Author: John McCarthy

A look at the front page of The Olean Times Herald (OTH) on Monday, February 27, 1961, revealed little about the tumultuous event that took place two days prior at the Olean Armory.  The lead story was about area flooding, though a top-page banner indicated that Niagara had used St. Bonaventure as a “stepping stone” to the NIT Tournament and pointed to more stories in the sports section. 

The consecutive home victory streak, started in 1948, had neared triple digits.  St. Bonaventure had won 99 straight games at home.  It started under Coach Ed Melvin before Coach Eddie Donovan took over the Bona program in 1953.  As a reserve on the Bona team in 1947-48, Donovan knew the history all too well.

The front page had no story of the consecutive home wins.  One of the main article in the sports section headlined, “The Fortress Falls…100 Never Came…Joy for One…Tears for Another.”

Win #100 was denied by the same team upon which the win streak started: the Purple Eagles of Niagara University. 

Coach Donovan’s team had cruised by DePaul, Providence, Boston College, and third-ranked Bradley earlier that month.  The win against Bradley, played before 15,497 in Madison Square Garden, came after it ended the Bonnies’ season in the 1960 NIT.  Coach Eddie Donovan’s squad handed DePaul their seventh straight loss, 78-69, on February 18 in the Buffalo Auditorium. 

Siena visited the Armory on February 23.  In the preview story, an OTH reporter wrote, “It’s practically unanimous that the hapless men of Siena will be the 99^th Armory victim.”  The reporter was correct: The Saints were marched out of Olean, 99-57. 

Then came February 25 with Niagara’s visit to the Armory.  St. Bonaventure won convincingly at Niagara, 88-68, about six weeks prior.  By this point in the season, the Bonnies were 21-1, losing only to the top ranked team in the country, Ohio State, in late December. 

However, the Little Three matchup was not a game to be taken lightly.  On the day of the game, a writer for The Olean Times Herald predicted, “It could be rough sledding before the century mark is recorded.”  Niagara entered as a 19.5-point underdog, but was hoping for a post-season NIT invitation.  An upset against the second-ranked Bonnies would add to its resume.

But this was the Armory…where a loss hadn’t been known since Truman was president.  Unique in its own way, the Armory offered something special for those sitting in the first row of the courtside bleachers: Their feet actually straddled the out-of-bounds lines.   

Smoking was prohibited in the Armory.  However, according to an Associated Press writer, many fans in the inevitable capacity crowds of 2000 would smoke in the outside foyer during halftime.  This would drift to the gym, and, by the start of the second half, the teams would “need radar to find the bench.”

One Bona fan, Pat (Tiger) Flynn, recalled going to Armory games from the age of six.  “It was always a great experience, especially when Niagara would come in,” he said.

National media, including Sports Illustrated, headed to the corner of Times Square and Barry Street for the February 25 spectacle.  The standing room only crowd was an estimated 2300.  On top of the streak, it was Tom Stith’s final home game in a Bona uniform. 

Ten first-half turnovers were a part of the five-point Bona deficit at halftime.  St. Bonaventure tied the score at 61 with 11:20 left, but Niagara surged ahead behind 70 percent shooting in the second half.  Though Stith scored 33 points in his home finale, Niagara had four starters in double figures, led by Al Butler with 24 points (11-19 from the floor). 

Flynn, then nine years old, sat with his neighbor at midcourt in the Armory balcony.  “Every time they [St. Bonaventure] rallied, there was Butler hitting a shot,” Flynn said. “Niagara just had control of the game.”

Final score: Niagara 87, St. Bonaventure 77.  The OTH story summarized the sentiment: “It was as final as death.”  The following morning was a somber one for Bona fans.  According to the OTH writer, they were “dazed as though in disbelief that a dear friend had departed from this life.” 

Flynn said that he “cried like a baby” after the Niagara loss. 

“I lived and died with Bonas,” he added.  “It was just so unbelievable that they lost that game.  I think everybody thought they were going to win.  As the game went on, you knew that was not going to happen.” 

