By Jerome Boettcher | George Mason Athletics

When the ball caromed off the rim, the buzzer sounded and Lamar Butler grabbed the defensive rebound to make his Final Four dream a reality, George Mason fans, students and alums everywhere erupted in euphoria.

Bert Readyhough drove his car through the Fairfax campus, laying on the horn and releasing yells of joy. Tim Campen and his wife cheered loudly in front of stunned Connecticut fans at the Verizon Center after watching the Patriots do the seemingly impossible as a No. 11 seed in knocking off the top-seeded Huskies.

While many shared their bliss, Readyhough, Campen and a handful of others felt a rare sense of pride that couldn't be matched. They were there at the beginning as members of George Mason's first intercollegiate men's basketball team in 1966-67.

"Such a proud moment. I couldn't believe it," Campen said. "We were just playing basketball (in 1966-67). I don't remember anybody having any thoughts about what it meant. We were just a bunch of kids happy to be playing ball."

The 1966-67 squad celebrates its 50th anniversary this season and will be honored, along with other men's basketball alums in the half century since the program started, during the men's basketball game against Fordham at 6 p.m. Saturday in conjunction with Homecoming.

In 1964, George Mason College moved from an elementary school in Bailey's Crossroads off Virginia Route 7 and Columbia Pike to its permanent location in Fairfax. There were just four buildings – the Quadrangle (North (now the Finley Building), South (now Krug Hall), East Building and West Building) – and residence halls wouldn't be built until 1977.

During that same year, in the fall of 1964, George Mason fielded a club team by the name of the GMC Chargers to compete in the Fairfax County Men's Recreational League (an "industrial league"). During the 1965-66 school year, the Chargers played teams such as Brothers Furniture, Bill Page Pontiac and Fatboys and finished with a 7-2 record.

It wasn't until 1966 that the college added basketball as an intercollegiate sport. At the time, there were just three sports on campus – basketball, baseball and rugby. Several of the players were on both the basketball and baseball teams, including Readyhough and George Wilson. Rugby is the oldest club sport on campus and was co-founded in 1965 by basketball manager Rick Stafford.

By the time the 1966-67 season began, the school had landed on a nickname – the Marauders after a school-wide vote conducted through the school newspaper (by the fall of 1968, the name had change again, this time to the current Patriots). The 1966-67 team photo featured Hal Woodside, Mike Baker, John Lieberman, George Wilson, Tim Campen, Pat Ayres, Barry Fink, Jim Heston, Mike Johnson, Paul Nance, Bert Readyhough and manager Rick Stafford. Names also etched into the red scorebook Stafford used to keep stats included Paul McCarus, Doug Rowl, John West and Downs.

"I don't remember anybody who showed up who didn't get to play a little bit," Wilson said.

The team practiced and played their home games at W.T. Woodson High School about three miles down the road.  

While most of the players were fresh out of high school, several were older. Ayres, Woodside and Wilson had all played "service ball" as they had served in the military already. Woodside, who played from 1966-69, averaged 19 points during the 1966-67 season. He scored a then-school record 36 points in the third game of the season at Vint Hill Farms Station. His 39 points on Jan. 6, 1968 against Bowie State are still tied for the third-most in a single game in school history.

Wilson was 22 when he stepped on campus in 1966. He had served in the Coast Guard, gone to school part-time at Long Island University and played for the U.S. Third Coast Guard District against other service teams. At 6-foot-2, he said he went from the second-smallest player at the Coast Guard to the second-tallest at Mason.

"They had played service ball, which was notoriously a tough brand of basketball in those days," Campen said. "Those guys brought a certain mental and physical toughness to our team that us young kids just out of high school really didn't have. They helped make us competitive in almost every game we played as I can recall."

Leading the Marauders was someone who also brought in a military background - Arnold Siegfried, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. He served as the program's first head coach before moving to an assistant role the next season. Raymond 'Hap' Spuhler came in and took over for three seasons before serving as the athletic director and baseball coach until 1979.

