A heartfelt tribute to Jayhawk legend Nolen Ellison

It’s been said perhaps the greatest gift you can give someone is sharing your knowledge and time. Nolen Ellison, one of the greatest players in Kansas basketball history, one of the greatest educators America has ever produced, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, definitely shared his knowledge and time with me during his lifetime. He also constantly called me by my first name during our talks, something all successful and kind people do. A person's first name has been called the most beautiful word in the world, the most beautiful word in the English language (and in any language), and I always appreciated Nolen for repeatedly referring to me as "David." The last time we talked for two and half hours in April 2025, he even asked me the names of my beloved late parents. I told him: "Goody and Shirley." He knew my Dad was a professor in the KU School of Social Welfare (for 34 years from 1969-2003) and my mom worked as a field instructor for the School (for 33 years from 1970-2003). He even thought his cousin Elmer Myers was in class with my father until I told him the years my dad taught, which Nolen wrote down. His cousin was actually in the KU School of Social Welfare years before my dad taught at KU.

Nolen, one of my true heroes, sadly passed on June 12, 2025 in Rosevile, California, at age 83. I got the devastating news two days later from Murray Anderson, a friend and colleague of Nolen’s and someone I met with for three hours at Panera restaurant in Lawrence a few months earlier. I was deeply pained and stunned over Nolen’s death; we just had that lengthy phone call in April and he was full of life and vigor.

I first talked to Dr. Nolen Ellison on a Saturday March morning in 2002 at 9:30 a.m. for 90 minutes, which was a Where Are They Now? interview for Jayhawk Insider. He spoke about his KU experience, his life after basketball, and all he humbly accomplished in his professional career. I’ve thought a great deal about Nolen since then and especially since his passing.

I told him at the time about my 82-page honors thesis on racial participation and integration in Kansas basketball history at the University of Kansas, that my Dad was a professor of social welfare at KU, and that he attended the historic March on Washington in 1963. Nolen said, “There’s a reason you called me.” He also urged, “You need to do more with this than Jayhawk Insider.” 

Nolen, who talked about mentoring me that morning, was one of seven African-American players on head coach Dick Harp’s revolutionary 1960-61 team, a squad that I became fascinated with after doing extensive research and writing my senior honors thesis in 1988.

 

Nolen told me during our interview he became a starter the fourth game of the season (against Michigan State), replacing Dee Ketchum, who injured his foot. Nolen never relinquished his starting position the remainder of season and his career, becoming the fourth black starter for Harp’s Jayhawks in 1960-61, a decision that broke the “gentlemen’s agreement,” an unwritten code about never starting more than three black players/playing more than three at one time. KU was a forerunner nationally in the recruitment of the Black athlete, led by their idealist and progressive young coach Harp. This was before Loyola of Chicago made history starting four black players in winning the 1963 NCAA title, and then when Texas Western, with its all-black starting lineup, beat all-white Kentucky (Rupp's runts) for the 1966 national championship.

Nolen (a Wigsman High School All-American at Wyandotte and two-time All-Big Eight player) and I connected again in 2007 for four hours as I drove with giddy anticipation from my home in Lawrence to his house in Kansas City, Kansas, where we then departed in Nolen’s car to the nearby Legends at Panera. He treated me to lunch while his older brother and former KU teammate, Butch, a Sumner High School graduate and JUCO All-American at Kansas City Kansas Community College. joined us during a large part of that talk, where Nolen and Butch shared their memories of playing for Dick Harp and many other topics. It was an afternoon I’ll never forget.

 

While we talked briefly a few times after this, I’m saddened that we didn’t connect and I wasn’t more active in reaching out until Nolen emailed me in March 2025 after Murray had read my blog post on KU’s 1960-61 team and shared that with Nolen. I then soon saw Nolen and his lovely wife and junior high sweetheart, Carole, at a Zoom call at 11 a.m. that Murray initiated. Nolen, who smiled when saying he was "spry" at his age, talked for an hour that day, again sharing his time and knowledge with me. It was so great to see and talk to him after all these years!

During our long and expansive conversation last April, Nolen told me I was a "rare entity in Lawrence, Kansas," with my work on my honors thesis and my knowledge of race and Kansas basketball history. He urged me to meet with Lawrence attorney and former KU hoops star Al Lopes and get my thesis copyrighted. I asked him why? Nolen replied: "Someone might use it the wrong way." He talked about how valuable the thesis was, how he had just re-read it (I made a copy for him many years ago), and how he had written notes all over it. Again, I was deeply humbled how he viewed me and how much this great man and educator believed in me, more than I actually believed in myself. 

Nolen also told me he was writing two books and was interested in my "editorial services." Again, I was deeply humbled that he trusted me so much to work with him. He also confided in me some very personal informational that he said he had never told his lovely wife.

During our talks last year, Nolen had spoke of coming to Kansas and meeting with me. He said that day in March, "This will require a face-to-face discussion when I'm out in Kansas so it requires that you and me to understand exactly what I'm saying and not talk in metaphors because that's the only way you can complete (your) book is to understand race at that level, feelings, faith, God."

Very sadly, that day never happened.

 

I attended his memorial service in Kansas City, Kansas, on August 9, 2025 at Thatcher Funeral Home, which was a beautiful tribute to this great man and his extraordinary life. Nolen, I treasure our time we shared together. I’m also forever grateful you took such a keen interest in me and my thesis, even calling me his “hero”  many years ago, a comment that deeply, deeply humbled me and blew me away. We both shared a strong and deep conviction in racial equality and social justice, something my progressive parents instilled in me. I know countless people viewed you as their hero, including me, and your legacy will always be a rich one for making a profound difference on people’s lives and society!

