World beaters
A long-lost scrapbook renews
‘durable satisfactions’ of Jayhawks’
1952 championship run
by Steven Hill
The photographs have curled and the pages have bronzed over the years, but the thrill of ultimate achievement beams as fresh as yesterday on the faces of the boys of ’52.
“Along the Road to Helsinki,” a scrapbook put together by Don Pierce, c’41, KU’s sports information director from 1946 to 1964, documents the 1952 KU team that won the NCAA title and went on to capture gold for the USA at the Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.
Ann Pierce, ’68, recently discovered the book among some 40 boxes of KU memorabilia that belonged to her late father. Much of the material she donated to the Booth Family Hall of Athletics. “But this wouldn’t be any good behind glass,” Pierce says of the scrapbook, which preserves newspaper articles, souvenir programs, photos, letters and an 18-page account of the season that Don Pierce wrote before the Olympics. She loaned it to the Alumni Association.
Among the treasures is a letter coach Phog Allen wrote to his players after the NCAA title game, which the Jayhawks won, 80-63, over St. John’s.
“It’s been great fun. But twenty-five or thirty years from now you boys will radiate and multiply the recollections of your struggles and your successes and your defeats and your dejections,” Allen wrote. “All these will be rolled into a fine philosophy of life which will give you durable satisfactions down through the years.”
Doc may have understated the time frame, but he got the sentiment right. Fifty-five years after they conquered the basketball world, the thrill that was fresh in 1952 endures. It’s written all over their faces.
1952 Interactive Basketball Scrapbook
Scrapbook Slideshow
View photos from the “Along the Road to Helsinki" scrapbook in our online slideshow.
Letters to the team
Download pdf letters from "Phog" Allen, A.C. Lonborg and Chancellor Franklin Murphy.
