Varsity Football or Basketball players
One of my roommates, Mike Martin (became Captain of Wrestling Team at 118 lbs?) and I drove to Jeff's wedding in St. Louis where he married his longtime girlfriend, aka Hawk woman. The bride had had a nose job and looked stunning.
We met up with fellow Stanford men Fred Swedsen, Bill Etter, and a couple of other of Jeff's friends and teammates. Tom Merritt?
I had met Jeff when I was a freshman running a dart tournament on the fourth floor. The finals came down to the two of us but Jeff did not show for the final. Two weeks later, drunk, he banged on my door in the wee hours ready to play.
At his wedding, former St Louis manager Red Schoendienst gave a talk to the bride and groom on a large screen. Red just passed two years ago, the oldest living Hall of Famer at 95.
On the ride back to South Bend, we took a sip of booze every time we saw cows. Crazy times.
Jeff was very proud of that Golden Hatchet and quite deserving as I recall. No one knows where Mike Martin is these days.
Back to Bookstore:
I remember a Bookstore game in the early seventies where Shumate wore boxing gloves? Perhaps an exhibition before the championship? Or warm-up joke?
players. One was Mike Meyer who was Mr Bookstore in 1976, I think. They were big guys 6'4" and 250 pounds. One was a shot putter or discus thrower.
They were great at the Bookstore permitted goal tending. They would swat the balls off the rim.
Clemens was an amazing Bookstore player. One game he would dribble down the court, and make a turn around jump shot from the top of the key. I think he had 12 or 13 baskets in that game.
I went to grade school and high school with Jeff Carpenter. He was amazing in Bookstore 1978. A year or 2 before he got run into a pole on one of the old Bookstore courts and broke his collar bone. He kept playing, although he couldn't use one arm.
Carp was quick and a great ball handler, but he had side spin on his jump shot and was not a good outside shooter. Everyone but UCLA and Indiana zoned ND back then and so he struggled at ND. ND guards needed to be very good outside shooters.
Strangely enough, Jeff's best games were against Indiana and UCLA who each won national titles in his 4 years at ND, because they played man to man defense against ND and he could beat their very good players off the dribble.
Dubenetsky played football really hard, but he was a half step slow to play safety. He was flagged for a bunch of late hits which I was convinced was just bad timing and that he wasn't a dirty player. I used to joke that he had the record for most personal fouls in a career.
and the Combat Wombats. I think the "mask" in the name was a gas mask that they used to smoke stuff.
The 1978 championship was played near the ACC with baskets from the ACC and lots of stands. It was much more antiseptic and lost much of the charm of playing by the old Bookstore. So many people wanted to watch that I suppose they had no choice.
He lived w/ some guys in Morrissey who had a team called "PLO Bus Tours." Between FB winning a NC, MBB going to F4, and national attention to Bookstore, it was a heady time to be a soph.
I've included the best link I could find to that article, “Look Out for the Manhole Cover”. IIRC, that article led to the NCAA decreeing that that varsity hoopsters w/ eligibility couldn't play in Bookstore b/c it constituted additional practice time.
I recall Jeff Carpenter taking over a Bookstore semi game that year--he scored like 9 or 10 baskets in a 21 basket game. After making critical comments about Digger's substitution patterns to a Chicago paper (I think after OT loss to DePaul), Carpenter saw his playing time plummet. Digger was in the crowd for that semi, and Carpenter had a point to prove.
2 asides: 1) You were correct about Strapamasquon & the Combat Wombats--it referred to a rumored recreational activity of Tripucka's; 2) Rich Branning (a classmate of mine) never played in Bookstore--he apparently took an annual off-season break from BB.
Here's a link to a Letter from Publisher about Telander article:
https://vault.si.com/vault/1978/05/15/letter-from-the-publisher
EDIT: Tracy Jackson’s team was called The Jackson 5. A guy who lived next door to me that year went to the same HS in MD with Jackson and put that team together
...As Mary Beth Sterling put it in her dedication to Look Out for the Manhole Cover: A History of Notre Dame's Bookstore Basketball Tournament (Chicago, 1993--geez, how can this book be 27 years old already??):
It was kinda cold with some lingering snow and they actually played it behind the old bookstore (across the quad from Dillon) so we wandered on over to watch.
I remember that Clay was dribbling with a pair of black leather gloves on because it was so cold. It was quite the show but I don't recall it being too too crowded.
We Dillonites used to play a lot of pickup behind the bookstore.
Q
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We went into the tournament with a plan. Every year, the headline the first day was about the biggest blowout - usually one of the teams with three varsity players on it, crushing some sad opponent. Our goal was to be that sad opponent, to get the free advertising for our candidate for Ugliest Man on Campus. Fate smiled upon us, and we pulled the team with Doug Becker, Randy Haefner, and Randy Harrison, I think.
My hand-picked team featured a couple of accounting majors (wearing their glasses) and the piccolo player from the band. Together, they may have weighed less than Becker and a case of beer. Their team arrived with a large crowd of supporters, who surrounded the court to cheer them on, and abuse the opposition. That quickly changed, as it immediately became obvious that we were there for the advertisements on our T-shirts, not to play ball. They beat us 21-0, and we got the headline and opening paragraph the next day.
The only notable moment for us was the first play of the game. A friend warned me that Haefner was going to set up in the corner, and they would pass it to him, and he, being a gunner, would take the first shot of the corner. My friend, who had played them the year before, told me that I absolutely had to run over to the corner and block his shot into the cheap seats - he wouldn't be expecting that. As they worked the ball around to Haefner, there was nothing to do but follow the scouting report, and boy was he surprised when his shot got swatted into and through the game on the next court. Their crowd of fans seemed very appreciative of the entertainment value of that play, and gave him a lot of grief. That ended the competitive portion of the afternoon, however, as retribution was swift and ugly.
Jim Jones and the Wow I could have had a V-8 bunch would be hard to top.
Or James Brady and the Washington Bullets (an actually NBA team at the time).
Karen Ann Quinlan and Her Vegetable Buddies
Steven Judy and the Electric Light Orchestra
Four who've never had it, one who never will
...were the sports, weather, and news anchors at WNDU.
Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeve, and 3 other white men who can't jump.