College men's basketball: Kentucky reigned in Twin Cities Final Four in 1951

Nearly 70 years later, words are still flying back and forth about the 1951 Final Four.

In the first NCAA basketball title game held in the Twin Cities, Kansas State came into Williams Arena in Minneapolis on March 27, 1951, looking to knock off Kentucky, which had won two of the three previous championships. K-State, though, arrived with leading scorer Ernie Barrett ailing.

The guard injured his left shoulder three days earlier in a win over Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State). Struggling with pain and playing reduced minutes, Barrett made just 2 of 12 field-goal attempts in the title game, and his Wildcats lost 68-58 to Kentucky's Wildcats.

"If I hadn't have gotten hurt, we would have won," Barrett, 89, said from his home in Manhattan, Kan. "That game sticks with me. I think we had the better team."

Basketball Hall of Fame forward Cliff Hagan begs to differ. Hagan, 87, the only living Kentucky player who saw action in that game, was weakened by the flu, but he came off the bench to score 10 points.

"No way, Jose," Hagan said of Barrett's contention. "If you want to dream, that's fine. You can't go back and talk about things."

That rekindled jabbering between the teams. After Kentucky won the title, guard Bobby Watson told reporters that Illinois was better than Kansas State. Kentucky defeated the Illini 76-74 to advance to the championship game.

The tournament MVP in 1951 was 7-foot Kentucky center Bill Spivey, who had 22 points and 21 rebounds in the title game. Nevertheless, K-State center Lew Hitch said after the game that Sherman White of Long Island University was a better big man.

Spivey, who averaged 19.2 points and 17.2 rebounds in 1950-51, and White would go down as being connected in basketball infamy. Both ended up ruled ineligible in college and banned from the NBA for life for being linked to a point-shaving scandal.

The Kentucky program, under legendary coach Adolph Rupp, would end up being shamed because of recruiting violations. The Wildcats were barred from fielding a team in 1952-53, the first "death penalty" ever given to an NCAA school.

In 1951, though, the Wildcats were riding high, adding a championship on top of their titles in 1948 and 1949.

First of four

It was the first of four Final Fours in the Twin Cities. The event was held twice at the Metrodome, with Duke winning both, in 1992 and 2001. And next week a champion will be crowned at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The NCAA didn't start using the term Final Four until 1975. But while the 1951 event is retroactively dubbed a Final Four, that is stretching it a bit.

Yes, there were four teams in the Twin Cities in 1951, but there was just one night of basketball, on Tuesday, March 27. In the third-place game, Illinois defeated Oklahoma A&M 61-46 before top-ranked Kentucky took on No. 4 Kansas State.

Kentucky's semifinal victory over Illinois on March 24 was dubbed the East Region final and played in New York's Madison Square Garden. Kansas State's 68-44 win over Oklahoma A&M that same day was the West Region final and played at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Mo.

The next day, players from those schools flew to the Twin Cities. That format was changed the next year in Seattle, when the semifinals and title game were played at the same site.

"It was kind of an unusual situation because after we lost to Kentucky in a very close, competitive game, we actually got on the same plane with them and flew to Minnesota," said Ted Beach, then an Illinois forward. "But no fights broke out."

For the big night of basketball, ticket prices were $2.40 (face value for non-student tickets for the 2019 championship game range between $210 and $650). Still, the doubleheader did not sell out, with the crowd announced at 15,348 when Williams Arena seated 18,025.

"It was kind of a lukewarm atmosphere," said Kansas State forward Dick Knostman, 87, who scored three points off the bench in the title game. "We were used to raucous crowds, but it was a ways from being a home court for either team."

It didn't help Kansas State that four chartered planes carrying fans couldn't make it to the game because of fog at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Two planes were diverted to Alexandria, Minn., getting there too late for fans to have any chance to make the game. One plane was forced to land in Des Moines, Iowa, and one returned to where it had taken off in Kansas City.

There was no television broadcast, but the game was well covered by 1951 media standards. The Minneapolis Star ran a story with a headline noting that 40 members of the media from outside the Twin Cities had been credentialed. The article listed 16 by name.

Last year, the NCAA issued a record 2,206 credentials for the Final Four, and a similar number is expected for the Twin Cities.

