Homegrown Pitt men won 22 games in a row 50 years ago
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While others were sleeping and the doors to Fitzgerald Field House were locked, they came out and ran up and down the streets of Oakland.
Sometimes, they climbed the steps of the Towers — the on-campus dormitory complex whose tallest building rises 224 feet above Fifth Avenue — building endurance for a long season.
In the midst of those rigorous cardio exercises, these history-making young men of 50 years ago talked about what they hoped to accomplish.
“We used to run the streets of Pittsburgh late at night,” said Keith Starr, the 6-foot-7 guard from Sewickley and Quaker Valley High School who served as the team’s sixth man. “We were talking about what we were going to do for the city. We all wanted to get better and serve the university in a better way.”
And so they did.
On Dec. 4, 1973, Pitt men’s basketball started a 22-game winning streak that stands today as the longest in program history. There were 18- and 16-game streaks during the Jamie Dixon years, and Ben Howland’s 2001-02 team won 22 in one stretch but needed 25 games to do it.
But there never has been a longer period of sustained success at Pitt to compare to what coach Buzz Ridl’s men stacked up, one victory after another, going 83 days between defeats.
That’s remarkable on the surface, but here’s the unique aspect of the story:
Ridl and assistants Fran Webster and Tim Grgurich didn’t need to travel the U.S. looking for players as coaches do today. There were 18 on the team, and 13 grew up in Western Pennsylvania.
“We were playing for more than the University of Pittsburgh,” Starr said. “We were playing for each hometown. We all had that Pittsburgh blood in us.”
What led to all those victories for a program that had one winning season in the previous nine?
Kirk Bruce, a Beltzhoover guy who graduated from South Hills High School and was a starting guard, said there was a simple reason.
“The buy-in of all the guys,” said Bruce, who later coached Pitt’s women’s team and was an associate athletic director for more than 20 years. “Sometimes, you had to check your ego at the door. Back then, that’s how it was. Team ball was how you played.”
Billy Knight, a Braddock native, humbly pointed to depth — when, in fact, he was the team’s best player who scored 609 points and became a consensus second-team All-American.
“We were a versatile team,” said Knight, who played 12 years in the NBA and later was a top executive for three franchises. “We had a lot of players who scored points and contributed in different ways. A lot of good all-around players. We didn’t have a big, dominating center. We didn’t have a guy who had garnered a whole lot of press.”
For Knight, that came later.
“We all stayed home. I could have gone to a lot of places,” Starr said. “And Tommy, too.”
Tommy was Tom Richards, the point guard from Moon who read the Bible most of the days of his life and later became a giant in the tech industry and chair of the University of Pittsburgh Board of Trustees. Richards died Oct. 28, 2021.
The other starters were Mickey Martin of Baldwin, the team’s second-leading scorer (306 points), and Crafton native and Canevin High School’s Jim Bolla, the tallest player on the team at 6-8. Bolla died Oct. 21, 2022.
The other players with local roots were: Ken Wagoner (Beaver Falls), Scott Nedrow (Ringgold), Greg McBride (South Hills Catholic), Bob Shrewsbury (Avalon), Frank Boyd (Oliver High School), Marvin Abrams (Highlands) and Sam Fleming (Fifth Avenue).
Another unique element of the team was its offensive discipline. Knight and Martin shot better than 50%.
“We were percentage shooters,” Knight said. “We didn’t take shots we didn’t think we could make.”
The streak started in a most unusual way: with a forfeit victory.
In the second game of the season after an 82-78 loss at West Virginia, Pitt was on the road again, leading Rutgers 36-21 with only a few minutes left in the first half.
Suddenly, dozens of students walked peacefully onto the floor as a protest to how Blacks were being treated on the Piscataway, N.J., campus.
“We were looking around (saying), ‘What’s going on?’ ” Knight said. “We thought — I don’t know — it was something arranged by Rutgers. They just walked out onto the floor and sat down.”
