For you IOWA folk---The real FAB 5 story...

viking611 · Dec 25, 2005

The Fabulous Five

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By Susan Harman
Iowa City Press-Citizen

Iowa's Carl Cain rises for a layup in the Hawkeyes' monumental win over Illinois on March 3, 1956, at the Fieldhouse, in a game that decided the Big Ten championship. The Fabulous Five led Iowa to the national championship game that season. Photos courtesy of Iowa Sports Information</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD>

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</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Sharm Scheuerman remembers living at Hillcrest dormitory and hearing the sound of students, lots of them, walking up the hill toward the Fieldhouse.
It was only 8:30 on a Saturday morning in March, but they were already lining up for a 1:30 p.m. game with hated Illinois, a game that would determine the Big Ten champion.
"They were going over and were clamoring to get in," Scheuerman said. "The atmosphere, the old cliché, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife."
Buck Turnbull covered the game for The Des Moines Register.
"The place was just electric before the game," Turnbull said. "It was a huge game for both teams. That Fieldhouse was excitement plus. The whole place would shake."
Iowa's starting lineup included four guys from Illinois and a fifth from Keokuk, just across the Mississippi River.
"I remember on the opening tip, I think Illinois got the ball, and they went down and shot, and I hit their big center, George Bon Salle," Scheuerman said. "I just crashed into him on the rebound just because I was so up for the game I had to do something to kind of release my emotions.
"I hit him real hard. He looked at me and gave me quite a look. I said, 'Sorry.' Yeah, we were up for the game."
• • •
This is the 50th anniversary season of the Fabulous Five, a basketball team of unprecedented accomplishment. It is the only Iowa team to qualify for two consecutive Final Fours (1955-56) and play in the national championship game (1956).
Five of the nine retired jerseys in Iowa history belong to the Fabulous Five -- Scheuerman, Bill Logan, Carl Cain, Bill Seaburg and Bill Schoof. Three earned All-American honors. As juniors and seniors the team won back-to-back Big Ten titles, and as sophomores they were second.
As adults they were all successful in whatever they did. They remember teammates with fondness and themselves with self-deprecation that comes from knowing full well what they achieved and how hard they worked to achieve it.
• • •
What made the five Fabulous?
"All of us knew what we were supposed to do," Schoof said. "Nowadays you would call us role players. We all knew what strengths we brought to the basketball team. We were satisfied with that. We were happy to just be a part of what was going on. Winning and establishing the kinds of things we were able to leave for other players to shoot at was the most important thing.
"We had three players who were as good of basketball players as ever played at Iowa in Logan, Cain and Seaburg. We weren't without talent. But without Sharm and myself filling the roles we did, the team might not have been as successful."
It was a team. Each man had his own strengths and weaknesses and each of his teammates knew them inside and out.
"Every one of us down to the substitutes wanted to win the game, and in doing so you had to give up a possibly marginal shot that you could take when someone else had a better shot that he could take," Logan said. "That's the whole bottom line."
Cain described the group as clannish because the players spent so much time together. They lived in the same dorms. When one volunteered to sell programs or usher at football games, the others would join in.
"It was a very unique thing," Cain said. "Nobody gave us instructions. We just really had an affinity for one another and enjoyed each other. So we became extraordinarily close as individuals. So when we began to practice, and that's all we could do as freshmen, we were surprised and pleased we all were as good as we were."
They sat around each other's rooms in the dorms and talked basketball. They talked about plays and the options they could use off their basic plays. There was almost a telepathy that developed on the court enabling them to react instinctively to each other's moves.
Wins and losses were the only statistics that mattered. Egos didn't enter into the picture. There were no subplots, no drama kings, no ulterior motives.
"I can't remember an argument," Seaburg said. "I can't remember any kind of confrontation. We had that mutual admiration and respect.
"There was no jealousy. None whatsoever. It was just the personalities that came to the table there. I think we just said, 'Hey to make this work, I'll do my job and I'll support you and you support me, and this is what I can bring and help bring it out.' We all did that."
• • •
The Fabulous Five were as fun to watch as they were successful. They pushed the ball up and down the court. Their idea of a fastbreak was a series of passes in which the ball never hit the floor and the result was a layup.
"We had in our mind, get the ball out and go," Scheuerman said.
In an era in which the dunk was illegal and the 3-point shot was decades away, the Fabulous Five could score points in a hurry.
"We all knew where everybody was at all times," Logan said. "That ball can move about as fast as you've seen any team move the ball."
Logan, the 6-foot-7 center, could run the floor and was an effective trailer on the break. He was a good enough athlete to have played on the perimeter but was way too valuable inside. He led the team in scoring all three years.
Cain, Turnbull said, was a jumping jack, an amazing athlete. He could fly down the court and, at 6-2, could out-rebound much bigger men. Seaburg was the shooter. He could bury a jump shot from anywhere.
Schoof, a 6-6 forward, guarded the other team's best offensive forward. He was an accomplished passer as well and averaged nearly 11 points as a senior. Scheuerman was the point guard, the traffic director who got the ball to the right guy in the right spot.
