The memorable triple overtime game of March 1, 1962

This is part one in a two-part series.

KEWAUNEE COUNTY – March of 1962 was a time when milkmen from Carnival Guernsey and Lake-to-Lake dairies still delivered milk in glass bottles to area homes. Residents used their rotary dial telephones to make calls as touch-tone phones were still around a decade away. St. Mary’s and Holy Rosary grade schools felt the impact of the postwar baby boom, as each grade swelled to over 50 students, with total enrollment in excess of 400 students.

Teenagers listened to popular songs like “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, Dion DeMucci’s “Runaround Sue” and Cubby Checker’s “The Twist,” on their transistor radios. With no cable television, northeastern Wisconsin TV consisted of channels 2, 5 and 11.

As March 1, 1962 dawned, a late winter arctic blast had sent the mercury plunging to a bone-chilling 29 below zero. An ice-cutter was brought in from Sturgeon Bay to free the tugboats that were stranded in the Algoma harbor.

But the weather wasn’t the big story on this day. The Algoma and Kewaunee basketball teams were set to square off in the opening round of the state high school basketball tournament. Ranked ninth in the state’s Big 16 ratings (schools with an enrollment of 400 plus) and sporting a perfect 17-0 record and a league championship already in its back pocket, Kewaunee was favored to advance to the finals in Madison, at the time a single-division affair.

Algoma, for its part, finished the regular season with a 13-5 mark, including 10-4 in conference play. In its first meeting with Kewaunee in December, Algoma suffered a 19-point defeat. In the return match at Kewaunee in February, before a standing-room-only crowd of 1,150 with another 200 fans turned away at the door, Algoma jumped out to a 9-0 lead. Kewaunee pecked away and pulled ahead by a point at the end of the third quarter. Trailing 51-50 in the closing seconds, Algoma’s Bruce Charles drove to the basket for the winning score. The referee’s whistle blew. Instead of calling a foul on the Kewaunee player, Charles was called for charging. With the Wolves forced to foul, Kewaunee made a pair of free throws to escape with a narrow 53-50 win.

In the season’s final game at Algoma a week later, the Wolves defeated Preble, 77-76, on a 30-foot buzzer-beating shot by Tim Zettel. Zettel and Charles were Algoma’s top scorers, finishing first and third, respectively, in the conference scoring derby, averaging 24 and 18 points per game. The other Algoma starters were senior Tom Baudhuin, sophomore point guard Jim Pavlick and freshman Mark Wautlet. Jerry Halverson was the sixth man.

En route to its perfect 17-0 mark, Kewaunee had averaged 63 points per game while allowing only 44 — an incredible 19-point margin. The starters included senior Allen Slack and juniors Bob Wits, Pete Rohr and the Von twins — Ron and Don. Junior Don Zuege was the team’s sixth man. The Green Bay Press Gazette described Slack as “slick as a banana peel on an oily floor” for his rebounding ability.

“Their team seemed to be cloned,” Algoma’s Zettel recalled. “They were all about 6-foot 1-inch tall, slender, quick, good jumpers and defenders, and unselfish at the offensive end. Their coach George Bahrke was tough, smart, disciplined, experienced and always had his teams well prepared.”

While Bahrke was in his seventh season as head coach, Leroy Sroda was in his first season as Algoma’s head mentor.

In the days prior to the big game, Algoma’s Charles, Baudhuin and Pavlick were all under the weather.

“As Ed Nesemann, my pharmacist, was filling my prescription,” Baudhuin remembered, “He said that he had made a major wager on the game with his brother, Kewaunee’s Dr. Reynold Nesemann, and that we had better win. Wherever you went that week, people were talking about this game. It was clearly the talk of the town in both Kewaunee and Algoma!”

(Next week’s part two of two will discuss the game itself as well as the aftermath.)