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23 Cliff Barker

Cliff Barker Headshot
Name
Cliff Barker
Position
Guard, Guard-Forward
Hometown (Last School)
Yorktown, Indiana
Ht
6'2"
Wt
185
Seasons
1946-47, 1947-48, 1948-49
Birthday
January 15, 1921

Cliff Barker was born Clifford Eugene Barker on January 15, 1921, in Yorktown, Indiana to Horace and Gertrude Barker.

Barker was a burly 6-foot-2 inch forward on the 1948 Kentucky team that finished the season with a 36-3 record, the national title, and the nickname of the Fabulous Five. He also played baseball as a star pitcher for Kentucky.

Barker was a 3-year varsity letterman at Yorktown High School and was three times all-sectional and all-county. He was also a baseball standout, pitching 2 championship games with a broken arm. On October 20, 1938, Yorktown’s Tigers won the Delaware County High School baseball championship for the seventh time in eight years. Barker pitched a one-hit ball for Yorktown in the final game and allowed no earned runs on the year. In three years, he had yielded only 17 runs in 20 games and five innings. His varsity record included 197 strikeouts. Barker pitched the last two games of the championship series with his left arm in a cast as a result of a fracture suffered two weeks previously. In spite of the injury, he had eight strikeouts in the championship game and gave up but one base on balls. He graduated from Yorktown in 1939.

Barker enrolled at Kentucky in the fall of 1939 and became a freshman star — leading his team in scoring although he was supposed to be more of a ball handler and a team man than a scorer. But after his first year, Barker dropped out of college mainly because war clouds were awfully black and basketball, and even classwork, seemed pretty futile. He went to work in a Muncie, Indiana factory.

On August 31, 1942, Barker was ordered by the Muncie, Indiana draft board to report to Indianapolis, Indiana to determine fitness for military training in support of the war effort. He was enlisted into the Army Air Corps on September 14, 1942. Barker was sent to Gulfport, Mississippi in October 1942 where he completed the airplane mechanics school then to Fort Myers, Florida for the Army Air Corps flexible gunner school.

On October 31, 1943, Barker married his high school sweetheart Meredith Marie Morrow at the Yorktown Christian Church, shortly before being sent overseas. At the time, he was stationed with the Army Air Corps at Grand Island, Nebraska.

A waist gunner in a B-17 bomber dubbed “Fancy Nancy III,” Barker’s crew, part of the 401st Bombers Group in the 612th Bomber Squadron, carried out operational missions over Germany and enemy-occupied Europe. Barker had participated in three missions over enemy territory shortly before he was reported missing. His crew was shot down 11 miles east of Brunswick, Germany on January 30, 1944, by a Focke-Wulfe 109. Barker claimed he and other crew members didn’t even see the enemy plane.

“The plane must have exploded,” said Barker. “A young fellow behind me as I jumped had his hand in the small of my back. I learned later that he was killed before he could jump.”

Barker made his first and last parachute jump that bleak January 30. Only one side of his parachute was fastened. “Somewhere, back in my training, someone said that if one side of your ‘chute was fastened and you needed to hurry, to go ahead. So I jumped and I’m glad I didn’t wait,” he said. Barker fell asleep, out cold, until he broke through the clouds and saw that he was going to land on a house. He pulled away, let go of his parachute, and fell to the ground, breaking two ribs. When he stopped rolling, he looked up into the barrel of a German pistol.

The bomber, the best of the bombers of that time, was flying at 23,000 feet when it took its death blow, on the crew’s fifth mission.

Barker was held as a prisoner of war in four different prison camps for 16 months, including Stalag Luft 4 in Gross Tychow, Pomeranis, in northwestern Poland. Prison time was hard. He filled idle time in prison camp by bouncing and passing a volleyball, the only ball he could find. Barker learned a lot of ball handling which later gained him the “Fabulous Five” nickname of the “old magician” by practicing with the ball hour after hour. When he returned to college, his ball-handling skills were remarkable.

