The program was an afterthought. The gymnasium was non-existent. That a team from the College of the Holy Cross should find itself in the championship game of the NCAA Tournament was a preposterous notion. But there was Holy Cross, the product of a happy accident rather than a well-conceived plan, preparing to meet Oklahoma for the national title in New York. In March 1947, the team without a home court had appropriated Madison Square Garden. The mecca of basketball rocked to the Crusaders' locomotive cheer: "Choo-choo-rah-rah!" Although basketball traced its origins to New England, the region had been left behind in the development of the game. 0l' Doc Naismith would have been thoroughly familiar with the facilities, provided the institutionshe visited had bothered to build any. The success of Holy Cross was a triumph of spirit and an act of fantasy. Instead of rising to basketball prominence, the Crusaders fell into it. Start with Alvin "Doggie" Julian, who was hired from Muhlenberg as an assistant football coach and told that among his duties was the supervision of the school's basketball team. There was no gym on the Worcester, Mass., campus, only an old barn that had been converted for practiceuse. Nor was there money in the budget for extensive recruiting. Remarkably, the first class to report to Julian in that barn in the fall of 1945 included several outstandingplayers from the New York metropolitan area. Gerry Clark, a Holy Cross alumnus and an assistant district attorney in the nation's largest city, took it upon himself to scout Catholic high school players and direct them to Worcester. Among those who accepted an invitation to join the 1,200-member student body was George Kaftan, a 6-foot-3 center with extraordinary leaping ability. "It never dawned on me that Holy Cross didn't have a gymnasium," Kaftan said. "I just liked the school." The team's first game that season was at Madison Square Garden, against City College of ...
