Tennessee Wesleyan Has A History Of Being UTC’s Basketball Nemesis

It would be understandable if the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball squad is guilty of looking past Wednesday’s opponent, Tennessee Wesleyan. After all, the Mocs have won 23 in a row over their foes from just up the road in Athens, and are traveling to a historic basketball mecca this Saturday to take on fabled Indiana.

But hopefully, a lesson was learned earlier in this season when UTC found itself in an unexpectedly tight contest against Johnson University, a fellow member of the NAIA’s Appalachian Athletic Conference with Tennessee Wesleyan. The Mocs led by only two at intermission before pulling away to a 20-point victory three weeks ago.

The current winning streak against the Bulldogs covers nearly 49 years, and the Mocs have won by an average score of 95-59 during that stretch. Tennessee Wesleyan enters the game at McKenzie Arena slated for a 7 p.m. tip with a 3-7 record on the year, while the Mocs are 7-4 having won seven of their past eight games.

Chattanooga owns an overall 52-18 advantage in the series that began in 1927. But there was a time when TWU served as a bitter rival for the Mocs. The Bulldogs won four straight meetings in the late 1960s as part of a period where TWU went 9-5 against Chattanooga. At that point, UTC owned a slim 16-to-15 edge in head-to-head encounters.

But when UTC transitioned from a private university into the University of Tennessee system in 1969, the Mocs began to gain the upper hand in the rivalry. In fact, Chattanooga had reeled off nine straight wins over the Bulldogs leading into a fateful match-up on Feb. 3, 1975. That frigid evening produced a stunning outcome that is forever etched in the basketball history of both schools for different reasons.

The Mocs were in their third season with Ron Shumate at the helm, the confident showman who had guaranteed a Division II national championship within three seasons of taking the job. Shumate’s brash promise seemed to be within reach as Chattanooga opened the season 13-2 and a No. 3 national ranking.

But consecutive road losses – including a 41-point thrashing two days earlier at Florida State, the program’s worst loss in nearly ten years – had the Mocs licking their wounds hoping to take out their frustrations on the Bulldogs in the not-so-friendly confines of Maclellan Gym.

But Shumate’s comments following the previous beatdown was an ominous indicator of what was to come.

“The only thing that scares me about this loss is what it is going to do to this ball club,” Shumate told Larry Green, the UTC beat writer for the Chattanooga News-Free Press. “We can use it as a learning situation, or we can just get depressed and not go out and play Monday night.”

Despite a 12-10 record entering the contest, Tennessee Wesleyan had given the Mocs fits earlier in the year in Athens as UTC escaped with a 66-61 victory. But Dwain Farmer, the Bulldogs fiery coach, didn’t take kindly to references of his school’s “cracker box” gym or the insinuation TWU did not even belong on Chattanooga’s schedule.

With the Mocs reeling and a motivated Farmer sensing the moment, Tennessee Wesleyan marched into the hostile environment and emerged with an 81-80 win. Ever the magical wordsmith, Green described the fallout in his story the following day.

“Evidently nothing is held sacred,” Green wrote. “The once hallowed Maclellan Gymnasium stage was desecrated Monday evening, the halls reeking with the distinctly discernable odors of death and something rotten in paradise. So often in the past, Big Mac had been a scene of joyous and expected pleasure. For over a year it meant certain victory. Now, so suddenly, it was just another place to wear out a pair of Converse basketball shoes. Monday night, in a replay of one of Ron Shumate’s recurring nightmares, UT-Chattanooga was laid to rest by Tennessee Wesleyan, yes, Tennessee Wesleyan.”

The stunning loss to the Bulldogs was the ultimate gut-punch for Shumate, especially after the Mocs jumped out to a 12-0 lead. Admittedly, UTC played the game without all-everything point guard William Gordon who was nursing a knee injury. But Farmer’s crew refused to go away, taking its first lead in the final minute before winning the game on an uncontested driving bucket by Sam Coleman with seven seconds remaining.

“This is the lowest point of my coaching career,” Shumate lamented following the defeat.

Farmer, who compiled a 360-290 record at Tennessee Wesleyan before retiring in 1987 and had an overall college coaching mark of 480-350, could not contain his glee in the jubilant visitors’ locker room.

“UTC is trying to be big-time. They want to beat teams like Dayton and Florida State. Well, we’ll take wins over Timbuktu, Holy Oak, even Soddy-Daisy,” Farmer said. “We’re a small school in the NAIA and we don’t want to be a big-time team. We only want to be what we are.”

UTC was able to quickly wash away the bitter taste left behind by the loss. Two days later, the Mocs soundly trounced Jacksonville State at home by 20, then picked up one of the program’s biggest coups to that point with a road victory the following weekend at highly regarded Dayton.

Shumate’s vision of scaling the summit of “Rocky Top” fell short that year, although the Mocs hosted their first-ever NCAA regionals, falling to Tennessee State in the finals, 82-81, to finish the season at 19-9. Two years later, Shumate would fulfill his promise by bringing the 1976-77 national championship to Chattanooga in their final season in Division II.

While times have changed as Chattanooga’s stature in college basketball continued to grow over the decades, the Mocs would be well-served not to overlook the Bulldogs. History, as they say, does have a tendency of repeating itself from time to time.

Paul Payne can be emailed at paulpayne6249@gmail.com