The University of Dayton began playing basketball in 1903, but it wasn’t until 1947 that anyone really paid a great deal of attention to who had the bigger number on the scoreboard at the end of the game. After suffering though two seasons with a combined 7-30 record, it was decided a change needed to be made. That change came with the name of Tom Blackburn. As Donoher said, “It all started at UD with Coach Blackburn in the 1947-48 season. Scholarships just came to the horizon at that time. The Board made the decision that it was going to get into basketball in a serious way. They had okayed the construction of the Fieldhouse, which was to be ready my freshman year.”

With the new emphasis that was being placed on the basketball program and the potential to make it a moneymaker, the University went about the business of viewing basketball as a business. With the belief that the University needed to spend money to make money, the use of scholarships came into play. “I got to UD just a few years after the birth of the program. Father Collins was the Chair of the Athletic Board at that time and he related to me one time how the school had set that up. They armed the basketball coach with 24 scholarships. They didn’t have to all be full; they could be spread out if Blackburn wished. The theory was to have 12 varsity players (4 seniors, 4 juniors and 4 sophomores) and 12 freshmen. At the end of that year, the four seniors would graduate and they would move the best four freshmen to the varsity and tell the other eight to get lost. When you came down here, you were a little naive. There really wasn’t a lot of security. You could have your scholarship snapped up in a heartbeat.” Survival of the fittest had become the slogan of the day.

Blackburn began to turn the program around immediately, and in his second year the Flyers were invited to the National Catholic Invitational. The big breakthrough, though, came in 1949-50. The Fieldhouse was being constructed and the Flyers played in the Ohio Catholic Tournament. That 24-8 team featured sophomores Don Meineke, Chuck Grigsby and Junior Norris. The annual trip to the NIT started in 1951-52 when the Flyers went 27-5 and lost in the Finals to Brigham Young.

Five thousand eight hundred and eight people packed the Fieldhouse for every game that season, and Donoher got his first glimpse of Blackburn in action, “We had some interaction with Coach as freshmen because we practiced at the same time on the end court of the Fieldhouse. Practice was always 3:30 to 5:30 and it would never vary. Occasionally he would pull us up to defend the varsity during practice or run a scrimmage. We knew what made him tick. He was one tough son of a gun. You knew what it was like to play for him, just being on the other end of the court. As a player, practices were tough. They were grueling. The players during that time were as competitive as any I have been around. They were physically tough, competitive guys. These were no-nonsense practices. Every night, it was all business. There was never any messing around.”

Success became an addiction for Blackburn and everyone else associated with the program. The NCAA Tournament is easily the choice for any top team in today’s environment, but that wasn’t always the case, “There was no selection committee. They (the NCAA and NIT) would start giving out bids in January as the NCAA and NIT fought for the best teams. The NIT was his tournament. There were a number of years that we were invited and he turned them (NCAA) down and as a result didn’t make many points. That came back to haunt us in 1963 and 1964 with the probation that we received.”

But Blackburn wasn’t always against the NCAA and its tournament. In 1952, the Flyers finished the regular season 24-3. After making it to the NIT Finals and again losing, UD made its initial trip to the NCAA Tournament. “My sophomore year, we played in the NIT first and then came back to play Illinois, the Big 10 champ, in Chicago. The teams there all had dinner together at an NCAA function, and an NCAA representative announced that he wished Illinois good luck in the Final Four in Seattle the next week. We received some of the worst officiating I have ever seen in that game. The number of fouls on Dayton in that game might still be an NCAA record. Blackburn came home from that and decided never to go back.”

After tasting the kind of success that found its way to UD in the previous two years, the 1952-53 season was a huge disappointment. The team finished 16-13 and did not receive an invitation to the NIT after being runner-up in each of those two seasons. Despite the drop off in success, the Flyers won the most memorable game ever played in the Fieldhouse. Seton Hall came to town undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the country. The Flyers, on the other hand, were 14-13 and going nowhere. Earlier in the year, UD had played fairly well in an 82-74 loss in New Jersey, but no one could have predicted what was going to happen that night.

The Fieldhouse was packed to the rafters with 246 extra people somehow squeezed in over and above the normal sellout of 5,808. “It was a Sunday night,” Donoher recalls. “They had Walter Dukes and Ritchie Regan, future NBA stars. It was one of those years everybody started at one time or another. Blackburn was just searching for the right combination. It was a miserable year, but on that particular night we got off to a good start and kept going. The one thing that I can remember about that night was the shrill, the noise of that crowd. You couldn’t talk to one another. It was loud from start to finish. That place was just wild.

“There was one time in that second half that I was so tired that I was just bent over hunting air. You would never ask Blackburn to come out. If you came out, that was it for the night. That is the way it was then.”

Those in attendance got their money’s worth as the Flyers led all the way and finally closed it with a 71-65 final score. UD, however, didn’t get the full advantage of beating the No. 1 team in the country because the very next night Seton Hall traveled to Louisville and again lost. To top it off, a fight broke out that got just about everyone involved. “We lost all of the publicity of the win because of the fight. Life magazine had the sports edition then and all the pictures they had were not of our game, but of the fight.”

Things got back to normal the following year as Donoher teamed up with Bill Uhl, John Horan and Jack Sallee to finish the regular season with a mark of 24-6. In the last game of the regular season, the Flyers knocked off No. 1 Duquesne 64-54 at home in front of another sellout, reversing an 18-point blowout in Pittsburgh earlier in the year.

Once again, the NIT came calling and Blackburn was ready to again try for that first championship. Although the NCAA Tournament was slowly becoming more of a factor, there was never a question of where the Flyer players wanted to go. “The excitement was so great, as a kid, going to play at Madison Square Garden. Compared to the NCAA, there was no comparison. Blackburn was obsessed with the NIT and had an obsession to win it. My sophomore year, we stayed the whole week. We flew in on Friday night and went to the fights. You grew up as a kid listening on the radio to the 10 o’clock feature fight from Madison Square Garden on Friday nights. There we were actually getting to see the fight. On Saturday we would play. On Sunday night, tickets to the Rangers’ game. Monday night, watch the Quarter Finals. On Tuesday night play in the Quarter Finals. Wednesday night, see a Broadway show. On Thursday night, you play in the Semi-Finals. Friday night, back at the fights and Saturday the Tournament Finals. It was like you died and went to heaven. UD treated us great. We stayed near Times Square and ate at nice restaurants. It was just the best time that you could ever imagine.”

Once again, the Flyers came up short and came home without a championship. It was time for Mickey to begin the transition to life after basketball. This was something that he had not envisioned just a few years before. Although a pretty good evaluator of talent after he became a coach, Don had difficulty estimating his own abilities. Most would have looked at his numbers as a junior – 6.3 points and 3.8 rebounds per game – and realized that the hardwood was not where he was going to earn a living. “Even then, the dream of every kid was to play pro ball. The NBA wasn’t big bucks, but it was still getting paid to play. The incentive wasn’t to become a millionaire but to play pro ball. That was the ultimate. I probably had that dream until my senior year in college. You would just hope that somehow you would get drafted. A player just never realizes how lacking he is. Blackburn was just so blunt about that kind of thing. A kid came to him at one point and wanted to know why he wasn’t playing. Tom said, ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it. You know I have a big edge over you in evaluating you. I see you play every day. You never get to see yourself play. If you did, you wouldn’t be in here asking me that question.’ He would cut you to the bone, but there is a lot of truth to that. I was a perfect example of that. I was relatively just a bum. I was lucky to be playing at Dayton.”

Continue on to Part III.