Talented Final Four

In the consolation game, the Illini had no problem dispatching the Cowboys, relegating the team coached by the legendary Hank Iba to fourth place. But Harold Rogers, then a Cowboys guard, still has fond memories of the trip to Minnesota.

"We got to watch the (Minneapolis) Lakers and George Mikan play the Indianapolis Olympians," Rogers said of a March 25 NBA playoff game his team attended. "That was a thrill for us little country boys to see the big pros play."

As it turned out, plenty of players from the 1951 Final Four went on to play in the NBA.

Kentucky's future pros included Hagan, who became a star for the St. Louis Hawks; guard Frank Ramsey, who made the Hall of Fame after being a legendary sixth man for the Boston Celtics; plus forward Lou Tsioropoulos, and guards Watson and Skippy Whitaker.

Moving on to the NBA from Kansas State were Barrett, Knostman and Hitch, who played four years for the Minneapolis Lakers. From Illinois, guard Don Sunderlage and forward Irv Bemoras were eventual pros. And Oklahoma A&M sent center Pete Darcey to the NBA.

Despite their many stars, Kentucky fell behind 19-13 in the first half when Spivey got off to a slow start, being outscored 10-4 by the 6-foot-7 Hitch, who gave up five inches to Kentucky's 7-footer. This was despite Barrett missing all sorts of shots.

"I could barely raise my (non-shooting) arm," Barrett said. "It's hard to shoot one-handed."

With Kentucky needing a spark, Rupp sent in Hagan, who did not start after missing practice the day before because of illness.

"I had the flu and and sat on the bench the first part of the game, and Coach Rupp kept asking Harry Lancaster, our assistant, 'What's his temperature?' " Hagan said. "They finally put me in and we weren't doing too well. I remember we were shooting a free throw and I was in the second position, and I tipped it in, and that gave us a little bit of a spurt."

Hagan, who made 5 of 6 shots in the title game, entering the game took some of the pressure off Spivey and allowed him to get untracked after his early struggles. Kentucky trailed 29-27 at halftime but outscored K-State 41-29 in the second half to finish the season with a 32-2 record.

Spivey missed 13 of his first 17 shots but finished 9-for-29 from the field. He eventually got the better of Hitch, who made 6 of 15 shots and finished with team highs of 13 points and nine rebounds.

"(Spivey) got rolling and he made the difference, and that's why we won the championship," said Hagan, who spends winters in Florida but lives the rest of the year in Lexington, Ky., not far from the University of Kentucky campus. "We had a real nice team. I remember we had a big celebration in Lexington after we got home."

Trouble followed

Being named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player was Spivey's last big hurrah in basketball. On the same day Kentucky won, it was announced that three CCNY players had been arrested in a point-shaving scandal after four from that school and Long Island's White had been arrested the previous month.

The scandal spread to more schools later in the year, with gamblers alleged to have paid players to not necessarily lose games but to control the point spread. That fall, Alex Groza, Ralph Beard and Dale Barnstable, Kentucky stars prior to 1950-51, were arrested. Then Spivey was charged with allegedly accepting $1,000 to shave points in some 1950-51 Kentucky regular-season games. It never has been claimed that any games in the 1951 NCAA tournament were affected.

"I know it was a shock to everybody on the team," Hagan said of the news breaking and Spivey being kicked off the team for 1951-52. "But it can't take away from that 1951 team."

Spivey, who died in 1995 while living in Costa Rica, always proclaimed his innocence. He went on trial in New York in January 1953, and was acquitted after the jury voted 9-3 in his favor. A mistrial was declared, and the charges were dropped.

Still, the NBA banned Spivey for life. He sued the league, and in 1960 accepted a $10,000 settlement because he said he would have been too old to play had the case continued to drag through the courts.

"Bill was King Kong," said Guy Strong, a reserve guard on Kentucky's 1950-51 team who didn't play in the championship game. "Bill was the best big man ever to play at Kentucky. If he had been allowed to play in the NBA, he would have been another Mikan. He never got over the fact that they wouldn't let him play."

After Spivey was declared ineligible, Strong joined him on a barnstorming team that traveled to towns throughout Kentucky for exhibition games that always sold out. Spivey then played 15 more years in minor leagues and for teams that served as foils for the Harlem Globetrotters.

"I think they made me a scapegoat," the New York Times quoted Spivey talking about being kicked out of Kentucky. "They were paying players to go to school there, and they wanted to stop the investigation from going any further."