A Glorious Return Home
1969 Ram Legends honored during game against San Jose State
Braidon Nourse
History honored. Memories celebrated. Legends commemorated.
The trip back to Fort Collins from various corners of the world was one to remember for members of the 1969 Colorado State men’s basketball team — the squad which set a program standard and record for excellence when it reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.
That was back when the quarterfinal’s namesake did not yet exist in the college ranks. Before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Before Pong was released by Atari. Just months before Bryan Adams got his first real six-string.
The 1969 Rams had to battle just to earn the right to play in the tournament. At the time, the sport was dominated — both in skill and notoriety — by East Coast teams, with exception to UCLA, which boasted Lew Alcindor as its best player, winning its third consecutive title that year on the way to seven straight under coach John Wooden, losing fewer games than national championships won in the stretch.
The lack of spotlight didn’t matter to guard Bob Caton and forward Jim Stockham. It mattered even less to coach Jim Williams, according to the two. Entering the tournament, the 15-6 team knew they were good enough to make some noise. They had the confidence to say most nights, they were going to be the more physical and dominant team on the court.
All they had to do was get there. And as a program without a conference at the time, it was tougher. Every conference got a sure-fire bid to the tournament; independents had to fight their way into the fray.
Upon invitation to the tournament, the Rams were just one of nine teams to qualify having not been ranked once the entire regular season. Of those, CSU advanced the furthest.
Nowadays, you might call it a Cinderella run in the tournament, characterized as a low-seeded team making a deep tournament run which nobody expected.
The Rams? Low-seeded in comparison, sure (though official seeds weren’t around yet). A deep tournament run, OK. The nobody-expected-it part separated them from a Cinderella designation.
“I don’t think we were a Cinderella team, per se, because we felt we had the talent and so did Coach Williams,” Caton said. “He built this team to play against teams like UCLA and beat them.”
The ‘69 team was led by a talented guard tandem in Cliff Shegogg, along with the late Kerr brothers, Floyd and Lloyd. Shegogg led the team in scoring that year with 16.7 points per game. Lloyd and Floyd Kerr averaged 15.8 and 14 points respectively.
The Rams’ first game of the tournament was against Dayton, which lost in the national final to UCLA just two years prior. It came down to free throws late, two of which Stockham hit to push CSU’s lead to 52-50 with less than 10 seconds to go. Dayton had a chance to win it in that time span, but the shot came off the rim and Shegogg came up with the winning rebound.
“I didn’t contribute much besides the free throws at the end,” Stockham said. “But for context, I was horrible at free throws. I think I shot a better percentage from the field than at the line. But in that moment, when it seemed really clutch, I walked up there, hit two free throws like it was nothing, like ‘yeah, I do this all the time.’ It was funny it would come to me because I was probably the worst free throw shooter on the team.”
I want so badly to not be the best team in this school’s history. I’d like somebody to supplant us.Jim Stockham
The Rams had reached the tournament a few times in that decade (1963, ‘65, ‘66), but never got over the hump of winning the first-round game. Once they broke through that barrier, there was no way the team was squandering the chance to reach a quarterfinal.
The next game was against No. 18 Colorado, a team which the Rams had some deal of animosity for but didn’t get much opportunity to settle the rivalry. The tournament game was the only matchup between the Rams and Buffaloes between 1959 and 1979. The Rams won 64-56 to set up an Elite Eight matchup with Drake.
Drake beat CSU 84-77 for a Final Four date with the eventual champions. Drake was the only team to give Alcindor, Wooden and UCLA trouble, losing by just three points to a team which won every other tournament game that year by at least 15.
The Rams team, which was self-proclaimed as built to beat UCLA, were left to wonder what might have happened should they have met in Louisville that year.
Shegogg was flooded with emotion when speaking of his relationship with the Kerr brothers and what they meant to the program. Numerous members of the Kerr family attended the game and were celebrated with the team on the court at halftime.
When reflecting on the guard trio’s time together on the court, along with rebounding machines in Mike Davis and Archie Weems, who knows the noise they could have made. Perhaps if there was such a thing as a 3-pointer at the time, they would have gone the distance.
“I was shooting 3-pointers before they had them,” Shegogg said. “The outside shot came easy to me. In high school, I was an All-American and I averaged about 32 points a game without 3-pointers, and it was mostly because of the outside shot.”
No surprise his favorite player today is Stephen Curry, going against almost every basketball purist from the ‘60s and ‘70s. According to Caton, that’s just one of the things which made the ‘69 Rams special.
Another was Lloyd Kerr’s ability to see the floor and command a basketball game, which in many ways mirrors that of Isaiah Stevens today.
“Basketball is a different game now, but oh yeah, it was very similar in how Isaiah Stevens can take over a game at times. I’ve watched a lot of games, and there’s a lot of similarity. The thing that kind of sparked our reunion was the game against Creighton this year. You see them beat Creighton that way and they get into the rankings and everything gets exciting, and that’s what made everything come together.”
One of the main talking points during a season for any team in today’s era is to get to the NCAA Tournament. The notoriety around the event has made it a cultural spectacle which keeps millions glued to their TV screens from mid-March to early April.
As a social phenomenon, it wasn’t necessarily the same in 1969, but from a player’s perspective, that was the ultimate goal for CSU. Especially since the tournament only featured 25 teams at the time.
The goal remains the same now for many teams — to have a spot in the 64-team field. But Caton noted the extensive parity involved in college basketball in this era. COVID-19 years, the transfer portal and jumping to the NBA after a year or two in college all make for a much different landscape for college basketball.
With the absence of those things in the ‘60s, the better teams in the nation were “senior-dominated,” according to Caton, something not so common in today’s game.
But the way things have shaken out, CSU has wound up a senior-dominated team, headlined by Stevens, a fifth-year point guard who will go down as the best to ever do it at CSU at the position. To supplement, the starting lineup features three more graduate students and a senior with a combined 534 starts, including Stevens.
Caton sees a connection between the success of senior-heavy teams of old and the current Rams, which gives him hope for this year’s tournament he hasn’t felt quite as heavily since he donned the Green and Gold that magical 1969 season.
Stockham sees the same thing. “I want so badly to not be the best team in this school’s history,” he said. “I’d like somebody to supplant us.”