Massillon Tigers Win Title
Somewhere, Paul Brown is smiling.
So is Horace Gillom.
And Jim Houston.
And his older brother, Lin Houston.
And Tommy James.
That’s because the Massillon Tigers on Sunday afternoon won their first boys basketball state crown, topping defending state champion Westerville North 68-63 in overtime in an incredibly exciting Division II state title game — an instant classic if there ever was one — before a raucous full house at University of Dayton Arena. It was the 24th consecutive victory for the Tigers, who rallied from a 15-point (45-30) deficit with 3:49 left in the third quarter en route to finishing 27-1. Massillon had not been to the state tournament for 81 years — the spring of 1945, five months before the end of World War II.
As such, then, Tigers fans are still partying on Lincoln Way — the main drag through the middle of town — as you read this, and will continue to do so until oh, along about the middle of July when football starts.
Westerville North, which had won 21 in a row and 50 of its last 51 dating back to its state championship season of a year ago, ended with a 26-2 mark.
Massillon has one of the most storied high school football programs not just in the state of Ohio, but in the entire country as well. That tradition — that legacy — began, in earnest, when Brown, who had been a quarterback at the school a decade before, returned to his alma mater as head coach in 1932 with the directive to get the program going. He certainly did, almost immediately, in fact, and beyond everybody’s wildest dreams, as he guided the Tigers to a series of state titles and even national crowns over nine seasons.
Brown did so with players like Gillom, Lin Houston and James, the last two of whom followed him to Ohio State when he was named head coach there in 1941, guidihg the Buckeyes to their first national championship. Then Lin Houston and James, rejoined by Gillom, followed him to Cleveland when he was named head coach of the Browns as they began play in 1946, making it to the league championship game in each of their first 10 seasons, capturing seven titles.
Jim Houston came along later, playing at Massillon and then Ohio State, but not for Brown. When he came to the Browns in 1960, Brown was the coach.
Brown is one of the greatest head coaches in the history of football and, of course, is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But all of that started, and the foundation was set, in Massillon. Nearly a century later, Paul Brown is still revered there. It is why the community remained dear to his heart until he passed away in 1991.
Brown also coached boys basketball at Massillon and took the team to the state tournament three times, which includes a second-place finish in 1937, which, until this year, was the best the Tigers had even done.
Massillon has always remained “a football school,” the program that Brown built becoming so big that it has overshadowed all the other sports at the school, especially boys basketball, the second-biggest program there. Try as they might for over eight decades, Tigers coaches and players — a number of them pretty noteworthy and accomplished — could never carve out a niche for boys basketball. Now they have.
With that then, “The House That Paul Brown Built” has added an entry door marked, “Boys Basketball.”
That makes everybody at Massillon — past and present — smile.
Steve King