 

RIP.

 

Here is that 2002 Where Are They Now? story on the great and legendary Dr. Nolen Ellison with a few updates.

 

By David Garfield

            

It was, quite simply, two of the sweetest events in Nolen Ellison’s life.

            

Flash back 40 years ago to Dec. 29, 1962 at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City. In one of the greatest Big Eight basketball games ever, Ellison’s Kansas Jayhawks upset Kansas State in a four-overtime thriller, 90-88, for the Big Eight Holiday Tournament Championship. It was a magical evening for senior Ellison, who scored a career-best 32 points and dished out nine assists while playing the full 60 minutes. Remarkably, he tied the score at the end of each of three overtimes, and made the game-winning assist in the fourth OT. 

            

“It was obviously the game of my career,” Ellison recalled recently from his home in Kansas City, Kansas. “I got married the next day. My anniversary makes me remember that particular game. … Dick Harp (KU head coach) evidently thought I was doing the job out there on the court that night. That’s a game that will always stand out in my mind. Obviously, because of the anniversary, we get the chance to annually sort of commemorate that.”

            

Former Jayhawk teammate Harry Gibson will never forget Ellison’s commanding game, which one publication called at the time “arguably the most phenomenal performance ever by a Jayhawk.”

            

“He wouldn’t let the team lose,” Gibson told the Kansas City Star. “Every time we had a critical juncture, he made a key play.”

            

Indeed, he did. Ellison’s play that evening defined his sterling character and extreme competitiveness — both on and off the court. Yes, he was one of the best KU players of his generation, a two-time All-Big Eight selection (1962-63) who finished his memorable career as the No. 5 leading scorer (1,045 points) in school history (now No. 38). But Ellison achieved even greater heights after graduation from Mount Oread.

            

He eventually went on to become the president of a couple of urban community colleges in the country, and retired over a year ago as an endowed professor at UMKC. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Citation for outstanding contributions at KU in 1983, and in 1988, the Miller Co. identified Ellison as one of 12 outstanding educators for its "Calendar of Great Black Educators in the 20th Century.” Ellison credits his older brother, Butch (a KU teammate), junior high coach Jack Van Treece and Wyandotte high school coach Walt Shublom for helping him strive for greatness.

            

“(They) instilled this question clearly in my mind, in my motivation in athletics that was really part of the same motivation in life, that is to be the best “ Ellison said. “That issue came out clearly in that ‘62 game I’d like to believe that’s a part of my character and whom I am. “

            

The Kansas City native could do it no other way. Ellison, who was the first player in Kansas school boy history to play on three consecutive state high school championship teams, came to KU with great expectations. After coming off the bench for the first three games his sophomore year (1960-61), Ellison started the rest of the season. He averaged 7.9 ppg for Kansas, which went 17-8. It was a deeply talented team with people like 6-6 All-American center Bill Bridges and 6-8 forward Wayne Hightower.

            

“Those guys were phenomenal players,” Ellison said.

            

Unfortunately, KU struggled in Ellison’s junior and senior years. Without a legitimate big man, KU wound up going 7-18 in 1961-62 and 12-13 in 1962-63. Despite the losing records, Ellison flourished. He averaged 18.1 ppg during his junior season and 15.8 ppg his senior year. A quick guard who could shoot outside and take the ball to the hole, Ellison was also a defensive stopper. He only wishes his last two seasons would have been more successful.

            

“I missed playing with the truly big guys, and the truly big guys are what KU and every other team has needed to win the big games and national championships,” Ellison said.

            

Yet, he savors his time at KU and the relationships he built with former teammates and coach Harp. Ellison, 62, said he and Harp had an “exceptional relationship,” built in large part on their strong belief in racial equality and justice. A pioneer, Harp was an idealist with a deep social conscience. He recruited black athletes to Kansas at a time when the doors were closed in many programs throughout the country. Ellison was one of seven black players on the 1961 team, a number which was just unheard of in that era.

            

“Dick Harp was a wonderful human being,” Ellison said. “He was a good coach and a terribly tolerant coach who helped carry KU basketball into the 21st tradition, both with the recruitment of Wilt Chamberlain and opening for KU the real era of integrated basketball. He was a good shaper, molder of men, and he had a representative record there at the university.”

            

After graduating in 1963, Ellison was drafted in the fourth round by the Chicago Zephyrs (No. 29 overall pick). He turned down a professional basketball career to enter the educational arena.  Ellison first taught at Sumner High School in Kansas City for five years. A lifetime activist, Ellison was then elected to public office on the first board of trustees in Kansas City, Kan., where he served for a year and a half while also working in the city planning department. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April, 1968, Ellison decided to change directions and pursue his doctorate degree. He received a Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1971, and a year later became president of Seattle Central Community College. At just 31, he was one of the youngest college presidents in the country.

            

In 1974, Ellison became the president and chancellor at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. He enjoyed 18 years of service there before returning to Kansas City in 1991. After dividing his time as a visiting professor in urban affairs at UMKC and as a consultant to the Samuel Rodgers Community Health Clinic, Ellison took an appointment at UMKC as a Schutte professor of urban affairs. He was the Schutte chair from 1994 until his retirement in 2001.

            

It is certainly an impressive resume for Ellison and “kind of rounds out I think an interesting life of a young kid born in 1941 before World War II in Kansas City.”  Ellison has worked tirelessly over the years trying to make a difference for young people.

