If you wonder why Chicago sports fans have been called the hardiest in America, look back to the weekend of Jan. 26-28, 1967.
That was the weekend of Chicago’s infamous “Super Storm.” It started snowing on Thursday evening, the 25th, and it snowed furiously until a then-record 23 inches had been dumped on the city.
Fierce winds swirled the snow into drifts that completely covered parked cars. Drifts became as tall as Lew Alcindor, the 7-foot-2-inch UCLA sophomore who was in town to play twice that weekend at the old Chicago Stadium.
The teams had arrived before the weather, so the games were played after a one-day delay, even though the storm paralyzed the city and made transportation virtually impossible. A total of 27,000 fans managed to trudge through the drifts Saturday night and Sunday afternoon to watch Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
What was Chicago like that weekend? A North Side couple took their children, ages 12, 10 and 8, on an “L” ride (the only CTA service operating) so the children could see some scenes they still vividly remember.
From the “L”, one could see families trudging home from grocery stores pulling sleds laden with milk, canned goods and other necessities.
Major streets were cluttered with abandoned cars, trucks and even buses jack-knifed at every which angle. “They look like toys,” the 8-year old said. “Toys a child forgot to pick up and left on the floor.”
But the games went on, and many fans took the Lake Street “L” and then trooped south on foot to the Stadium at 1801 W. Madison St. From the South Side they took Rock Island trains to the LaSalle Street Station and made the same westward trek on Madison.
Alcindor put on a show. In Saturday’s tripleheader he scored 35 points as UCLA beat Loyola 82-69. In the other games, Notre Dame beat Illinois 90-75 and defending national champion Texas Western defeated Brigham Young 85-76. On Sunday he scored 45 as the Bruins, en route to a 30-0 season and the first of three NCAA titles with Alcindor, routed Illinois 120-82.
That Sunday, coach John Wooden removed the gag from Alcindor, whom he had shielded from interviews.
“I much prefer playing defense,” said the young star, who would go on to become the most prolific scorer in NBA history. “Defense is more important than scoring.”
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DePaul athletic director Bill Bradshaw helped put together Saturday’s Dell Classic 4 Kids doubleheader featuring DePaul vs. Notre Dame and Texas vs. Stanford at the United Center. It’s the first of its kind since the Great Eight completed its mostly successful Chicago run two years ago, and it raises the question whether doubleheaders, once the star attraction of the local college basketball scene, could return on a regular basis.
Bradshaw is a big fan of college doubleheaders. He grew up in Philadelphia, where “Big Five” doubleheaders involving Villanova, LaSalle, St. Joe’s, Temple and Penn drew turn-away crowds to Penn’s historic Palestra. He recalls Chicago Stadium doubleheaders as “the crown jewels of college basketball.”
Yet for as much as he’d love to see them return, Bradshaw realizes that for several reasons–mainly financial–college basketball doubleheaders seem to have gone the way of the doubleheader in baseball.
“I’d like to keep the door open for the return of doubleheaders,” he said, “but the interest has gone way down because of the financial side.”
Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White offered even less hope for a revival of doubleheaders.
“At the moment we have no plans for any more doubleheaders in Chicago,” White said. “It would have to be something very special, a significant payout. We just wouldn’t want to give up a home game.”
Simply put, people on the business side of college basketball ask: “Why should we give up a home game that would draw enough fans to fill the Joyce Center or Allstate Arena to play at a neutral site and then divide the money among four teams and the stadium landlord?”
“You’d have to offer the teams such large guarantees that it would produce higher ticket prices,” Bradshaw said. “One way to avoid this is to have a third party as corporate sponsor, as we have Saturday [Dell computers].”
A promoter might avoid paying a huge guarantee, Bradshaw said, if the team involved was either recruiting in Chicago or already had a Chicago player and wanted to reward him with a homecoming game.
Selecting a team that “travels well” is also helpful, Bradshaw said. Illinois, for example, always draws well in its Chicago appearances. Iowa helped draw more than 17,000 to the United Center for Tuesday night’s game with top-ranked Duke in the Big Ten-ACC Challenge, and Bradshaw mentioned Bradley as another team that travels well.
“Bradley fans from here come out for their team, and they come up from Peoria,” he said. “We played Hersey Hawkins’ team during an ice storm and we still drew 16,000 at the Horizon.”
