At the heart of the magnificent Kentucky scoring machine is a young man who plays the game with an inborn skill polished to incredible perfection by long hours of practice. There is no distraction powerful enough to break through his devotion.
Published in Sport Magazine, March 1949, pp. 16-19, 72, 75-77
by ED FITZGERALD
ALL the way from Washington to Lexington, the train had limped laboriously through the countryside, chugging breathlessly up the rolling hills and moving lazily across the flat. Then, when it finally poked its nose into the blue-grass country, it shuddered like a tired old thoroughbred retired to stud and going home to graze. Its ears flattened back and its heart began to pound crazily as it gathered itself for the homestretch gallop. Over the familiar ground it raced, swaying from side to side, bound and determined to roar into Lexington in a genuine grandstand finish.
As the brakes squealed and the train, blowing hard, drew up alongside the platform, an old gentleman popped out of a drawing room at the end of the car and strode down the aisle. Under a shaggy white mustache, his mouth was spread in a wide smile. A bottle of bourbon whiskey was in his hand and he was followed closely by a grinning porter carrying a tray full of paper cups filled with water.
"Step this way !" bellowed the old boy. "Have a glass of bourbon with me, gentlemen ! Finest drink known to man. A little bourbon, then all out for Lexington, Kentucky, the capital of the whole dang world!"
 |
Before the start of the current season, the University of Kentucky Wildcats, operating out of their Lexington base under the command of Colonel Adolph Rupp, had piled up an almost unbelievable three-year record of 98 victories against eight measly defeats. One of the main reasons for their success is a young man, practically a midget by present-day basketball standards, whose name is Ralph Beard, and who may very likely be the finest player in the game today.
To see this 21-year-old prodigy, whose flabbergasting feats with a basketball have played a tremendous part in the building of the Kentucky basketball dynasty, it's almost necessary to go to the University gym. If he isn't in class or eating, the chances are he's out on the polished hardwood floor, practicing with the team or just shooting baskets by himself.
Ralph was waiting in the gymnasium building, sitting in the athletic office. He got to his feet with a quick grin and held out a hand that gripped yours as though it meant to be really friendly and not just polite. Instead of acting important, he started off by thanking us for going to the trouble of making the long trip to Lexington to see him. He asked - and seemed to expect - no thanks for giving up his whole Saturday to posing for a photographer and talking to a reporter.
As we walked across the gym floor, on the way to the locker room one flight down, where Ralph was to put on a varsity uniform for the pictures, it was impossible to keep from wondering how a fellow his size had gotten to be such a great star in a game that has been virtually taken over by members of the six-foot-six-and-up club.
 |
Not that Beard is a runt. He's a solidly built five-foot-ten and a half, with 160 pounds evenly distributed over his wiry frame. For a baseball player, that's a pretty good size. It's not too bad for a football player. For a bowler, it's swell; for a golfer, perfect. But for a basketball: player, it's a serious handicap. It is not necessary to be as huge as Bob (Foothills) Kurland of the Phillips Oilers to get along in basketball today, but it sure helps. Most college coaches figure the only thing you can do with a varsity candidate under six feet is throw him back in and hope you catch a bigger one on the next cast.
It's a good thing that Adolph Rupp, the big, expansive, smart Wildcat coach, didn't feel that way when he got his first look at Beard. He would have lost the cleverest playmaker, the finest guard, and one of the greatest scorers of the day if he had chased Ralph out of Alumni Gym.
At that, it was a shock to learn that Kentucky almost did lose this gifted youngster before he ever put on a Blue and White basketball suit. I'd heard rumors to the effect that something like that had happened, so it was one of the first things I asked Ralph. He answered frankly, with the complete honesty and lack of inhibition that characterized his attitude all through our day-long session.
"That's right," he said, yanking a white jersey over his thick brown hair and tugging it down. "I left school once in my freshman year, but not for long."
"What happened?"