            

“The belief that change in society that goes all the way back to early civilization, has rested upon our ability to provide the kind, I think, of spiritual growth and educational opportunity for citizens,” Ellison said.  “The fact is my commitment to education as a life work has been in the sense a wanting to help and work with other young people to give them the same opportunity in life that I had.”

            

The former Jayhawk standout is now at peace back home in Kansas City. Ellison stays busy with volunteer work (outreach ministry programs, among his efforts) and is active in his Trinity African Episcopal Church. He looks back with great fondness over his college career, and, of course, that unforgettable four-overtime classic against K-State in 1962. Ellison was part of an underdog team that night who “who knew what it meant to sacrifice and win.”  

            

Off the court, he feels blessed that he married his junior high sweetheart at KU and that he and his brother were the first two graduates of his family.

            

“I think the crowning achievement for me when I really look back on it, I was absolutely elated to walk out of the University of Kansas in four years with a degree and with the athletic achievements that I had, and with the prospects for the future,” Ellison said. “The university experience for Nolen Ellison and his young family at the end of my senior year was nearly storybook in character. I think that’s why the transfer of something called achievement, character, personal outlook on life, all that stuff that shapes who an individual is, I think that all came together for me at the university, and I’m thankful to the university for the experience.”

 

A Closer Look at Nolen Ellison:

Years at KU: 1959-63

Career Notables:  All-Big Eight in 1962 and ‘63...Career-high 32 points on Dec. 29, 1962...Led team in free throw percentage in 1962 (81.1)...Member of Big 8 Holiday Tournament Championship team in 1962...Ended career as No. 5 leading scorer in KU history (now No. 38)...captain of 1962-63 team.

Family: Wife, Carole, sons Marc, 40, Steven, 37, and four grandchildren.

Education: 1963, B.S. Education (history and psychology); 1971. Ph.D. Higher Education and Leadership. Michigan State.

Since Leaving KU: Ellison taught at Sumner High School in Kansas City for five years before being elected to public office on the board of trustees, where he served for a year and a half while also working in the city planning department. In 1968, he went to Michigan State to pursue a master’s and doctorate degree. He was president of Seattle Central Community College from 1972-73. In 1974, Ellison became the president and chancellor at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. He enjoyed 18 years of service there before returning to Kansas City in 1991. After dividing his time as a visiting professor in urban affairs at UMKC and as a consultant to the Samuel Rodgers Community Health Clinic, Ellison took an appointment at UMKC as a Schutte professor of urban affairs. He was the Schutte chair from 1994 until his retirement in 2001.

Currently:  Ellison is retired and living in native Kansas City, Kan.

Hobbies: Reading and watching sports.

Favorite Memories: Playing with his older brother, Butch. “We were only the second brother team to play at the same time at KU. That was really kind of a special occasion for me as I reflect back on my KU years. We were the first and only black brothers that played there during that period of time, and came early on the front end of minority players there at the university.  That sticks out in our minds. We talk about it today an awful lot, the desegregation of colleges and universities and athletics. That’s the kind of distinction that will probably be there forever.”...”The opportunity to be enculturated in the KU tradition after Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Bridges, Ron Loneski. The football greats like John Hadl, Doyle Schick, Curtis McClinton, Burt Coan. I think when I arrived at KU as a freshman to see Allen Fieldhouse and know you were going to play, these were the impressions that really motivated and spurred me on to want to make a contribution at the university.”

On the Jayhawks Today: “Roy Williams is a wonderful coach. He continues to recruit wonderful kids, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed at some point that his wonderful coaching and wonderful kids are going to end up with another national championship.”

 

Dick Harp is my Hero

.                                                         KU Libraries Digital Collection
This article of mine was published in the Fall 2020 KANSAS! Magazine. I wanted to pay tribute to former KU basketball standout, assistant coach, and head coach Dick Harp as being a true pioneer and revolutionary. I fervently believe Dick has NEVER gotten the credit he justly has deserved as being a brilliant technician with "no superiors," said his assistant JerryWaugh (1956-60), and his pressure defense, which led Kansas to the 1952 NCAA title and revolutionized college basketball.

And ABOVE ALL, when Dick became head coach at KU in 1956, he began revolutionizing the college game with the recruitment of the black athlete. I learned about this in 1988 when I wrote my honors thesis my senior year at KU on Racial Participation and Integration in University of Kansas Men's Basketball: 1952-1975. By recruiting the best players, including the Black athletes before just about anyone else in the country, Dick was making a huge statement about racial equality and equal opportunity for equal ability. For that, Dick Harp is my forever hero!

 Bill Lienhard, who played under head coach Phog Allen and assistant coach Harp, with his senior year in '52 culminating in the national title and Olympic gold medal — and the late beloved father of my kind and sweet childhood friend and South Junior High tennis teammate, Amy, said of Dick after he passed in 2000:

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the college game has ever seen."

Bill, indeed Dick was! And he should never be forgotten for the contributions he made to not only his beloved alma mater, but to humanity and all of college basketball.

Dean Smith may have summed up Harp's character, integrity and who he was as a human being better than anyone, when he once called his former assistant coach at Kansas "one of the finest citizens this country has ever produced."

...

When Kansas basketball lost two straight games in 1952 and trying to find its identity, head coach Phog Allen called his brilliant assistant Dick Harp into his office and told him to change the defense. Harp's response was to institute a innovative pressure defense, propelling KU to 13 straight victories, culminating in the national championship (28-3 record) and revolutionizing college basketball.

