Members of Loyola University's 1963 men's basketball team share with Chicago Tribune reporter Katherine Skiba their experiences meeting President Obama Thursday. They remain the only Division I school from Illinois to win an NCAA men's basketball title.
WASHINGTON ? After 50 years of fame, they got 15 minutes more ? in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama.
The seven surviving members of Loyola University's 1963 NCAA basketball tournament championship team met Thursday with Obama, talking sports, trading quips and watching him dribble on the carpet.
Aside from toppling two-time defending champion Cincinnati to win the title, the Ramblers are noted in the annals of sports for having four African-American starters at a time when colleges in the South refused to take the court against a team with even one minority player.
One Loyola starter was center Les Hunter, 70, who now lives in Overland Park, Kan.
Hunter, who later played in the NBA and old ABA, said Obama sized him up and told him it looked like he still could play.
His response?
"I said, 'I could, I can ? but not long.'"
Team captain Jerry Harkness, 73, said he was so nervous before meeting Obama that he was "tingling in his fingers and toes."
He had met him in 2008 in Indianapolis, where he lives now, after campaigning hard for him that year. The All-American forward played briefly in the NBA and ABA, and then moved into sports broadcasting.
Harkness said Obama put him at ease calling him "Cap," and that they discussed being left-handers who love basketball.
Harkness said the exchange prompted another former player, guard Ron Miller, to ask Obama: "You're left-handed, but can you go to your right? Because Jerry (Harkness) could never go to his right."
Obama, Harkness said, replied: "I can't either, but we're just so fast that they can't keep up, even though they know which side we're going at."
Then John Egan, a Chicago attorney and former guard who was the team's lone white starter, made a crack about the political spectrum.
"I said, 'I didn't think he was capable of going to his right,'" said Egan, 71, who lives in River Forest.
Meeting the president is just one of the tributes the team's survivors are relishing a half-century after they made their names as young men.
In September, the team will be inducted into the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame and in November, it will become the first squad enshrined in the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.
"It's phenomenal," Harkness said. "You think your day is over and the giant wakes up again. It's just unbelievable."
The Ramblers, on the road to their title, beat the all-white Mississippi State team that had defied the governor of that state to play Loyola in an NCAA regional semifinal at Michigan State. "The Game of Change," it was dubbed, for promoting racial integration in college basketball.
Also in attendance was Judy Van Dyck, the daughter of the '63 coach, the late George Ireland, as well as the Rev. Michael Garanzini, university president, and current coach Porter Moser.
kskiba@tribune.com
Twitter @KatherineSkiba
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