He reached for a pair of trunks, blue ones, with white piping. He grinned. "Coach Rupp wouldn't like me mixin" uniforms like this. We once did it, and lost a couple of games. Now he makes us wear all blue or all white. But I don't have a clean blue shirt, so I'll have to take a chance." He sat down on the bench and pulled on a pair of white sweat socks with blue tops. "Anyway, what happened was that I played on the football team in the Fall of my freshman year and - "
'"On the varsity?"
He nodded. "Yes, sir. I played halfback. But I got a shoulder separation after the fourth game of the season and I had to quit. When I couldn't play any more, everything seemed to get mixed up and I finally decided the heck with it, I'd go home. So I packed my things and went home to Louisville. When I woke up the next morning, I went down to the University of Louisville and enrolled there."
What Ralph means when he says "everything got mixed up" is that he resented a remark made by one of the Kentucky coaches at a practice after he was hurt. "Nobody on this squad," growled the coach, "has any guts." Beard took the crack as a personal affront and blew his top, promptly quitting not only the team but the school as well.
"What happened next.?" I asked, wondering meanwhile if Adolph Rupp didn't still wake up in the middle of the night every once in a while in a cold sweat, thinking about how he'd once almost let this brilliant kid get away from him.
Ralph grinned and shrugged his shoulders. "I didn't stay. My old high school coach found out about it and called Coach Rupp and everybody started talking to me and I decided to go back. So the next day I did and that was all there was to it. I never did really go to Louisville. I just enrolled there."
"You glad you came back here?" I asked. It was a loaded question and I knew it, but I figured I'd ask it anyway.
Ralph looked a little surprised. "Oh, yes, sir," he said, seriously. "This is the greatest school in the world. I love it."
And that makes it mutual, because the University of Kentucky certainly loves Ralph Beard. You can't take two steps with Ralph in the gym, on the campus, or on the streets of downtown Lexington, that three or four people don't start hollering and waving at him. He's as popular in Lexington as Man o' War.
With good reason, too. In the first three years of Beard's basketball career at Kentucky, the Wildcats roared to the very top of the national rankings. They won the Southeastern Conference championship each of those years, won the National Invitation Tournament in '45-'46, were runners-up at the NIT in '46-47, and won the NCAA championship in '47-48. They won 28 games and lost two when he was a freshman, won 34 and lost three when he was a sophomore, and won 36 and lost three when he was a junior. A coincidence? Perhaps.
 |
Ralph scored 278 points his first year, 392 his second, and 478 his third. What more he could have done, besides stoke the gym furnace and teach a course in English Literature, is not clear.
It would not be sensible to imply that Beard accomplished all those wonders himself. He had a lot of help winning those championships, help from such magnificent players as Alex Groza, Bob Brannum, Jack Tingle, Kenny Rollins, Jim Jordan, Joe Holland, Wah Wah Jones, Cliff Barker, and others. But the guys who have played with him at Kentucky would be the last ones to deny that Beard's catlike grace, split-second playmaking, defensive tenacity, and scoring prowess have carried the club through many a crisis it would not otherwise have survived.
Beard is that 1949 rarity, a complete basketball player. He's not seven or eight feet tall, so he can't be a basket-hanger or a goal-tender or any of the other strange types you see all too often on the courts today. He's just an average-sized guy who beats the brains out of the big boys by out-running them, out-smarting them, and out-shooting them. If there were more athletes like Beard playing the game, there would be fewer critics yapping that basketball is just volleyball with people watching.
There's an old saying around Lexington that the doorway to Baron Rupp's little office behind the gym is six feet, two inches high, and that the Baron accepts no basketball candidates who don't bump their heads on the way in. But since Beard has taken charge of the school's cherished record of basketball success so convincingly, it's possible that Rupp will start throwing out the guys whose heads do bump, If he could turn up any more Beards that way, it would be a good idea
Unhappily for Mr. Rupp, and happily for his Southeastern Conference rivals, who have just about forgotten what it feels like to put an occasional slug on Kentucky, you don't turn up a Ralph Beard very often. It takes a certain inimitable set of circumstances, a certain elusive mixture of chemicals, to produce a Beard.