Soon, Harp's defense was being adopted on other courts. San Francisco coach Phil Woolpert visited Lawrence in the summer of 1953 to study Harp's defense and then applied it in winning two NCAA titles with Bill Russell in 1955 and '56. Legendary UCLA coach John Wooden used Harp's defense and won a record 10 NCAA titles, including seven straight (1967-73). Wooden once said the "arrival of the Kansas pressure defense was one of the turning points in college basketball."

Harp, who did practically all the coaching in Allen's latter years and saw what the game was becoming, had already established a legacy as a true innovator and basketball genius before being tapped to replace Allen as head coach from 1956-64.

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the coaches the college game has ever seen," Bill Lienhard, a member of the 1952 Jayhawks, said in 2000 after Harp died.

Dean Smith, the late North Carolina Hall of Fame coach, once stated Harp "had the brightest basketball mind of everyone I've ever known." Smith, who also played on Harp's '52 team, wrote about that experience in his 1999 autobiography, A Coach's Life. "That team employed a great innovation: a pressure man-to-man defense that absolutely smothered opponents by overplaying. ...The idea was to cut off the passing lanes and make it hard to complete even the simplest pass. ...This was unheard of at the time, really the first instance of man pressure as we know it. And, Smith added, "The Kansas defense had a lasting influence on the game."

Now, more than 68 years later, virtually all college basketball teams play some version of Harp's defense.

Harp was also a great innovator in recruiting African American players in the early 1960s, when the majority of black athletes weren't given an equal opportunity. His former assistant coach, Jerry Waugh, respected how Harp's integration began with recruitment.

"How adamant Dick was when he took over (for Allen that) the black athlete would not be denied," Waugh says.

In 1962, only 45 percent of the country's collegiate teams had black players on their roster, and the average number of Blacks on integrated squads was just 2.2 Harp's 1959-60 team had four and his revolutionary 1960-61 team had seven, with four starters (a decision that defied unwritten codes to never play more than three Black athletes at any one time). This was five years before Texas Western made history with its all-Black starters beating all-white Kentucky for the 1966 NCAA championship.

An idealist, Harp was far ahead of his time. By comparison, the SEC didn't integrate until Perry Wallace became the first hoops player at Vanderbilt in 1968.

 Harp, a very religious man, also always brought equality to the pews by bringing his black players into white church services. "(He) integrated more churches in the United States than the Pope," Butch Ellison, a member of the 1959-60 and 1960-61 teams, said in 2007.

Kansas has many champions and legends. But Dick Harp should never be forgotten because of his revolutionary defense and unwavering commitment to racial equality.

— David Garfield

Border War brawl in 1961 almost ended bitter rivalry between KU and MU

I wrote about the Border War brawl in 1961 in my blog on May 1, 2019, when KU and MU almost ended the historic and bitter rivalry. Now, I revisit that piece with some new information.

...

The final game of the 1960-61 season against Missouri on March 11, 1961 proved the great “animosity” between KU and MU and served as a huge black eye for both schools and college basketball as one of the biggest and ugliest brawls in hoops history broke out in Columbia at Brewer Fieldhouse on national television.

Kansas had always faced hostility playing in Columbia, as did the Tigers when playing in Lawrence. The schools had a deeply rooted and violent rivalry which traced back before the Civil War to “Bleeding Kansas” with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. “Bleeding Kansas,” which historians like Williams Tuttle called the “nation’s battleground over slavery,” pitted pro-slavery forces from Missouri against anti-slavery forces from Kansas. Abolitionists like John Brown “made raids into Missouri and brought back men, women, children.”

Kansas eventually joined the Union as a free state in 1861 and Missouri a slave state.

In “True Sons: A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball,” Michael Atchison stated that “Missouri’s Constitution of 1875 mandated ‘separate but equal education’ that was anything but. White students were welcome at Mizzou while blacks were restricted to Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Black students who wished to take courses offered only in Columbia were not admitted to the university; rather, they were shipped out of state to integrated schools, with the state of Missouri paying their tuition.”

MU was not integrated until after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine in 1886. Al Abrams, a 6-5 forward, became the school’s first black scholarship athlete in 1956, four years after LaVannes Squires first suited up for Kansas.

“Dixie” had served as Missouri’s fight song until “Fight Tiger” started in 1946, while “for a time” MU’s “official policy prohibited competition against teams that included nonwhite members.”

While Missouri was still a backwards state, the Tigers were more progressive than Southern teams like Mississippi State, which did not integrate and have a black scholarship athlete until 1972.

With KU featuring six blacks on the roster (Ralph Heyward was academically ineligible the second semester) — a virtually unheard of number when the national average per integrated squad in 1960 was just 2.2 — the Jayhawks realized quite early before the game that Missouri fans were in no mood to celebrate diversity this afternoon.

The Jayhawks were target of racial slurs from the outset from the unruly fans, coaches, and players. MU’s band even played “Dixie” when the “Negro-laden KU squad was on the floor,” reported the Lawrence Journal-World’s Bill Mayer.

Butch Ellison, a KU African-American player on that team, said in an exclusive 2007 interview near his home in Kansas City that “nobody really knows” what happened that day.

“They were calling us niggers, spitting on us with (assistant coach) Norm Stewart right on the bench,” Ellison said. “Norm Stewart was sitting on the side (with head coach) Sparky Stalcup yelling nigger and spitting on us.”

Stewart’s actions pained Ellison, who considered him an idol while growing up in Kansas City when Stewart played for Missouri.

“That was the most disappointing thing to me because we didn’t have black role models,” Ellison said. “If a kid was a good ballplayer, that was your model.”

