Massey- One of my first memories of the 1974-5 season was having a staff meeting at Coach Owen’s house in pre-season. We went into his basement he had a little office. Early in the meeting, Coach Owens went thru various organizational things- offense, defenses, practice. But his tone was matter of fact talking about the potential of the team to be good enough to go to State. He wasn’t talking about winning a conference title, he was talking about going to State.
The IHSA allowed practices to start at the beginning of October at that time. I can remember how exciting it was to go onto the floor for the first practice as a coach. I know exactly where I was when Coach Owens started that first practice. For the next 50 years, almost all of them as a girls coach, I was always reminded of that first day when I looked at that spot.
In sports if you are going to succeed, you have to be focused on the process. Sometimes you just have to grind. Let’s start by looking at the 1974-5 season.
Doss- I was injured (knee) for the first part of the year. My 1st game back was at Quincy and we went down there and won. Not sure I contributed much other than leadership and confidence, but in my 2 years we never lost at Quincy.
Kelley- Junior season. We were so young and inexperienced. Mike was the only one on our entire team with any varsity experience to speak of. Several of us practiced with the varsity as sophomores, but only Mike played the previous year. Our inexperience showed, and we struggled early in the season. Part way through the season there was community (and team) concern that we might not finish above .500. We did. But just barely! We were 12-11.
One odd memory from our junior year – As I recall, Mike and I went down to the radio station before the season started to do an interview with Swick. During the interview Swick made the comment that we were going to be a young team filled with underclassmen and we should be looking to win the next two state championships like Dolton-Thornridge did in ’71 and ’72. That was eye-opening!
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| 1973-4 Streaks with Swick |
Campbell- Our junior-year season in 1974-75, both as a team and as an individual, was one of those athletic and life experiences that is quite challenging and emotionally difficult as one is living through it, but that, looking back with the perspective of later events, turns out to have been a critical period in both the team’s and one’s own personal development, athletically and in other arguably even more important ways, while also establishing the foundation for the next season’s basketball successes.
To fully grasp the significance of our junior season, however, one needs to understand the context created for it by the prior season. The 1973-74 Silver Streaks, led by All-Stater Joe (“Swede”) Swedlund and an otherwise strong senior class, including Mark (“Wilma”) Wilson, Ollie Thierry, and Ian Davies, had had a successful season, sharing the Western Big Six Conference title with East Moline (Galesburg’s first league title in the then-new-ish WB6) before losing a close battle with #2-ranked Peoria Richwoods in the Regional Final. The program appeared to be on the upswing under Coach Mike Owens, even though it was operating in a more competitive two-class system than had been faced by the Streaks under long-time legendary Coach John Thiel.
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| 1973-4 Galesburg Stats |
As a sophomore, I had been brought up to the Varsity in the pre-season (a decision by the coaching staff that gave me a (perhaps, at the time, undeserved but) much-needed jolt of self-confidence, after I had mostly been a reserve player on the Churchill Junior High School team) and was able to play a significant complementary role on the team, primarily as a catch-and-shoot threat, when left open by the defensive attention paid to Swede and the other seniors, or as a secondary post-up option. I was able to contribute in these ways (plus adding to the team’s good ball-movement and supplying an occasional rebound) despite being extremely thin (during that season, I was 6’7” and only 170 lbs.!!) and physically weak.
With that season seemingly having built some nice momentum for the program, and with a strong sophomore class waiting in the wings (Scott Kelley and Rance Berry having appeared in a handful of Varsity games that season) the perception within the Silver Streaks fan community was that the next season would be even more successful and that I, with my Varsity experience and relatively strong performance, would lead the way to greater heights! In addition, within the context of that modest athletic success, through the heavy coverage of the team in the local media, it became known that I was also a “straight-A” student (as was Kelley), making us even more the recipients of a sort of local adoration – at least among adults and parents; being perceived as a jock-nerd (and, at the time, a socially immature one) didn’t do much for my prospects with our female classmates!!!