You watch Ralph play the game, watch his unselfish devotion to the welfare of the team show itself in his reluctance to shoot too much and in his delight in setting up goals for the other guys, and you watch his unquenchable desire to win boil over in a surge of explosive activity on the court, and you wonder what went into the making of such a player. You wait until the game is over and you wait until the player is showered and dressed and then you go off with him to a quiet restaurant and you talk to him about it. You're glad that his best girl came along because you figure you'll find out more about what he's really like with her there to make him feel at ease.
Ralph looked at his cup of steaming soup, picked up a spoon, and started in. Between spoonfuls, he talked, answering questions and adding little comments of his own, turning to trade good-natured jibes with Ginger Bowman, the pretty Kentucky senior whom he's been dating for three years and who is 'undoubtedly an important figure in his future plans.
"I'm not kidding," he said. "I could talk about basketball all day. I just love it. I can't get enough of that game."
That's one of the qualities you must start with if you have any ideas about manufacturing Ralph Beards on a mass-production basis. Basketball is the biggest thing in his life, and has been ever since he was a kid in the little town of Hardinsburg, Kentucky.
"I'll tell you the truth," he grinned. "I started shootin' baskets when I was just a baby. My mother claims the first thing I used for a goal was my little old pottie. I wasn't a heck of a lot older, either, when I 'got my first real basket hung on the garage door. From then on, I was all set. We used to play some great games out there in the alley. We'd choose up sides as soon as we got out of school and go to it."
"When did you first get to play on a real team?"
Ralph waited while the waitress picked up the soup cups and replaced them with plates buried under broiled T-bone steaks and french fried potatoes.
"In 1940," he said. "I played for the Hardinsburg High School team and we went to the state tournament. Lost in the second round. The year after that, though, we didn't lose until the finals of the regional."
I stopped writing and pointed to the steak. "Go on and eat. The questions can wait."
"Go on and ask 'em," Ralph said, picking up a fork. "The two things I like to do best are talk about basketball and eat, and I can do 'em both at once. Can't I, Ginger ?"
Ginger just smiled.
"What's your favorite food?" I wanted to know.
Ralph dropped his fork. "There isn't much I don't like to eat," he assured me.
This time, Ginger laughed out loud. "That's the truth," she said.
"Did you play any other sports in high school?"
"Yes, sir." (The "sir" came on the end of almost every sentence.) "I lettered in four sports - football, basketball, baseball, track. That was at Male High in Louisville. I went there my last two years. You see, the family moved to Louisville when I was fourteen."
Which was an excellent break for Male High School in Louisville. In Ralph's senior year, the school won the state basketball championship for the first (and, so far, only) time in its history. Wherever Beard goes, basketball championships naturally seem to follow. It can't all be accidental.
Male High, incidentally, gets its name from the fact that there are no girls at all in the student body. When you meet Ginger Bowman, you can understand why Ralph is glad the U. of Kentucky is co-ed.
As the steak disappeared and the conversation picked up speed, it was possible to piece together a good picture of this youthful prince of American basketball players.
Ralph's father and mother have been divorced since he was six - which is one of the reasons he's eager to start making some money out of basketball as soon as he graduates. His mother has been working for a long time to help him get an education. Right now she's the head of the alteration department in Byck's Department Store in Louisville. His father, who has remarried, lives in Dallas, Texas, where he has a factory that manufactures celluloid bags. Ralph lives in a Louisville apartment house with his mother and his 17-year-old brother, Moorman, but he's on good terms with his father, too.
His father has seen him play only twice - once when Male High won that state championship and once when Kentucky played an exhibition game against the Oilers at Tulsa, Oklahoma, last summer. His mother sees him play a lot. She catches all the games at the Louisville Armory, an 8,000-seat hall where the Wildcats play a lot of their home games, and she frequently drives over to Lexington to watch the games there.
