ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 27, 1996 TAG: 9603270031
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Jack Bogaczyk
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK
It's that time of the year in the Southeastern Conference. From Knoxville to Tuscaloosa to Starkville, you know they must be talking spring football.
Well, hold on to your official Bear Bryant houndstooth hat. Maybe not. Known for years as a league where the best ball is the one that bounces funny, the SEC has become a basketball league, and one with gender equity at that.
The SEC was 2-4 in bowl games after the 1995 football season, and in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, Nebraska left Florida as crunched as what's in the bottom of the bag. Basketball, however, has become the SEC's significant other. The league has two teams in each of this weekend's Final Fours.
At the Meadowlands and the Charlotte Coliseum, the hoops worlds could see SEC national championship games. For years, SEC basketball tradition was one word - Kentucky. Then, the women started playing for NCAA titles in 1982, and Tennessee coaxed the rest of the SEC - the best women's basketball league, exclamation point - to greater heights.
There's a notion the SEC, with the Wildcats and Mississippi State in the men's Final Four, has come to this hoops renaissance only recently, with six teams in the past four Final Fours, and seven schools in the past six Sweet 16s. Not so.
The SEC started to evolve into a legitimate hoops league not long after John Wooden started winning titles at UCLA, in the mid-60s. Until then, the joke was that except at Kentucky, basketball was something for SEC schools to do between football and spring football.
Then came the change. It wasn't about coaching or facilities. It was societal.
It was black and white.
Thirty years ago, that was how the NCAA championship game was defined. Kentucky, all white, against Texas Western, all black. It was a basketball game then, that night at Cole Field House in College Park, Md. When Texas Western won, it became much more. It was a sociological marker.
``That was a long time ago, and I look at it differently than other people,'' said Larry Conley, the longtime ESPN analyst who played his final game for Kentucky that night. ``To me, it was just one game, and I'm not sure what kind of impact that one game had in pushing the SEC toward integration. Eventually, it was going to happen. It was time. It's just sad Kentucky wasn't in the forefront in that regard.''
The next season, Vanderbilt enrolled the SEC's first black player, Perry Wallace. Kentucky's stubborn coaching legend, Adolph Rupp, may have been known for superstitiously wearing a brown suit for all games, but he hardly was colorblind. Rupp wouldn't sign a black until Louisville high school star Thomas Payne went to Lexington in 1970. Payne's off-court problems contributed to UK not having another black player for several more years.
Conley said he believes the SEC's overdue integration was sparked by earlier developments than Texas Western's victory or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. San Francisco, in winning back-to-back NCAA titles in '55 and '56, started four blacks. Cincinnati's superb teams of the early '60s had mostly black players on the floor. In '62, Mississippi State was once-beaten, but state law prohibited the Bulldogs from playing in the NCAA Tournament - because there might be blacks on opposing teams.
The following year for the NCAA Tournament, State coach Babe McCarthy defied that law and secretly put his SEC champs on a train to Evanston, Ill., to play Loyola of Chicago, which started four blacks and eventually won the NCAA title. A man who coached college hoops in Lexington, Ky., probably had more to do with blacks turning the tide for the SEC on the hardwood.
C.M. Newton, now Kentucky's athletic director, went from Transylvania College - a few blocks from UK - to Alabama and in the mid-70s brought to the SEC the first quality team with significant black contributors. Newton coached the Tide to its first NCAA berth - and it wasn't until 1975.
``It's absolutely a shame it didn't happen sooner,'' Conley said. The same can be said of the ACC. And guess which two leagues have had the most Sweet 16 appearances since the NCAA field was expanded to 64 teams in 1985? The ACC leads with 38. The SEC is next, with 27.
Consider that except for Kentucky, the SEC had only five NCAA bids in the 27 tournaments before that Kentucky-Texas Western game and Wallace's varsity debut at Vandy - Louisiana State in '53 and '54, Georgia Tech in '60, Mississippi State in '63 and Vanderbilt in '65.
Mississippi State didn't return until '91. Tennessee made only one NCAA trip before '76. LSU went 25 years without a bid. Auburn, Georgia, Florida and Ole Miss didn't make NCAA play until the '80s.
This year, four entrants from that same league are a combined 12-2, with most of the victories in convincing fashion, and they've eliminated teams ranked Nos.3, 4, 7, 9, 12, 18, 20 and 22 from the field. Alabama reached the NIT semifinal round, and the SEC put seven teams in the women's NCAA field, with four reaching the final eight.
When the talk turns to SEC guards and centers these days, the offensive line may not be the topic.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Logo. color.by CNB