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| Mike Campbell as Soph |
Nevertheless, as one can imagine, that sophomore season and its aftermath were heady times for me, who as a young lad had grown up (1) aspiring to be 6’8” tall – the height I had been projected to achieve by doubling my height when I was two years old (despite the modest height of both of my parents) and the height of my basketball hero, Seattle Supersonic star forward Spencer Haywood -- and (2) dreaming of becoming a Silver Streak, but not the apparent budding star of the team!
But, then came our junior season, in 1974-75! With Swede and the other seniors gone, and only one senior (who was a really great guy, but contributed very little statistically to the team) on the ’74-’75 team, we struggled – to put it mildly. In addition to our lack of Varsity experience, we also had an out-of-balance roster. Ironically (but fatally), whereas Galesburg had always had small, quick, fast teams, led by dominant, athletic guards and moderate-sized forwards/centers, our class featured an abundance of legitimate “bigs” with a nice variety of skills: myself (then 6’8”), Scott Kelley (6’7”), Mark (“Slim”) Brown (6’7”, long-armed and athletic), and Bill (“Nate”) Dwyer (6’5” and a bulldog-tough low-post presence, despite having been slowed by a knee injury), the latter two of whom made significant contributions to our teams as juniors and seniors and might have been stars if they had not been in the same class as Scott and me; plus an athletic wing player, Rance Berry, and a versatile wing, Jay Stone, but, especially with Eric Doss’s availability having been limited by a knee injury, only very inexperienced, moderately talented guards. As a result, our season was very up-and-down and we never really established any real momentum, finishing just barely above .500 at 12-11. But the real “finish” to our season was a 103-51 loss (yes, that’s a FIFTY-TWO point loss in a relatively short high school game – YIKES!!) to, once again, Peoria Richwoods.
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| Campbell as soph |
Now, such a season, and maybe even such a loss, could be perceived (and/or rationalized) as a natural consequence of it being a developmental year for a young squad, lacking any real senior leadership, still developing its individual talents and its collective cohesion, and struggling to find a way to play to its strengths (significant size, with inside-outside versatility) and hide its weaknesses (primarily ball-handling and shooting among its guards). But, in the context of the expectations coming out of the prior season, both for the team and for me personally, it was perceived as a disaster!! As a result, in the immediate aftermath of that Regional Final loss to Peoria Richwoods (did I mention that it was by FIFTY-TWO points?!?!) the “dream” seemed to be becoming a nightmare!!
And yet, and yet, get this: having those experiences, for our team and for me personally, was crucial to both, in the short run, the highly successful, redemptive season that we had as seniors (1975-76) and, in the longer run, our/my development as athletes and individuals, looking toward our post-high school days. You see, as a team, although walking around school and in Galesburg generally, after getting shellacked in that manner by Richwoods, was quite tough, having grown up in Galesburg, within its high school basketball-crazed community, we remained highly motivated to still build upon the team’s legacy and to make our own contribution to that legacy. That motivation, plus the realization, I think, that we had just experienced what had to be the lowest point that we could possibly experience in our athletic lives (personally, I did not then anticipate certain other future athletic experiences, witnessed by even larger crowds, against, for example, nationally-ranked teams such as Notre Dame on the road or North Carolina!), and the general compulsion we had to play and get better at basketball, got us right back into open gyms and onto outdoor courts, “working” on our skills and games (in truth, just playing the game we loved and arguably to which we were addicted – in a good way).
And we were getting signals that we were, in fact, improving significantly. In pick-up games around town, our group, and especially Scott and I, were starting to dominate, and with that kind of domination, comes confidence, and with such confidence comes a “swagger” that allows one to play and shoot with better rhythm, which only leads to even better performance, and around it goes, the momentum of such a progression multiplying the positive impact of one’s “work”.
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| Covenant Church court |
Scott and I also benefitted from our two-on-two games with Joe Swedlund and Ian Davies, who had returned to town from college. Gradually, over the summer of 1975, our battles with them, typically under the blazing afternoon sun on the outdoor half court at the Covenant Church near my house, started to turn our way, helping us to develop the skills – and, equally importantly, the confidence – needed for our next confrontations with Richwoods’ stars, Derek Holcomb (who eventually played at Indiana University and then Illinois) and Mark Smith (eventually a star at Illinois).