As the hostility mounted during the Border War (the tensions leading up to this always heated game escalated after KU’s 23-7 victory over No. 1 Missouri in Columbia the previous November was later forfeited, as well as its Big Eight championship to MU, after it was ruled that Kansas' standout halfback Bert Coan was ineligible due to a recruiting violation. KU supporters believed MU athletic director Gene Faurot turned the Jayhawks in.) and after MU’s Joe Scott was called for a flagrant foul against Nolen Ellison just before halftime, KU's Bill Bridges had a premonition something bad might happen in the second half.

As KU assistant coach Ted Owens wrote in his book, “At the Hang-up,” “At halftime, Bill Bridges said to coach (Dick) Harp, ‘I have been called the n-word all of my life and I can handle that, but if their players keep spitting on me, something is going to happen.'"

Bridges turned out to be a prophet. Five minutes into the second half, KU’s Wayne Hightower threw a punch at MU’s Charlie Henke following his second-straight hard foul at the Jayhawk star just by the KU bench and MU’s goal.

Henke retaliated with a swing at Hightower. Then it was mayhem.

Both benches cleared and fans — including about 15 MU football players — stormed the court.

“When it (brawl) it broke out, I had one person in mind, that knuckle right there (Butch Ellison pointed to his fist); I was going right for Norm Stewart,” Ellison said.

The heavyweight fight lasted nearly five minutes and the game (MU won, 79-76) was stopped for 10 minutes. 

“Fortunately, Bill Bridges cleared half of the court himself, for no one wanted any part of him, and order was finally restored,” Owens wrote.

Afterwards, Mayer wrote about his thoughts over the melee in Columbia:

“The MU folks stress they think Saturday’s brawl was KU’s fault and that the calling of names and spitting on KU players by MU players was OK. Yet no matter how how MU tries to don a ‘holy’ mantle, the fact remains the Tigers basketball teams have a league-wide reputation as hatchet-men, have been in a number of jams involving physical violence in recent years; generally are among the nation’s fouling leaders, have a home court which because of the crowd is considered by many the loop’s top snake pit. It’s hard to believe that just happens. And if it does, why isn’t there some obvious effort to change it.

“More and more, MU appears to be to the Big Eight what bellicose Russia is to the U.N. If MU doesn’t give evidence of good faith in an effort to clean its own house, maybe severance of the series would be a good idea. Good conduct like this has to be a two-way street.”

The idealist Harp had deep regrets over what happened.

“This is a tragedy,” Harp told the Journal-World after the game. “Competition as such is not the factor here. It is a matter of attitude. Let me emphasize. I’m not singling out Missouri. This condition has been prevalent on all levels, including high school, junior college and college. As yet I do not know the answer, but something must be done.”

Like perhaps canceling the series as Mayer wrote might have to happen?

KU athletic director Dutch Lonborg took on that issue with this statement to the Journal-World following the game:

“I feel that if this extreme bitterness continues between the two schools, we will have to discontinue playing each other, at least for a while.”

Owens certainly got a first-hand lesson over the bitterness between KU and MU that day.

“I left Columbia with a clearer understanding of the deep hatred that exists between the two states,” Owens wrote.

After order was restored in the Border War battle and MU won, this ended KU’s 10-straight wins versus the Tigers and costing the Jayhawks a chance to tie K-State for the conference championship. The MU win was also the first time Harp had ever lost to the Tigers.

That particular game left lasting wounds for some former Jayhawks, including Butch Ellison. He said he ran into Stewart one time years later when Ellison was an administrator at Washington High School in Kansas City and Stewart visited as MU head coach to recruit one of the black athletes.

“I said, ‘Norm, what are you doing here?’” Ellison recalled. “’Before any of our black kids ever go to Missouri, I will shoot him first. He will not come to Missouri.’ That was the last time I saw him (Stewart). He just turned and walked out. Turned red.”

For Ellison, seeing Stewart indeed brought back painful memories of that dark day at Brewer Fieldhouse in 1961.

“We were almost killed down there,” Ellison said. “I hadn’t been to Columbia since. When I’m on I-70, I don’t even look that way.” 

Tom Hedrick, the voice of the Jayhawks, was also scared of his life during the brawl.

“I didn’t think the fight would end before somebody got really hurt,” he told the Kansas City Star book, “Rivals: MU vs. KU.”

Steward also commented about the brawl and how MU was treated when it played in Allen Fieldhouse earlier in the year.

“When we played at KU, the booing was so loud that they could not play the national anthem,” Stewart said. “They were booing everything about Mizzou, because they blamed us (for turning in the Jayhawks and costing them to forfeit the football game).

“When they came to Columbia, the refs tried to prevent things from getting out of hand. They did for a while, but then the fight happened. There were 300 people on the court and they weren’t exchanging pleasantries. Everybody got it. It’s like bullets. They don’t put names on them.”

Butch Ellison certainly had a fist-full of "bullets" for Stewart.

KU’s promising 1960-61 season ends with disappointment and probation

While KU coach Dick Harp wanted his white players to “walk the extra mile” for their black teammates, he also hoped the black players like Maurice King would integrate with the whites and appreciate who they were as human beings. 

That happened one night when African-American player Butch Ellison “got on my knees to pray” as his roommate and white teammate Jerry Gardner looked on curiously.

“Jerry goes, ‘What are you doing?' Ellison recalled in 2007. “I said, 'I’m praying.’ He said, ‘We pray lying down in the bed.’ Since that time, I’ve been lying down in the bed praying. You do pick some little things up.”

