tennessee, Virginia Tech and No. 4 North Carolina before facing unbeaten, No. 1 UCLA and its 7-foot-2 center Lew Alcindor.
As Donoher reminisced, a black briefcase at his side filled with meticulously-kept statistics from 1966-67, hand-written game notes and a couple of NCAA and UD record books, you noticed the framed photo above him that showed him coming off the plane from Louisville on Easter Sunday, a day after he and his team had fallen to the Bruins 79-64 in a game that wasn’t that close.
The old idiom says a picture is worth 1,000 words, but from this image you had no idea of the full embrace taking place.
According to newspaper reports, just beyond the scope of the photo, Dayton mayor Dave Hall — nattily clad in a burgundy sports coat and dark trousers — waited to greet the players, shake hands with Donoher and kiss the coach’s wife, Sonia, on the cheek.
Donoher then got into an open convertible and, like his players, was driven in a caravan through Dayton to campus. People stood in their yards and waved. Cars pulled over and drivers honked horns. As the spectacle passed Miami Valley Hospital, patients crowded up to the windows to watch.
Although the students were gone for Easter break, 2,000 people awaited in the Fieldhouse for the team’s red carpet entrance.
Donoher, though, was a reluctant celebrant. “I was embarrassed by our performance in the final,” he said now, his voice lowering. “We laid an egg.”
Few others were so critical then … and especially now.
Donoher, still trim and sharp at 84, is the most revered basketball figure in this city.
Current UD coach Archie Miller gets much praise — and rightly so — but consider what Donoher did. In his first three years as the Flyers coach, his teams went 70-19 and made three NCAA Tournaments, twice getting to the Sweet 16 and the other time to the title game. Each year they were beaten by the No, 1 team in the nation.
The year after the storied run to the title game, the Flyers won the still-prestigious NIT and the next two years after that they were back in the NCAA Tournament.
And, mind you, Donoher started out making $200 a week or $9,600 for the year.
Contrast that to Ohio State’s Thad Matta, who was paid $5.8 million last year or the 24 coaches in this year’s NCAA Tournament who, USA TODAY reported, make over $2 million a year.
Yet, few of them and their teams will make any bigger impact than the 1967 Flyers. Many of the players became legends in this area and their accomplishments didn’t just pad a record book, they helped build UD Arena, which opened two years later.
“The whole significance of that year came after we beat Virginia Tech in the regional,” Donoher said. “There was one heck of a party afterward and Tom Frericks (athletics director) went around the room and in so many words said, ‘Tonight, we just built an arena!’
“From the day he took over, he had a vision. He knew we had to get into a bigger place.”
With the new arena came larger crowds, more revenue, and big-name opponents. The arena also became a regular home of the NCAA Tournament — it has hosted more postseason games than any place in the nation — and in the process brought recognition to the whole region.
Hooper wants the ball
The historic 1966-67 season, though, began with boos.
“We opened with (Division III) Baldwin-Wallace and at halftime we were tied,” Donoher remembered. “When we were going to the locker room, the people in the east end bleachers were booing us.”
The Flyers had had 7-foot senior center Henry Finkel in the fold the year prior, and by most accounts were a better team. And those concerns suddenly seemed more acute at halftime of the opener.
Donoher got his team to regroup, it won by 14 and seldom faltered after that. It finished the regular season 21-4, only losing twice to No. 2 Louisville, being upset at Niagara, and then falling in the regular-season finale at DePaul.
Throughout the season almost everyone had a moment of note. All-American forward Donnie May, who averaged 22.2 points and 16.7 rebounds, had many and even the last player on the roster, John Rohm, had one that Donoher recalled with a chuckle:
“He was 6-6 and strong. We were playing Eastern Kentucky and they had a cheap shot artist who undercut people. I warned the team that guy was a bad actor, and then I told John: ‘I want you to police that SOB all night.’
“And during warm-ups, lo and behold, John goes over and confronts the guy and says, ‘Buddy, you better watch your (butt)!’ The guy’s like, ‘What? I just got off the bus.’ ”
It was more of the same in the tournament. Opponents didn’t know what hit them.
The Flyers, who had entered the 23-team tournament unranked, drew Western Kentucky in the NCAA opener in Lexington. Although the Hilltoppers’ star, Clem Haskins, was still recovering from a broken wrist and had trouble shooting, UD still trailed by 10 at the half.
That’s when Donoher challenged his team to step up.
Guard Rudy Waterman answered the call and scored nine straight points to get the Flyers back into the game. In overtime, the score was knotted when UD called time out with 13 seconds left.
“In the huddle, Hooper said, ‘Give me the ball,’ ” Donoher remembered.
The Flyers did and the 6-foot guard hit a 25-foot jump shot with four seconds left for the win.
Prayers are answered
When the team returned to campus, 1,000 cheering students were waiting at the Fieldhouse. The excitement was beginning to grow and next up was No. 8 Tennessee, which played a stifling 1-3-1 zone defense.
UD’s backcourt — Hooper and senior captain Gene Klaus — shot over it. The pair went a combined 11 for 14 from outside, UD built an 11-point lead at halftime and hung on for a 53-52 victory.
The next night, after the rousing comeback and overtime win against Virginia Tech, the celebrating UD players threw Donoher in the showers.
That set up the semifinal with Dean Smith’s fourth-ranked North Carolina team, and though the Tar Heels were heavily favored, the Flyers were undaunted.
At the campus pep rally before the team’s flight to Louisville, Waterman told the assembled masses: “We’re going down to Louisville with the purpose of winning two ballgames, but if you got a bad heart don’t come down.”
He was referring to the three close games the Flyers had just won.
