Old Dominion basketball coach Sonny Allen staggered into the visiting locker room inside Crenshaw Gym in Ashland.
His squad trailed Randolph-Macon by twenty points off the back of missed shots, sloppy turnovers and raucous road environment.
“It's the first game that I ever played in where you didn't have to be out of bounds to pass the ball in,” said Wilson Washington, the team’s starting center. “There was no room to step out of bounds. You got both feet out of bounds, and you feel somebody pressing up against you. Okay, so you tell a referee, ‘Hey, man, I can't.’ He said, ‘Well, you do whatever you can do, okay?’”
The Booker T. Washington High graduate and his teammates rolled into the locker room dejected at halftime.
Guard Joey Caruthers sat on the bench awaiting Coach Allen’s frustration.
“He basically came in and said, ‘Get your man to man assignments from Coach Woolen. We're going man to man in the second half. When the game's over, get on the bus. We're going back to Norfolk,’” Caruthers recalled.
Allen told his players — either you’re winning this game or you aren’t. Decide in this room.
“And he left the locker room,” Caruthers said.
The Monarchs pressed hard and pushed the ball continuously. They incrementally sliced the lead in the second half to force overtime. Then despite Washington and backup forwards Tommy Street and Grey Eubank fouling out, Old Dominion managed a second overtime.
They proved their mettle and finished off Randolph-Macon 86-85 in a pivotal game that decided home court advantage for the regional playoffs.
The Virginian Pilot dubbed the game “Mayhem in a Matchbox.”
That mid-February game distilled and bottled the essence of the 1974-75 Monarchs — relentless effort and intensity.
The whole halftime speech? Forward Jeff Fuhrmann said it was one of Allen’s classic attempts to motivate the squad.
“It was all a play on his part. He knew exactly what he was doing,” he said. “It's like, ‘What do I got to lose here? I'm gonna give it a shot. I'm gonna try to motivate him just like this.’ It was an unbelievable game.”
But it took some time to get there. The season started on shaky ground.
Washington transferred to Old Dominion from Maryland the year prior, barring him from playing in the first half of the season.
“The way that it worked [then], no transfer portal. You just gotta sit out a year,” Washington said.
The Monarchs dropped their first game on the road at Dayton then squeaked out a narrow win against Biscayne at home. Caruthers and Fuhrmann committed a few missteps to close out the game, nearly handing a sure win over to the visitors.
The Virginian-Pilot wrote that after the Biscayne game that Allen “administered a verbal lashing.” Here’s how Fuhrmann remembered it.
“In the locker room, Sonny, he chewed me, and I mean specifically me and Joey,” he said.
“We're just taking this whole thing that when he finishes and leaves the locker room, we had upperclassmen coming to us saying, you guys, okay, you guys, okay, I mean, but he was, his point was, look, I know you guys are sophomores, but now you're not. You're not going to play like sophomores anymore. The mistakes never happened again.”
The expectations were set high because of the team’s potent offensive attack.
It was a fast-paced, wear-you-down speed that lit up the scoreboard, said Carol Hudson, the team’s manager.
“The Sonny Allen fast break was kind of innovative back in those days, organized fast break so the fans loved it,” he said.
Allen’s offensive system was predicated on pushing the ball up the floor and constant movement in the halfcourt to score quickly.
Defensively, the Monarchs pressed teams and guarded every inch of the floor.
Allen’s son, Billy, helped the team as a high school freshman. He said ODU’s pace broke teams down physically.
“They put so much pressure on opposing teams that it kind of threw the opposing teams off their game plan, because they would work so hard to get back on defense, to stop the break, that it would wear them down and completely take them out of their original game plan,” he said.
The schemes accentuated Caruthers’ speed.
“In Sonny’s system, That was paramount,” Caruthers said. “You had to be able to get the ball down the court as quickly as possible.”
It allowed Washington to take advantage of his height and leaping ability. He’d grab a rebound and quickly find the outlet pass to push the ball up the floor.
“To slow us down, you have to slow me down,” Washington said. “And I'm going to get my 12, 15, 20 rebound, and every last one of them. I don't get rebounds and take photos.”
