'Talk of the town;' players from 1959, 1960 reminisce

     Two teams from last century laid the groundwork for what would be, 60 years later, another State Boys Basketball Tournament appearance for Monticello High School.

     The 1959 Panthers went 20-5 and reached the state tournament, losing in the quarterfinal round. The 1960 squad earned a 26-2 record, finishing fourth in the state and going 26-0 before losing to Marshalltown in the state semifinals.

     The Express caught up with some of the players from those years, all of whom expressed pride both from their accomplishments and those of the 2020 state-qualifying Panthers.

     Here’s a look at those two teams.

1959

     The 1959 team was the first to play in state competition. The Panthers won a district championship game 76-59 over Notre Dame of Burlington to reach the state tournament first round, where they lost to Clarion 74-69 in Waterloo to finish with a 20-5 record.

     Differing accounts show the Clarion game, as well as the 1960 round-of-eight win over Mason City Holy Family, as “sub-state” games, and the games involving the last four teams as the “finals,” but the Iowa High School Athletic Association recognizes each contest as a first round game within an eight-team state tournament.

     “We had a pretty decent team, but nothing like a year later,” said Jeff Podhaski, who graduated in 1959. “The next year they were so well-known all over the state. They were unbeaten until they got beat at the state tournament.”

     To get to State, the ’59 Panthers, led largely by Ron Long and Mike Hall, won a sectional championship game in Manchester over Springville by a  score of 88-38. Hall had transferred from Cedar Rapids Washington that year.

     “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone who could shoot the ball as well as Mike Hall could,” Podhaski said. “And it was all long jump shots.”

     That put the Panthers into the district tournament, where they beat Tama 90-57 and St. Mary’s of Clinton 57-48 to reach the final against Notre Dame of Burlington, a game the Panthers won 76-59 as Long and Hall scored 10 points each.

     The Clarion game was a thriller; the Panthers rallied from an 18-point deficit in the third quarter to get within two points in the final minute before falling 74-69. Long had 25 points in that game, Hall had 16, Jim Helgens had 12 and Carlyle Wacker added 10.

     “Clarion’s big guys beat up on us,” Hall recalled.

     Even though the Panthers didn’t make the four-team “finals,” they still got to go to Des Moines to watch. On the first night, though, they didn’t make it there.

     “We had our rooms paid for, but there was a big snowstorm, and we only made it to Tama and spent the night,” Podhaski recalled.

     Though he wasn’t part of the 1960 team, Podhaski enjoyed watching the Panthers play after he graduated.

     “They played so well together,” he said. “We weren’t bad, but nothing like that team.”

1960

     If the 1959 team was the one that broke the ice and got Monticello statewide recognition for the first time, the 1960 squad was special, made even more so by the fact it would be 60 years before another Panther team reached the biggest stage.

     “We only lost one starter from 1959, Ronnie Long, and although he was very good we had a more cohesive and experienced team,” Mike Hall said via email from his winter home in Florida.

     “We started that year ranked second in the state in Class A,” recalled Larry “Cecil” Goettsch, who was usually the first Panther off the bench. “The reigning champ, Sioux Center, was number one. Then they lost to a Class AA team, and we got moved up.”

     The 1960 Panthers won their first 26 games, scoring 100 or more points in four of them. They posted an average score of 77.9 to 54.6 for their opponents.

     “And that was with no three-point line,” Bob Matthiessen said.

     A memorable game from that regular season was a January game at Maquoketa. Monticello won 114-89, and the 203-point total, Goettsch said, “at the time was the highest combined score of any two teams in Iowa history.”

     Part of it had to do with the extremely short court at Maquoketa; Goettsch recalled that the edge of the center jump circle and top of the free throw circle actually touched.

     They won the sectional championship game over Elkader 75-51.

     In district play they took down Mount Vernon 72-41, and Keystone 51-48 in the semifinals.

     In the Keystone game, Mike Hall sank two free throws with 10 seconds left to ice it.

     The Panthers then advanced to State with a 80-56 district final win over Maquoketa.

     There, Monticello downed Mason City Holy Family 81-66 in a game played in Waterloo.

     That win put Monticello in the state semifinals, which included both Class A, and Class AA (larger schools). Semifinal and championship games were generally played at Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines in those days, but in 1960 that building had a prior commitment, so the games were moved to Iowa City at the University Field House.

     “That was good because it was close to Monticello,” Matthiessen said.

     “In our class we played A teams until there were two Class A and two Class AA teams left for the final four,” Hall said. “This of course was ill-conceived and patently unfair to the smaller schools.”

     The Panthers went up against a much larger Marshalltown team in the semifinals, and by then the squad had captivated the city of Monticello and beyond.

     “You can’t explain it,” Matthiessen said. “There was so much hype. The backing of the town was phenomenal. I can’t say enough about what it meant to everybody on our team.”

     Hall added: “We had car caravans of 50 to 100 following us to all our games and filling the stands. Believe me, it was so much fun to have the whole town basically consumed with our success.”

     “As we rode out of town,” Goettsch recalled, “there was a banner hanging over the road. It said, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ It was wonderful.”

     Marshalltown boasted a front line averaging 6-foot-6, while Monticello’s tallest player, Jim Helgens, was 6-2½. Ironically, the Panthers outrebounded Marshalltown, according to the Express article on the game, but the Bobcats’ fast-break wound up being the difference, as Marshalltown won 73-64.

     “They played awfully fast ball for such a tall team,” coach Dean Nelson is quoted as saying in an Express article from March 21, 1960. “They got behind us time after time at the end of the first half for easy scoring, and that’s when the ballgame was decided.”

     There were other factors as well.

     “The basketball court was a lot different than what we played in,” said Doug Himes, who lives in Grand Terrace, Calif., referring to what is now called the “old gym” in the current Monticello Middle School. “I couldn’t get used to the glass backboards. We didn’t have those (at home).”

     Matthiessen ended up being the leading scorer of the entire four-team “finals,” with 32 points, including 23 against Marshalltown.

     “I had a good night,” Matthiessen said. “But they were too much for us. We were thrown in with the big boys, but we wanted to be with the big boys. We thought we could beat them, but it didn’t happen.”

     Monticello went on to play in a consolation game against Sioux Center, which the Panthers lost 68-49 to finish fourth.

     Accounts of Nelson’s coaching were that he was a taskmaster, but also let the team run its own show on the court.

     “Nelson was more of a disciplinarian than an X’s and O’s coach,” Hall said. “We had no plays, and in all our practices we scrimmaged the whole time. We were free-wheeling, and he let us go. But on the other hand you didn’t mess with Dean.”

     Matthiesen has similar memories: “He controlled the team, but didn’t put in plays, and he was smart not to. We knew what to do. We knew everybody’s moves and knew what to do with the ball.”

     Himes added: “He was strict, but we all respected him. You had to listen up when he talked.”

     There are parallels between that 1960 squad and this year’s Panthers. Hall was the undisputed leading scorer, but there were five players on the team averaging in double figures.

     Similarly, while the 2020 squad hasn’t scored as much as the 1960 team, averaging 56.3 points per game, Justin Recker leads the way with 17.0 points per game, there are five players averaging 6.1 or more, and any one of them is capable of leading the team in scoring in a given game.

     And it’s just as likely the memories of this season will stick with this year’s Panthers as much as those of the 1960 squad in years to come.

     “We were free spirits and great friends,” Hall said. “We were happy and proud to represent Monticello. When we finally lost they still backed us and softened the blow a little. We were, for that time, indeed the ‘talk of the town.’”