One of the benefits of being a daily part of TCU life is the opportunity to attend the public programs, speeches, and lectures sponsored by the campus community during the school year.

I have always been drawn to a fair amount of these events, and I particularly like the large convocations that are held in Ed Landreth Auditorium, one in the Fall and another usually in the Spring on Honors Day. I like the convocations because they call together in one place the varied components of our university's heart--its people. I like the air of formality and erudition, with robed and hooded faculty and administrators passing in procession, the group assembled rising as they pass in recognition of the collective high calling such processionals represent. I like the ceremony of academe; it reminds me of a past and present, in which I was, and am still, privileged to take part.

This past September, Dr. James I. Cash, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business and newly-appointed member to the TCU Board of Trustees, was invited to speak at the Fall Convocation which traditionally marks the opening of the academic year. I went with a little more than casual interest to hear Dr. Cash, for he and I participated in some of the same instances of TCU history, and I claim, therefore, some small stake in what he has to say.

A slightly older, slightly more portly James Cash than I had known, began his address by chronicling the year, 1968, a year in the fall of which he would become a senior math student. That year, he recalled, had begun on a high note the night of March 2 in Waco's Heart o' Texas Coliseum, when TCU beat Baylor for the Southwest Conference Basketball Championship. James was the starting center on that team, playing under TCU's new head coach, Johnny Swaim. As James told of that night, I fleetingly wondered if anyone else in that day's audience remembered, the way James and I did, the particular flavor of that Waco victory, and why it might be appropriate to place its memory in the serious context of his speech. As the memories of that season and that night came bounding back into my consciousness, I found it hard to concentrate on the point that James was moving on to in his speech--that although his year had started out so bright, it soon became a dark, despairing one with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the rioting that erupted in the nation's cities and on its university campuses; and how there might have been no better time and no better place for him than at TCU, where he was afforded a protected opportunity, in the midst of a world seemingly gone mad, to think, to work, to hope, and to achieve.

Later, the memories that James evoked sent me hunting for the yellowed newspaper clippings and Linda Kaye glossies of the 1967-68 Southwest Conference Basketball season I knew we had kept. They weren't hard to resurrect from bureau drawers and closets--mementos of one's successes seem never far away.

With little surprise, the first thing I discovered in reading those twenty-year-old news accounts, is that they tell only a portion of the tale. They deal with the names, facts, and figures, which are short to relate:

"The date: March 2, 1968 The place: Heart o' Texas Coliseum, Waco The contestants: TCU and Baylor; TCU tied with Texas and Baylor for first place The team: James Cash, Jerry Chambers, Tommy Gowan, Jeff Harp, Randy Kerth, Mickey McCarty, Robert Nees, Mike Sechrist, Carey Sloan, Bill Swanson, Tom Swift, and Rick Wittenbraker; Head Coach Johnny Swaim, Assistant Coach Hal Ratcliff, Trainer Les Bradley, Manager Rick Hosea. The score: TCU 72 - Baylor 65 The clincher: Arkansas beat Texas the same night to thrust TCU alone to the top Season record: won 14, lost 10 SWC record: won 9, lost 5"

What I could read in the news was that the Frogs, that year, were picked to finish no better than third in a field of eight Southwest Conference teams. I read the names of the players and the box scores of the games. I followed the way to the championship from a victorious pre-season tournament in Storrs, Connecticut down through out-and-in league play to the late-season wins over Conference co-leaders A & M, Texas, and then, Baylor, and past that Waco finale to the NCAA playoffs in Kansas, where, after miraculously outscoring a taller Kansas State team, TCU finally found the end of their season when Houston and its "Big E," Elvin Hayes, predictably sent us packing.

What the reports don't say, what the news is not able to tell about, has to do with what makes its all relevant. Between the lines of the reporters' words, there is so much to be said. To give flesh to the impressions of events that endure and subsequently inform us, we need more than names, facts, and figures. Reflective recollections are needed to give significance to the human experience.

It should be told, therefore, of the strong commitment and steady resolve of an unusual group of intelligent young men, who combined their ability, strength, and character into a cohesive, unselfish whole. And there should be mention of the coach who helped them maintain that delicate balance, who was not just leader, but wise instructor and faithful counselor, as well, who spent sleepless nights, figuring with the Xs and Os, how to best the opposition with the resources at hand, and how to get those resources to respond beyond the call; who told them they had a chance if they tried, and they believed him; who told them they were winners, and they believed him.

It needs to be said that we were not alone in the effort. The news reports can't tell about the Clinkscales and Lowrances and scores of other friends who were always for you and always there to revel with you in triumph and equally there to lighten the burden of defeat. They don't tell about a friend like Bruce Boswell, who drove to Waco a few days before the final game, bought all the tickets they had left, came back to the Brown-Lupton Student Center and sold them all to the first takers, ensuring that the Frogs would have vital fan support on a foreign court.

And what of the giddy group that drove back from Waco that night full of themselves and their good fortune--the same group of coach, wife, and children, who sometime still laugh in the night, remembering the coup? Hindsight tells me it wasn't the triumph over Baylor that alone set us to giggling, nor was it the outright championship we had won. We were heady with the occasion, the chance that had been ours to work an opportunity into success in spite of predictions against us, the same kind of opportunity that an older, wiser James Cash would reflect on in the fall of 1988. We had been given an opportunity, we had worked honestly and hard with it, and we had won. I'm not sure you can beat that.

If you weren't there that year, that season, that night, you should have been. It was a good time to be at TCU.

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