Incidentally, the Kentucky gym seats only 4,000 people and demand for tickets is so great that only half the student body is allowed to see each game. The two halves have to alternate, as do the townspeople and the faculty.
You wouldn't say Ralph is handsome, but he certainly is nice-looking. He looks like a bigger Mickey Rooney - without the freckles. He wears his hair chopped off close to the scalp, which adds to the general youthfulness of his appearance, but he's extremely careful of his clothes. When I met him in the lobby of the Hotel Lafayette in Lexington, for dinner he was wearing a handsome blue wool suit, a white shirt with button-down collar, red bow-tie with tiny white polka dots, a gray gabardine topcoat, and a brown felt hat. You could tell by looking at him that he didn't just throw his duds on. He'd thought about it first.
"Clothes are my hobby," he confessed, over coffee. "Especially sport clothes - jackets and shirts."
"You got a lot of them?" I wanted to know.
He looked at Ginger, who nodded vigorously. "Well," said Ralph, unwilling to go overboard, "I'd say I got a fair share of them."
According to Ginger, he's got enough sport shirts to stock a store. "All different colors," she says, "They're his weakness."
Everybody, including Ralph, agrees that another of his big weaknesses is ice cream. He doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke but he's a sucker for a plate of ice cream. In fact, if the campus legends about him are to be believed, a plateful of ice cream is only a teaser for Beard. He likes to eat it out of a good-sized cereal bowl.
All the boys on the team like to tell about the time Ralph had a bad game against Notre Dame at the Louisville Armory during his freshman year. He succumbed to stage-fright and played terribly.
"Boy, I just blew my top," he told me. "I went right out of my mind."
Whatever happened, he didn't do much against the Irish. It was his first game with the Wildcats before the hometown folks and he tried too hard. He was wound up like an eightday clock and he never did shake the tension.
When the boys got back to Lexinglon, Coach Rupp took Beard aside and talked to him like a Dutch uncle. "You were all tightened up over there," said the easy-talking coach. "You forgot to relax. You gotta learn to take it easy, don't let it get you down. I think you been workin' too hard and I think it would do you a lot of good to get out and enjoy yourself for a couple of days. Don't show up for practice. Break training. Give yourself some fun, you hear?"
Ralph nodded soberly and took off. He thought over what the coach had said about breaking training, and headed downtown.
Two hours later, Jack Tingle and Jack Parkinson, two of the other basketball players, spotted him in a Lexington hangout. They stared at him in amazement. They couldn't believe their eyes. Flatly ordered to break training, Ralph was sitting at a table working his way through a heaping order of cherry pie a la mode !
Tingle and Parkinson walked away, shaking their heads. "Well," said Tingle to his partner, "it is between meals, you know!"
Ralph laughs when you repeat such stories to him, but he points out that the legend of his passion for physical fitness has by now gotten out of hand. "I believe in keeping in shape all year 'round," he says, "but the guys make up an awful lot of those stories."
Which could be, but one thing is for sure. Nobody ever caught Ralph Beard in a gin mill or buying a pack of cigarettes. He doesn't care if the State of Kentucky does make a lot of money out of selling tobacco and bonded bourbon. They're not going to get rich off him.
FOR recreation, Ralph and Ginger go bowling a couple of nights a week at the Colonial Bowling Lanes, where Ralph usually scores around 150 or 160 and Ginger generally rolls around 130. His highest game to date is 198; hers is 148.
They're both crazy about the movies and go frequently. "Whenever there's a new picture in town," Ralph says. They agreed that the best pictures they'd seen lately were "Good Sam" and "Johnny Belinda." They were disappointed in "The Babe Ruth Story" - especially Ralph.