Nolen Ellison, Butch’s younger brother, said that was one case where Harp would have rejoiced.

“Dick wanted these players to appreciate each other and to appreciate each other’s culture and to truly become brothers,” Nolen said.

Harp’s dilemma was even more difficult when the team was referred to in such ways as “four blacks and a brave (Dee Ketchum was a Native American).”

Nolen laughs at that reference now and said he didn’t hear that mentioned back when he played in the early 1960s. But the white players who belonged to fraternities such as Sigma Nu, whose chapter was known, Nolen said, as having the “most white right-wing conservatives in the country (and) notorious for racial attitudes, (they) “would hear that stuff.”

“(The white players were) getting mixed messages,” Butch added. “That never showed up on the floor, but they go back (to their frats) and hear that stuff.”

While Harp was doing his best to integrate his team off the court, he was also focused on making the 1960-61 squad one to remember. After starting just 3-3, KU won 12 of its next 14 games, including six-straight victories. The fifth-straight win was a convincing 88-73 victory over MU in Lawrence, where Wayne Hightower dominated with 36 points and 21 boards.

KU was now 7-1 in the league and tied with KSU for first place. The Jayhawks then took a one-game lead in the standings as Colorado beat K-State before KU blew out the Buffaloes, 90-62, in Boulder. K-State, though, crept back in a tie with KU after beating the Jayhawks, 81-63, in Manhattan.

With four regular-season games remaining, Kansas needed a strong push for its second-straight conference championship and third overall in the Harp era.

It didn’t happen. KU lost two of its last four, stumbling to a 10-4 record in the Big Eight (17-8 overall) and tie for second place as the Wildcats won the league.

The Jayhawks lost all life when they learned late in the season that they were put on probation and a one-year postseason ban after recruiting violations surrounding Wilt Chamberlain.

Assistant coach Ted Owens remembers the team’s sadness when they learned the news.

“The problem is we had a great team,” Owens told John Hendel in “Kansas Jayhawks: History-making basketball.” “We had Bill Bridges and Wayne Hightower and Jerry Gardner, who was an excellent guard. And Nolen Ellison and Dee Ketchum and Al Correll. We had dynamite talent.

“And I’ll never forget the day that Dick walked on the court and told them. It was a morale and spirit killer because that was a team that could done very well in the NCAA playoffs.”

Nolen Ellison, a sophomore, was quite angry with Chamberlain.

“(There were) strong feelings that Wilt had betrayed us,” Ellison said. “You take the car and you know that’s going to put the team in trouble. He couldn’t afford a ‘57 oldsmobile, flaming red. (He was a) poor kid. Where are you going to get money (for that car)? That started my career with being under a cloud. Dick called us all together and said we’ve been placed on probation. It was confusing and difficult to accept. (We didn’t have a) chance to stand on our own.”

Owens elaborated on the affects of the probation in his book, “At the Hang-up.”

“Although we finished second in the league, the 1960-61 basketball season was a bit of a disappointment because the expectations were so high after reaching the NCAA regional finals the previous year,” Owens wrote. “Knowing that the team was barred from the NCAA tournament, the players’ spirits had evaporated.”

The Jayhawker Yearbook noted the inconsistency of the team which plagued KU that season.

“When Kansas was ‘on,’ nobody could stop them; when cold the Hawks were a pushover. Consequently, the Jays bowed to two considerably weaker teams, thereby killing any hopes for a conference championship.

“The lack of a team drive at times, as well as the brawl at Missouri, could be in part attributed to the ... NCAA ban clamped on the KU basketball team. The ban hurt the attitudes of those holdovers from last year’s conference champs, who had dreamed of another NCAA tournament berth. Moreover, Missouri Athletic Director Don Faurot has been accused by many of instigating the NCAA probe — an accusation which has only heightened animosity between the two schools.”

KU’s 1960-61 team that changed the color of college basketball

I've always been fascinated with KU's 1960-61 team, which featured seven, yes, seven African-American players. I first learned about this team while doing research on my 82-page honors thesis at KU about racial participation and integration in Kansas basketball: 1952-75. I have this team picture on my wall at home next to my computer, a daily reminder of how strongly committed head coach Dick Harp was to social justice and racial equality. Harp should be greatly commended for his brave and courageous efforts in recruiting so many black players in an era where segregation ruled and many African Americans, especially in the South, were not allowed to be recruited to play college basketball. 

This 1960-61 team should never be forgotten by historians, basketball fans, and all humanity.

Dick Harp is my forever hero!

...

Three years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was instituted, five years before Texas Western— with five black starters beat all-white Kentucky for the NCAA championship — and nine years before racial and political unrest reached a crescendo in Lawrence, the young and idealist KU coach Dick Harp and the 1960-61 men’s basketball team were opening eyes and making a bold statement about racial justice and equal opportunity while changing the color of college basketball.

 

Led by Harp and first-year assistant coach Ted Owens (he replaced Jerry Waugh, who resigned to enter private business), the 1960-61 team and its seven black players (plus one Native American in Dee Ketchum) was virtually unheard of throughout college basketball at the time, an age in which many qualified black athletes were being shunned by college teams. Bill Mayer of the Lawrence Journal-World wrote that Al Correll (a black player on that team) once mentioned to him that Kansas may have been the only team in the country which had seven blacks represented out of its top 10 players.

In 1960, only 45 percent of college basketball programs had blacks on their rosters and the average number of blacks on integrated squads across America was just two.

Bob Frederick, a white player on that team and future KU athletics director who had a severe knee injury, just played one minute that season. He had no complaints with the black athletes getting the majority of minutes.

