Gordon Wright

Gordon Wright grew up in Garrett County, Maryland, in the rural western part of the state. He worked in steel mills and automobile factories in Ohio and Baltimore in the summer to help pay for college. After attending Potomac State College, in West Virginia, he graduated from West Virginia University, where he later got his master's degree. In 1958, he was hired for his first teaching job, at Calvert County High School.

"At that time, the schools were segregated," Wright remembers. "There was Brooks High School, the black school, and Calvert. I got a job teaching math, science and social studies. I met the physical education teacher and coach, Don Merriman, and he and I became good friends. Don had come out of Glenville State College in West Virginia, and had been at Calvert about two years. I told the administration that I was trained in physical education and science, and that I did not plan to be back the following year unless they gave me a position in physical education. So they put me in charge of physical education for the seventh and eighth grades. I started helping Don with the athletic teams, and since I played soccer in high school, I became the soccer coach."

"I helped Don with the coaching for two years, and then in the fall of 1961, he got a job at Gwynn Park High School, in Prince George's County (Maryland). So I took over the basketball team, but there was no pay for coaching. When the new Calvert High School opened in 1962, I had a family by then, so I applied for a job in Prince George's County, where the pay was much better, and it was within driving distance of my home in Dares Beach."

"In the meantime, I met Tim Carney, also from Glenville State, who had started teaching in the middle school, which was in the old Calvert County High School building. I asked him to help me coach. He knew a lot more about basketball than I did. They were still building the gymnasium. It was not going to be completed until the second half of the year, so we had to schedule all our games away from home at the beginning of the season. I was teaching physical education classes in a barn out in back."

"Calvert was a rural county, and a lot of the kids never came out for the team until they were 16 years old and could drive a car, because that was the only way to get home from games and practice. Therefore, Calvert's teams were not very successful. In fact, when Don was there, we had about five wins each year, and I had a similar record my first year. But for this season, we had a pretty good team."

Wright still has vivid memories of the game, and most of what he told me is confirmed by the newspaper articles, including one he sent me from the Washington Star. Wright continues:

"Ed Lakes, the coach at La Plata, had come out of West Virginia. There was rumor that he had won a high school state championship there. In an earlier game at La Plata, they had beaten us badly, 79-53. When we played them at Calvert, La Plata already had 15 victories. Tim Carney came up with the strategy, and I figured we had nothing to lose by trying. Tim said, ‘La Plata plays a zone defense. Let's hold the ball and make them come out and play us. If they do that, we'll have an opening to go in.'"

"In those days, there was no shot clock, so you could hold the ball. But you couldn't just stand there with the ball, you had to make an attempt to go in toward the foul line every 15 seconds. So I told my two guards, Bobby Manning and Johnny Mattera, ‘Stand out there, dribble in toward the foul line every so often, but don't try to take the ball all the way in as long as they are back in that zone.'"

"So La Plata got the tip-off - every quarter started with a jump ball in those days - and they went down and scored a basket. We came back and held the ball. Immediately, Lakes yells to his players, ‘Get back. Don't go out after them.' He saw what we wanted to do, so we told the boys, ‘Just keep it up, you're only behind by two points.' At the end of the quarter, we hadn't taken a shot, and La Plata hadn't touched the ball again. La Plata got the tip in the second quarter, but they missed a shot. We got the ball back and did the same thing, and the half ended like that."

"At halftime, we reminded the boys, ‘If they come out to get you in man-to-man coverage, then try to score, but don't be too anxious. If we keep this up, we'll still be in the game all the way to the end.' The players were doing just what we wanted them to do, and they were doing it well. They realized that they had lost badly to La Plata, and they seemed to be with us on the strategy."

"La Plata got the tip in the third quarter and scored right away, so it was 4-0. And then we held the ball the rest of the quarter. In the fourth quarter, we lost the tip again, but La Plata missed a shot, and we got the ball back. Late in the game, Bobby made a little push in and got fouled. Lakes yelled at his team, ‘Don't do that, stay back.' In those days, there was no such thing as the one-and-one, so Bobby got only one shot, and he made it. We put some pressure on, La Plata missed a shot, and we came back down."

I wondered out loud why Wright didn't call time-out.

"Back then, the coach couldn't call a timeout. The boys on the floor had to do that. There was a lot of noise from the fans. It went down to the very end of the game, and we were yelling to the boys to take it in and shoot it. I think they were afraid of making a mistake, so they just kept passing it back and forth. They weren't paying any attention to the clock, and it ran out. So Bobby's foul shot was the only shot we took in the game."

I asked why Calvert didn't at least toss up a 20-footer at the end of each quarter.

"In hindsight, that's what we should have done. But La Plata put on a little token pressure right toward the end of each quarter, so it wasn't as easy as you think. You have to remember that you're dealing with young boys that were not that experienced. You also have to understand that we didn't anticipate this type of game. I think Lakes should take credit for the low score, because he pulled his team back and refused to challenge us. But we had a good season. In fact, we won the rest of our home games."

Tim Carney

Though Wright didn't know the whereabouts of Carney, I found him living, not surprisingly, in Glenville, West Virginia. His recollections are similar to Wright's.

"I came to Calvert in the fall of 1962. I taught physical education and language arts and coached basketball at the middle school. I remember a game against Brooks Middle School. The schools were still segregated then, and the only people that were allowed at that game were the coaches, players and cheerleaders. But there was no trouble. Then a coaching job came up at Calvert High School, so I taught at the middle school and coached at the high school.

"The game plan was to see if we could bring La Plata out of their zone. But Lakes was kind of a stubborn guy, so if he didn't let them come out, we planned to hold the ball and try to take a shot at the end of each quarter. They took the lead right away, but at 2-0, we didn't feel like we were out of the game. So we basically just passed it around the perimeter. It was just one of those crazy things. We never thought it would end that way."

Once again, I asked the obvious question: "Why didn't you take a shot?"

"It was always our goal. If we had the ball, we would take a shot at the end of each quarter. Why we didn't get a shot off, I don't remember. One of our best players was Jimmy Tidwell, and his father Jim, who was the football coach, was not very happy after the game. He complained that it was an awful idea to hold the ball."

In the fall of 1965, Carney left Calvert for Gwynn Park, where he became the basketball coach. Right away he was reminded of "The Game."

"I'll never forget the guy who was the athletic director of Prince George's County. In a pre-season gathering of the basketball coaches, he made light of the game and said that he didn't want to see that type of coaching in his schools. And there I am sitting in the audience. Obviously, I wasn't going to raise my hand and tell him I was the guy who did it."

Carney said that the game hardly ever came up in conversation, until many years later at a college golf tournament.

"I was coaching the golf team at Glenville State. James Madison University would hold a spring tournament every year, and they often brought in some Division One teams. That year, the University of Maryland and the Naval Academy came. I was standing in the pro shop, and this guy comes up and says, ‘You're Tim Carney, aren't you? You're the guy who was at Calvert County when they held the ball against La Plata.' I said, ‘I had almost forgotten about that.' And he said, ‘Well, I haven't forgotten. I played on that La Plata team.' It was Larry Ringer, and he was the golf coach at the Naval Academy. About a year later, I went up to Annapolis and visited him."