"(Siegfried) was a pretty likeable guy," Stafford said. "He wasn't one of these real hard core coaches because it was meant to be fun and he made it fun. He never really criticized people or yelled too much. He was a real mellow guy. He was very likeable and doing it for fun more than anything else."

Prior to the 1967-68 season, the Marauders joined the Maryland Intercollegiate Conference and played nearby collegiate foes in Maryland and Virginia like James Madison, Coppin State, Bowie State and Virginia Wesleyan. But that first year in 1966-67 featured a wide variety of opponents.

With Siegfried's background in the military, the team played several games on bases in the area. The first game in Mason basketball history, on Dec. 12, 1966 (a 71-68 Mason victory), was played against a team at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Three times that season they competed against the USA Military Prep Academy based out of Fort Belvoir, Va. They also played teams from Arlington Hall, which served as an Army intelligence facility in Virginia, and Fort Detrick, an Army medical command installation that was the center of the U.S. biological weapons program.  

Stafford remembers having to be incognito when driving onto Vint Hill Farms Station – a "top-secret" Army and National Security Agency facility  in Fauquier County, Va.

"You had to turn your lights off when you went on base so the enemy couldn't spot you," Stafford said. "That was pretty standard operating procedure for the military. Everything was dark."

The Marauders did play against other colleges as well. They had games at Episcopal Seminary and Montgomery Junior College, the latter ending in a 142-52 loss for Mason – "I think we got the record for the worst whipping George Mason ever took," Wilson said.

Mason also played Howard University's junior varsity team twice but the outcome wasn't what stood out these years later.

"I do remember Howard University had a hell of a bunch of cheerleaders," Wilson said, "and they made a lot of noise."

The most memorable games from that first season, though, came against teams from Lorton Reformatory.  On Dec. 16, 1966, for their fourth game of the season, the Marauders headed 12 miles south down Route 123 to what is now Laurel Hills, Va., to play inmates from Lorton Reformatory.

Yes, inmates. Operated by the District of Columbia Department of Corrections, Lorton Reformatory was a prison built in 1910.

"We must have been the first college team to ever go play a game at Lorton," Campen said. "That was mind-blowing. I remember thinking, 'What the hell do we have ourselves into here?' I had never encountered anything like that in my high school career. You could imagine the things that were said (by the inmates). They were just having a good, ole time at our expense."

Campen recalls the game being played in a cage separating the court from more than 500 inmates in attendance . The scorebook from that game reads names such as Big Deal, Slim Carrol, Pop Crump, Joe Ball, Mouse Wheeler and Rat Parker. But while those watching made the environment intense, Lorton's players were surprisingly friendly.

"They kept telling us not to worry about it, just play the game," Campen said. "I remember being impressed thinking that was the only saving grace, the players on their team were just playing ball. They were friendly to us. They could see we were terrified and overwhelmed."

Wilson recalls the talent of Lorton's team, saying "their first team could have played Division I ball." One of Lorton's players went by the name of Pittsburgh Smith.

"This guy could have been Mugsy Bogue's granddaddy," Wilson said.

Despite his small stature, Wilson and Stafford remember Smith looking like a gazelle as he jumped out of the gym.

"He had a size 13 shoe and was about 5-foot-6," Stafford remembers, "and he could take a quarter off the top of the backboard and leave you change."

As unforgettable of a game as it was at the prison, the scene was just as interesting when Lorton came to Fairfax to play the Marauders at Woodson High School that February. More than 300 fans packed the stands for the game – many of them cheering for the visiting team.

"I think we had more state troopers than we had fans from George Mason," Campen says, laughing. "There were probably a couple hundred family members from Washington, D.C. who came out to see their boyfriends, fathers and uncles play basketball because they had a chance to see them. I think that was the biggest crowd we ever had at a home game and that was all rooting for Lorton."

Mason lost twice to Lorton and finished with a 6-12 record overall that year. Even so, the dozen or so young men on the 1966-67 team at George Mason look back fondly on that first season of men's basketball at George Mason.

"This really was the first opportunity for people to represent the school," Wilson said.

"It was fun playing," Readyhough said. "Any time you play for a high school or college, the games mean something. So they were fun to play in. It had to start somewhere."