Ernie Wagner (pictured second from right) also played for the Harlem Globetrotters.

Men's Basketball 6/24/2021 12:20:00 PM Cameron Weidenthaler, Assistant Media Relations Director

Former Basketball Standout Ernie Wagner Passed Away

Former men's basketball standout Ernie Wagner passed away at his home in Flint on Wednesday at the age of 88. He played for the Tartars from 1951 until 1953.

Below is an article from Director of Athletics Rob Fournier about those teams in the 1950s coached by Joel Mason, which Wagner was a part of.

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In the End, the Game was Only a Small Part of It
Rob Fournier, esq.
Director of Athletics

Back then, they did not offer a class in diversity. There was not a webinar to explain the value of integration and the advantages of a common community. And "implementation" did not require a legal mandate as was the case with the Little Rock Nine or Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. By comparison, what unfolded in the athletic department at Wayne State was as uneventful as the rising of the sun…but just as significant. Now, over one hundred years later, that early epiphany for Wayne State athletics has made it unique in the history of intercollegiate athletics. What was that distinction?

You see when they first started an athletics program at then the Detroit Junior College (precursor to Wayne State University) the athletic teams were integrated. Athletics at WSU respected individual rights long before anyone called it civil rights. And they did it together. That's the way it should be. The very first athletic teams (football, basketball and track) had both African Americans and whites as teammates. To give it perspective, that was 1918. Women had not yet been granted the right to vote and yet Wayne State athletic teams had young men of different color as teammates.... working together, competing together and, along the way, learning about each other -- together. It has not changed. That is the legacy of the athletic program. That is our teaching classroom. You won't find that distinction in the history of many college programs. And along the way that inclusiveness has changed many lives…and opened the eyes of others.

Detroit has long played a role in changing the landscape of America – from work opportunities, to fair wages, to racial upheaval, to the Arsenal of Democracy. And it was no more evident than in basketball at Wayne State. It is a program steeped in history that defied societal injustices in an open setting with young men not just navigating a basketball court but the roadblocks of prejudice.

Back in the 1955-1956 season, the Tartars were selected to play in the NCAA basketball tournament. Today's "Big Dance". To underscore just how impressive those Tartar teams were, they beat DePaul in the opening game of the tournament to advance to the "Sweet Sixteen" against the University of Kentucky. It might be argued that the integrated Wayne State basketball team back then representing "the freeways of Detroit" may have been a foreshadowing for the movie "Glory Road" that told the story of the all black University of Texas at El Paso team that won the NCAA national championship in 1965. Interestingly, that integrated Wayne State team suited up against another all-white team from that same Lexington, Kentucky institution some nine years earlier. Those teammates from that 1956 team had some vivid recollections of that game played in Iowa City, Iowa, including some questionable calls against WSU star George Brown forcing a game-altering substitution for the key player. But even more unforgettable, if not unremarkable, was the halftime exhortations of the opposing head coach who injected a few racial slurs into his comments to his team as they trailed WSU at the break. The Tartars in the nearby locker room separated by very thin wallboard were stunned by the goading – so much so that their reunion some 50 years later they still recalled the incident. A different time.

As much as that success seemed to predict what was to come, the next season when Wayne State again qualified for the NCAA Tournament, they declined the "invitation". To this date, Wayne State remains the only team ever to be invited to what is now the Division I NCAA postseason basketball tournament to "decline" that opportunity. That success was not isolated. In the 1952 season, they were ranked in the Associated Press Top Twenty in the country -- the standard long before ESPN and NCAA Selection Committees. They had built…and were building upon, a powerhouse and in that "house" were faces of different colors.

Unfortunately it all changed abruptly. It was reported, then President Hilberry thought such diversions would take away from the students' studies. Not sure if the student athlete current overall grade point average of 3.43, or the fact that every team has a cumulative grade point average of not less than then 3.17, would have changed his mind. His predecessor David Henry also had the program withdraw from the newly formed Mid-American Conference it had joined as a charter member claiming it did not emphasize academics. In a strange coincidence, as Wayne State partners with the Detroit Pistons to build their first ever basketball arena, the University on the other side of campus is building the Hilberry Theatre.

Although some might question the marriage of athletics and academics, there is no denying the simple lessons of social justice that are woven into the fabric of intercollegiate athletics – a foundational truth not as universally apparent so quickly elsewhere. The ideal of America has its perfect reflection in the imagery of athletics that includes the transformational likes of: Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. Likewise, those early Tartar teams embraced those same beliefs long before others opened their eyes, opened their minds…and unfortunately in many cases, even a little more slowly, their hearts.

One of those early head coaches/teachers was Joel Mason who guided the Tartar Basketball teams from 1948 – 1966. He had been a football coach and played professional football for the Green Bay Packers, albeit as the secondary wide receiver opposite NFL Hall of Famer Don Hutson. The talent that Mason blended was so dominate that four Wayne State basketball student-athletes went on to play for the Harlem Globetrotters when opportunities for blacks in professional basketball were at least tacitly restricted under the "two-fer" understanding – no more than two blacks per roster. To best illustrate that point, one of those like college students who was impacted by that unwritten edict was a young man named Wilt Chamberlain who gave up his senior year at the University of Kansas to play with the Harlem Globetrotters while awaiting a chance in the 1959 NBA draft. You could certainly make an argument, that Tartars: Charlie Primas, George Brown, Johnny Kline and Ernie Wagner, all of whom played for the Globetrotters, and with whom two played with Chamberlain, might have been the greatest basketball student-athletes to ever play at Wayne State.

But it was more than a basketball game. Here is how the story weaves together like a basketball net that realizes success when the ball passes through it. Mason's objective was more than young men moving through a basketball program. It wasn't just the ball through the net…but what those young men became after they left the court. And that has not changed under Coach Greer or Coach Lohr. Mason was acutely aware of 20th century America and was preparing young men for bigger lessons than jump shots and rebounding. Unfortunately, too many even today overlook and dismiss those simple lessons played out daily in intercollegiate athletics.

Mason was not oblivious to the segregation his team confronted. He just chose not to accept it. If they could not find lodging at the local hotel, they bunked at the YMCA or a fraternity house. If they were refused service at restaurants, they went somewhere else. Years later when those teammates reunited, those simple lessons were not lost upon them…and it helped guide them through their own individual confrontations with racism, and importantly, it was a learning tool for every member of the team. Impressionable young people who played a game of basketball at Wayne State left with a year-long seminar in life – and it carried to others. They did not apologize for skin color that they could not change. But they could change how others viewed that color. Mason's unyielding approach did not mean compromise. If the team could not dine or sleep together, then there would be no exceptions even if that meant traveling further or questionable food options.

The late Charlie Primas recalled for me some of those experiences' years later. Building blocks that were learning tools in his personal journey. "We were from Detroit. Heck many of us had not even traveled outside the City. It was different…but together we felt safe and we knew our coach was with us. Funny, I realized later, that not everything I witnessed was intended for us…some of it was for a larger audience." He reflected upon that lesson when he recalled winning the Indiana State Holiday Tournament in December of 1951 in some difficult circumstances. As Charlie pondered on that moment so many years later, he had already come to realize the moral from that moment was not meant entirely for him, or his teammates, but instead the larger on-looking crowd who were not wearing Wayne State jerseys. Mason was teaching without a classroom, without notes, but with an agenda. He was teaching all of us. We need more of those lessons.

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them" Frederick Douglas.

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