Seventy years since Fred Clarke helped Mission to its first provincial basketball championship, he still keeps up with the game.
However, the more the game changes, the more it stays the same.
“They still bounce the ball,” Clarke said.
Clarke was a member of the 1954 Mission high school basketball team that became the first team from outside of Vancouver to claim the title.
Despite being from a small town, the Mission squad became one of the better teams in B.C. for a number of years. Clarke attributes the success to unselfishness.
“The team was a real team,” Clarke said. “We weren’t worried about anybody getting the glory.”
The team captain, Jon-Lee Kootnekoff, compared Mission’s championship run to that of the 1986 movie, Hoosiers, based on the true story of an underdog claiming the Indiana state championship — also in 1954.
In the provincial tournament, Mission defeated bigger schools with more students including Duke of Connaught, Lord Byng, T.J. Trapp Technical and finally Gladstone High School in the championship.
“I think our school – our graduating class — it looked like we had about 35 to 40 people,” Kootnekoff said.
Kootnekoff says the 1954 squad was a special team that got along well. The starting five of Kootnekoff, Clarke, Frank Imakire, John Kabatoff and Lou Cliffe logged major minutes with George Kootnekoff, Bill Ordog, Jack Heinrich and John Symonds coming off the bench. The team was coached by school English teacher Charlie McPherson.
“When you got the ball, you would have taken the shot,” Kootnekoff said. “We would race down the court because we were in such great shape. Most teams had a tough time keeping up.”
In 1952, Mission came up short against a Duke of Connaught team coached by B.C. Sports Hall-of-Famer Ken “Hooker” Wright and finished second. The following year, Mission finished fifth.
They entered the 1953-54 season with the goal of winning the title, Kootnekoff says.
In the opening round of the provincial championship, Mission downed four-time champion Duke of Connaught 54-35. A Mission Record reporter at the time said the game was “erroneously termed a major upset by one Vancouver newspaper”.
Mission followed up the victory with another win over Lord Byng 38-32 and a 50-40 win over Trapp Tech in the semi-final.
In the championship on March 20, 1954, at UBC War Memorial Gymnasium, Mission edged Gladstone 40-39 for the championship.
Mission found themselves down 39-38 in the final seconds when Kootnekoff snatched a rebound and hit Cliffe as the outlet. Cliffe was fouled while attacking the rim and went to the free-throw line.
“Lou Cliffe was our worst free throw shooter,” Kootnekoff said.
However, Cliffe was able to connect on both attempts despite efforts to ice him and the crowd erupted.
“I guess Charlie knew the people who were in charge of the buses. There must’ve been two or three buses full of fans [from Mission],” Kootnekoff said.
Kootnekoff said McPherson was a wonderful teacher, friend and an empathetic person.
“He never played basketball but he studied it,” he said.
McPherson’s pregame and halftime talks had a gently assertive tone with a casual elegance of style and delivery, Kootnekoff said. Clarke also spoke of McPherson with admiration.
“He was a hell of a coach and a hell of a man. We just loved him. We’d always leave everything on the floor for him.”
Both Clarke and Kootnekoff continued to play basketball after high school. Clarke played at UBC, while Kootnekoff went on to play in Seattle on a scholarship and earned a spot on Canada’s Olympic basketball team before coaching Simon Fraser University’s first-ever college basketball team.
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