I Was There: Loyola Ramblers Are NCAA Champs

This was in 1963, the first and only time the Ramblers won the tournament, though they did make it into the 1985 NCAA Bracket.

I was a student at Loyola in 1963, along with my friend, Mary, who I’d known since 5^th grade. We weren’t at the game on that fateful night, regrettably, but we learned about it while on a double date at the Hillside Theatre, watching some dumb movie neither of us can remember.

Sometime in the middle of the movie, one of our dates—John? Ken?—had his small portable radio on and let us know that the Ramblers had won. According to Mary, we then got up and rushed into the Theatre lobby so we could turn up the radio.

Now it's 2018, and the Ramblers again are in the tournament. It’s a swell time to be reading the sports pages both in the Chicago newspapers, and even in the New York Times. That article was focused on Sr. Jean, the 98 year-old Loyola team chaplain since 1994.

Today in the Chicago Sun-Times there were two more articles about the Ramblers, one that especially moved me. Because for some reason I hadn’t either remembered or known that the championship game between the Ramblers and the Mississippi Maroons (now Bulldogs) is referred to as the “Game of Change.”

 As reporter Madeline Kenney described it:

“The beginning of the end of racial barriers in college basketball started with a handshake 55 years ago Thursday.

“Loyola senior Jerry Harkness, an African-American, extended his hand to Mississippi State senior Joe Dan Gold, a white player, before tipoff of the Mideast Regional semifinal. Flashbulbs popped and nearly blinded both as they made history.”

March 1963, just five months before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. Oh, what a year it was.

And what was even more surprising--and unsettling--to learn was that the Mississippi team had to sneak out of Mississippi to play the Ramblers in East Lansing, Michigan. Turns out, then-governor Ross Barnett “barred Mississippi teams from playing opponents with African-American players.”

While there's more I'd like to say about this--something about barriers broken, both in March and August of that year--the Loyola-Miami game is now in progress. Time to go online and check the score.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/game-of-change-loyola-ramblers-mississippi-state-jerry-harkness/