Allen replaced 'Horrible Hoch'
Almost all of Bill Lienhard's memories of his playing days at Kansas are warm, fond, endearing. One doesn't play for a national championship team, as Lienhard did with the 1952 Jayhawks, without some wonderful recollections.
There was, however, one aspect of playing for Dr. Phog Allen in the years before the opening of Allen Fieldhouse that Lienhard remembers as ... well, irritating.
Scratch that. "Itchy" might be the more appropriate word.
"Doc made us wear these damn warmups that were all wool," Lienhard remembered. "They were hooded and hot and they scratched the devil out of you.
"But, there was a good reason we had them."
You'd want extra warmth, too, if after playing a two-hour college basketball game you had to walk 100 yards outside on a winter's night in a sweat-soaked uniform just to reach your locker room.
Such was the occasionally snow-packed walk Lienhard and hundreds of Jayhawk players made from Hoch Auditorium -- the concert hall that doubled as a basketball arena from 1928 through 1955 -- to old Robinson Gymnasium, where they practiced and dressed.
It was a dramatic contrast to the short yet exhilarating walk KU players make today through the "tunnel," the gauntlet of adoring fans lining the path from the Allen Fieldhouse locker room to the James Naismith Court. In doing so, they follow in the footprints of KU athletes who established the tradition and necessitated the building of the arena that has become a Mecca of college basketball today, 50 years after its March 1, 1955, dedication.
Younger Jayhawks may not appreciate that the BC Days -- Before Chamberlain -- in 3,800-seat Hoch were equally glorious days in Kansas basketball played under inglorious conditions.
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University Archives/Spencer Research Library
Phog Allen began talking about building a fieldhouse at KU as early as 1927, but it would take almost three decades for the Jayhawks to move out of Hoch Auditorium and into a new home.
It was the time when Kansas won a national championship in 1952 and just missed doing it back-to-back in '53. It also was a time when hitting a layup often meant hitting a wall -- an inevitable result of squeezing a basketball court into the tight space between the stage and the first row of seats in a concert hall.
"It was never intended to be a gym," Al Kelley, a two-time all-conference player, said of Hoch Auditorium. "The walls along the ends were just a couple of feet off the corner of the court. You had to be real careful anytime you went out of bounds."
Added Lienhard: "You talk about a home-court advantage? At Hoch when you took the ball out of bounds, a guy in the front row might have his knee pressed up against yours. There was a lot of pressure on visiting teams from all those people right on top of you, literally."
"As far as facilities go, it was very inadequate compared to what we have today," said Jerry Waugh, who played in Hoch and was an assistant coach at Allen Fieldhouse as part of his lifelong involvement with KU athletics.
"The floor was set on concrete, which meant it was hard on the legs. We rarely practiced in there. And the walls behind the basket were slanted. That created something of an optical illusion as you looked at the background, so they had to put up black drapes to help the shooters.
"But for those of us who played there at the time, it was OK. It was all we knew."
Doc Allen knew he had to have something better. Playing in an opera house that became known as "Horrible Hoch" wasn't acceptable to a basketball coach with a background in osteopathic medicine.
"The floor ... has no resilency. The boys have sprains, bruises and shin splits," Allen told a state legislative committee in a 1949 appeal for a new arena. "It's a hodgepodge and it isn't good for basketball."
At issue, too, was the fact that Kansas State College had just opened a new 11,000-seat arena, later named Ahearn Fieldhouse, in 1950. Allen couldn't abide seeing his respected rival, K-State coach Jack Gardner, playing in a better building than his.
"There was no question in Doc's mind that if Ahearn had 11,000 seats, we were going to have 12,000," said Waugh, who was part of the KU delegation that lobbied the legislature for funding. "If K-State built an 18,000-seat arena, Doc wanted 19,000."
History shows that Allen -- who directed the fund-raising efforts in the construction of Memorial Stadium -- actually began talking about building his dream fieldhouse, a 14,000-seat facility costing some $400,000, as early as 1927. Circumstances beyond his control -- The Great Depression and World War II, to name two -- put the grandiose project on the back burner. The Kansas Board of Regents didn't give its go-ahead until 1946, and the first legislative attempt to provide funding stalled in committee in 1947.
Allen's lobbying finally paid off in 1949 when the legislature appropriated $750,000 for the construction of a new 16,000-seat fieldhouse. The final authorization for additional funds did not come until 1951, however, and the first construction bid was let in October of that year. The first concrete pilings were poured in March, 1952. The goal was to have construction completed in August 1953.
It didn't happen.
Securing steel was a problem during the Korean War. To get the necessary girders and beams, Allen Fieldhouse had to maintain availability for military use, which it did as a drilling area for the ROTC. The expansive lawn in front of the fieldhouse officially remains designated for ROTC use even today.
It would be six years from the first appropriation until Allen Fieldhouse opened as a 17,000-seat palace -- The Monarch of the Midwest, the nation's second-largest college arena at the time -- with a price tag of about $2.5 million.
But it wasn't exactly a powerhouse Kansas team that christened the building on March 1, 1955.
With just two games remaining in the season, the Jayhawks were only 3-6 in conference play and without a Big Six Conference victory at home coming into the dedication game with Kansas State. K-State's Roger Craft scored the first points, but KU got 21 points from Gene Elstun and 20 from Lew Johnson and upset the Cats 77-67.
"I don't think any KU players have ever had the unique pressure those kids played under that night," Lienhard would say years later. "You can't underestimate what a tremendous challenge they faced."
The sad aspects for Allen was that he coached only one season in the building that bore his name -- a 14-9 campaign with a 7-2 home record -- in 1955-56 before reaching the state's then mandatory retirement age of 70.
Nor did he get to coach the 7-foot phenom he had recruited out of Philadelphia, a young man named Wilt Chamberlain.
As freshman were ineligible for varsity competition at the time, Chamberlain didn't play in Allen's farewell season. It wasn't until his varsity debut on Dec. 3, 1956, that he scored a KU-record 52 points with 31 rebounds against powerful Northwestern. That performance jump-started a season that culminated with a three-overtime loss to North Carolina in the national championship game.
Allen wasn't around to see Chamberlain's first game after commiting to speak in tiny Bushton that night. He had to be content with knowing that he had built the palace that would become the home of so many future KU basketball memories.
Rick Dean can be reached at [email protected].
