Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
The sweet smell of success that now permeates Wright State basketball began as the smell of salami and baloney.
“We didn’t have a place to practice on campus so we went to Stebbins High School at 9 o’clock at night. We couldn’t get the gym until after all their teams were done,” Jim Brown, the WSU Hall of Fame coach and now broadcaster of Raiders basketball remembered of the school’s first varsity season in 1970-71.
“We vanned over there and had sandwiches for them afterwards because everything on campus would be closed. They fixed the sandwiches on campus and we’d pick them up.”
The guy often tasked with that chore was Mike Zink, who had played on the Raiders initial junior varsity team the year before. He then became the student manager and the keeper of the scorebook and now – in his 50th consecutive season with WSU basketball – serves as the Nutter Center clock operator.
Zink remembers the sandwiches were often in brown paper bags and Brown said: “We’d leave them in the vans until after practice and I remember that smell.
“The vans always smelled like salami and baloney.”
As he sat court side at the Nutter Center with Becky, his wife of 52 years, the other night before the Raiders’ ESPN-televised matchup with Northern Kentucky, Brown laughed at the long-past memory and then nodded toward the WSU team warming up a few yards away:
“The guys today have absolutely no idea.”
