I was fortunate as the broadcaster for Howard Payne basketball because the first year I did the games for them they moved into the Brownwood Coliseum, and it was an eventful year. I remember that year we played UT and North Texas State. I mean we played some really good ball clubs, but we were a really good ball club as well. Playing in the Coliseum made it that much sweeter because everybody that came in was envious of us and where we played.
Howard Payne basketball had been good for quite a while under Glen Whitis, especially in the two or three years prior to going into the Coliseum. They had Dobie Craig and all those guys and they were a terrific basketball team. We were a good basketball team that first year, I would say “pretty good”, but the Coliseum was what made us REALLY good playing in there. We had solid team and good solid players. I don’t remember the streak, but it was a long time before we lost in the Coliseum. Anyway, that first year in the Coliseum we won the conference championship and we got a trip to Kansas City for the National Tournament.
So, we took off. Most of us had never seen Kansas City and, fact is, we had never seen many big cities. We left in a charter bus from Brownwood and we drove the twelve hours or whatever it was to get to Kansas City. It’s funny, but I can’t remember what I ate for supper last night, but I can remember the bus driver, the players, everything about that trip. We stayed in an old hotel in downtown KC. We played in Municipal Auditorium, which was also downtown. It was a trip that we couldn’t even imagine. You talk about little people going to the big city! So, we got a little piece of almost everything they offered even though we played a grand total of one ballgame. We got to eat at the biggest Kansas City steak house that had seating for I don’t know how many hundred people, but it was enormous. It had a huge grill out in the middle of it and we ate big at least that one meal and did about everything you could do in downtown Kansas City. We had an ever loving ball!
I’m not sure we thought much about basketball until Tuesday. There were eight games on Monday, eight games Tuesday, eight games Wednesday, then it started paring down the 32 teams down to one. We got the last game on the second day. It started about eleven o’clock at night, but what a game it was! Howard Payne was playing Georgia Southern and it goes to overtime. The reason it went to overtime – this was obviously before the three point shot – was because we throw the ball in down by two, and Danny Faubian took the in-bound just shy of mid court, turned and fired, and it popped the net! We went to over time and a minute into the ballgame’s overtime period we lost our fourth and fifth starters. We had to play the rest of overtime with our back-ups against a very good team.
We got beat but we got memories and those memories, I assume, are going to be with me forever.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].