This is the first of three excerpts from Bill Reynolds’ book Our Game: The Story of New England Basketball, published by Hall of Fame Press. Today’s excerpt is from the chapter “The Old Gazazza,” which told the story of Frank Keaney and the University of Rhode Island.

The first school to break out of New England? The University of Rhode Island.

Only it was called Rhode Island State then, located in a little town in the southern part of the state called Kingston, a place so small and nondescript that before the 1920s it was little more than a whistle stop on the train between New York and Boston.

In fact, you can make the case that basketball dramatically changed at Rhode Island State, that it made its first giant step into the modern era there. The architect was a remarkable man named Frank Keaney, who arrived at Rhode Island State in September of 1920 as the basketball coach, the football coach, the baseball coach, the athletic director, and, oh yes, a teacher of chemistry. Think about that today when a basketball coach has three full-time assistants, an entire staff at his disposal. Now think about Keaney’s duties when he first came to Rhode Island State.

One of five kids from an immigrant Boston-Irish family, Keaney was nothing if not eccentric. He sprinkled his conversations with innumerable one-liners, and loved to zing his players.

“You’re sold to Louisville,” he’d say, which meant you were sent to the bench.

“Go back to Meddybemps,” which meant you should retire from the game.

“You’re nothing but a gol ding fried banana.”

“You play like a traveling cemetery.”

“Sell that shot to Raymond’s.” (A nearby junkyard.)

When he took his teams to New York City, he would tell them to watch out for the tall buildings and the painted ladies. He often came to practice in old blue baseball knickers, which he cuffed just below his knees. Whatever shirt or jacket he wore never seemed to fit him. He wore high-cut basketball sneakers, which were rarely laced. His shock of white hair was often frazzled. Intensity ran off him like sweat ran off his players.

“It’s great to be alive,” he’d say.

Keaney believed strongly that you had to have a passion for what you did, an excitement. It’s the way he wanted his teams to play, the way he wanted them to live. He called it the “old gazazza.”

“We need the old gazazza,” he’d say, slapping his hands together.

Fast break preacher

Practices were hard, and tried to simulate game conditions. No idle shooting. No casual playing. Everything was movement, go, go, go. Keaney believed in making practices interesting. If a practice session was listless and dull, it was the coach’s fault. If he sensed a practice was flat, he would invariably look toward the heavens and cry out, “Please come down, oh Lord, and help me. I’ll pay for the shingles.” Most of his practices were open to students and faculty members. Keaney loved them there, not only because he loved an audience, but also because he believed that practicing in front of a crowd was more akin to game conditions. But Keaney was infinitely more than a showman. His intellect was vast and deep, traits he showed early in life. He studied five years of Latin and four of Greek. He excelled in English. He loved mathematics. To the young Keaney, learning was a game, just like sports.

So when Keaney began his teaching and coaching career in the small town of Putnam, Conn., in 1911, he was ready. He was paid $900 to teach three subjects and to coach all the sports. The next year, he went to Woonsocket High School in northern Rhode Island, where he coached football and baseball, in addition to basketball. During his five years in Woonsocket, his baseball team won 77 straight games.

Keaney brought his inventiveness to Rhode Island State. Before his teams played in Madison Square Garden, he put smudge pots in Rodman Hall, so his players would get used to the smoky haze that hovered over the Garden. He put smaller rims inside the regular basket so his players would have to fine tune their shooting touch. He created a unique shade of light blue in the chemistry lab, then used it as his teams’ colors. To this day it’s called “Keaney Blue.” He wrote endlessly in journals, elaborating on everything from philosophy to coaching techniques to educational theory. He was forever searching for different ways to motivate his players. For, in his heart of hearts, Keaney was always the teacher, which is why he liked the nickname Menty, given to him by one of his players. It was short for mentor, and to Keaney it was the ultimate compliment. So Menty he became.

Under Keaney, Rhode Island State’s basketball teams became more successful in the 1920s. He used the element of surprise to compensate for inferior talent. Then, in the 1930s, he added speed to his coaching style. He wanted his teams to play at a faster pace, the antithesis of how the game was being played at the time. To accomplish this, Keaney essentially rewrote the game, including long passes as a means of moving the ball up the court.

The fast break was born.

Keaney began teaching his players his new style, and the centerpiece was the long pass. In Keaney’s new view of basketball, the dribble became the enemy, the ultimate sacrilege. “What are you trying to do?” he would yell, “prove there’s air in the ball?” He would have someone start dribbling a ball up the court in practice only to throw another ball up the court that would get there quicker.

