Indiana University Athletics
Bob Hammel Remembers The 1974-75 Hoosiers
3/5/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Bloomington, Indiana - So why, on Senior Day in 2015, are seniors from the IU basketball team of 40 years ago being honored?
One reason is a Hoosier team in 2014-15 without a senior. The second is to seize a chance to relive through these honored 1975 seniors - really for the first time out here on the court where they played - some of the greatest basketball memories in IU's glorious basketball history.
This is the 40th anniversary season for a team that has a strong case for being called the best ever to play in the Big Ten. Until consensus All-America forward Scott May broke his left arm in the team's 15th Big Ten game at Purdue, this team stood 14-0 in its always-competitive, always-strong league, with an average winning margin of 28 points a game. Nothing in league history comes close to matching that.
I remember the feeling that all of us had as November moved to December and December to January in 1974-75. We were watching a very good Indiana team take shape but thinking of its magnitude, its relative strength, in basically Big Ten terms. No. 1, in the country? That was something else ... something for other people, UCLA primarily but an occasional Houston or North Carolina State, a royalty that the working-class, intensely competitive Big Ten didn't waste any dreams about crashing. But, boy, this was some team we watched score 67 second-half points in blowing away from poor Tennessee Tech in the opener, and survive an overtime test against No. 7-ranked Kansas on its fabled Phog Allen Arena court.
Some blinking started, even among the faithful, when Kentucky came in 15th-ranked and found itself down 88-54 before the benching began on a Saturday afternoon at Assembly Hall. We all began to think that day in terms of maybe the best IU team in a long while, a team that maybe - and this was pretty high presumption at the time - should win the Big Ten this year, could even make a real tournament run. But ... North Carolina State was back with David Thompson and its 1974 national-championship team and UCLA was UCLA, so 1 and 2 in the polls were for other people but 3rd wasn't looking out of reach ... maybe. Then a 10-point win over Adrian Dantley at No. 8 Notre Dame felt pretty good, and respectable teams started falling by blowout margins, consistently - the wariness started to fade: this was a real Big Ten challenger, this group Bob Knight had put together starting with his very first recruits. By Christmas, the polls had these IU kids No. 3 in the land, which felt good, but not regal.
Then there was a night in Hawaii when they had Ohio State - always solid Ohio State - down 60-38 at halftime. And they stood 10-0 entering Big Ten play, as some other league teams had over the years only to fade back to beatability. But along the way UCLA had lost a game or two, and suddenly so did No. 1 North Carolina State, the night before this team opened Big Ten play at Michigan State. And I don't know about the players, but my brain hadn't even entertained the real, conscious thought till the bus emptied in front of old Jenison Fieldhouse and as the Indiana team carrying bags walked through snow to enter Jenison Fieldhouse an MSU student waiting to buy a ticket shouted out, "Indiana - No. 1 in the country!"
It wasn't true. No votes had been taken. There was one of the chronically toughest Big Ten road trips to handle at MSU and at Michigan before a vote would be taken. But - for the moment ...
It was a heady, very unfamiliar, almost uncomfortable thought: No. 1?
Indiana?
That game took on a competitive-joke stature when a surprise intra-team flare-up produced a strike and a reduced Spartan team that got blown out meaninglessly, 107-55. But two nights later, a solid 90-76 win at 11th-ranked Michigan meant the pollsters would be looking at a 12-0 Indiana team in preparing their weekly ballots, and ... Suddenly, there it was: Indiana No. 1, in both wire-service polls.
And it stayed that way, through 28 consecutive in-season polls over the next 14 months - despite a trainwreck of a development when first-team All-American Scott May, clearly the team's best player, broke an arm and went out with four regular-season games left. Still they stayed unbeaten, still they stayed No. 1, until that Kentucky team that, with May, this team had down by 34 points and beat by 24 in December pulled off a 92-90 NCAA-regional heartbreak.
That's the way this 1974-75 season ended. No Final Four. No championship banner on the honor row on the south end of Assembly Hall. Nothing, really, to shout out that - hey!
• This team was the first in Big Ten history to go 18-0, to beat every other Big Ten team on its home court, and to win the league championship by an unheard-of six games - still, and probably forever, a Big Ten record.
The 1975-76 team, with a core from 1974-75 including a healthy College Player of the Year Scott May, was, in the 75th year of NCAA-championship play, voted in a national poll the best champion ever. And it deserved it, deserved every recognition it could get.
But while that 1975-76 season was happening, some of the league's veteran coaches still were awed by the Hoosier team of the year before. Minnesota coach Jim Dutcher said after a nine-point loss at Williams Arena finished another Hoosier sweep over his '76 team, said: "I still think they're No. 1, but I don't think they're as overpowering as they were last year. I said at the time that was the best college team I'd ever seen. When Scott May was in there, you just couldn't find a weakness." Iowa coach Lute Olson, whose teams lost 88-73 and 101-81 in 1976, still said: "I thought last year's Indiana team was the best in the country, without any question at all. I thought it was the best college team at both ends of the court that I had ever seen."
But even some of those '76 players think they had a better team in 1974-75, when the stars of '76 also had with them All-Big Ten Steve Green, all-world Super-Sub John Laskowski, and solid contributors from Bob Knight's first recruiting group Steve Ahlfeld and John Kamstra. Those - the four 1975 seniors being honored today - are the names captain Quinn Buckner had in mind just last April at Atlanta when he was asked if he still thought the '75 team was better: "Yes, I think so because it was deeper. Healthy the '75 team was better."
Today's four were the cornerstones for his new IU basketball program when Knight hit the recruiting trail for the first time in late March 1971: first signee, Steve Green, future dentist; second signee, Steve Ahlfeld, future orthopedist; third signee, John Kamstra, future Chief Financial Officer of the global Cook company. Then John Laskowski, "Super Sub," who joined Green as an NBA player. Green from Silver Creek close to Louisville, Ahlfeld from Northfield in Wabash County, Kamstra from Rossville on the outskirts of Lafayette, Laskowski from St. Joseph's High in Notre Dame-loving South Bend - all of them Hoosiers.. That was the Knight building plan from the beginning: Indiana-based, reaching into adjacent states Illinois and Ohio and, unless sorely short on something, no farther.
In their first year of varsity eligibility - 1972-73, the first year of freshman eligibility in football and basketball - sophomores Green and Laskowski teamed with freshmen Quinn Buckner and Jimmy Crews to backstop senior leaders Steve Downing and John Ritter on Knight's first Big Ten championship team, first Final Four team. And then the role of leadership settled on those first two years of recruits, including 1973-74 sophomores Scott May, Bobby Wilkerson and Tom Abernethy. Historic things happened, including that January 1975 rise to No. 1.
Indiana teams now have been ranked No. 1 in the weekly polls 54 times - the first six by the 1953 and '54 teams of Branch McCracken, in and around the 1953 NCAA championship; the last 10 by Tom Crean's 2013 Big Ten champions. The bulk of the others came in the 28-week run of in-season rankings that the '75 Hoosiers began.
That was the rise that established Indiana as something much more than a Big Ten power of the moment. Much of the aura that became a part of Assembly Hall dated to that 1974-75 season, when IU basketball - always so respected - reached a level never reached before or since in the Big Ten.