Barker and his fellow-prisoners were liberated by General Patton’s armored fighters. He was sent to La Havre, France. Barker returned home in June 1945 and was given furlough until August 16, 1945. He was discharged from the Army Air Corps as a staff sergeant shortly thereafter.

Barker returned to the University of Kentucky basketball team in January 1946. He got off to a late start and, being slow to round into condition, was held out of varsity games in order not to lose a year of eligibility.

In the summer of 1946, Barker began pitching for the Man o’ War Bombers, an American Legion independent semi-pro baseball team. The SEC ruled before the summer of 1947 that Kentucky athletes attending summer school could no longer play semi-pro baseball.

With improved abilities that caught Rupp’s eye, a year later, Barker became the unsung member of a starting unit with Beard, Rollins, Alex Groza and Wallace “Wah Wah” Jones that dribbled into history. The ’47-48 Cats went 36-3. They lost only to Temple and Notre Dame during the regular season, swept through the Southeastern Conference Tournament and beat Columbia, Holy Cross, and Baylor by an average of 19 points for the NCAA title. Barker, the colorful and versatile cager, was rated by some experts as one of the best ballhandlers in the nation. “He had good hands, exceptional hand,” his Kentucky teammate Rollins said. “His hands were very sensitive to the ball. And he was able to visualize things on the floor that other people couldn’t see.”

Barker had only the sixth-best scoring average at UK at the time, 6.5, but returned with Groza, Beard, and Jones in 1948-49 to average 7.3 points as Kentucky went 32-2 and won the NCAA again. Assists weren’t kept by schools in those days, but Barker would have had a ton. Usually Groza, the Wildcats’ dominating 6-7 center, was the beneficiary. “He was one of the trickiest passers,” Beard said, “but of course under Adolph you couldn’t use all your tricks.” Barker once said, “I’d run down one side of the court, Adolph would give me hell, and when I’d run down the other, Meredith (his wife) would.” Barker worked his artistry from the forward slot, but in ’48-49, after UK was upset by St. Louis 42-40 on December 30, 1948, Rupp switched him to guard, flip-flopping him with Dale Barnstable. Kentucky didn’t lose again during the regular season.

Barker, the Grand Old Man of basketball, didn’t get the newspaper inches his teammates did, but not because he didn’t deserve them. He handled a basketball like it were an apple, doing everything but eating it. He liked to pass to his teammates and was known as no great shakes at long shooting until the last seven seconds of the last game he played in Alumni Gym. With seconds left of the regular season, Ralph Beard passed the ball to Barker under Vanderbilt’s basket. Barker squinted at the basket 65 feet away from near Vanderbilt’s free throw line and almost knocked the backboard down and the roof off as 2850 students screeched their surprise at seeing the ball bang through the nets as the Cats beat Vanderbilt, 70-37.

A fancy ball-handler and superlative feeder, Barker was asked once why he didn’t shoot more often. His answer wass something of a classic: “I guess I’m just too busy,” he replied, “making All-Americans out of the other guys.”

Barker was a member of the 1948 national championship team. After that season, the Kentucky team played in the trials to select the United States team for the 1948 Olympics. In the final game of the trials, Kentucky lost by 4 points to the Phillips Oilers, a semiprofessional team. The five Kentucky starters joined Phillips players on the Olympic team and won the gold medal.

In 1949, Kentucky, with a 32-2 record, won the N.C.A.A. championship again. On April 4, 1949, Coach Adolph Rupp announced the retirement of the numbers worn by his five Olympic basketeers. Wearers of the numbers were Cliff Barker (23), Alex Groza (15), Wallace Jones (27), Kenny Rollins (26) and Ralph Beard (12).

After the 1949 season, the team of Barker, Groza, Beard, Jones, and Joe Holland turned professional and became the nucleus and part-owners of the Indianapolis Olympians of the NBA.

Barker was player-coach for the first year and a half, and a player only for another year and a half. The team was jolted in 1951 when Groza, Beard and the former college player Dale Barnstable were arrested and charged with having roles in a gambling scheme that involved 90 college games. The three were charged with accepting $500 bribes to control the score of a 1949 Kentucky game in Madison Square Garden.