“Get the point?” he would yell.

He wanted passes thrown on a line. No lobs. No high-arcing passes. He wanted his teams to play quick. Move up the court. Try to get an advantage. Shoot the ball. You can’t score unless you shoot, right? Most of all, move, move, move!

In 1936, the game was further quickened by the eradication of the center jump after each basket. No longer would there be pauses after every basket so a player could take a shot. The game was on the move and Keaney was leading the charge.

A bigger stage

Rhode Island’s new style of play immediately captured the crowds at Rodman Hall, a stone building that had opened on the Rhode Island State campus in 1928. Rodman sat 800 people and, on game nights, every seat was full. Keep in mind that it was the middle of the Depression. People hungered for entertainment that would take their minds off grim realities like not having a job. They found that entertainment inside Rodman Hall. Frank Keaney and his Runnin’ Rams were the best show in town.

Rhode Island State led the country in scoring 9 out of 10 years in the 1930s. In the first year it averaged 40 points a game, earning the nickname “point a minute a team.” By the end of the decade it averaged 75 points a game, and became a national phenomenon.

But not without a certain amount of controversy. Critics derisively called the Rams’ new style “racehorse basketball” or else “fire engine basketball,” as if it were somehow not real basketball. It was often dismissed as a freak show in short pants, a basketball circus. The Rams were also chastised for playing only in New England, for not daring to try their style on a national stage. Still, the points kept adding up and the Rams got more and more acclaim. They drew huge crowds when they traveled around New England.

But even with all their success, Keaney and his Rams never really got their due. Not then. They were too different, too revolutionary, too much of a threat to the established order. And if they were so good, what were they doing playing in the little gyms around New England, far from the bright lights and the big media?

As the decade of the ’30s drew to a close, Keaney realized that he had to bring the Rams out of New England if they were going to get any respect. To win over the skeptics, he had to bring his team where the skeptics could see them. Places like Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden. So, to the Gardens they went.

A game in the Boston Garden in the winter of 1946 was particularly noteworthy. It was between the Rams and Holy Cross, part of a doubleheader that also included Providence College and Boston College. It was Rhode Island’s first visit to the Boston Garden, and it arrived with star guard Ernie Calverley leading the country in scoring. The game was sold out 10 days in advance, the 13,509 crowd the biggest ever to watch a basketball game in New England.

It was a night Boston fell in love with college basketball, Rhode Island winning on the heroics of Calverley who, according to the next day’s Boston Globe, received the greatest ovation “a crowd had tendered an individual athlete since Eddie Shore left the game after the 1929 Stanley Cup hockey playoff victory.”

The Boston Herald added, “a record crowd for a basketball game in New England came, saw, and are now convinced that all the superlatives that have been showered on the highly-publicized Rhode Island State College basketball team are true.”

At the end of that season, the Rams were invited to the National Invitation Tournament and drew heavily favored Bowling Green on the opening night in Madison Square Garden. Bowling Green had Don Otton, a 6-foot-11 center, unheard of in those days, and were expected to easily dispatch the Rams back on the milk train to Kingston, as the Rams had been the last team selected to the eight-team field. But with 10 seconds to play, Bowling Green was leading by only two.

And Ernie Calverley was about to meet his immortality.

Calverley was a long shot

Calverley already was a great player before that night against Bowling Green in the Garden. He had come to Kingston in the fall of 1942 after a storybook career at Pawtucket High School, the old mill city just north of Providence. He had been both All-State and All-New England as a sophomore in high school, but he was only a shade under 5-foot-10, skinny to boot, and Keaney was not all that impressed. But World War II was under way, the Rams needed a player, and Calverley got his chance.

He didn’t need a second one. From the beginning he was an instant star, adapting to Keaney’s freewheeling style of play as if he had been born into it. He scored 346 points as a freshman, then went into the Army Air Corps for five months, before a heart murmur got him discharged. He came back to Rhode Island State and averaged 26 points as a sophomore, tops in the country. The next year he led the 19-3 Rams to the NIT, where they eventually were drubbed by DePaul and the towering George Mikan, who would go on to become the most dominant big man of his era, one of the game’s all-time greats.

But it was one shot of desperation in March of 1946 that would come to define Calverley’s career.

