Kingsport Wins Cage Championship - Again - 77 Years Later

 

The Kingsport Times News Headline in 1945, the Last Time D-B Won the State Championship in Basketball

Saturday evening March 19, 2022, D-B won the state again!

Here is a column I wrote seven years ago about that long ago basketball championship. 

It was 1945, seventy years ago, February was turning into March, and, like this year, the Tennessee high school basketball tournament was beginning. But it was a much different tournament then. There were no classifications, all the teams were grouped in one big pot. And there wasn’t a girls’ tournament. Just the boys. (Tennessee’s black schools held their own tournament.)

The action began with the district – D-B was home to the District 15 tournament – with one team advancing from each district to the Regional. There were four regionals and this area was in what was called the Maryville Region. Two teams from each region would then advance to an eight-team state tournament, which was slated for Nashville that season.

The prospects for Dobyns-Bennett were not especially bright heading into that postseason. The team had finished second in the Big Five conference, well back of Science Hill, which had closed the season on a sixteen-game winning streak. And one of D-B’s starters, center Paul Cloud, was out with an appendicitis attack. (He did not return.)

But the team managed to win the District 15 tournament on their home floor and earn a spot in the regional in Maryville. There they beat Knoxville Young and Johnson City before falling to Chattanooga Central in four overtimes in the final. Fortunately for D-B the top two from the regional went to the state tournament.

Their opponent would be McMinnville. The other six teams in the state tournament were Grove High of Paris, Savannah, Linden, Nashville West, Chattanooga Central, and Flintville.

Let’s cut to the chase: D-B defeated Chattanooga Central 38-32 in the final for its only state tournament championship. Cecil Puckett and Herb Hoover led Kingsport with 12 points each in the final.

But D-B’s victory didn’t get the banner headline in the next day’s newspaper that it should have. What could be more important in Kingsport than D-B winning the state tournament in basketball?

How about the Third Army taking the German city of Coblenz? There was a world war going on.

In fact the game wasn’t even on radio in Kingsport. The Sunday paper reported that more than 100 people flooded the newspaper’s phone lines beginning at 11 p.m., seeking to find out who won the game.

You might guess there was no radio broadcast by reading the newspaper story by sports editor Roy Elkins: it reads like a radio play by play.

The game didn’t start till 10:30 p.m. Kingsport time. How did the Times News get such a detailed story in the paper in such a short amount of time, considering how primitive the technology was in 1945 compared to today? No laptops, no internet. The type was set by hand.

I asked my buddy Grady Amann, whose father was a typesetter in Kingsport in 1945, how they would have done it.

“The writer and his spotter at the game had earlier secured a dedicated courtside phone to the sports department. He called the info to a sports writer back at the Kingsport Times who typed the running story then handed it in short takes to anchorman who proof-read and then fired it to the composing room.”

So the writer was actually telling the story as it happened: a play by play. And a sportswriter back in Kingsport was taking it over the phone and rewriting it as it came in.

“The composing room's copy editor would farm the takes - usually three to four paragraphs each - to his best Linotype operators. Then the pages would be built bottom up, leaving space at top for the lead. Usually the heads would already be written. One for win, one for lose.”

So an editor would have two headlines typeset and ready to go:

Kingsport Wins Cage Championship (the headline that actually ran)

or

Kingsport Drops Cage Championship

“Obviously there would have been many column inches saved for a story this big. Disposable wire stories of different sizes would be at hand to plug any last-minute holes.”

It was a busy production team at the newspaper that night. Basketball coverage got a five-column headline but it couldn’t match war coverage, which dominated with a seven-column banner headline on the Coblenz story and seven other war-related stories on the front page.

The 2015 state basketball tournament starts this week with a much more complicated format: A, AA, AAA, II-A, II-AA, boys, girls, multiple sites for games. And that’s just in Tennessee. There’s a whole other tournament in Virginia.

What isn’t as complicated in 2015 is the technology for reporting the results. It’s much easier. The hard part is getting through the ice and snow to the games.

Front page of the school newspaper in 1945.