If someone played in the state's most famous high school game in history, his memory of the final quarter would not likely be, "I just walked around in the corner and tried to stay loose."
Yet, that is what Gene White did in the 1954 state championship game at the Butler Fieldhouse while Milan teammate Bobby Plump stood above the top of the key, holding the ball for four minutes and 13 seconds with Jimmy Barnes loosely guarding him. The Indians trailed Muncie Central 28-26 at the time, but won 32-30 on Plump's jumper at the buzzer.
Milan and Muncie Central will meet Saturday evening at the Muncie Fieldhouse in a 50th-anniversary game to celebrate the original contest. White, currently an adjunct professor of mathematics at Franklin College, will be among the many from the original game in attendance. He remembers the confidence the team had in 25-year-old coach Marvin Wood and the stall tactic, which they termed the "Cat-and-Mouse."
"It wasn't the first time we'd ever done that," White said. "When Coach said we were gonna do it, we were going to do it. In this particular case we were behind by two, so (the Bearcats) weren't going to attack.
"I felt like if we were within a point and went to the stall, we would probably win."
Phil Raisor, a sophomore guard on Central's 1954 team, was doing even less than White during those tenuous minutes, and felt anger instead of confidence. Although Raisor had started all season in the backcourt with classmate Jimmy Barnes, coach Jay McCreary had benched Raisor in favor of Leon Agullana in the second half.
"I couldn't understand. 'Why am I sitting here, why am I not back in the game?'" said Raisor, now an English professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, who will also be in attendance Saturday. "Part of it was being angry at me for not playing well enough to stay in the game, angry at the coach for not putting me back in the game.
"Then when Plump stands there and holds the ball after we're ahead 28-26, at one point I stood up and yelled from the bench 'Pass the ball, you idiot. Play the damn game.' Those were my reactions. (There was) nothing else I could do."
Looking back, Raisor knows the stall tactic was brilliant strategy, as it stemmed the momentum Central created by erasing a 19-11, second-quarter deficit. He only wishes McCreary had told the team to pressure Plump after a while.
"Once they got the cat-and-mouse going, they just kept going on with it," he said. "We were coming back. I understood that what they were doing was taking us out of our momentum, and trying to play for the final shot. Good thinking, smart play."
Raisor did not score a point and grabbed three rebounds in that championship game. White only had one point and two rebounds, but he also held Muncie's star counterpart, John Casterlow, to nothing on both counts. Although there were some taller players on Milan's team, the design of Wood's offense placed the 5-11 White at center.
To neutralize its opponents' height advantages in the tournament, Milan relied on quickness and the experience of several seniors. Both White and Raisor believe that people forget how good Milan really was and have actually exaggerated how big of an upset the game was.
The Indians had advanced to the semi-state finals the year in 1953. The following year they downed a Indianapolis Crispus Attucks team led by a sophomore named Oscar Robertson, 65-52. Before upsetting Central, Milan stomped Terre Haute Gertsmeyer in the first semifinal.
"They were very good club," White said of Crispus Attucks. "That was also our best game. We just didn't know Oscar Robertson would be so good.
"I had mentioned to mom and dad sometime the week before playing Gertsmeyer, who had been ranked No. 1, that I was worried. My dad asked me how old they were. I said 17 or 18, and he said, 'You're all 18, what the hell's the problem?'"
"We never thought of it as a David versus Goliath game," said Raisor, whose school was looking for its third state title in four years and fifth overall. "That's an ad hoc post-game thing that newspaper people put on this game. "How could the people from Milan think that? They had been to the state championship the year before. They didn't think of themself as the young, tiny David. They thought, 'Last year we almost won it. This year, I don't care who we're playing, we're going to win it.'"
And after some standing around and staying loose, they did.
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