Dancing is also on their list but not as often as bowling or the movies. All in all, they have two or three dates during the week, when they're at school, and several more over the weekend. When they're home, it's not so easy. Vine Grove, where Ginger lives, is 40 miles from Louisville and Ralph can get to see her only when he can borrow his grandfather's car. "I can generally get it on weekends," he said, "but not during the week. So that kind of cuts it down."
Ralph insists he's not thinking of getting married until he graduates but he doesn't say anything about afterward. He makes it plain that he intends to take the best pro offer he can get and stick to the game at least for a couple of years. "I want to get enough money put away to start a business of my own," he told me. "I don't care if it's only a peanut stand, as long as I own it."
He told me he definitely will not sign with the Phillips Oilers, the fabulous amateur team that boasts such stars as Bob Kurland and Gerald Tucker. School gossip is that Alex Groza, the Kentucky center, is already committed to the Oilers - and a lot of newspapers around the country have been hinting broadly that Beard intends to follow the same path. But Ralph says no. "I'd rather play pro," he says. "I think it'll be better for me."
BECAUSE of the player draft in effect in the principal pro league, the Basketball Association of America, he can't very well pick his team. But he did tell me that he doesn'think he'd like to play for the New Yurk Knickerbockers.
"Their coach, Joe Lapchick, wrote a magazine article a few months ago saying I was too small to play pro basketball," he recalled. "I don't believe I'd like to play for the Knicks after that." He must have been thinking about it for a while because out of a clear blue sky, a few minutes later, he shook his head and said, "I don't see why he said that." It seemed to bother him a lot.
This business of size is tremendously important to Ralph. One way or another, it hits him at almost every' turn. Basketball is so much a big man's game today that it's nothing less than startling to see a player well under six feet get to the top. So, on the one hand you find experts saying Beard had to be twice as good as the beanpoles to get where he is. On the other hand there are those, like Lapchick, who claim he's a good college player but not big enough to pull that stuff with the professionals.
By "that stuff" they mean the slick, scientific passwork he sets in motion, the dribbling artistry, the lightning cuts into the basket, and the deft layup shots he executes so beautifully. Even the skeptics don't say Ralph's deadly eye for set shots wouldn't be as useful in the pro game as it is in college competition - but they do mourn that the rest of his marvelous skill would be considerably diminished because he lacks the altitude that has become so commonplace in the game.
Maybe they're right. But Beard figures the burden of proof is on the guys who think they can hold him. He's been hearing this "too small" routine all his life, but nobody's been able to make it stick yet and he doesn't think they can start now. He can hardly wait to get into a big-time pro uniform and start proving his case.
Ralph hasn't given up playing baseball, at which he excelled as a schoolboy, even though basketball is the big sport on his list now. He holds down the second-base job on the Kentucky varsity and does a lot of hitting for the Wildcats. Last year, for instance, his batting average was a potent .365. Anybody who can hit like that, even in college competition, is grist for the major-league mills - and Ralph is no exception. He has been approached several times by scouts eager to get his name on a contract.
So far, they've all been turned down. He has no desire to swap a bird in the hand for two in the bush. "Anyway," he says, "I've also had an offer to play semi-pro baseball next Summer in North Carolina and I think I can make more money doing that than I could in organized baseball."
It's entirely possible that the Army might step in and change some of Ralph's plans for the future, as it has a habit of doing with young men in their early twenties. So far, Beard has missed military service because of a chronic hay-fever condition from which he suffers. But he does belong to a National Guard outfit in Louisville, where he's a private in a radar unit. He drills at the armory there every Thursday night.
That hay fever isn't funny to Ralph. He gets it every year, especially in the Spring. And no matter what he does for it, he can't get rid of it until the attack runs its course. He's tried pills, injections, medicines, and everything else anybody has ever recommended to him - but he still gets it.
Ralph chews gum incessantly while he's playing basketball. The folks around Lexington anJ Louisville wouldn't recognize him if he didn't have a big wad of it stuck in his jaws while he was racing up and down the floor. He uses two giant-size wads a game, switching over between the halves.
