"GAME OF CHANGE"

 “GAME OF CHANGE”

Sixty years ago in March, 1963, the Mississippi State University men’s basketball team snuck out of its home state in order to play in March Madness, the NCAA tournament.  They snuck out of Mississippi because its governor and legislators did not want the team to play any teams with Black players.  Awaiting them at the NCAA tournament in East Lansing, Michigan, was a team that had also broken the unwritten rules of college basketball:  Loyola University of Chicago.  The unwritten rule was that no team could start or ever play more than 2 Black players at one time in a game.

Loyola was founded by the Jesuits in 1870 as St. Ignatius University, and changed its name to Loyola in 1909.  It is one of the largest Catholic universities in the country.  In the 1962-63 basketball season, Loyola coach George Ireland had regularly broken the unwritten rule about the racial composition of his players on the floor, usually starting 3 Black players and sometimes 4.  Known as the Ramblers, they compiled a 24-2 record for the year and were ranked in the top five in the country.   They had endured their share of racial animosities, especially on trips to the South that season.  .

    Having a starting lineup of at least 3 Black players led to numerous issues – other coaches often mocked the Ramblers by saying that Coach Ireland went to Africa to recruit his players.  When the team traveled to New Orleans for a game in January, the Black and white players were forced to stay in segregated lodgings because of neo-slavery laws in Louisiana.  On another road game in Houston in February, crowd members shouted racial slurs and threw objects at the Loyola players.  They played through the adversity, however, and their record and their play led to an invitation to play in the NCAA national tournament.  Their first game in the tournament was against Tennessee Tech, and they defeated the Tennesseans 111-42, the largest margin of victory in the history of the tournament.

    Mississippi State’s subterfuge to sneak out of Mississippi had worked, and they arrived the day before the game with Loyola. They gathered to play on the evening of March 15, and the arena was sold out, with national press covering the game.  Indeed ,when Loyola player Jerry Harkness and Mississippi State player Joe Dan Gold shook hands before the opening tipoff, cameras went off everywhere.  Harkness remembers it this way:  "When those flashbulbs went off -- boom, boom, pop, pop -- you felt the history of it right there," Harkness said, "but I don't think many people even know about it now. That game, if you ask me, was key. I felt like it was the beginning of things turning around in college basketball.”

    Oh yes, Loyola went on to win the game 61-51, and the barriers of racial composition of college basketball teams had been broken.  Loyola went on the Final Four in Louisville that year, and in a thrilling final game, the Ramblers defeated two-time defending champion University of Cincinnati 61-60 in overtime to become the new national champions.  In the audience in Louisville that night was a young boxer who was a rising star – his name was Cassius Clay.  Three years later in 1966, a team with all Black starters – Texas Western – would play one of the premier white basketball programs in the country, the University of Kentucky in the NCAA tournament final.  Texas Western upset the Wildcats and turned college basketball upside down. 

     But, it began with a team of white players from Mississippi and their coach who had dared to break the rules to play basketball, and with a team from Chicago that also broke the rules, a team that endured racial hatred to go all the way to the national title.  The Loyola/MSU game became known as the “Game of Change.” Several documentaries have been made about this game and its background – check them out.