However, some solace was present in the opponent that cracked the streak.  “While Bonaventure fans were devastated they lost that game,” Flynn remembered, “they probably would have been more upset if it had been someone like Canisius.  Bonas and Niagara seemed to have a good rapport with each other.” 

A part of that seemed to be the respect given to Coach Gallagher, who was carried off the floor by Niagara fans after the game.  Even before the final buzzer, Donovan walked to the Niagara bench to congratulate Gallagher, who got the game ball with Donovan’s approval.  Afterward, according to an OTH story, both Bona and Niagara fans stopped by the Niagara locker room “to say ‘nice going’ to a nice guy.”  The story added that Gallagher was as gracious in beating the Bonnies than he was in his previous nine losses or so to them.  

The OTH called it “the upset of upsets in ‘Little Three’ basketball history.”  And win #100 was never reached.

On March 16, 1995, the top pop song in the US was Madonna’s Take a Bow. 

That’s exactly what the Bonnies did that evening in the Reilly Center, and it was Francis Tommasino’s most memorable Bona game behind the microphone in his Bona tenure.  Tommasino, the “voice of the Bonnies” from 1988-1995, called 180 games over that span.  The dream had been realized fairly early in life: Tommasino said that getting the radio job for St. Bonaventure was his dream since second grade.  “Not a lot of people knew what they wanted to be at that age, but I did.  To me, it was the best job in the world,” he said.

He took over mid-season for Don McLean, whose career covered 33 seasons, and found himself at Rutgers announcing his first game at the age of 24.  “I remember it vividly,” he remembered.  “I survived…I got through it.  More than anything else, I was petrified that I wouldn’t get on the air or something would go wrong.  I think people realized, ‘Well, he’s not Don, but he’s going to do all right.’”

Fast forward 178 games to his first post-season call. 

It was the next-to-last game of his radio tenure that was recalled with fondness.  He also knew that the end of the Bona season would mark the end of the announcing role, as he would be moving to Virginia for family reasons.  Game #179 would be fresh in his mind years later: Coach Jim Baron’s squad beat the University of Southern Mississippi for a first-round NIT victory, 75-70. 

What made the victory more memorable was that it marked the Bonnies’ first return to post-season action since the 1983 NIT (a 90-76 loss to Iona).  However, the idea of the Bonnies even being picked for the NIT that season was uncertain.  They lost their last two regular season games before falling in double overtime to St. Joe’s in the Atlantic 10 tournament and finding themselves with a record of 17-12. 

“When the team went belly up in the A-10 tournment, it was like our hopes were dashed,” he said.  “The way that [St. Joe’s game] ended, I thought, ‘That’s it…we won’t even get to the NIT.”

Yet, to the surprise of many, they did get an NIT invite. 

While the Bonnies won the NIT in 1977, Southern Mississippi took that same crown in 1987 in defeating LaSalle in the championship game. The 1994-1995 team brought impressive victories to the Reilly Center that included wins over SEC foes Mississippi State and Mississippi as well as over Louisville, Virginia Tech, and VCU.

Three Bonnies averaged in double figures that same season: David Vanterpool, Nii Nelson-Richards, and Jeff Quackenbush.  St. Bonaventure started 0-3 before win streaks of four and five games boosted them in the home stretch of the season. 

The Reilly Center fans were energized for the post-season matchup with Southern Mississippi.  Tommasino described the crowd as “incredible” with an energy level “absolutely through the roof.”

The Bonnies responded in kind, surging to a 25-8 lead and ahead, 34-27, at half.  Nelson-Richards scored nearly half (16) of the Bona points in that half and eventually led all scorers with 24 points. Southern Mississippi took the lead in the second half, in part due to the Bonnies’ poor foul shooting (20-38), but the team prevailed behind Nelson-Richards.  “He really had a terrific game,” said Tommasino, “and pulled the team through it.”

Looking back, Tommasino saw the season as a pivotal one, describing it as “an uplifting year overall.”  After all, he noted, “By those standards of the time, it [an 18-13 record] was a great turnaround for Bona basketball.”

