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For a sports-crazy kid growing up in the Akron suburbs in the 1960s, there was definitely a hole in the Northeast Ohio pro sports fandom sphere.

There was no NBA team in Cleveland then. The Cavaliers did not exist until the fall of 1970, when I was beginning my freshman year at Manchester High School.

The Cincinnati Royals, now the Sacramento Kings by way of Kansas City, were carrying the flag for all of the state. They would play a game, or two, at Cleveland Arena every season, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer tried to help the effort by changing the team’s name in the NBA standings on the agate page in its sports section to the Ohio Royals. But nobody was buying it. They belonged to Cincinnati.

Those people at the other end of Ohio, like me, needed something closer. So I became, like my dad, a big fan of the Ohio State basketball team as well as the school’s football squad.

And I also passionately followed the Akron Zips, the long-ago predecessors to the current John Groce-coached team, which is fresh off winning the Mid-American Conference regular-season and tournament championships, and will play Arizona at 7:40 Friday in a first-round game in the NCAA Tournament. Playing then in the Ohio Conference, the Zips were a power in the NCAA’s small-college division. One year they lost the national championship game to Evansville.

Coached by Tony Laterza, Akron played before sellout, overflow crowds of 3,200 in tiny Memorial Hall. There were people everywhere, crammed into all of the building’s nooks and crannies. Good thing that the fire marshal looked the other way.

Bob Wylie, the bow-tie-wearing sports director at Akron’s UHF Channel 49, WAKR, the TV half of the radio station by the same name that still exists, was the play-by-play announcer of the telecasts of Zips home games. They were all must-see TV.

One night, Wylie was heard to say during a game against Wooster, “The Zips are red-hot from
the foul line, 15 out of 14.”

Whoa! That’s smokin’!!!

The players included:

*Kenny Mackovic from Barberton, in the days before Jack Greynolds arrived, when the Magics were still walking the ball up the floor and running a pattern offense.

*Tall, angular Randy Berentz, who was holding his own against grown men in pickup games when he was 14 years old, and later went on to play for Akron’s famed Goodyear Wingfoots in the National AAU Industrial Basketball League, whose Sunday afternoon home games at Goodyear Hall were sometimes televised live by Cleveland’s Channel 5.

*Bobby “Sumthin’ “ Smith, from Akron Ellet High School and later serving as the tuxedo-wearing head coach at Akron South.

*Jerry Sloan, who got an invitation to try out for the team as a freshman after Laterza was told that he was tearing it up in the school’s intramural league.

*Frank Thompson, a forward who was dubbed “The Quiet Man.”

*Center Billy Turner, the best player on those teams who later went on to play briefly with the then San Francisco Warriors.

*And finally, the other big man inside, and my favorite player, Don Williams. He was so strong and a ferocious rebounder. Much to the chagrin of my mom, I took a brand-new white undershirt out of the plastic package of such that she intended for me to wear for school, and, using a thick, black Magic Marker, wrote a big “55” — Williams’ number  — on the back of the shirt and “Akron,” from breastplate to breastplate in a semi-circular fashion, on the front, being careful try to duplicate the artsy, Serif font that was used on Zips jerseys.

Then I put it on over my chubby stomach, leaving me as happy as a pig in mud. I was, if only in my mind, the guy I idolized.

Decades later, I was watching a little girls league basketball game in the Akron are when my jaw dropped, for I saw that the man serving as the official was none other than Big Don. His knees were shot and he was shuffling along with the players who were moving at a snail’s pace. When he whistled to stop play for some kind of an infraction, he would bend down ever so gently and carefully explain to the girls what they had done wrong.

I was prouder than ever that, all those years ago, I had picked him as my guy. He still is.

In the 1967 NFL Draft I covered in
my last post, the Browns, with their pick in the 16th, or next-to-last, round, selected Williams, listing him as a wide receiver. He had not played football since his days at Canton Central Catholic High School. He was taking the road traveled years later by new Pro Football Hall of Famer Antonio Gates, a basketball player from rival Kent State. In 1962, the Browns had used their seventh-round draft pick to take another basketball player as a wide receiver in John Havlicek, who had not played football since his days as a first-team All-Ohioan at Bridgeport High School. He instead played basketball at Ohio State and was part of its national championship team in 1960. He made it until the final cut of training camp.

Don Williams survived until the final cut as well and might have made the team had it not been for the fact the Browns already had the best wideout duo in the NFL in Hall of Famer and Warren Harding High School product Paul Warfield, who was at Ohio State with Havlicek, and should-be Hall of Famer Gary Collins, who was also part of the Browns’ 1962 draft class with Havlicek, being chosen at the top of the first round, at No. 4 overall. Havlicek, of course, is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Go Zips on Friday night!!

Steve King

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