The game was broadcast in New York by famed basketball broadcaster Marty Glickman, and it turned out to be a great one. The undersized and underdog Rams were down only two with just eight seconds remaining. A foul had given the Rams the ball in their own backcourt. Calverley got the ball, and with just three ticks on the clock left, let fly a shot from about the foul line, a two-handed heave from past half court that somehow found the bottom of the net and tied the game in the dying seconds. A miracle shot.

It was estimated at 62 feet.

The next day a camera crew was dispatched to Madison Square Garden where Calverley tried to recreate the shot. He never came close.

No matter.

Calverley had his slice of basketball immortality.

“It was just a hoper,” Calverley would say 50 years later.

The Garden crowd went wild when the shot went in, many of them running out on the floor. Then Calverley continued his heroics in overtime, putting on a dribbling exhibition in the last 90 seconds as the Rams cemented the upset. Calverley was carried off the court on his teammates’ shoulders when the game ended.

The next day, one New York paper called it the “shot heard round the world.” Sports pages around the country had stories on it for days. A young New York sports writer named Dick Young, who would go one to be one of the giants of the business, called Calverley “the boney Sinatra of the court.” And Red Smith, the preeminent sports writer of his generation, wrote, “There hasn’t been another sports show in years which lifted the shackles and stirred the pulse so thoroughly as the performance of young Ernie Calverley leading his team to an overtime conquest of Bowling Green.”

The Rams returned to a hero’s welcome the next day, arriving by train to tiny Kingston station to a throng of 700 students. There was a 200-car procession back to the school where both Keaney and Calverley spoke to the adoring crowd, along with school president Carl Woodward. The team practiced over the weekend in smoke-filled Rodman Hall as hundreds of fans watched, before taking the train back to New York for a Monday night game.

Their next opponent was tiny Muhlenberg from Pennsylvania, casting Rhode Island State in the strange role as favorite. The Rams responded, though, once again thrilling the large Garden crowd with another display of fast-break basketball, thus setting up the final with mighty Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp, the most famous college basketball coach in the country.

It was a Kentucky team led by Ralph Beard and “Wah Wah” Jones, and the Wildcats were expected to win. Win, they did, but it wasn’t easy. In a jam-packed Garden, the Rams led by one at halftime. And with just two minutes to go, they took the lead on a shot by Dick Hole, another local kid who had played high school ball in Newport. But trailing by one with 23 seconds remaining, Hole missed a free throw, Kentucky got the rebound in a mad scramble, and Keaney’s quest for a national title was not to be.

The crowd gave both teams a huge ovation, and then erupted again when Calverley was named the MVP of the tournament. Afterwards, Rupp praised Keaney and the Rams, saying that, contrary to popular perception, the Rams did play defense and their full-court, pressing style had bothered Kentucky. The New York papers were gushing in their praise for Keaney, his team, and the way they played. The Garden crowd clearly had adopted the gritty, underdog Rams. They loved their flash.

Keaney had gotten his validation, if not his national title.

Calverley’s historic shot is remembered to this day.

Keaney a true visionary

Keaney left coaching after the 1948 season. He was 62, had a health scare after a game, and decided that was it. By one account, he had coached more than 2,000 games in five sports since 1911. He remained the school’s athletic director until 1956. Three years before that, a new gym seating 5,000 people was named in his honor, built on the site where he used to coach so many baseball games.

His legacy, though, far transcends numbers or even a gym named in his honor. He was decades ahead of his time. Lost in all the controversy over racehorse basketball was the fact that he was pressing the full-court game decades before John Wooden made it fashionable at UCLA in the early 1960s. It’s inconceivable to imagine where basketball would be today without the fast break, without up-tempo offense — and all that was started by Frank Keaney, in the incredibly improbable place of Kingston, Rhode Island.

But much of this took place in a vacuum. No radio. No television. A tiny campus gym in a little rural community in southern Rhode Island, only 35 miles away from Providence, but halfway to the moon back then. Take away a handful of games in Madison Square Garden, and Rhode Island State’s incredible success took place in a certain anonymity, a victim of small gyms and the era they played in. The Depression. World War II. A difficult time in American life, one so different from the post-war America that was to follow.

How big would Keaney have been in the modern era if his style of play had been captured by television? Rest assured it would have been very different, Keaney remembered as one of the game’s all-time great visionaries.

But it was Frank Keaney’s fate to coach in a time when his genius was often kept under wraps, far removed from the kind of attention it would have later gotten. His fate to coach in the decades before college basketball truly went big time.

Coming tomorrow: Excerpts from the chapter “The Right Coach,” about Joe Mullaney and Providence College.

breynold@projo.com