Another significant turning point in my own development occurred when, in the GHS gym one summer day, Coach Owens, while watching me shoot around (I think we were there for the camp he ran for youngsters), suggested that I relax my legs more when I rose up on my jump shot. Within a few moments, my signature “Campbell (slight) leg kick” had been established and I went from being a relatively good perimeter shooter to an elite jump shooter who eventually led the Big Ten Conference in field goal shooting percentage for most of my senior season at Northwestern University, being eventually beaten out by a couple of players who were primarily dunkers. So, the off-season between our junior and senior seasons, coming on the heels of, and significantly motivated by, that season-ending loss to Richwoods by FIFTY-TWO points, finished laying the foundation for our highly successful and redemptive senior season in 1975-76.
That, however, describes just the directly basketball-related impacts of our junior (1974-75) season and the off-season/summer that followed it. I would argue that the impacts that those basketball experiences had on my development as a person were even more profound. You see, coming on the heels of the local adoration that I had experienced as an apparent up-and-comer as a starter on the Varsity as a sophomore during the 1973-74 season, I was expected to be a leader and a star on the 1974-75 team, as a junior.
When that team struggled, however, the fact that I was not yet ready to be a strong leader and had not yet developed physically sufficiently to be a dominant player became apparent, to me, no doubt to the team’s coaches, and critically, to the fans of the team. This latter reality was made clear to me when a number of prominent fans began booing me when I was introduced prior to games, during pre-game player introductions, at home, in our gym. And these were not snarky high school kids sitting far from the court either; the boos were coming from among the “nice sweater crowd” of professional ladies and gentlemen who sat in the front rows near half court and, as I understood it, had had those seats for years! (If you’d like to confirm that this happened, it is the subject of a “Comment” essay written by Galesburg Register-Mail columnist Bill Campbell (no relation, as he was careful to point out) chastising those fans and referenced in an “On the Rebound” column written by Joe Morrissey, reflecting upon the pluses and minuses of rabid fandom, both of which ran in the Register-Mail during that 1974-75 season and are, presumably, in it archives.)
Well, this, as you can imagine, was an eye-opening experience for a high school kid like me, especially it being the opposite experience from the affirmation that I had received from such folks during just the previous season. Oddly, you may perhaps think, at the time, I remember thinking that this fan behavior was in some ways a confirmation that I had “made it”: I had become a significant enough player on the team that I had dreamed of playing for as a kid that the folks who were now sitting in the stands, like my dad and I had (although we had sat way up at the top of the bleachers, when we could even get tickets to the usually sold-out games during the Thiel Era, from which seats no one could hear us voicing our opinions concerning anyone’s play, which were almost always positive -- e.g., we’d shout with the rest of the crowd, “Be there, Woody!!”, as Dave Wood unleashed a corner jumper!), were focusing their emotional energy on ME!! I mean, this was the kind of treatment I had witnessed professional athletes experiencing, right?! I suspect that these Silver Streak fans hoped that they were sending me a more motivational message, rather than just confirming to me that I had made the “big time”, eh?! (Consider: perhaps this tendency to process such criticism philosophically is one explanation for why athletes at academically high-achieving colleges such as Northwestern have, historically, not been motivated by their coaches or fans to achieve more athletically?)
But, seriously, and much more profoundly, what did these contrasting experiences over the 1973-74 and 1974-75 (my sophomore and junior) seasons teach me, crucially, at this relatively young developmental age? That people (other than my parents and, to a significant extent, my coaches) “loved” – or at least showed their appreciation for -- me primarily based upon my performance (be it on the court or in the classroom) and, in the context of athletics, based upon how well I helped to entertain them and helped to supply a positive emotional release for them through winning basketball games!
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| Mike Campbell |
This was occurring at a time in my life when I was also confronted by the fact that I was, in fact, flawed (but capable of improving) as an athlete and, as a sinner, deeply flawed (despite the public perception of me among teachers and other adults/parents) as a person. Providentially, all of these experiences and realizations were hitting me during a period of time and personal development in which, under the mentorship of the pastor of our church, the Covenant Church (yes, the same one that had that very useful half court in its side yard where a lot of the improvement to my jump shot occurred), Rev. Harold Ahlberg, I was learning that, as a follower of Jesus Christ, I had access to His grace and forgiveness for my personal shortcomings (in those days, things like lack of patience, selfishness, lack of empathy for others, a temper, etc.) and, in stark contrast to the fickle support of basketball fans, God’s unqualified love!!