And the NIT game with Southern Mississippi was significant on a number of levels, according to Tommasino.  “Not only because it was a return to the tournament, but it was also a win, and it was a game that the Reilly Center hadn’t seen in a long time…getting to play a post-season game and come away with a win,” he said.    

It was the Bonnies’ only victory in the final five games of the season, as they lost at Marquette in the ensuing round of the NIT despite Vanterpool’s 27-point performance.  “A game that St. Bonaventure should have won,” remarked Tommasino.

After the final buzzer in the Bradley Center, Tommasino signed off for the final time, taking along the fond memories of many Bona games courtside and a most inspiring NIT win over Southern Mississippi.

Even Hall of Famers have “bad” games.

Ask Sam Stith, the legendary player who scored over 1100 points in his three varsity seasons at St. Bonaventure University (SBU) from 1957-60.  Playing at a time in college basketball when players weren’t eligible to play at the varsity level until their sophomore year, Stith also collected 620 rebounds, rather impressive for a 6-2 guard/forward.    

His #22 jersey was raised to the Reilly Center rafters upon his 1969 induction to the University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

After all, losing wasn’t common to Stith’s career at SBU.  In his three seasons, the Bona teams coached by Eddie Donovan amassed a record of 62-13, good for a .827 winning percentage. 

The basketball success in that era was known for something else during Stith’s playing days: a prominent home-game win streak.  The Bonnies’ last loss had come to Niagara on February 11, 1948.  By the time that Stith joined the varsity squad in 1957, the streak of victories in the Olean (NY) Armory had gained national attention. 

“There’s no way in the world that someone would come into the Armory and beat us,” Stith recalled.  “That was our feeling.  It didn’t matter who it was.”

Asked about the most memorable games in his Bona career, Stith pointed to consecutive home win #73.  Though the Bonnies survived with a narrow victory over Niagara, 69-66, the streak appeared to be coming to an end in the final seconds of regulation.  Stith fouled a Niagara player, who made both free throws to put the Purple Eagles ahead by a point.  Donovan called a timeout, and Stith headed to the team huddle with his head down, thinking that he was being pulled from the game for committing the foul.  On top of that, he hadn’t made a basket the entire game.      

To this point, it wasn’t Stith’s best moment in a Bona uniform.

Donovan, however, kept Stith on the floor and instructed the Bonnies to run a set play.  “We’re moving it [the ball] around, the clock is ticking off, and [teammate] Larry Weise yelled at me when I got the ball to drive to the hoop.  The defensive guy played me for the charge, so I pulled up and banked it off the backboard,” Stith remembered.   

The Olean Times Herald story—headlined “Pipe-Dreamer Couldn’t Have Improved on Bona’s Victory”—credited that basket with 15 seconds left as deciding the game and keeping the streak alive. 

Was there pressure in the moment with such a long win streak on the line?

“Nope, nope,” he said without a second thought.  “I wanted it because I messed up by fouling [the Niagara player].

“The only thing is that I came close to charging the other player.  That would have really been disastrous.  If I went one more step, I would have run into him.  Game over.”  And 72-game home win streak over.   

Still the Purple Eagles of Niagara nearly sent SBU fans home from the Armory in shock.  The final 14 seconds were “sweat-producing,” as described by The Times Herald, and found Weise, the 5-11 senior guard and subsequent Bona head coach, sinking two foul shots in the final two seconds to seal the win. 

Stith’s recollection of what happened after the final buzzer was vivid. “The students put me on their shoulders and carried me off the court,” he recounted, adding that he almost hit his head on the overhang in exiting the Armory court. 

Win #73 was pivotal to Stith’s career.  “That Niagara game jump-started my career at St. Bonas,” he said.

He realized that the ending to the game nearly 55 years ago could have been different.  Being called for a charge on that last shot, particularly after committing the foul to allow Niagara to take the lead, may have affected his subsequent time in a Bona uniform.  “If I miss that shot, it means I’m the goat, and keep in mind that it would have broken the Bona winning streak,” Stith added. 