Despite the fact that Ginger's father runs a Kaiser-Frazer automobile agency back in Vine Grove, Ralph boldly admits that his favorite car is an Oldsmobile. He hopes to get one pretty soon after his first pro pay checks start rolling in.
Like most Kentuckians, he thinks Happy Chandler, former Governor of the state and United States Senator from Kentucky, now the Commissioner of Baseball, is quite a guy. He admits Happy has his faults but thinks his virtues outweigh them. And he doesn't think the New York City sportswriters, who make a game out of blasting Chandler from pillar to post, are fair about it.
He likes to tell of Happy's red-hot interest in U. of Kentucky athletics and how he comes to the basketball games every time he gets a chance. In Ralph's sophomore year, Happy took in a game just before Christmas. That was in 1946. Between the halves, they turned out all the lights in the gym and threw a spotlight on Commissioner Chandler as he walked to the center of the floor. As every eye in the place grew damp, Happy's excellent voice rang out in a stirring rendition of "White Christmas." It was a big night in Alumni Gym.
Ralph also had a few words to say about the attitude people in the rest of the country have about Kentuckians in general. "No kidding," he said, laughing, "I'll bet they think we all run around down here in bare feet and torn overalls, with a brown stone jug over our shoulders, dodging revenooers."
I told him I didn't think that was so. I wanted to know how come, if such a fear existed, the University's basketball team carried a cheerleader dressed exactly like that on its big road trips. I had him there, I guess; at least, he didn't have a comeback.
Ralph doesn't do much reading that isn't directly concerned with sports, but he does a lot of that. He remembered just about every article that had ever been printed in SPORT Magazine and discussed a number of them with enthusiasm.
YOU can tell what holds Ralph's interest when you walk into his living quarters on the second floor of Kinkead Hall, one of the men's dormitories on the Kentucky campus. He and Roger Day, another Wildcat basketball player, share a two-room layout consisting of a study and a bedroom. The boys have a table and chair apiece in the study, twin beds and twin dressers in the bedroom. They each have a closet, too.
The walls are profusely decorated with pictures of pin-up girls and famous athletes, with the athletes holding a slight edge at the last count. I saw color photos of such basketball notables at Ed Macauley of St. Louis, Kevin O'Shea of Notre Dame, Bob Kurland of the Oilers, and George Kaftan of Holy Cross.
I looked for a picture of Ginger but didn't find it. So I asked Ralph why he didn't have one. Sheepishly, he pulled it out of a dresser drawer. He doesn't care if somebody swipes a picture of Ed Macauley or Kevin O'Shea, much as he admires them, but he doesn't want anybody borrowing Ginger Bowman's picture. That's not the same thing at all.
Ralph does a lot of hard work in that study, especially when the team comes back from a long road trip. Assignments have a way of piling up when you're out riding airplanes and trains and playing one-night stands all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. "The profs help us a lot, though," he explained. "If we miss exams, they give us make-up tests. They don't try to make it tough for us, though they sure could if they wanted to."
No campus fraternity can claim Ralph Beard as a member. He's just about the biggest man on the campus, and every fraternity at Kentucky would hock its furniture to get him, but he has steadfastly refused all bids. I was tremendously interested in his explanation.
"It's hard to say what I mean without sounding pretty conceited," he said quietly. "But the way I see it a fellow who gets to play for his school, and gets a lot of publicity that way, ought to belong to the whole school, not just a little part of it. You join a fraternity and you're sort of in a clique, away from everybody else. I think you lose a lot more than you gain."
A level-headed young man, this Ralph Beard.
Like most of the athletes, Ralph is at Kentucky on a scholarship. And, in common with all the Southeastern Conference schools, the Kentucky officials don't in the least mind telling you exactly what they give him. Beard gets free room, board, tuition, books, and laundry - and $10 in cash each and every month. He gets along comfortably on that deal but has so far been unable to acquire a new Cadillac convertible as do some of the athletes at institutions that tell you haughtily they give no assistance whatever to their halfbacks, forwards, and shortstops, all of whom "just happen to come here."
