No. 77: Talent-blessed Tucson High won 1949 state hoops title

On the day Tucson High won the 1949 state basketball championship, you could’ve made a case that Tucson was America’s No. 1 basketball city.

On March 5, 1949, the Badgers won their 51st consecutive game. At the same time, the Arizona Wildcats were preparing to play Baylor in the NCAA Tournament, fueled by a 51-game winning streak at Bear Down Gym.

Are you kidding? What are the odds that two basketball teams separated geographically by no more than two miles would have identical 51-game winning streaks?

Tucson in 1949 was a basketball town and the Badgers were the recognized dynasty in Arizona high school basketball, winning their fifth state championship in eight years.

When coach Bud Doolen’s 1948 team completed a perfect 28-0 season to win the state championship, they drew a record crowd of 4,000 at Bear Down Gym, then the largest crowd in Tucson history — college or high school. The Badgers beat Phoenix Union for the state title that night, 48-46. The crowd stormed the court afterward, believed to be the first such court-rushing incident in our city’s history.

Doolen, who had played football at the University of Illinois with famed All-American Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost,” had arrived at THS in 1935 after coaching five years in the Miami-Globe area. His Badger teams soon won state championships with records of 25-1 in 1942, 20-1 in 1943 and 25-3 in 1945.

But his back-to-back undefeated teams of ’48 and ’49 took it to a higher level, one that didn’t seem possible.

Doolen didn’t do it with magic. He was blessed with first-team All-State players Linc Richmond, Joe Cherry, Julian Lewis, Fred W. Enke, Bill Hassey and Jim McKissick. In ’48, Tucson was blessed with future Arizona All-American Roger Johnson, followed on the undefeated ’49 team with future Wildcat Bill Kemmeries and all-state guard Rudy Castro.

In a radio interview before the ’49 state championship game, an all-Tucson affair between the Badgers and Amphitheater High School — coached by former Badger and Wildcat standout George Genung — UA coach Fred Enke said that he “licked his lips” every time he watched the Badgers play.

Indeed, Enke built Arizona into a Top-25 program in the early 1950s with a core of Tucson High ballplayers.

The ’49 Badgers routed Amphi in the championship game, 49-26 at Bear Down Gym. Genung had returned from World War II a few years earlier, where he was among the U.S. combat troops that met the Russians at the Elbe River in a march on Berlin. He told me that he was so deflated after getting blown out by the ’49 Badgers that he sat on the steps of the gym, alone, wondering how a team with all-state players like Sid Kain and the Hart brothers, Larry and Bob, could get so thoroughly defeated.

That’s what Doolen’s teams did to most teams.

Said Doolen: “I didn’t think I could ever get a team to hustle like that. You can go a long way with defense.”

Few could’ve predicted it in 1949, but Doolen’s Badgers didn’t win another state title, or even get to the championship game. Phoenix teams won the next 12 state championships until THS broke through again in 1962, under coach Tony Morales.

Doolen, who began his coaching career at tiny Plymouth, Nebraska, in the late 1920s, went 387-77 at THS, and was 701-134 over his full 32-year coaching career. Tragically, Doolen died of a heart attack midway through the 1954-55 season. He was only 57. Morales, his assistant, took charge and the Badgers won just 11 games that season.

Doolen’s legacy lives on. Two years after he died, a new TUSD school on East Grant Road was named Doolen Junior High.