Instead the win over Niagara became a signature game for Stith en route to the Bona Athletics Hall of Fame honor.  The University’s webpage of Stith offers an apt description: “When the game was on the line, he became the ‘Go To Guy,’ and he seldom disappointed.”  Win #73 included.

My wife has never watched a St. Bonaventure (SBU) men’s basketball game, but she deserves an assist on leading me to learn more about the loss that effectively ended the hopes of an NCAA championship on a gloomy St. Patrick’s Day in 1961. 

Her directive to me was clear: In preparing to move, my childhood boxes collecting dust in the basement needed to be sorted out.  Combing through them uncovered an array of Bona gems.  I found the Bob Lanier autograph taken to my first grade class in 1968.  Of course I had kept the copy of The Olean Times Herald on the day after SBU beat Houston for the 1977 NIT championship.  Eastern 8 newspapers?  Yes, I had them, too, not to mention a collection of Bona game programs from my time as a sports information intern in the early 1980s. 

Then there was an unusual item, something related to a Bona defeat to Wake Forest College—its name at that time—in March 1961.  How it found its way into my assortment of memorabilia was a mystery.  After all, the game was played a month before I was born, well before I remember listening to Don McLean call games as a kid.  I knew the Bonnies had some good teams in the pre-Lanier era, but knew nothing about the 1960-1961 squad and wondered about this particular loss.      

Yes, Wake Forest upset St. Bonaventure on March 17, 1961, in the NCAA Eastern Regional semifinal game before a capacity crowd of 12,000 in Charlotte, NC, a profound disappointment to Bona fans thinking about a national championship.  After all, this first visit to the NCAA tournament featured a Bona team ranked as high as second in the country that season.  The final AP poll placed St. Bonaventure at #3 in the country, two spots behind the NCAA champion Ohio State team that featured Jerry Lucas, Larry Siegfried, Mel Nowell, John Havlicek, and Bobby Knight.  

In fact, the Bonnies accepted the NCAA bid a month before the tournament started.  According to a Sports Illustrated account from February 1961, St. Bonaventure was the first independent team chosen for the 1961 NCAA tournament.  Called the best team in the East, the story related that the “enterprising” Bonnies could get a rematch against Ohio State, the only team to beat them to that point in the season.  That Madison Square Garden tilt on New Year’s Eve 1960 found the Bonnies down by 11 points in the second half before losing, 84-82. 

Niagara and Duquesne upended St. Bonaventure toward the end of the regular season with the consecutive setbacks occurring within five days of each other.  The Niagara loss in the Olean Armory ended SBU’s 99-game home winning streak that dated to 1948, while the Dukes upset the Bonnies in overtime, 79-74, in Pittsburgh. 

The first round of the NCAA, played as part of a tripleheader before 18,000 fans in Madison Square Garden, saw the Bonnies rally over Rhode Island.  Tom Stith, the two-time All-American and runner-up national player of the year that season, scored 34 points, while Freddie Crawford added 29 points.  The New York Times account described the Bona duo as the “most dazzling practitioners” among the six teams that day in playing with “startling acrobatics.”

The 78-73 setback to Wake Forest in the NCAA East Regional semifinals at the Charlotte Coliseum was unique from the outset.  Billy Packer, the famed Wellsville (NY)-born television analyst who covered 34 consecutive Final Fours, wouldn’t have been courtside at that point.  He actually played in the game.  The 5-9 junior guard for the Demon Deacons averaged 17 points per game, but wasn’t the scoring leader for the squad.  That achievement belonged to the star 6-8 forward Len Chappell—the Tom Stith equivalent for Wake Forest—who had a 27 point per game average.  Though growing up closer to Olean than to Winston-Salem, Chappell took his high school experience from a small town near Johnstown, PA, to become a two-time ACC Player of the Year.