These were lessons that not only gave me confidence to be and express who I truly am, but to do so free from concern about garnering the approval of folks who do not really know the true me (neither all the good parts with which I’ve been blessed NOR the broken parts which, like all humans, I’ve accumulated), even the approval of those folks in the court-side seats, in their nice sweaters! I have responsibilities to, and, in some cases, love (even unconditional love) for, others – e.g., teammates, coaches, friends; eventually, a wife, children, work colleagues – but, ultimately, I answer only to Christ. He is the center. Moreover, the realization that my athletic and academic attributes and skills were, in large part, gifts from God (supplemented by those hours shooting baskets in gyms and on outdoor courts), provided a humility that helped keep any competitive confidence I was developing from sliding into arrogance. The experiences of my sophomore and junior seasons -- mixed as they were from a basketball perspective – drove these truths home beautifully and in a very timely manner, for which I am very grateful!
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| Richwoods Gym |
Massey- It is interesting as initially we emailed back and forth, in all of your responses about the 1976 Regional win, you didn’t mention an exact score. But when I brought up the 1975 loss, all of you had an exact score for the loss. It turned out Eric was off by one point. I think that says something about that loss, that 50 years later it is still burned into your memory. For me, I just remember it as one of those awful nights where you look up at the clock with 5 minutes to go and it seemed like it took 5 weeks not minutes to finish.
Doss- Richwoods was host for the regional. We were over matched and young, mostly juniors and sophomores, and I twisted my knee maybe in the 2nd quarter. So spent a good amount of time in the locker room with coach Swanson. I do remember the ride home. Campbell and I always rode with coach Swanson, (traveled by cars that year) and he remembered his junior year when the Streaks lost to Quincy in the sectional? By 1 point and used that for motivation the next year. A great talk, but Mike and I were like, yeah but, we just lost by 52 points! Uggh 103-51. They finished 4th that year at state. They did run up the score in the regional, so you never forget those games.
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| 1975 Richwoods |
Campbell- Coach Swanson’s invocation of his Streaks’ one-point loss in the Sectionals in comparison to our FIFTY-TWO point loss in the Regionals was really a case of comparing (relatively shiny) apples to (worm-infested) oranges, but I think he probably knew that, in that moment, it was important to let us know that folks like him who cared about us would not be giving up on us but, to the contrary, would be expecting us to bounce back from that debacle in a manner that used it as motivation. I doubt that message fully resonated with us in that moment in that vehicle, but it might well have planted in us a seed that grew into the determination and, eventually, confidence that we felt going into the 1975-76 games versus Richwoods.
Massey- Maybe because Barry had been through it at Galesburg, but as an assistant coach, I thought he did a lot of one on one coaching to help you deal with the “pressures of being a Streak.”
Kelley- We played them pretty close early in the season. The Regional game got out of hand from the start. It felt like we were down big before we even had a chance to regroup. My two specific memories of that game after all these years are one of our players having a semi-breakaway layup and Chris Williams catching him and spiking the ball off the backboard. It was an amazingly athletic play and pretty demoralizing. My other memory is watching from the bench as the game completely unraveled. 103-51 was a bad loss. But I guess in the end it helped set the stage for the next year.
Massey- Recently Jimmie Carr told me a story about that night. Jimmie said when Coach Owens finished the post-game radio show, Mike took the head phones off, just starred at the scoreboard with the score still up for about 10 seconds, and then turned back to Jimmie and said,”That’s not going to happen again.” Jimmie said he knew right then that as tough and as competitive as Mike was, the next year would be different.