Opponents were required to play their best to win.
“Wilson in the middle and in the guards we had there, put a lot of pressure on the opponent,” Hudson said.
Practices were relentless scrimmaging affairs where the players pushed each other. Players like Eubank, Street, Jay Rountree, Dave Moyer and Oliver Purnell pushed everyone in practice. They sacrificed potential starting roles at other schools to come off the bench at Old Dominion.
“If you could execute in practice, the fast break in your press, then you got the game, but the other team didn't know what you were doing,” Caruthers said. “It made it a little bit easier.”
The Monarchs went on to win nine of their next 11 games. That included an 84-73 win over California to win the Kiwanis Classic.
Washington was cleared to play in January. He played his first game during the streak — a 101-79 win over Bloomsburg.
After three consecutive losses to South Florida, Florida Southern and East Carolina in January, Old Dominion quickly corrected its issues and peeled off ten wins to close the regular season — including the double overtime Mayhem at Randolph-Macon.
The winning streak was, in part, due to the overwhelming advantage that the Monarchs held at the ODU Fieldhouse — the school’s home before Chartway Arena.
The tightly packed arena held about 5000 people who made it their mission to deafen each other and overwhelm the visitors.
Fans smashed together one thing in particular to disorient opponents.
“You would have 5200 people there, all with those wooden blocks in the fast break, going, in the band going, and it was just, it was pretty darn electric,” Allen said.
The Monarchs rode that homecourt electricity all the way through the South Atlantic regional playoffs where they dismantled Baltimore 95-72.
Old Dominion rode that homecourt electricity all the way through the South Atlantic regional playoffs where they dismantled Baltimore 95-72 and won once again beat Randolph-Macon in the regional finals — this time 83-75.
Finally, in March ‘75, The Monarchs arrived by plane in Evansville, Indiana for the national tournament.
They blew past North Dakota 78-62 and Tennessee State 77-60 in the opening rounds to set up a championship bout with New Orleans.
It was a back and forth affair.
“That game came down to both teams were tired, and it was like survival of the fittest,” Fuhrmann said.
Washington had a strong first half with 19 points, but was stymied in the second, after New Orleans double-teamed him. He finished with just 21 points.
“I wish I could have gotten the ball a little more in the second half,” Washington said. “I don't know if [New Orleans] made a brilliant adjustment, because with 19 first half points, obviously they needed to make some kind of adjustment.”
Old Dominion led 76-74 with seven seconds remaining. Joey Caruthers stepped to the free throw line for a 1 and 1…and a chance to seal the win.
The first shot went up. And it clanked off the front iron.
“Will Brown got the rebound, dribbled the length of the court, went up for a shot in the lane to tie the game, and Oliver Purnell was right in his face, and he missed it, and we won,” Caruthers said.
They just clinched the championship. But it still sticks with Caruthers all these years later.
“That miss, I'm not going to say it's haunted me because he missed the shot and we won the game,” Caruthers said. “But it's something that I'll remember my entire life.”
The team sprinted out on the court, jumped and cut down the nets to cap off a remarkable season. Washington won the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award.
“I think we deserve it,” Coach Allen said in a locker room interview after the championship. “We came a long way. We won 25 ball games and the kids have worked hard. We won 15 in a row. We deserve to be national champs.”
The real celebration began when they got back to Norfolk.
“Just as we begin the we come out of the tunnel and all that, Coach Allen's got the trophy, and it was just a throng of people in there,” Hudson said.
Shortly after the championship, Sonny Allen decided to leave for a job at division one Southern Methodist. He made it a point to not recruit his Old Dominion players to his new school.
“Joey and Fur and Wilson were all just sophomores, and he just said, ‘I just wouldn't feel right taking him right now,’” Billy Allen noted.
Asked about the team’s legacy 50 years later, Washington put it succinctly and emphatically.
“We had fun. And we've been champions all of our adult lives. You can't change that. All right? Cannot change that.”
Old Dominion plans to honor the 1974-75 team at a home game later this season.
