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As a small population state Nebraska turns out precious few athletes who reach the highest level of their sport but there was a golden era when one man, the late Neal Mosser at Technical High School in Omaha, coached a succession of talents who went on to achieve great things as professional athletes.  In a span of less than a decade he coached Bob Gibson, Bob Boozer, and Ron Boone in hoops.  Mosser commanded great respect from his student-athletes because he didn’t play favorites and he didn’t bow to bigotry.  His best players were African-Americans and where some coaches may have been reluctant or dead set against to play an all-black starting five, he wasn’t. In the 1950s and ’60s in an arch conservative and predominantly white state like Nebraska that wasn’t a popular thing to do but he did it anyway.  It may have cost his team some wins come state tournament time, too, when officials seemed intent on doing what they could to prevent Tech from winning championships against white squads.  One of Mosser’s legendary players, Bob Boozer, died this past spring (2012).  This story from about eight years ago appeared as part of a series I did for The Reader (www.thereader.com) on Omaha’s Black Sports Legends called Out to Win: The Roots of Greatnesss.  You’ll find other installments from the series on this blog.

Neal Mosser, A Straight-Shooting Son-of-a-Gun (from my Omaha Black Sports Legends series, Out to Win: The Roots of Greatness)

@by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared om The Reader (www.thereader.com)

In the days of segregation, the racial divide extended to school sports competition.  At Omaha melting pots Technical, North and Central High schools, diversity was a given, even if some students and teachers were slow to accept it. While blacks played alongside whites, an unwritten practice saw to it few athletes of color suited up, regardless of ability. An informal quota system operated then at all levels of sports. From 1948 to 1967 Omaha Tech’s uncompromising head basketball coach Neal Mosser consistently defied the status quo. Under him, Tech had dozens of black hoop stars whose names survive today: Bob Gibson, Bob Boozer, Bill King, Joe Williams, Fred Hare, Ron Boone. A crusty ex-Marine with little use for hypocrisy, Mosser, who played at Purdue and Nebraska, took heat for playing his best players, even if they were all black. Consequently, he saw games openly stolen from his teams, including a couple infamous larcenies at the state tourney in Lincoln.

Gibson, a Creighton University great and Harlem Globetrotters veteran before a Hall of Fame pitching career with the St. Louis Cardinals, said Mosser followed a color-blind standard. “Race just never seemed to be a part of his thinking. He did a lot as far as me going from a young boy to a young man. It was more the way he carried himself than anything else and the respect he had for us as players.”

“Neal Mosser fought a tremendous battle for a lot of us minority kids,” said former player Lonnie McIntosh. “He and Cornie Collin. At that time, you never had five black kids on the basketball court at the same time.” But they did. “Their jobs were on the line, too.” McIntosh said of the two coaches.

Mosser said his ability to relate to minorities stems from growing up in a racially mixed town, Cambridge, Ohio, that straddled the Mason-Dixon line. “Blacks and whites got along pretty good then in Cambridge,” he said. “The glass works factory my dad worked in was integrated. In our church basketball league we played against blacks from the AME church. So, in playing together and in working together, we learned to get along.” As a coach, he applied unprejudiced principles. “If they showed me any promise, I worked with ‘em,” he said. “I enjoyed coaching guys that wanted to be coached. All you had to do was believe in ‘em.”

Omaha Technical High School

When the pressure mounted on Mosser to play it safe at Tech, he didn’t back down. “I didn’t take any of their shit,” he said, referring to prep officials, coaches and fans who got on him and his players. He bluntly told bigots where they could go, but asked his players to keep their cool. “I told ‘em, ‘You can’t be thinking about these people that are always on your butt and razzing you and calling you the N-word and everything like that.’ I told them they had to look past that. Right now, they would fight, but they didn’t in those days.” A sign of the unwelcome climate was the time Mosser drove his team back from a game in Hastings and, looking for a place to stay overnight in Lincoln, he had to vouch for his players before a hotel would accommodate them. “So you see how touchy it was,” he said.

Gibson recalls Mosser standing firm. “As a matter of fact, we went to the state tournament in Lincoln my senior year and he started five black players. I give him a lot of credit for that. That night, you could hear a pin drop. And he didn’t give a shit. He just wanted to win.” While the crowd’s “stone silence” didn’t faze Mosser, what happened next did. With the fast-breaking Tech team already frustrated by Fremont High’s slow-down tactics, the referees seemingly conspired to give the edge in the nip-and-tuck stalemate to the Tigers. Observers and participants confirm it was neither the first time nor the last time that teams from Tech and Central got beat with an underhanded assist from referees.

As if he still can’t accept it, Gibson explains how his vastly superior Tech squad got robbed that night. “By the end of the first-half four out of our five starters fouled-out, and within a couple minutes of the second half I fouled out, and I never fouled out. They were cheating us,” he said. “It was that blatant. And Mosser did the same thing Josh (his older brother and first coach) did — he was out in the middle of the floor screaming, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack.” There was nothing Mosser or anyone could do. Tech lost 40-39. The pain of it all made Gibson cry. He said it was the last time he ever shed a tear over a loss.

