Overview:
The co-captains for the 1941 basketball team at Santa Barbara State, the precursor of UC Santa Barbara, were black center Lowell Steward and Latino forward Tommy Guerrero
“March Madness” became the official brand of the NCAA’s National Basketball Tournament in 1989.
But hoops hysteria wasn’t brand new in Santa Barbara.
UC Santa Barbara, which had made its Division I tournament debut the previous year, had already sold out the 6,000-seat Thunderdome 12 times during regular season of 1988-1989.
And it wasn’t the first time the locals had gone loco for basketball.
The hyperbole poured out of the typewriter of Santa Barbara News-Press sports editor Al Williams 85 years ago as he chronicled the Gauchos’ triumphant return from the Final Four of the 1941 National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball Championships.
“Santa Barbara State’s travel-weary Gaucho cagers returned yesterday morning aboard the Southern Pacific streamliner,” he wrote, “and a cheering throng of several hundred students and townspeople were on hand to welcome their heroes home.
“As the Gauchos stepped off the train, they had officially completed their 3,600-mile junket to the Kansas City basketball tournament in which the local five copped the fourth-place trophy from 32 entrants representing colleges of their size from over the United States.”
Williams reported that after Gaucho co-captain Tommy Guerrero stepped off the train with the “huge bronze loving cup” in his hands, the madding crowd carried him off “on their shoulders to the waiting bus.”
Coach Willie Wilton addressed the fans briefly by saying, “Santa Barbara looks mighty good to us, but the trip will be an experience none of us will forget.”
It was an unforgettable team that had been thrust into unforgivable circumstances.
They’ve all long since passed away. Co-captain Lowell Steward, the first black student-athlete to play basketball in the California Collegiate Athletics Association, made it to age 95 before dying on Dec. 17, 2014.
The Gauchos of 1941 were an anomaly of the times: an ethnic patchwork of white, brown and black.
Guerrero, a Converse All-American that season, was one of the team’s Latino bookends. He was paired on the front line next to Ignacio “Paddy” Caudillo.
Together, they helped the Gauchos win their first CCAA championship in 1940 and then run the table through the Pacific Regional in 1941 while finishing with a record of 20-9.
They used their knowledge of Spanish as an advantage by alerting each other about where they were headed on the court.
“They’d say, ‘Debajo de! Debajo de!,’” Wilton told me during an interview a decade before his death in 1999. “That means ‘underneath.’ They’d get the ball under the basket.”
Rainbow Coalition
Steward had grown up in Pasadena with Jackie Robinson, the first black athlete to play in Major League Baseball.
He also starred on the Gaucho track team, clearing 6 feet, 4 inches in the high jump the previous spring.
Steward excelled in the classroom, as well, and eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in business.
“Lowell was one of the smartest players I ever had,” Wilton said. “He should have been in chemistry or something, but that was unheard of.”
Bob Sherman, a sophomore on the 1941 team, said the team had strong chemistry despite its racial diversity.
“There was a lot of prejudice going around in those days,” he said. “Everybody thought they’d feel better by putting another guy down … That’s what whites did to blacks.
“Those things didn’t affect the guys on the team, though. That’s why we were such a good unit.
“The most fun I ever had was with those guys.”
But 1941 Missouri, like all Jim Crow states of the pre-World War II South, had a different view of racial mixing.
The national tournament bid offered to the Gauchos came with a condition: Steward couldn’t play.
The NAIB, which later became the NAIA, didn’t start allowing black players until 1948.
The Gauchos had experienced racial discrimination in their own state earlier in the 1940-1941 season when they were turned away by two different hotels in San José.
They didn’t know what to do about the NAIB’s conditional bid until Steward told them to accept it.
“We were sitting in a sedan after practice one night and we asked Lowell how he felt,” Wilton recalled. “He said, ‘Go ahead. It’s the chance of a lifetime.’”
Steward confirmed Wilton’s recollection during a team reunion in 1984.
“They left it up to me whether they played or not,” he said. “I told them they deserved the chance to play for a national championship.”
The team kept the racial controversy under wraps while it raised $1,000 for the trip. Sorority sisters pitched in by shining shoes on State Street.
The News-Press reported simply that, “Steward will accompany the team as manager, being ineligible to compete under the tournament rules.”
Sherman, who later became a world champion senior tennis player, said the irony of it all was that Steward wasn’t even the darkest Gaucho.
“We had a pretty dark team, with three Mexican-Americans — a wonderful bunch of guys,” he said, referring to Guerrero, Caudillo and sophomore Joe Nuñez.
“If they’d seen them beforehand, the tournament probably would’ve nixed the whole deal for us.”
Steward had to stay at Kansas City’s “colored” YMCA while the team roomed at the Hotel Phillips. He wasn’t even allowed to dine with his teammates.
Caudillo tried to include him when they entered the arena for the tournament’s parade of 32 teams.
“‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘march in with us,’” Wilton recalled. “But when we got to the entrance, a guard stopped Lowell.
“It was a terrible heartache for him.”
Steward, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder that season, wasn’t even allowed to sit on the team bench.