“All those fellows were better and deserved to play ahead of me,” he once told Mayer. “I felt privileged to be on the same squad and to get to know them as friends. No resentment about my lack of playing time.”

Butch Ellison, an African-American on that 1960-61 team, was aware of the changing color among his Kansas basketball team and decided to go public with a letter to the editor in Sports Illustrated in the April 4, 1960 issue. Ellison was commenting on a story SI wrote about the Negro (the word associated with blacks in that era) in baseball.

“I enjoyed it, first, because I am a Negro and, secondly, because I am an athlete,” Ellison wrote. “Your article touched on many of the problems of the American Negro in athletics today. On our basketball team here at the University of Kansas this past season, we had four Negro boys on the traveling squad, and next year there will be six and possibly seven. I am sure that everyone who read your article could not fail to be enlightened on the color problem. The one thing which seems most important to me is the quota of Negro athletes in sports, generally speaking. If (somebody) is good, it shouldn’t make any difference what color he is, and if the best nine players happen to be Negro, Chinese, Russian, or Mexican, I think that they they should the ones to play.”

Ellison said the letter got him on “bad personal footing” with Harp, who was proud about the amount of minority athletes on his team but worried about the reactionary and bigoted alumni.

“Dick called me in, he was getting repercussions from alums,” Ellison told me in 2007. “Everyone read that, all the KU alums. (I) never talked to Dick about that. As a 19-year-old kid, I didn’t know that was going to create hat kind of (uproar). ... Dick could not share with us what he was going through. It was risky.”

“It was risky” starting three or four blacks as well, but Harp opened the season with three black players in the starting lineup, including Correll, Wayne Hightower and Bill Bridges up front with Ketchum and Jerry Gardner in the backcourt. 

Expectations were high for the Jayhawks with Hightower and Bridges leading the way. Hightower, who was on some preseason All-American teams, was described by the Journal-World as the “do-everything willow wand.” 

And big things were also expected of Gardner, who could shoot, dribble, and pass with the best, although he needed to control his game to best suit his teammates. He was “touted as potentially the (best) all-around backcourt man in school history.”

“The Gardner, Ellison, Ketchum, (Grover) Marshall crew could be the best backcourt crew in the league, and one of the best in the nation,” the Journal-World added.

And then there was (Ralph) Heyward (another African American player) who got contact lenses in the preseason and was expected to have a “prominent role” on team. Earl Morey of the Journal-World called Heyward the “fastest,” Bridges the “toughest," Hightower the “most outstanding," and Correll “fanciest in around the basket.”

It would be up to Harp, who entered the season with a career 72-31 mark, to mold these men into winners and ideally fulfill his mission by bringing the two races closer together that season. Owens felt he was up for the task on the court.

“Practices under coach Harp were well-planned, which was a good lesson for me,” Owens wrote in his book, “At the Hang-Up.”

“At OU, coach Bruce Drake was a creative offensive coach, and now I could learn from coach Harp, a master of teaching half-court pressure defense. The varsity practices were intense, and we felt that we were positioned to make a run at the conference championship and an NCAA bid.”

After opening the season with an easy 86-56 home victory over Northwestern, KU traveled to Lubbock, Texas, to face Texas Tech. It was the Jayhawks’ first trip to Texas since the 1957 heated Midwest Regional, and Harp and his players were treated to a “vociferous crowd.” Ellison came off the bench to score a career-high 14 points in the second half as KU won 97-75.

He said the team was called “jungle bunnies.”

“We had never heard that before,” he said. “We ran them off the floor. Up and and down the floor, we jut out ran them.”

Mayer wrote that “KU displayed loads of passion de combat. ... But again, the important aspect of the game was the KU desire. If this is maintained, it could be a great season ---NCAA ban or not.”

Kansas didn’t seemed fazed by the “typical hostile Texas crowd of of 8,000.”

“All things considered, we were well treated at Lubbock,” Harp told the Journal-World. “That 1957 Dallas crowd was still the worst I’ve ever seen and though the one Monday was noisy and naturally for Tech, it wasn’t as bad as it might have sounded on the radio. The problem was that (KU announcer) Tom Hedrick’s radio booth was situated in the middle of a group of Tech rooters and everything was amplified out of proportion. I supposed some things that shouldn’t have, screeched through. They asked me afterward what I thought about the crowd and I told them that basically it wasn’t any better or any worse than the average crowd in our own Big 8. I’m sure there were ... unpleasant things. I did notice that several Texas Tech lettermen were in the group that seemed to cause the most furor, and I know the school wasn’t in favor of that, because it has some fine officials. But back to my original premise, we were well treated and accommodated at Lubbock. The boys didn’t mind the crowd, since we won.”

At 2-0 with a date at St. John's in Madison Square Garden in New York four days later,  observers already thought this team could be pretty special.

“Fact is,” Morey wrote, “many already suspect that with proper improvement, this year’s oufit could turn into one of the year’s finest teams ever for the school.”

A critical newcomer was learning the college game and would be in an instrumental player for KU this season with his play and also change the color of Kansas and college basketball. His name was Nolen Ellison (Butch's brother) and KU had high hopes for him despite his struggles in the first two games.

“Ellison hasn’t found the scoring range yet, but his coaches think he will,” the Journal-World wrote.

After coming off the bench the first five games, Ellison was inserted into the starting lineup after Ketchum sprained his ankle. Ellison never lost his starting spot the rest of the season and career, becoming a 1,000-plus point scorer and one of the most underrated and toughest players in KU history.