Campbell- I (blessedly) do not remember the details of that 52-point 1974-75 Regional Final loss to Richwoods, other than it seemed to go on for a looooong time. Despite its emotionally traumatizing impact at the time and its later significance in our team’s and my personal redemption story during the following (1975-76) season, that game actually reflected a relatively common pattern for such lopsided games: the physically more mature and more experienced team (in this case, Richwoods) gets off to a hot start, allowing it to play even more freely and with a flowing rhythm, thus causing it to play with even greater-than-usual confidence and to shoot at a very high percentage, while the other team (in this case, us) finds itself in a constant uphill battle, feeling the pressure to make every shot they take, as they fall further and further behind and their deficiencies are further exposed. Described in that way – and having observed, since then, other teams and athletes (even some very great ones) going through such experiences – it sounds very clinical and understandable, right? But, boy, does the experience of being the losing team, in the moment and in its immediate aftermath, SUCK!!
Massey- At the end of the 1976 season, after the loss to Morgan Park, Coach Owens met with the team the next day in a hotel banquet room. He told Mike that at the welcome home that Mike needed to speak. Another player turned to Mike and said, ”Tell them how much I appreciated the guy at Walgreens who told me that I sucked.”
There were great things about playing in a town crazy about basketball, and there was also pressure and stress. After the Richwoods loss or during the 1975 season, do you remember comments addressed to you by other students or by crazy fans?
Doss-I don’t remember anything like that. One teacher commented that I was somehow smart for getting injured and didn’t have to complete the Richwoods Regional game. Kind of hurt my pride, but as a varsity player you had to take the good with the bad, especially in Galesburg.
Kelley- I don’t really remember any derogatory comments after the game. I am sure they were out there among students and the community. I just didn’t encounter them. There were a couple of things working in my (our) favor in this regard. The 1975 - Richwoods game was on a Friday night. We had the weekend to let some of the emotion around the loss dissipate. The game was also played at Richwoods, so maybe there weren’t as many Streaks fans there as there would have been if we had had a more successful regular season. Thankfully, social media did not exist back then! But recently, I have thought about what the fallout on social media would have been around that loss if it had existed then. I am pretty sure it would have been absolutely brutal.
Campbell- Just the booing during pre-game player introductions described in my earlier description of our junior season. Interestingly, I do not remember ever getting any negative “feedback” from other students at school or from fans around town. Most folks, at least in my experience in that era, were not confrontational in that way and the internet was not available to them to vent their frustrations anonymously, eh?
Massey- 1974-5 season was my first year out of college. As we went into that first season, Coach Knosher talked to me a couple times to prep me. Coach Knosher’s message was for me to understand that people in Galesburg have very high expectations- “stay focused on the team and your coaching staff.”
I had great respect for Coach Owens, he treated me well. I respected him as both a person and as a coach. It is tough being the man to follow the “man.” I remember going on Swick’s radio sports show for lunch in late January of 1975. I am guessing for me to be on the show at that point in the season he had run out of the good guests. Every time we broke for commercial, he ripped Owens and was obviously trying to get me to be negative about Owens which wasn’t going to happen. Did you encounter similar situations- especially your junior year- people trying to undermine your confidence in Owens or digging for dirt?
Doss- Having grown up in Galesburg in the 60’s and 70’s my ultimate goal was to play for John Thiel, Mark was a good friend of my brothers and helped me later when I was recruited by Mizzou for baseball. So, I have the utmost respect for all of the Thiels! But once Coach Owens took over, I was a Mike Owens guy. I knew Mike had played at Bradley and also played minor league baseball, which were my 2 favorite sports. Coach Owens personally drove me to Peoria on a couple different occasions to see a knee specialist. We always stopped by Bradley to see basketball practice and see his picture on the wall of fame! He also played with knee issues and helped me learn how to play without injuring my knee again! He knew my sport was baseball and pushed me to Iowa when their basketball guys came to the gym scouting Mike and Scott. (Lute Olson was the head coach at Iowa at the time) We took 1-2 trips to Iowa City to see them play.
Kelley- First, I completely agree with your assessment of Coach Owens. To this day, I have great respect for him and am thankful for the opportunities he gave me and the experiences I had playing for him. My family moved to Galesburg in the Fall of 1967. My Dad was in the leadership of Carl Sandburg College when it was getting started. I share this because it is probably fair to say that I did not experience the Silver Streak and Thiel mystique as fully as many Galesburg kids did growing up at that time. I did the Thiel Summer Basketball Camps growing up, so was exposed to it in some ways, but probably not as fully as most kids from that era. The Thiel camps were instrumental in the development of my passion for basketball.