The game was also unique in a way likely unmatched in any NCAA game since 1961.  It highlighted two players who went on to become the second picks in the first round of a professional draft.  Stith, a subsequent Hall of Fame inductee at St. Bonaventure, was chosen as the second overall pick of the 1961 draft by the New York Knicks, while Washington selected Wake Forest player Norm Snead as its quarterback in the second spot of the NFL draft the very same year.

Ahead 37-36 at halftime, the Bonnies faced a persistent Wake Forest team that forced six lead changes in the second half.  Bob Woollard, a 6-10 center later drafted by the New York Knicks, scored 10 points and grabbed 11 rebounds off the Wake Forest bench to contribute to the Demon Deacon win.  Woollard averaged just four points per game that season, yet his performance against St. Bonaventure was pivotal in dashing NCAA championship dreams.

The referees were no doubt busy in the 40 minutes of play, though the game must have been far longer.  Each team shot 34 free throws with Wake Forest sinking five more than Coach Eddie Donovan’s squad.  Three of the seven Bona players fouled out as the team committed a season-high 24 fouls.  In addition, only five baskets were scored from the field by both teams in the final nine minutes of regulation.  The 73-point output by St. Bonaventure was the lowest of the season.

Both The Bona Venture and Olean Times Herald reports of the game referred to numerous traveling infractions called against the Bonnies.  In the latter story, Coach Donovan conceded, “We were called with an unusually large number of traveling violations, but I guess we were traveling.” 

The Bona defeat was also mentioned in a 1968 Sports Illustrated story by Curry Kirkpatrick, who described it as “a game still remembered for its odd officiating and for a Wake Forest fast break started by the coach from his bench.”  That specific second-half play, as related in an article years later in The Buffalo News, had the Wake Forest coach taking the ball from one of the Bona guards, who was about to offer an in-bounds pass, and throwing it to Packer for a basket.  A post-game commentary in The Bona Venture concluded, “When a coach is allowed to pass the ball into one of his players and this results in a score for his team, it is apparent that the officials either don’t care or are blind—or both.” 

On top of this, a story in the Charlotte Observer referred to a clock malfunction in the scoreboard in the final minutes of regulation, leading to “anxious inquiries about the time remaining.” 

Wake Forest lost its next game, the Eastern Regional finals, to a Jack Ramsay-coached St. Joe’s team.  For St. Bonaventure, there would be no rematch against Ohio State, which eventually suffered an overtime loss to Cincinnati in the NCAA championship game. Stith, who passed the 2000-point mark in the subsequent consolation victory over Princeton, saw his spectacular career at St. Bonaventure come to an end, and, just two months after the Wake Forest loss, Donovan accepted a head coaching position with the New York Knicks. 

The new Bona coach, 24-year-old Larry Weise, inherited the team later that year.  His success in the ensuing seasons propelled the program to new heights, which prompted kids like me to become ardent Bona fans and to keep special memories in all kinds of ways for decades to come.

I have been a fan of St. Bonaventure men’s basketball for as long as I can remember. As a kid growing up in Olean (NY), I recall the excitement of getting the cardboard schedule of the upcoming season and filling in the results as the year progressed. The games were often the topic of wintertime conversations at school, the neighbor’s hoop, the dinner table, and really anywhere in the community.

As a student at St. Bonaventure (SBU), I had the joy of interning in the Sports Information office and experiencing the excitement of Reilly Center games from a pressbox perspective. My first time on a plane (age 20) was flying from Bradford (PA) to Washington, DC, to see an SBU-GW game (sadly a 78-64 loss). After graduating from SBU (1983), I continued to follow the Bonnies. In fact, I distinctly recall listening to the championship victory in the 2012 A-10 tournament from a hotel in Armenia. For the upcoming season, I’ll be St. Bonaventure’s #1 fan in Dubai.

As many college basketball fans know, the St. Bonaventure basketball fan base is a special one: dedicated, loyal, and vocal. In launching this blog, I hope that fans enjoy the memories of some special games, both wins and losses, through the years.

My gratitude goes to the people featured in the blogs for sharing their memories and to Dennis Frank, SBU Archivist. This blog certainly wouldn’t be happening without them.