The Bells Must Ring - A Rutgers Basketball History Blog: Rutgers 111

Courtesy of Doug Britelle - note the 15 cent price

Rutgers Daily Targum - December 6, 1968

The December 7th game with Colgate marked the 1969 team's home opener at what today is known as "the barn." Bob Greacen doesn't remember ever hearing that name during his time at Rutgers which is my memory as well. To us,it was simply "the Gym." Regardless of what it was called, however, Bob remembers both the good and bad of the second home of Rutgers basketball. "I remember practicing on rainy days when the managers had placed buckets on the floor to catch drops from the leaky roof and I remember Coach Foster with a hammer, banging down nail heads that had popped up through the aging maple floorboards. Not good when diving for a loose ball! But when you were in the stairwell, waiting to take the floor for pregame warm ups and the crowd was getting wild, the din cascading down from the upper seats to reverberate against that big blank wall .... well, I'm starting to sweat. And the crowd, especially along the baseline was close enough to be part of the game. And the (all male) cheerleaders with their acrobatics . . . . Well, we were 11-1 at home that season."

Newark Evening News - December 8, 1968

Recalling the Colgate game, Bob commented that "Coach Foster left me in the game longer than he should have and I scored 46 points on 19 fields, still a record." Spoken modestly, but Coach Foster's was repeating something he had done previously, giving a senior player a chance to set a school record. Ironically two years earlier to the day, Bob Lloyd, in a similar situation, scored 45 points breaking a record that was set in 1957. While nothing was said at the time, my guess is that Coach Foster was well aware the old record of 44 points wasn't held by a Rutgers player, but by Chet Forte of Columbia University. If that name sounds familiar, it's probably not because of his basketball prowess which was considerable, but as founding director of Monday Night Football. Forte, who stood only 5'9," was, however, a great basketball player who led the country in scoring that year, beating out one Wilt Chamberlain. In that game at the Rutgers Gym, Forte also made his 39th consecutive foul shot setting a record eventually broken by Bob Lloyd in 1967. One of the Rutgers players who tried in vain to guard Forte that night was Bruce Webster who coached the freshman basketball team my first year at Rutgers before going to a very successful career at the University of Bridgeport.