I think at the time there was a lot of talk about why we didn’t run the “Silver Streak offense” with two low post players, a high post player and two guards. Why aren’t Mike and Scott exclusively down in the low post? We both still posted up, but we also had the freedom to play out on the floor at times. I think this made our team more multi-dimensional. I also think the fact that Coach Owens ran this offense allowed for Mike and me to develop more fully as players and helped us achieve the success we did as college players.
I guess I do remember hearing some of this talk. As a 16–17-year-old kid I think I did my best to ignore the negative talk I might have encountered. Maybe there was a life lesson here that if you don’t entertain and engage in the negativity it is less likely to find you. Overall, I had a great experience being a Silver Streak.
Campbell- I was generally aware of there being disgruntlement among some fans with Coach Owens and the team, but I really only remember hearing about it indirectly from others and, to his credit, I never heard Coach Owens speak about it and I never perceived Coach Owens’ coaching or behavior as being affected by it. To the contrary, for example, one philosophical pillar of Coach Thiel’s approach was to use any big men primarily in the low post, with their back to the basket, with a lot of time and effort devoted to the development of their low-post games. As far as I could tell, having watched a lot of Silver Streak basketball growing up and having attended Coach Thiel’s summer camps as a youth, Thiel was, indeed, a great coach and I, in fact, benefitted from his teaching of various low post moves during those camps, helping me to become the versatile player who could eventually succeed playing in the Big Ten Conference, despite some of my physical limitations (primarily relatively limited physical strength in a very rugged league).
On the other hand, it was Coach Owens, perhaps because he had been a college assistant coach prior to returning to Galesburg, who, perceiving my and Scott Kelley’s potential to also be strong perimeter players, trained and allowed us to both play in the post and on the perimeter, rather than just playing us as a double low-post “twin towers” combination, as Coach Thiel might have done. Coach Owens’ approach not only benefitted our Silver Streaks team, by allowing Scott and I to complement each other in ways that made us harder to guard as a tandem but, I believe, greatly benefitted my own development as a player as I moved into the college game. Yet, because this approach was perceived by some (relatively savvy) Galesburg fans as a deviation from Coach Thiel’s highly successful methods at a time when the two-class system in Illinois basketball was forcing Galesburg, under Coach Owens, to play the likes of Peoria Richwoods in the Regional, rather than allowing Galesburg to first get a couple of easier wins against smaller schools, those fans (putting it nicely) questioned the wisdom of such deviations.
Reflecting upon these (and other) criticisms of Coach Owens’ coaching, I’m not sure some folks in Galesburg realized what a good coach they had in Coach Owens, not only as a person and role model for his players but as a basketball tactician and developer of players. I believe, for example, that Coach Owens clearly out-coached Richwoods’ Coach Hammerton, both in our preparations for, and during, the 1976 Regional Final game (in an admittedly very difficult coaching environment, where the crowd was so loud even during timeouts that communication with one’s players was difficult) and, even more crucially, especially during the period between the 1975 and 1976 Regional Final games, in developing the players on his roster (both the stars and the role players), not only in terms of the development of our skills, but also the building up of our confidence and the team’s cohesion. Unfortunately, I think that these significant coaching accomplishments were overshadowed, in some folks’ assessments, by the fact that, after vanquishing Richwoods, we did not go on to win the 1976 Illinois Class AA State Championship, losing in the “Elite Eight” State Quarterfinals to the eventual State Champions, Morgan Park.
Perhaps I did not hear more directly about criticisms concerning Coach Owens and our team because, having arrived in Galesburg when I was in third grade (when my father was transferred there in a career move), I do not think that my parents and I were ever really fully plugged into the social circles (primarily among native or long-time Galesburg residents) in which such criticisms were likely voiced most intently. Because both Scott Kelley’s family and mine were not native Galesburgers, we were both also not as naturally or deeply immersed in the Thiel mystique and traditions. My parents also did not, in general, really circulate widely socially, spending their time mostly with a few close friends and involved in their church’s social activities – not that, in Galesburg, basketball, didn’t come up even in those settings, to a degree!
Next Up- Galesburg vs Richwoods 1976- Part III 1976 Regular Season
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