COLUMBIA, Mo. — With elevated expectations stemming from a wildly successful debut season, the Missouri men’s basketball team crashed and disappointed its way through a winless run of conference play. The Tigers scheduled tougher opponents than the previous year and, despite suffering the program’s worst-ever losing streak, continually drew strong crowds to home games.
One player scored consistently and seemingly at will for MU, though he was unable to play in some key games. The season ended with some confusion, a bit of disdain and plenty of optimism for the next campaign.
Sound familiar?
There’s a twist. The Model T was close to hitting roadways. The Wright brothers were beginning to publicly showcase their flying machine. And the Chicago Cubs were preparing for a season that would end in a World Series win.
The basketball season in question was the 1907-08 campaign, the last time Missouri failed to win a conference game before this year’s 0-18 finish in Southeastern Conference play. It was a different age for the sport — players could only take one dribble, among other drastic contrasts to modern rules — but it was a season that echoed, or maybe foreshadowed, the contemporary Tigers’ challenges.
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And it started with a championship.
As a school, Missouri began playing basketball in 1906. Rothwell Gymnasium — the exterior facade of which still stands as part of the university’s recreation complex — had been recently built. Basketball, a less violent alternative to football, was viewed as a women’s sport, but a handful of male MU students who’d played the game at the Joplin YMCA successfully pitched the idea of an intercollegiate team.
The Tigers won the Missouri championship in their maiden season, an honor based on their record against in-state opponents. (Travel, at this stage, was largely limited to trains.) The new collegiate sport was a hit.
“The Missouri rooters (fans) have taken to basketball quite naturally,†the MSU Independent, MU’s student newspaper at the time, observed.
With all five starters from that first team returning for the 1907-08 season, expectations were high.
“There is a big probability that Missouri will again show up superior in the basketball world,†the Independent predicted.
The first game of the season was a win over the Joplin YMCA — in that era, college teams played a variety of opponents under varied sets of rules. The Tigers scored either 41 or 42 points, depending on the report, but captain and starting center Zeke Henley scored 22 by himself — more than the 21 scored by Joplin.
Henley then scored 45 points in a 75-11 win over Rolla, which is now Missouri S&T, putting “the ball into the basket so often that the scorekeeper almost lost count,†according to the Independent.
That blowout victory only served to further raise expectations.
“Captain Henley’s crew of basketball fighters cleaned up the gymnasium … and showed much improvement,†the Independent observed.
Then came games against Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association opponents. The conference had just formed and included MU, Washington University in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa.
The Tigers played their first conference games against all four opponents on a 10-day, eight-game tour through the plains. In its first matchup with Washington, MU’s offense dried up for a 30-22 loss.
That was nothing compared with what transpired the next day against Iowa, though. Missouri failed to score in the first half, losing 46-15 in Iowa City. The Tigers were “completely outplayed and outconditioned. This was the worst basketball defeat the Tiger five has ever suffered,†wrote the Independent.
Two losses to Nebraska followed. There, MU encountered a bunch of Huskers who played “a species of indoor football that is entirely too fast and rough.â€
The Tigers migrated to Kansas City, playing a tuneup game against an athletic club there for something of a reset before the trip’s climax: two games at despised Kansas.
Two games, though, became two defeats — one by a single point, one by six.
“Full of new life, the angry Tiger journeyed over to Lawrence to set his teeth in Jayhawk meat,†the Independent wrote, “but all he got was a mouthful of tail feathers.â€
By the time MU’s train chugged back to Columbia, the season was off the rails.
“Missouri’s basketball five, early in the season heralded as Missouri Valley championship contenders, has returned from a 10-day tour through Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas with a disastrous record, and in bad straits, so far as said championship is concerned,†was the Independent’s verdict.
Henley’s scoring ability had become a focal point of opponents’ defensive gameplans, and his teammates — including a forward nicknamed “Screw†Driver — weren’t picking up the slack.
Focus shifted to turning the season around ahead of a home game against a feared opponent: Baker University, a private school from Baldwin City, Kansas, that did not play football and instead specialized in basketball, was coming to town. Coached by Phog Allen, the legendary namesake for KU’s fieldhouse, Baker hadn’t lost a game in two years.
Missouri students packed Rothwell Gymnasium for the game, filling the bleachers set up around the court and the track above. A band arrived and “played its best fighting music, rendering Dixie occasionally to keep the Tigers in trim,†the Columbia Herald noted.
It worked. MU beat Baker 38-28.
Just like earlier in the season, a bit of momentum ran into the apparent obstacle that was Kansas. The Jayhawks beat Missouri twice more, benefiting from an off night from Henley for one win and holding on through a close game for another.
They were the last of MU’s Missouri Valley opponents and left a stinging wound.
“A detailed account of these (Kansas) games would be painful history to relate — we lost because the other fellows were better than we were,†the Independent wrote. “But the team ought not to be blamed — every man certainly did his best to win for Missouri.â€
The last game of the season was a home loss to the Kansas City Athletic Club, a defeat attributable to the visitors’ coach officiating the second half of the game. With his side trailing 18-14 at halftime, he called some 20 fouls against the Tigers in the second half to help the team from Kansas City win by six.
Henley missed that game with “la grippe,†or the flu. After the season, he left the university to work as a building contractor with his father in Joplin.
That Missouri team finished 8-10 overall and 0-8 against Missouri Valley opponents.
Afterward, blame for the winless conference run went to the scheduling of the “strongest opponents,†according to the Herald, and “the men on the team themselves, who were indifferent as to practice and training†in the Independent’s eyes.
“Here we have fallen from our high eminence of last season,†the quarterly MU alumni magazine mused. “With the same team in the field it was confidently expected that we would again enjoy a successful season.
“But the ‘plans of mice and men go oft astray,’†it concluded, quoting a .
After the season, A. Mills Ebright, the coach of MU’s basketball and baseball teams, resigned. He cited “friction†with the athletics department. The newspapers deemed his tenure a “failure†and “not up to the standard.â€
Some players from the 1907-08 team returned. And Missouri, of course, managed to win at least one conference game in the next 115 seasons — until this season trundled along the pitfall-ridden path of a century-old predecessor.
But even after the first bad season in MU basketball history, there was optimism.
“Let us hope for better things next year,†wrote the alumni quarterly. “If there is one thing that we Missourians are particularly strong on it is hoping to do better next year!â€