The Gophers’ golden age: Chuck Mencel was a standout guard for the University of Minnesota basketball team in the 1950s. His coach, Ozzie Cowles, had a .613 winning percentage from 1948 to 1959. Cowles was hired the same year a young John Wooden interviewed for the Minnesota job but chose instead to stake his claim out west at UCLA.
The game was on television. I recall that the picture on the small Philco black-and-white screen was very snowy, so perhaps we were trying to pull in the unreliable Ch. 9 signal from Sioux City, Iowa, rather than our one real station, Ch.