When all three admitted their part, their pro careers were over. They received suspended sentences, and Groza and Beard were suspended by the N.B.A. Barker was not involved, but the Indianapolis franchise disbanded after its fourth season.

After a short time away from athletics, Barker returned to coaching for the 1955-56 season at Eaton High School in northeastern Indiana, near Yorktown. Eaton (now consolidated into Delta) went 39-10 in his two seasons but couldn’t get past Muncie Central in the state tournament.

Barker moved to Jeffersonville from 1957-62, winning 173, losing 35, and reaching the semistate round of the state tournament in ’58. Among his players at Jeff was Cotton Nash.

Next came three seasons at Franklin County (Ky.) High, where he went 38-42 with two 11th Region runner-up clubs. His last coaching stop was Interlachen High in Palatka, Fla.

After retiring, he stayed in Florida.

In 1979, Barker was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

In 1992, his health worsened and Florida doctors told him they wanted to amputate his toes, Beard said. He decided to get a second opinion and moved back to his boyhood home of Yorktown, where Beard said doctors grafted skin onto his toes.

Barker improved and returned to Satsuma, Florida.

Barker was inducted into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame in 1995. Alex Groza’s son, Lee, was his guest at the banquet.

His last public appearance came on February 1, 1998, when the surviving members of the Fabulous Five (Groza died in 1995) were introduced before the Kentucky-Florida game in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the 1948 national championship.

Barker passed away on March 17, 1998, at his winter home in Satsuma, Florida. He had suffered from diabetes for several years. He was 77. Fellow All-American Ralph Beard remembered Barker as “one of the best passers I had ever seen when he came back (from the war). He could handle that dude like a yo-yo.” Cawood Ledford, then a Centre College student who later would make a name as the Voice of the Wildcats, felt that same way when he saw the 1947-48 team while sneaking into games on a UK student pass. “He was the first person I ever saw do a look-away pass,” Ledford told Courier-Journal sportswriter Mark Woods. “He was probably the best passer who ever went to UK.”

Barker’s wife stated that people always asked him what his favorite memory was. She said, “Cliff always answers ‘the night Rupp said, Tonight, you start, Barker.”

College Statistics:

Season G FG FGA % FT FTA % F PTS
1946-47 34 52 161 32.3 16 31 51.61 27 120
1947-48 38 98 317 30.91 52 93 55.91 101 248
1948-49 34 94 315 29.84 60 88 68.18 99 248
Total 106 244 793 30.77 128 212 60.38 227 616

On This Day In UK Basketball History

On March 28, 1992, in what many called the “best NCAA Tournament game ever,” Kentucky takes defending NCAA champion Duke into overtime before losing 104-103 in the East Regional finals in Philadelphia. A last-second shot by Christian Laettner sends Duke to the Final Four, and breaks the hearts of Wildcat fans everywhere. It is Cawood Ledford’s last game as the “Voice of the Wildcats.”

 

On March 28, 1998, against Stanford, Kentucky rallied from a 10-point second-half deficit, then grabbed a 5-point overtime lead, before fending off the Cardinals to advance to the title game for the third straight season. Jeff Sheppard canned three long-range three-pointers - two in the final three minutes and one in overtime - en route to a career-high 27 points.

 

On March 28, 2014, unranked Kentucky beat No. 5 Louisville 74-69, in the 2014 NCAA Tournament Sweet 16.  Aaron Harrison buried a three-pointer from the left corner with 39 seconds left that put UK ahead to stay before 41,072 in Lucas Oil Stadium.

 

On March 28, 2015, No. 1 Kentucky defeated No. 8 Notre Dame, 68-66, in the 2015 NCAA Tournament Elite Eight.  With its 37-0 record on the line, Kentucky trailed Notre Dame 59-53 with 6:14 left. UK rallied in front of 19,464 fans in Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena and preserved its perfect season thanks to a crucial blocked shot by Willie Cauley-Stein and two game-deciding free throws from Andrew Harrison in the final seconds.

 

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