The same story was repeated in 1955, when Mosser had future collegiate All-American, Olympic Gold Medalist and NBA world champion Bob Boozer in the middle and a talented supporting cast around him.

“We had the state championship taken away from us,” Boozer said. “We played Scottsbluff. We figured we were the better team. I was playing center and I literally had guys hanging on me. The referees wouldn’t call a foul. I’d say, ‘Ref, why don’t you call a foul?,’ and all I heard was, ‘Shut up and play ball.’”

Mosser said Boozer was clearly a target that night. “They beat the hell out of him,” he said. “They about cut his arms off.”

The bad calls didn’t end there. “On one play, my teammate Lonnie McIntosh stole the ball and was dribbling down the sideline when one of their guys stuck his foot out and tripped him,” Boozer said. “There was Lonnie sprawled out on the floor and the referee called traveling and gave the ball to Scottsbluff.  We were outraged, but what could we do? If we had really got on the refs we’d have got a technical foul. So, we had to suck it up and just play the best we could and hope we could beat ‘em by knocking in the most shots.” Boozer said Mosser helped him deal with “the sting of racism…Neal was a real disciplinarian. And he used to always tell us that life was not going to be easy. That you’ve got to forge ahead.” That credo was tested when Boozer, a hot recruit his senior year, was rejected by his top choice — the University of Iowa. “Neal showed me a letter Iowa’s head coach wrote telling him he had his quota of black players. Neal said, ‘Bob, these are things you’re going to have to face and you’ve just got to persevere in spite of it.’ It hardens you. It makes you tougher.” The same thing happened before, with Gibson, when Mosser tried getting Indiana to look at his prize player only to have the Hoosiers coach say, “I’ve got enough of ‘em.”

Bob Boozer with Neal Mosser

Perhaps the lousiest dirt dealt Tech came in its 1962 finals loss to Lincoln Northeast when the Trojans were leading by five with the ball and a couple minutes left in the game. Tech was called for an offensive foul, but instead of Northeast merely getting possession, they were incorrectly awarded a one-in-one free throw chance, which sent Mosser into a tirade. “The rule had just come in where if you had the ball and committed a foul, then the other team takes it out of bounds. They don’t get to shoot,” said Mosser. “So, when I saw them shooting a one-in-one, I just raised hell and they called a technical on me. Northeast made both free throws, plus the technical. They took the ball out of bounds, threw it back in and scored, and the game was tied without the Goddamned clock even running.”

Worse yet, after regaining the lead with just over a minute to go Tech’s go-to-guy, Joe Williams, was ejected after retaliating to some rough tactics inside. Mosser said, “he had guys hanging all over him and he swung an elbow, and they kicked my star black player out for fighting. Well, it takes two to fight. You don’t just kick one guy out of the game. Oh, yeah, they really screwed us.” Mosser lodged the usual complaints over the controversial calls, which made headlines for weeks. Referees even came out in the paper saying “they called the plays completely wrong,” Mosser said. “They all knew I was right, but they couldn’t do anything about it.” Ironically, Mosser was later put in charge of all officials in Omaha.

Mosser and Tech got a measure of revenge when his 1963 Trojan team, widely viewed as the best in Nebraska prep history, swept to the state title by such big margins that any hanky-panky by officials’ made no difference.

The star of that ‘63 club was Fred Hare, yet little-used reserve Ron Boone earned more lasting fame. Boone cracked the starting lineup as a senior, but he was given no hope of playing major college ball due to his size — 5-8 and 140-pounds. He played a year of juco ball at Clarinda (Iowa) Community College, where his stellar play and dramatic growth spurt saw him blossom into a strapping 6’2” physical specimen with major college prospect etched all over him. Mosser turned Idaho State University head coach Claude Retherford, a teammate and roommate of his at NU, onto Boone. Retherford signed him unseen. The rest is history. Boone developed into a college star and iron man of the ABA and NBA.

Ron Boone

It wasn’t the first or last time Mosser looked out for his players. “I did a little bit for every one of ‘em,” he said, “but I did more for Ron Boone than for any other kid I ever had.” Boone appreciates Mosser’s influence. “He was very, very fair. Even after I became a professional, I would go up to Tech and he would let me in the gym to work out.” Over the years, Mosser’s kept in touch with his stars and lesser-knowns and regards former players like Bill King and Bob Gibson as good friends.

Mosser’s influence extended to the playing ops he gave neighborhood kids on the full-size court he built in the back yard of his family’s north Omaha house and the annual basketball school/camp he conducted for promising young talent.

The Mosser hoops legacy continues. Neal’s four sons all played ball. Jerry played for Pops at Tech. All four have coached. Grandson Mitch, a former Nebraska Wesleyan NAIA All-American, is a current assistant men’s hoops coach at UNO.

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