Reflecting back toward his career, Ellison told me in 2007 that Ketchum, whom he called an “interesting fella,” “made a mistake” by not trying to earn his starting assignment back.

(“I) thought I was a better player, but he was a senior and he accepted it in the same way, I was grateful as I look back that Jackie Robinson would have accepted Branch Richey (if he) would have said, ‘You’re not playing today.' ... He  might have hit three home runs yesterday.

“He (Ketchum) didn’t have the fight in the Native American today, they turned the other cheek. If you do that enough, a man will hit you hard. I felt bad about that, but he didn’t seem to mind.”

With Nolen Ellison starting now, that marked four blacks in the starting five. It was certainly unconventional in college basketball at the time as Harp experienced growing pressure about playing too many blacks.

George Ireland, the head coach at Loyola of Chicago, which beat Cincinnati two years later in the 1963 NCAA title by starting four blacks, said he was a pioneer in the race movement.

“I built the bridges many of those guys crossed,” Ireland told Street and Smith Magazine in 1978. “People don’t understand that now. The black (high school) kid can go on and play now and it is the accepted thing. In those days, it was not the accepted thing.”

Ireland said “there used to be a joke. You play one at home, two on the road, and if you’re behind play three.”

Ireland, who most historians give credit for bringing in a new era of integrated basketball, played four blacks on the court at the same time during the 1961-62 season while breaking the longstanding gentlemen’s agreement about not playing more than three blacks at any given time. He also was credited with fielding the first all-black lineup in a game against Wyoming in December 1962.

But historians have to look long, hard and clear at what Harp was doing in 1961 before Ireland in playing and starting the best players, and they happened to be four blacks. Also, the two coaches had contrasting personalities. They were both recruiting blacks to win games, but Harp seemed to being do so also to give blacks their shot at the American dream and an equal opportunity to success. He loved his players, and was color blind.

Ireland, meanwhile, was also color blind but didn’t have a true affinity for his players. He certainly wasn’t making a stand on principle for recruiting and playing so many blacks.

The Chicago Reader wrote in April 2012 that “Ireland wasn’t a civil rights activist; he cared about the civil rights of players who could help his teams win." He also wasn't beloved by his players. "George didn't see color," Jack Egan, the team's lone white starter, said at Ireland's funeral in 2001. "He hated all of us the same.”

Harp died a year earlier than Ireland in 2000, and hate was one word never used to describe the former KU head coach. Each of the mourners and his former players expressed extreme gratitude over the man who made such an indelible impact on their lives.

With Harp starting four blacks in 1961, this didn’t set well with alumni and boosters, who protested adamantly.

Harp sadly received threatening notes and criticisms for playing too many blacks.

“Sometimes an alumnus would come up to Harp and refer to the team’s black athletes as niggers, ‘and I’d get so mad I wanted to kill them,'” Harp told Sports Illustrated in 1968.

While Harp was confronted with racist boosters, he also became conscious of the racial slurs he heard in Allen Fieldhouse. During home games, Harp “heard certain sounds from the cheering sections whenever he started a few Negroes.

“They’d play Sweet Georgia Brown, the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme song, when our boys came on the court, or they’d take the Kansas yell — ‘Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU,’ and change it to ‘Rock Chalk, Blackhawk, KU.’”

For Harp, he knew he was doing the right thing by starting four blacks, but he also felt an internal struggle about offending the alumni.

Jack Olsen wrote in 1968 in SI that “Harp first began to think of quitting his job as Kansas coach on the day he found himself wondering whether it would offend the Kansas spectators if he started four Negroes.

“All four of them deserved to start, but the mere fact that I had to think about whether I should start that many brought me up short,” Harp said.

Olsen wrote that “Harp played the four and kept on playing them, but the insult of the fans and digs from the alumni wore him down. ... He could feel the pressure of a quota system and he did not want to be a part of it.”

While Harp encountered difficulty at home with boosters, he and his black players faced even more prejudice and discrimination when his team ventured to such southern schools as Texas Tech.

“I never even calculated (what blacks) were on those other (Big Eight) teams, but I know when we got to Texas Tech, we were slipping in the back doors to restaurants because we couldn’t go in the front door,” Nolen Ellison said.

That was the plight of the black person in America in the early 1960s. He was still viewed as inferior to whites, particularly in the Jim Crow South. And even in 1960, historian William Tuttle said “Lawrence was still a segregated town.”

He wrote in “Beyond John Brown: The Story of Race Relations in Lawrence," that Joanne Hurst, who grew up in Lawrence during the 1940s and 50s, was sickened by the treatment of blacks. She “remembered ‘sitting in the balcony of the three theaters we were allowed to attend, balcony only; and I remember that the Granada Theatre was off limits completely, and when it was finally opened to us, white lines were painted on the back of the seats to identify our section. I would go without seeing a movie for the rest of my life before I would subject myself to the humiliation of  sitting in a seat with a white stripe on it.’”

And that wasn’t the worst for Hurst and many other blacks in Lawrence in 1960.

When Hurst was pregnant “about to deliver, she was placed in a bed in the hallway of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. It wasn’t that rooms were unavailable. But she was told that ‘the black rooms on the obstetric floor were all filled up and so it’s the hall for you, young lady.’”

A transformation in race relations eventually came to Lawrence to lift the city and university out of dark and troubled times.

“Much change, including progress in race relations, would come in the 1960s both to Lawrence and the University of Kansas. And in the decades since, the people of the community have tried to build on these victories to ensure that racial equality, once achieved, would endure,” Tuttle wrote.