Blast From The Past
Tagged in: Associations
Fifty years on, Colin Agnew remembers it (most of it, anyway) like it was yesterday.
The bits heís hazy on, he has more than a week to make up before reuniting with his mates from the 1957 Hamilton team that won the national basketball championships on their home court at Bledisloe Hall.
ìBack then, we used to have a North Island tournament, a South Island tournament and a national tournament Ö that was our representative basketball for the year.
ìSometimes, we might have home-and-away games against Auckland, Tauranga or Rotorua, but the national championships were the peak of the season.î
The tournament consisted of eight teams with the top team after round robin play crowned champions. Hamilton had last won the title in 1950, but had consistently finished in the top half of the field in subsequent years.
ìAt the start of the season, we realized this could be our best chance of winning,î says Agnew. ìWe said we had good players, good team chemistry and as much ability as anyone else Ö letís go out and win the tournament.
ìWe had a mixture of experience and a couple of young guys coming in, and we were on our home court with a home crowd, so that gave us perhaps a little edge.
ìAs it turned out, we lost our first game to Wellington and beat everyone else. Fortunately, Wellington also lost a game and at the end of the tournament, we needed a playoff at the end of the tournament to find the winners.î
Agnew also coached Hamilton and went on to guide the national menís team after he had retired as a player in 1963. In the presence of US college coaching legend John Wooden, Agnew remembers this as perhaps his first taste of scouting and preparing a specific game plan against an opponent.
ìWe had already lost to them, but we worked out a strategy that we thought would give us an edge and implemented it pretty well.
ìThey had a very good player named Alan Bruce, one of the best players the country had, in my opinion. We worked out how to stop him getting the ball and how everyone else could help out if he did get the ball.î
Woodenís wife, Nellie, presented the trophy to the winning team.
The following summer, the Hamilton players took all kinds of extra jobs to pay for a tour around Australiaís eastern states. They held a reunion 20 years later, but havenít gotten together since then.
ìBy the time we had that reunion, we all had families and we held a pick-up game between the í57 team and their next generation,î reflects Agnew (76), who had a quadruple by-pass last year. ìNot much show of that now Ö too many wonky knees and artificial hips.î
As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations on May 19, organized by current U Park It Waikato Pistons coach Murray McMahon, the team have invited anyone who played in Waikato during 1950s & 60s to meet at the Hamilton YMCA for a cup of tea and a chin wag, while watching the Pistons during their pre-game shoot-around before meeting Youthtown Auckland Stars that night.
Dodgy joints notwithstanding, you just know one ìback in my dayî story will lead to another and before long, the warriors of the past will end up on the floor trying to teach Pero Cameron and Benny Hill the finer points of the game.
ìIíve seen a lot of these guys play over the years,î says Agnew, whose son Steve is Pistons assistant coach. ìPlayers today are a lot bigger, stronger and faster, and much better shooters.
ìThe jump shot had only just come into being back then and we didnít have total control of it.
ìBut I know the foul shot is still taken from the same distance and we were probably as good from there as the players today Ö I think we shot about 80% that year.î
The Pistons are converting about 70% this season Ö that sounds like a contest right there.
