Larry Ringer

Ringer had come up the ranks at La Plata with Dale Cornette, and on the 1963 team, he was the starting shooting guard. I found him living in West Virginia also. He was happy to talk about the game.

"We were expecting Calvert to come out running and gunning very quickly. So it was a shock to everybody that it was a stall. Coach Lakes told us to just sit back and let them make the first move. We had a height advantage, and we could run with anybody, so we just waited for Calvert to make a mistake. When Tommy Jameson made the first shot, I got the assist. The longer the game went on, the more pressure was on both teams. Calvert knew they were going to have to make a basket, and we were afraid of making a mistake. We were very focused on playing good defense, which is one thing that Coach Lakes always stressed."

"When we got home, nobody believed us when we told them the score. They said things like: ‘Yeah, right. So what really happened?' ‘How bad did you beat them?' or ‘Did you guys get beat, and that's why you won't tell us the truth?' Later that night, I remember sitting in front of the TV at home, and they gave the score on the local news, and my mother says, ‘Okay, I guess you were telling the truth.'"

"When Dale and I went to Charles County Community College (also in La Plata), Bill Close, who had coached at nearby Lackey High School, became the coach for us. One day, we took a long bus ride up to Cumberland to play Allegany Community College. Bill had heard about the game, and he talked to us about it for over an hour."

Dale Cornette

Ringer's teammate, Ivan (Dale) Cornette, was the point guard. He made the other basket for La Plata. In his scrapbook, he has an article about the game, which includes the box score. But he doesn't remember any of the Calvert players.

"Back in those days, we really didn't know the players on the other teams. It was a very rural area. There were no summer leagues, nothing like that. But I do remember the new Calvert gym. The floor was right up against a cinder block wall on one side. You only had about two feet to the wall. They had bleachers on one side, and then an upper deck with bleachers. They've changed it a lot since then."

After Manning hit the foul shot and Calvert got the ball back, Dale got worried.

"We were up by only three points. I was afraid that we might foul them when they made a shot, and they could tie the game with a 3-point play. I remember telling that to Jimmy Cox, our best scorer. I yelled, ‘We can't foul them.'"

But when the game was over, Cornette didn't recall it being a big deal.

"It was just something that happened. It was like a fluke. We knew we were going to win either way, by three points or 20 points. Coach Lakes just said, ‘Get dressed and let's go home.' We hadn't exactly worked up a sweat, because we just stood there most of the time and watched them. We didn't even take showers; we just changed into our clothes and got on the bus. Years later, I talked to my teenage son about the game, and when I told him the score, he looked at me like I was nuts, shrugged his shoulders and walked away."

Bobby Manning

By the time my brother was playing varsity sports, I was off at college, and then in the Air Force, so I don't think I ever saw him play basketball at school. When we sat down at his home recently, I think it was the first time we had ever talked about the subject.

"I think Calvert played only four sports: football, basketball, baseball and track. I played them all. I wasn't that strong in basketball. I was just naturally athletic. Getting to school was easy, because I rode the bus from our house in Solomons. But getting home was a big problem, because I had to stay after school every day for practice. Sometimes I could get a ride with someone, but I had to hitchhike a lot, and it was 20 miles. Fortunately, Calvert County was a small place, so people would recognize me. I often wonder what my parents thought about it."

I had been telling him some of the details I was getting from the other interviews, and that seemed to jog his memory a bit.

"La Plata was a powerhouse team. We went into the game with the idea that we were going to freeze the ball, but I don't know how much we worked on it in practice. I remember in those days watching college basketball on TV, and teams that were ahead would often go into a stall at the end of a game."

"The thing that stands out in my mind is that our strategy was successful. But the ultimate objective is to win the game, and we didn't win. But we didn't get beat by 50 points. I don't think we had a good plan at the end of the game. It was close, and a basket or two could have won it for us. I remember going in with the ball and making a head fake, and the guy that was guarding me went for the fake and landed on me. I made the foul shot, but the last time we had the ball, we just ran the clock out."

"It was kind of bizarre. It seems like the coach could have prepared us better. He could have yelled at us to call timeout or take a shot. After the first quarter was over, he should have told us to put up a shot in the last 15 seconds of the quarter, or something like that. The game went by really fast, because there were no dead balls. I remember some of the crowd yelling at us to shoot. It seems weird now, but we were just following the coach's instructions."