Honesty is still considered a virtue, and hypocrisy an evil, at the oldfashioned University of Kentucky.
Although he has a thousand wonderful memories left over from his journey to London with the United States Olympic Team last Summer, and he's plenty proud of the gold medal he won as a member of the championship basketball squad, Ralph doesn't list the Olympics as his biggest sports thrill. The Olympics, however, had something to do with the event he picks.
When the final round of the Olympic Basketball Trials was reached last March at Madison Square Garden in New York, it was Kentucky versus the Phillips Oilers. The champions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association against the champions of the AAU. College boys against college graduates.
Despite the fact that everybody knew it was going to be the game of the year, a classic struggle of titans, there was a good deal of feeling against the game. A lot of people didn't think it was fair for the Olympic Basketball Committee to force college kids to play against men who were so much older and more experienced, who were in effect being paid for jobs they did only part-time, and got only because they were hotshot basketball players.
But Ralph Beard, Kenny Rollins, Joe Holland, Alex Groza, Jim Line, Wah Wan Jones, and the other Kentucky boys didn't bother themselves about such trifles. All they knew was that this was a basketball game they wanted to win. This was the big one.
The game that was played before a packed house in the famous New York arena that night became Ralph Beard's greatest thrill in sports. He says he'll never forget it, and no wonder. Guarded at various times by such great players as Lew Beck and Jesse Renick, he was absolutely unstoppable. He fought like a tiger for possession of the ball, took charge of the Kentucky attack with undeniable authority, hung like a leech on the Oilers he guarded, and tossed the ball at the basket with unerring precision. He has scored more points in other games, but never has he turned in a more magnificent performance.
Sure, Kentucky lost - just as everybody expected it would. But the Wildcats went down fighting, refusing to concede a thing to an obviously superior force. And Ralph Beard won the hearts of 18,000 people who saw him struggle like a caged lion in a lost cause, scoring an amazing 23 points against a team rated as the greatest unit active in the sport today.
No wonder Ralph says it was his greatest game. It was an exhibition Hank Luisetti would have been proud of.
The Kentucky boys had four shots at the Oilers last year - one in the Olympic Trials and three on a fundraising tour for the benefit of the Olympic fund - and won only one of them. But in every one of the games, win or lose, Ralph Beard's stature increased. It became plain to everyone who saw him play against Kurland, Tucker, and Company, that Beard had everything any basketball player could be asked to have.
One of the four games with the Oilers was played before the home folks in Lexington. To accommodate the huge crowd that wanted to see the game, the Olympic authorities arranged to have the removable floor at the Louisville Armory trucked to Stoll Field, the University's football stadium, and set up in the center of the big arena. The largest crowd ever to see a basketball game in the South - 14,000 persons - poured into the stadium for that one. Tickets in the good sections were selling around town for as high as $50 a copy.
IT'S no accident that Lexington is so basketball-conscious. It got that way because of boys like Ralph Beard, boys who grew up with a basketball in their hands and who slip through the mechanics of a pick-off play as easily as you walk across the living-room floor to turn on the radio.
Only once, incidentally, has Ralph ever been hurt playing basketball. That happened last year, when Kentucky was at the Cincinnati Music Hall for a game with the University of Cincinnati. A temporary basketball floor was erected several feet above the actual floor of the building and at one end there was a gap where the boards didn't quite reach the wall. Racing in for a layup, Ralph fell through that hole.
The fall pulled several leg ligaments on him and as a result he missed half a dozen games. What hurt him most was that he was able to play only two minutes against St. John's in the one regular-season appearance the Wildcats made in Madison Square Garden. But he made up for it when the boys returned to the Garden for the post-season tournaments.
