March 12, 2015 7:00 pm • By PETER SALTER | LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR
Early in the season, after the Beavers had lost four of their first six games, their coach wasn’t thinking about the state tournament.
He would have been happy to break even on the season.
“We didn’t start off good,” Dean “Babe” Ruth said Thursday. “We were just trying to get to 500.”
Nobody knew what to expect from the 1965 Beaver Crossing boys basketball players, except that they would play in the shadow of the 1964 Beavers -- a team that had brought home the Class D trophy but lost its five starters to graduation and its coach to a new job in Iowa.
“I think the town, in a way, was pretty well enamored with the previous year’s team,” said Gerald Wambold, a guard on the ’65 team. “We had a hard act to follow.”
They also had an untested coach who wasn’t much older than his seniors. Ruth got his diploma from Nebraska Wesleyan in May 1964 and his biology classroom in Beaver Crossing in August. The Rising City native had played high school ball but was too small to make his college team.
And when basketball season started, and the team started losing, any hope of a repeat seemed to vanish.
“It was awful,” Wambold said. “We went out and tried and we just weren’t playing together as a team. But Coach Ruth, he never got down on us, he never quit talking to us.”
They listened. They started winning, going 16-2 after the Christmas break. They frustrated better teams with their aggressive defense. They got good at coming from behind.
And 50 years ago this weekend, the Beavers walked onto the court at the University of Nebraska Coliseum in their red and white jackets. They were about to play Odell for the championship, but the bleachers were already filling with Creighton Prep and Lincoln Northeast fans, waiting for their later game.
The Northeast fans decided to pull for the Beavers, said Jim Flowerday, a 6-2 senior.
Beaver Crossing was a small high school, fewer than 60 students in four grades, just 14 seniors.
At the Coliseum, the Beavers stared up at the stands.
“We had never seen 4,500 people, ever. Half of them stood up for our team and my knees felt like thimbles. Clink, clink, clink,” Flowerday said. “We were scared, but we thought: We need to perform for these guys. This is the big time.”
* * *
The coach didn’t return to Beaver Crossing in 1966. He took another teaching job in Geneva.
Two years after that, Ruth was teaching in Madison. He was a principal in Columbus and an administrator at Centennial and spent 16 years as principal of two elementary schools in the Adams Central School District.
He retired in Hastings in 2007 after more than 40 years as an educator. And he was honored earlier this year with a standing ovation at an Adams Central basketball game, students holding up cards spelling out: “We got you Babe.”
“It was one of the greatest thrills I’ve had in my long educational career,” he told the Hastings Tribune. “It's not very often that you get told by so many people that, ‘Yes, you did a good job.’”
And an important job. Earlier in his career, he and his wife, Robbie, spent 13 years in New Mexico. He was hired to launch an alternative high school for students who were struggling, or had dropped out, or had been kicked out.
“Seeing those kids graduate from high school and how happy they were when they got their diplomas, they were probably happier than kids who’d just won the state championship in high school.”
And he would know what that looked like.
* * *
With a minute left in the 1965 championship game, the Beavers were down 46 to 44 to Odell.
Ruth had a plan: Get the ball to Flowerday, the 220-pound underneath guy.
The senior had spent most of the second quarter and all of the third on the bench, four fouls against him. But late in the fourth, he tied it up with a left-handed hook shot.
And with 6 seconds remaining, Wambold faked out a defender and passed it to Flowerday, whose layup gave the Beavers their second straight championship trophy.
The team drenched their coach in their celebration. Ruth was 22, and his family believes he remains the youngest coach to win a championship in Nebraska. And he did it his first year as a coach, and in his first -- and last -- trip to a state tournament.
Thursday, he visited the trophy in Beaver Crossing on his way to Lincoln. He thought about what turned his team around 50 years ago, from early season losers to state champs. And he credited his team. They learned how to play together, how to win. They didn’t quit.
“They were hard-working, big strapping kids. They were men already at 17 years of age,” he said. “I told them at the athletic banquet in front of the entire town: ‘These kids are good kids.’”
Some of those kids are retired now, some of them already gone.
Flowerday lives in Florida. His points sealed the win for the Beavers, but the coach got them to the game. Ruth was fiery when he needed to be, caring when a player was struggling off the court.
“He made a team out of a bunch of guys who wanted to win. There were no heroes, no outstanding athletes. I choose to say it was all of us and Coach Ruth.”
Wambold scored a team-high 17 points in the title game. Afterward, the high school student told a reporter: “He’s the greatest coach in the world.”
“Still believe it,” he said Thursday from Colorado. He’s kept in contact with the Ruth over the years.
“And he’s a great person, too. There’s more to being a coach than just coaching.”