"We didn't need the ball, and if we didn't get it we didn't go around pouting about it," Schoof said. "(Scheuerman and I) guarded people and we set up our teammates and were happy in our roles. Yet when we needed to score, teams couldn't lay off of us with the hope of double-teaming others because both of us came out of high school as the leading scorers on our teams."
Indeed, all five averaged in double figures during the 1955-56 season.
• • •
Everyone but Logan, a Keokuk guy, was from Illinois. But Illinois never came calling.
"Truth be known, the only recruit that Illinois didn't get that they wanted was Carl," Schoof said. "They made no overtures toward me, towards Sharm, toward Seab, towards Log. We were in a sense (the) second and third all-state team in Illinois to go to Iowa."
Cain says flatly that Illinois never offered him a visit. Nor did the Illini offer one to his neighbor McKinley "Deacon" Davis, who went to Iowa the year before and was a mentor to all five. Davis led Freeport to the state championship as a senior and was first-team all-state. Cain, who like Davis is black, had a lot of visits after an all-state senior season but not at Illinois.
"Bill Seaburg, Sharm Scheuerman, Bill Schoof were all high-class basketball stars from Moline, Rock Island and Homewood, so we had a lot of incentive to show Illinois didn't do a job at all recruiting us to Illinois, notwithstanding the racial thing," Cain said.
Seaburg wanted to go to Kentucky or Minnesota, but they didn't come calling either.
"They didn't have any scholarships left," he said. "After my sophomore year when we beat Minnesota, their coach came up to me and said I now have a scholarship for you if you want to transfer.
"His name was Ozzie Cowles. I said, 'Mr. Cowles I'm going to enjoy beating you every year. And we did. They had great teams. I don't know if I could have made the team but they invited me anyway. But only after we beat them."
• • •
Ineligible as freshmen, the Fabulous Five learned of their potential slowly. Schoof said the subsequent success of the team was beyond their wildest imaginations when they first assembled. Cain began to see it when, as freshmen, they successfully scrimmaged against the varsity. Scheuerman said even as freshmen in 1952-53, they dreamed of being 1956 Olympians.
Then came the game at Indiana when they were sophomores. Having just lost at home to Illinois, coach Bucky O'Connor wanted shake up the lineup. He decided to start all five sophomores against a team that was the defending national champions.
"(Hoosier coach Branch) McCracken had no scouting report on us and had no idea who these guys were," Logan said.
"We walked on the floor and golly, these guys were heroes," Seaburg said. "And we beat them in Bloomington by 18 points. And that was the start. It just took off from there."
"These guys were great basketball players and we beat them on the road and we beat them handily, and I think for the first time we thought, 'God, maybe something is going on,'" Schoof said.
On Feb. 22, 1954 Iowa won 82-64 at Indiana and then won its last two games to finish the season 17-5 and runner-up in the Big Ten. The Fabulous Five were on their way.
• • •
The Fabulous Five might have been national champions except for one man: Bill Russell. Russell's University of San Francisco team won 55 straight games en route to two NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956. The '55 team also included his Celtic teammate-to-be, K.C. Jones, but in '56 it was Russell who dominated the court.
The Final Four was played at McGaw Hall in Evanston, Ill. After defeating Temple, the Hawkeyes went to a movie the night before the title game.
"My biggest recollection is when the San Francisco team came in after we did and sat a few rows in front of us," Schoof said. "Russell stood up and took off his trench coat and blocked the screen.
"At that point, I think all of us knew we were in for a hell of a game. He was just huge, and he played huge."
Russell's 26 points and 27 rebounds led the Dons to an 83-71 victory. The 27 rebounds are still a record for a title game. Al Grady, in the Press-Citizen story, described Russell as a spider web.
"Russell blocked Seaburg's first jump shot from behind me, and I knew we were going to be in trouble," Logan said.
"If they had changed the goaltending rules a year earlier, there's a good likelihood we would have won in 1956," Cain said.
It wasn't sour grapes. It was the truth. The Five were that good. Russell was just better.
• • •
On March 3, 1956 a soldout Fieldhouse and a national television audience watched two top five teams battle for the Big Ten championship. Emotions ran high. Even after a conference championship and a trip to the Final Four as juniors, the Iowa Five still had a nagging desire to prove themselves every time they played Illinois. It was a grudge match.
As Schoof said, the Illini (Paul Judson, Bill Ridley, Bon Salle, Harv Schmidt) were the first-team all-staters. Iowa's players were just the guys who went to Iowa.
The first half was everything everyone thought it would be, tight and tense. Iowa led 37-35 at halftime. Iowa erupted for 59 second-half points in front of a delirious crowd and buried the Illini, 96-72. Every one of the Five remembers that game.
"We blew 'em out of the gym," Cain said.
"When we completely dismantled them in the second half, supposedly a couple fans leaving the game said, 'If last night I'd have given you Illinois and 20 points would you have taken that?'" Schoof recalled. "And the guy said, 'Oh yeah. I would probably have committed you.'"
Was O'Connor a genius for projecting that these particular players would become champions, despite what Illinois thought, or was he looking for the kinds of qualities that enabled them to bond together and form the ultimate team?
"You could say it was master recruiting, and you could also say it was blind-ass luck," Schoof said with a laugh.
Or you could say they were just plain fabulous.
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