When you talk to the people at the U. of Kentucky about the way Ralph Beard plays basketball, when you ask them what they think of his talent, you're very likely to hear the story of what Ralph did in his first National Invitation Tournament in March, 1946, the year he was a freshman. Kentucky went up against Rhode Island State in the final round of that tournament and it was a close game all the way. Close right down to the final wire. First one team would push ahead by a point or two. Then the other would close the gap. The overflow crowd was in a lather. The clock was counting off the final minute of play, and the two teams were deadlocked at 45-45, when Beard was fouled.
There were 40 seconds to play - less than a minute - when the referee called the foul. The Garden was a madhouse. Everybody in the place was on his feet, yelling either from joy or despair. Everybody was excited. Everybody was nervous.
Everybody, that is, except Ralph Beard. Without a wasted motion, without taking an extra moment to compose himself, the 18-year-old freshman stepped up to the foul line, took aim, and sank the free throw that gave Kentucky the game and the championship, 46-45.
"That," they'll tell you around Lexington, "is the way Ralph Beard plays basketball."
The way Ralph plays basketball is so clearly the best way that he has accumulated a flock of trophies and awards in his years at Kentucky. He has been named All-Southeastern Conference guard every year he has played for the Wildcats. In his sophomore, year, the Kentucky AAU awarded him a trophy as the outstanding amateur athlete in the state. Also in his sophomore year, the New York Basketball Writers Association gave him their gold medal as the best visiting player to appear in Madison Square Garden all year. SPORT Magazine's Board of Experts named him as the Top Performer in basketball for 1947 and gave him a handsome watch emblematic of the award.
For that matter, Ralph has more watches than he knows what to do with. He got one from SPORT, one for being a member of the winning team in the '46 National Invitation Tournament, one for being a member of the runner-up team in the '47 National Invitation, and another for being on the NCAA championship club last year.
He wears the watch the NCAA gave him. The others he keeps home.
Ralph doesn't need a watch to keep time when there's a good swing band giving out anywhere in his neighborhood and he has a confederate in Alex Groza, the big Kentucky center. He and Alex generally manage to hear some top music in every town they visit on their road trips.
Right now Ralph and the other Wildcats are living for the day when they can run out on the floor and take another crack at the St. Louis University Billikens, who surprised a lot of people by handing Kentucky a beating in the final round of the Sugar Bowl Tournament at New Orleans last December. Led by Easy Ed Macauley, their great center, St. Louis outlasted Rupp's Raiders in the stretch and pulled out a 42-40 victory that they regarded as priceless enough to be wrapped in cellophane. It's a lead pipe cinch that the two ball clubs will try to get into the same post-season tournament - either the National Invitation or the NCAA - and stage a little re-play. Kentucky figures that if Oklahoma can beat the Billikens consistently - the Aggies made it three straight last January - it can't be too tough.
If Kentucky can get even with St. Louis, Ralph will be satisfied to see his college career close. There aren't many basketball honors worth having that he hasn't won. He's on every All-America team that sees print. About the only award he hasn't won is the Helms Foundation designation as "Player of the Year." Last year, that went to Macauley. Unquestionably, Ralph would love to add that final jewel to his collection, but he isn't worrying about it. Mostly, he just wants to get out and make some money out of the game, partly so he can get married and partly so he can begin to repay all the work his mother has done for him.
That's what he was talking about when I left him. We were back where we had started, sitting in the athletic office in the gymnasium building. Ralph, as restless as ever, was walking around the small room. looking at the pictures on the wall. We were talking about the way pro basketball was catching on, the crowds it was drawing all around the country.
Suddenly, Ralph turned away from the picture he was studying. "Gee," he said, shaking his head in genuine amazement, "imagine getting paid to play basketball!"
That's where this story ought to stop. That's Ralph Beard all over.
Return to Kentucky Basketball page, Kentucky articles, statistics, team schedules, team rosters, opponents, players, coaches, opposing coaches, games, assistance or search this site.