Tommy Terrific
He watched from the rafters in the “colored” section as Guerrero shouldered the team’s scoring load.
Guerrero poured in 20 points in a 32-26 victory over Wayne State in the NAIB opener. He scored 13 more the next night in a win over Bemidji State.
Sherman filled in for Steward at center with 12 points to help advance the Gauchos past Appalachian State, 33-29, and into the Final Four.
The Associated Press reporter covering the game was so impressed with Guerrero’s playmaking that he wrote, “Although short in stature and not as heavy as some stars of teams that play hoopla ball, the little Latin-American makes up in generalship and accuracy what he lacks in size.”
Guerrero nearly put UCSB in the championship game, scoring a go-ahead basket with 90 seconds left in the semifinal, before Murray State rallied for its 35-33 victory.
San Diego State, a team the Gauchos had defeated during the regular season, beat Murray State in the final.
“We went as far as we did because of the defense of (Dick) Rider and (Larry) Crash Brewster,” Sherman said. “With Lowell as our catalyst on offense, we would’ve socked it to them.
“We would have won the whole thing.”
The bloom was taken off the Gauchos’ rosy return to town when news about the tournament’s racist slight began to circulate. The student newspaper, El Gaucho, fanned the flames of ire.
“We got some flak,” Wilton said. “The president of the college (Clarence Phelps) was upset.
“But he’d never said a thing beforehand.”
Steward defended his coach through it all.
“He was a very caring man,” he said.
The Greatest Generation
The winds of war soon turned thoughts to other matters.
Many of the Gauchos heeded the nation’s call. Several joined the Army Air Corps after the United States entered World War II in December 1941.
Rider, the defensive ace of the 1941 team and its MVP the next season, was killed in action when he was shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe after volunteering for a dangerous mission.
Guerrero enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army even before America’s entry into the war.
But while training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, with the Sixth Battalion, he received a furlough to play one more basketball game.
He was selected for a collegiate all-star team that was to play the best professional team in the world: the National Basketball League’s champion Oshkosh (Wisconsin) All-Stars.
A crowd of 21,800 — the largest to ever see a basketball game at the time — turned out at Chicago Stadium to watch the collegians upset the pros, 35-33.
Nine days later, Japan launched its surprise attack on Hawai‘i.
Pvt. Guerrero’s application for an officer’s commission was soon accepted by the U.S. Army Air Corps.
His combat service as a fighter pilot was ended in the early part of 1944 when he was badly wounded while flying a mission over Belgium.
The Bakersfield Californian, Guerrero’s hometown newspaper, reported that, “One month later, he awoke in London, England, when his family was notified of his whereabouts.”
After he recovered, Guerrero accepted an ambassadorship to promote the sport of basketball in South America.
He opted just three months later, however, to settle into family life as an elementary school teacher in the Bakersfield area.
His students knew him simply as “Mr. G.”
Tuskegee Airman
Steward banded with his teammates when the call to duty was sounded.
“We had decided among ourselves that we would all go into the air force,” he said. “The others did.
“When I went down to sign up, they didn’t know what to do with me. Just told me they couldn’t send me to the air force.”
But 10 months later, the “Tuskegee Military Experiment,” as it was called at the time, gave Steward the chance to prove himself.
“As one of the officers in charge put it, if it doesn’t work out, it’ll be down South and nobody’ll see them fail, anyway,’” he said. “‘We’ll give them a chance. … If they succeed, I guess it won’t hurt anything.
“‘If they fail, we’ll hush it up and nobody will know about it.’”
But the heroic achievements of the 922 Tuskegee Airmen was soon known around the world.
They flew more than 1,500 missions and destroyed 112 enemy planes, mostly as bomber escorts. They earned three Distinguished Unit Citations.
Steward deployed first to Capodichino Air Base in Naples, Italy, with the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group. He flew missions in Bell P-39 Airacobras and Curtiss P-40 Warhawks.
In July 1944, he went from there to Ramitelli Airfield, where he was reassigned to the North American P-51 Mustang.
Steward flew 143 combat missions in all. He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal reserved only for aviators who “distinguish themselves by heroism or extraordinary achievement.”
“One of the best things I did was fly top cover on a mission to rescue POWs behind the lines in Yugoslavia,” he said.
The classified mission later became the subject of the Gregory A. Freeman book, The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II.
Sixty-six of Steward’s fellow Tuskegee Airmen were killed during the war.
And yet, despite their sacrifice and the World War II service of more than 1.5 million black men and women, Steward was confronted with racial prejudice soon after his return to America.
He was denied a mortgage loan when he tried to buy a home in Los Angeles.
“The broker said they didn’t let black people buy in that neighborhood,” he said. “I decided to go into the real estate business and find houses for blacks.”
Steward admitted during the team’s 1984 reunion that the bitterness stuck with him for a long time.
“I’ve forgiven,” he said, “but I’ll never forget.”
But he also never forgot the happy times he had as a Gaucho.
“We were all good little players,” Steward said. “Forty years ago, we started doing behind-the-back passes, through-the-leg passes, full-court press.
“In order to beat the big guys we had to be tricky and fancy.”
It was March Madness at its finest.
