Cat Tales: 1934 season, measles, referee interference, and homemade cheerleader uniforms
(This is excerpt #3 from the book currently being written called “Cat Tales: Jasper Sports Stories.”)
The 1934 Jasper basketball team, on their way to a gaudy 29-2 record, blasted through the postseason sectional, winning by margins of 22, 23, 16, and 16.
Eager to claim the school’s first-ever regional crown, the team was hit the next week with an untimely bout of measles and the flu. Star guard Eddie Rottet was affected. The other starting guard, Marty Gosman, sprouted a few measles spots just before the final regional game. Starting forward Johnny Steffen was still sick on game day.
Jasper whipped Carlisle by 15 in the opening game, but then faced a daunting challenge in the championship match: going up against a team they had never beaten, Vincennes, and trying to do it on the Alices’ home floor. According to Jasper player Cyril Birge in his autobiography, when the Wildcats had their only practice session at Vincennes, “Their coach, John Adams, was there and tried to prevent us from practicing because we might spread the measles to his kids. We didn’t have a good practice session, because of this and Johnny (Steffen) not making the trip.”
Gosman told former area sportswriter Jack Schneider in a 1987 interview that the Vincennes coach didn’t want to play the game, not wanting his boys to get measles, and asked for a forfeit.
Despite their sickness, the Wildcats stayed close in the title game, and Birge hit a late field goal to force overtime. Then came a shot for the ages. With Vincennes leading by one in the waning seconds of overtime, Wildcat Tony Berger had an open look at the basket. Rottet yelled, “Shoot!” But Berger whipped the ball instead to Rottet, who launched a shot from well behind the free throw circle with four seconds left. Birge caught the ball as it splashed through the net to give Jasper a milestone 27-26 victory.
Jubilant Jasper fans scrambled over railings eight feet above the floor to leap down and mob the Wildcats. Birge’s girlfriend and future wife, Antoinette, snapped a high heel off her new pair of shoes as she hit the floor. Gosman recalled fans “laying on top of us.”
The Wildcats advanced to a 16-team state finals in Indianapolis. They beat North Vernon by 15 and then a tough Richmond squad, 29-27, to reach the Final Four. Factories in Jasper blasted their whistles after each Wildcat victory.
Next up was Logansport, with two 6’5” starters, while Birge was the tallest Wildcat at almost 6’1”. Jasper led by nine late in the third quarter, but Logansport rallied to take the lead, 27-26, with less than two minutes left. But then came one of the rarest and unluckiest plays to thwart Jasper’s championship hopes.
“Logansport had the ball,” said Gosman. “They had a very silly habit of throwing a little lob pass in to this big center in the foul circle. I thought, I’m going to get that ball if they throw it, and I’m on my way. Lo and behold, there she come, and just about when the ball hit his hands, I got it. I started to dribble, I went to the right, and just started to the left, and I ran into the referee. The ball was lost (out of bounds). Nobody was between me and the basket. When I got the ball, I only had one guy, when I got around this one guy, I was open. I had my head down, and was really pouring it on. And ran right smack into the official. Can’t do it over.”
Logansport won by three, then beat Indianapolis Tech by seven for the state title.
The Evansville Courier stated, “Jasper would have won the game had it not been for the interference of the official.” While it was a heartbreaking defeat, it further fueled Jasper’s passion for basketball, and Gosman came away with a significant accolade. As stated in the Louisville Courier-Journal, “Logansport won the state title but Jasper’s team was the most popular, and Marty Gosman was paid the highest honor possible for an Indiana player when he was awarded the Gimbel prize (the Mental Attitude Award).”
Birge thought that Gosman’s calm reaction to the misplaced referee incident, by not complaining at all, helped him win the prestigious award.
Anna Mae (Haller) Gosman, one of the 1934 team’s two cheerleaders and Marty Gosman’s girlfriend and future wife, chuckled during a 2009 interview when recalling the Gimbel award presentation. She had returned home after the loss, so she wasn’t present when Gosman was announced as the winner that night. “Marty was so little and meek, and they told me when this big policeman came to get him out of the crowd (before the announcement) that he was scared to death he had done something wrong. Somebody else told me later that he won it. He was too bashful to tell me.”
Anna Mae also talked about how the townspeople wanted the cheerleaders to look sharp, although the Great Depression was raging. “The sweaters we’d been wearing were so old and rotten and ugly-looking. So for the state finals, some elite ladies made us some gold satin tops. They weren’t going to let us wear those horrible-looking old sweaters in Indianapolis. We were so poor I couldn’t afford to buy a new skirt, so my aunt made a new skirt for me out of an old spring coat of mine. She dyed it black. It was so dang long, but that’s the way we wore them then.”
Gosman noted that cheerleading in those days was nothing like it is now, with no acrobatic jumping, tumbling, or flipping.
“We had fun just getting the older people riled up (during games). If we got them standing and screaming, that was all that was necessary. I remember shouting at Fuzzy Bohnert, who had a gas station in town, ‘C’mon, Fuzzy, yell! You got a big mouth, you’re always yelling at people passing your gas station, so you can yell now, too.’”
(The next “Cat Tales” excerpt will cover how Jasper’s toughest loss came just five months after their Final Four appearance, with the tragic death of Eddie Rottet.)