Other factors working against doubleheaders include scheduling and the ready availability–some would say the oversaturation–of college basketball on television.
Loyola and DePaul were independents during the more than 35 years they took turns playing Stadium doubleheaders. Now their conference commitments leave them only 10 outside games. Also, if a “hot” player is scheduled to appear in town, such as Alcindor in 1967, chances are fans would already have seen him on TV and wouldn’t fight through a Super Storm to get to courtside.
“In order to make doubleheaders work you need a hot local team to host the games, a team that excites people in the city,” former DePaul coach Ray Meyer noted several years ago.
DePaul had teams like that in the 1940s when Meyer coached George Mikan in Stadium doubleheaders. Loyola had such teams in the 1960s when George Ireland coached the ’63 NCAA champs and several other nationally ranked teams. Marquette, with good teams and a large Chicago fan base, was an attraction in the early ’70s, around the same time Notre Dame and “hot player” Austin Carr were Stadium regulars.
“But now, Chicago doesn’t have a team like that,” Meyer said. “I think the best hope is for one or two doubleheaders a year. Notre Dame will draw, and maybe DePaul or Northwestern if they improve.”
And even if a doubleheader or two is scheduled, promoters should be wary of playing them in December.
Arthur Morse, promoter of the DePaul and Loyola Stadium doubleheaders from the ’40s through the ’70s, studied fans’ pre-Christmas spending habits and drew a doleful conclusion. “I learned that you can’t compete against Santa Claus,” he said.
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DePaul had a 14-12 record at Chicago Stadium in 1940-42, but the history of doubleheader success really began in the 1942-43 season when the “Triple-M” formula began to click.
The school hired Meyer. Meyer recruited Mikan, the gangling 6-10 teenager from Joliet who developed into the game’s most dominant big man up to that time. Morse, the matchmaker, brought some of the nation’s best teams to West Madison Street.
The Blue Demons had a 76-46 record at the Stadium in the 14 years (1942-56) Meyer’s teams played there. They had a glittering 47-13 mark during the Mikan-dominated first six years, but only a 29-33 record over the last eight years.
DePaul went 8-2 in the Stadium in the 1942-43 season, losing only to Notre Dame and to Camp Grant, a team of former college stars then in military service. The signature game of that season came when Mikan put on a sensational exhibition of goaltending (then allowed) in a 54-44 victory over Adolph Rupp’s mighty Kentucky Wildcats.
Post-World War II Chicago fans adopted DePaul as the city’s team, much as fans would do 35 years later when Meyer, who had lasted long enough to become “America’s grandfather,” coached the Blue Demons back to national prominence with local stars such as Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings.
“The excitement at the Stadium was unmatched,” Meyer recalled of the early years. “Seats weren’t expensive. We made fans and friends for all of basketball.”
Loyola played in the Stadium as long ago as 1937, and when DePaul moved back to campus in the 1950s, Morse began booking games for Ireland and the Ramblers became host for Stadium doubleheaders.
In the six-year stretch from 1956-61, Loyola went 11-17 in the Stadium, but by the end of that stretch Ireland had expanded his recruiting horizons to include both non-white and non-Chicago student-athletes. Eventually he assembled the only team from the state of Illinois to win the Division I NCAA championship. Jack Egan was the only Chicagoan and only white player among the five ironmen who played all 45 minutes of Loyola’s 62-60 overtime victory over Cincinnati in the 1963 championship game. Jerry Harkness and Ron Miller came from New York City and Les Hunter and the late Vic Rouse were teammates at Pearl High in Nashville.
Cincinnati, No. 1-ranked and two-time defending national champion, was playing the first game of a Stadium doubleheader in the `62-63 season. The Ramblers were watching.
“You know what?” Harkness told his teammates. “We can beat this team.”
The rest is history.
Loyola had a 30-11 Stadium record in the seven seasons from 1961-68, but lost 23 of 27 games in the final years ending in 1974. History of a different sort was made in January of 1972 when Loyola center LaRue Martin, from Chicago’s De La Salle High School, had back-to-back impressive outings against Marquette’s Jim Chones and UCLA’s Bill Walton in Stadium doubleheaders. The Portland Trail Blazers thought enough of Martin’s performance to make him the first overall pick of the 1972 draft. He didn’t exactly silence the “who’s he?” rumblings by averaging five points over his four NBA seasons.