Since they were playing North Carolina on Good Friday, the Flyers’ 10 Catholic players — and the four supportive non-Catholics, as well — didn’t eat meat at breakfast. Over the lunch hour, school president Rev. Raymond Roesch led them to the nearby Assumption Cathedral for a rosary service.
And once the game started, the vaunted North Carolina team didn’t seem to have a prayer.
Although the Tar Heels jumped to a 9-2 lead, May — who played with a religious medal tucked in the waistband of his trunks — then hit 13 shots in a row to push UD out in front 40-31 early in the second half.
Along with that, Flyers forward Dan Sadlier, the team’s defensive stopper, bottled up North Carolina All-American Larry Miller. UD shot 61.5 percent in the second half, May finished with 34 points and 15 rebounds and the Flyers won, 72-62.
Afterward, Dean Smith said May — who would end up playing 208 of the 210 minutes the Flyers played in five tournament games, two with overtimes — was the “best player I’ve seen all season.”
As the Flyers left the court, UD fans chanted “We’re No 1 … We’re No. 1.”
And then unbeaten UCLA came out for the second game, dismantled Houston … and the cheers stopped.
One shining moment
The front page headline in the Dayton Daily News the next morning read: “Nice Going Cinderella.”
Playing the unbeaten Bruins less than 24 hours after facing North Carolina was a challenge, and the ever self-critical Donoher thought he and his coaches didn’t come up with a good game plan.
In hindsight he thinks they should have played May at the high post and center Dan Obrovac underneath.
The team prepped for Alcindor using brooms and tennis rackets to simulate his reach. As usual the 6-foot-10 Obrovac would jump center, then give way to Glinder Torain, a greater offensive threat.
Before he died of cancer a few years ago, Obrovac told me how he’d had a poster of Alcindor on the wall of his bedroom back in Canton. He said during warm-ups before the final he’d been mesmerized by the Bruins big man:
“I thought, ‘Holy crap! My (rear end) is grass!’ ”
Even so, he managed to out-jump Alcindor on the opening tip, the only time that ever happened in the UCLA star’s career.
As it so happened, Tom Rafferty, a Dayton kid with a penchant for photography, had snuck down to courtside and managed to snap the shot of Obrovac’s feat. The picture ended up in Sports Illustrated and has become the most iconic photo in UD basketball history.
“I milked my 15 minutes of fame for a lifetime,” Obrovac joked. “For years after that I never had to buy a beer in this town.”
Alcindor, then known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, bumped into Obrovac a few years later at O’Hare Airport in Chicago and teased that he’d been looking at someone in the crowd when the ref tossed up the ball.
Later, when Jabbar found out Obrovac was fighting for his life, he sent a pair of notes that buoyed his Dayton counterpart.
That was one of the few good things to come out of a game that quickly had become a rout.
The Flyers were psyched out by Alcindor’s imposing reach, missed 16 of their first 18 shots and were down by 29 points with four minutes to go.
By then, UCLA coach John Wooden already had begun pulling his starters and that enabled Dayton to close the gap and save some face.
“Talk about calling off the dogs, he could have beaten us by 50,” Donoher said.
Although the Flyers held Wooden in high esteem after that, Donoher took the loss hard and brooded over a missed opportunity.
Seven years later, though, he and his UD team got vindication when they took UCLA to three overtimes before falling 111-100 in an NCAA Tournament game in Tucson.
‘Kids are like family’
Although much of the 1967 run to the title game was glorious, there was some troubling fall-out the season after.
Torain and Waterman, the team’s two black players, said they felt racially ostracized by the team. The issue became an Associated Press national story when Waterman spoke out at a campus function saying the discrimination he felt caused him to no longer give maximum effort on the court.
After that, Donoher almost never played Waterman and Torain — they often sat separate on the bench — even as the Flyers went on to beat Kansas and win the NIT at Madison Square Garden.
After that, Torain left school, went to Europe to play and, Donoher said, has never been back in contact with him or the school.
Donoher said he and Waterman later reconciled:
“Rudy was a sweet kid and years later he showed up at a game at DePaul. He was in the locker room afterward and it was great. Subsequent to that, he came to town and we talked about old times.”
But he said Waterman’s marriage broke up and he returned home to New York and “got into drugs big time.”
In 1981 Waterman shot himself in an attempted suicide.
“I visited him in the hospital in upper Manhattan,” Donoher said. “There was no one there. His head was all bandaged up and he was in a coma.”
Soon after that, Waterman died and Donoher returned for the funeral. In years since Donoher has gone to visit his grave in New Jersey.
Along with Waterman and Obrovac, the 1966-67 team has lost Jim Wannemacher, the backup forward from Ottoville High School, who died last April.
“God almighty what a sweet guy,” Donoher said. “He was the epitome of a team man. He was hurt a lot, but he had great heart and gave us everything he had.”
Donoher quieted, then added softly: “It’s tough. These kids are like family.”
The players feel the same about Donoher and when he was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame last November, two of the ‘66-67 starters, Sadlier and Klaus, along with former Flyer Jim Paxson Jr. — were there.
As Donoher reflected the other day, a few diners — all too young to remember the jubilant 1966-67 team — came over to say hello to him.
People respect him for what he did and the blueprint he set that Flyers teams today still try to follow.
And that brings us back to the team’s welcome-home gathering at the Fieldhouse the day after the final in 1967.
It was Waterman who stepped to the microphone and told the crowd that Alcindor — impressed by the Dayton team and its fans — had asked him to pass on an invitation to come to Los Angeles for the following year’s finals and once again meet with his California team.
He had told Waterman that UD belonged in the finals.
And ever since, UD has been trying to make good on that long-ago invitation.
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