“They ushered us down into our locker room,” Bruce said. “Phil Sellers (Rutgers’ star player) took the microphone and tried to calm the students down and tell them to get off the court so we could finish the game. They were having no parts of that. We stayed in the locker room until someone finally came down and said, ‘That’s it. Game is over.’ ”
While the streak progressed, several players — some unheralded — stepped up and contributed, just as Knight remembers 50 years later.
When Martin was ill and couldn’t make the trip to Virginia on Jan. 2, walk-on Willie Kelly, who had come to Pitt on an academic scholarship, scored 12 points.
In author Sam Sciullo Jr.’s book “100 Years of Pitt Basketball,” Ridl called that game a turning point.
“From then on, the team just seemed as if it couldn’t wait to get out on the floor to play,” Ridl said.
The streak ended on a cold, snowy afternoon in State College (Feb. 23, 1974) by way of a top-of-the-key buzzer-beater by Penn State’s Ron Brown. Ridl, though, could appreciate the drama of the Nittany Lions’ 66-64 victory.
“Time and odds were against us. It’s electrifying for it to end this way, though,” Ridl said in the next day’s Pittsburgh Press.
After that, Pitt lost two of its last five games, including 67-50 at South Carolina, the only regular-season game on TV that season. But a 25-4 record was more than enough for Pitt to earn its first NCAA Tournament berth since 1963.
Pitt played its first NCAA games in Morgantown, W. Va., where the Panthers never had previously won. But they defeated St. Joseph’s and Furman to reach the Elite Eight of the 32-team field.
In those days, top-seeded teams were awarded home games, and Pitt was forced to confront N.C. State and national player of the year David Thompson in Raleigh, N.C.
“Maybe that gave them an advantage, but the fact is they were just a really good team, too,” Knight said, recalling the 100-72 defeat.
At one point, Thompson became tangled with Pitt’s Lew Hill going for a rebound and fell on his head. He was carried off the court and returned later in a wheelchair with his head bandaged. But N.C. State’s 7-foot-4 center Tom Burleson made the difference.
“He was the one that was really killing us,” Knight said. “I can remember jumping as high and as far as I could to go for a rebound, and Burleson was behind me. He just reached over me. There was nothing I could do.”
Through all the ups and downs of the season — from its high point ranked No. 7 in the nation to a final ranking of No. 16 — Ridl remained calm.
“He was a players’ coach because he never hollered or screamed,” Knight said. “Some coaches were cussing and yelling in players’ faces. He never did anything like that. He treated you with respect, treated you like a grown man.
“He was such a nice guy, and he coached like that.”
The team’s strategic hallmark was Webster’s confusing and aptly named Amoeba defense. Opponents couldn’t tell if it was a zone or man-to-man because it was constantly changing based on where the ball was on the court.
“The reason why it was so good, to be honest,” Knight said, “was because the other team didn’t know what we were doing because sometimes we didn’t know what we were doing. Three or four of us would think we were in a zone. Another guy would think we were in a man-to-man, and he started guarding the guy all over the floor. We would have two guys doing something different than the other three guys.”
While Ridl and Webster quietly taught concepts, Grgurich was the “emotional leader,” Bruce said.
“He’d get you fired up. He was always there. You could always talk to him, always had your best interests at heart. He was always the guy who told you things you could do. He made you believe in yourself.
“We’d have jumped through a wall for him.”
“I hated him all the way to the pros,” Starr said, “because he made me work so hard.”
These days, Starr is an insurance agent and high school basketball coach in Henderson, Nev., and counts Grgurich as one of his best friends. In fact, he coaches Grgurich’s grandson, Zak Abdalla, at Foothill High School.
Neither Knight, Starr nor Bruce said the players felt any pressure to maintain the streak.
“It was one of those things, you’re just playing and all of a sudden you look up and you won 10 in a row,” Bruce said.
Knight treasures memories of the streak, but when he thinks of his Pitt days, more than basketball comes to mind.
“College is the greatest time of your life,” he said, “if I can say that without my wife hearing me say it.”