From the King County Journal, 10/26/2004:   Homegrown heroes: Buchan Bakers overcame odds to win 1956 national title by Jim Cnockaert Journal Sports Editor The players wore plain white, canvas high-top sneakers and plaid shorts that actually were short, and they worked day jobs before ever setting foot on the basketball court. Their team, not unlike those today in smaller professional sports markets, was owned by a local businessman who had to find creative ways to stay competitive because he could not match the resources of other owners. But long before the SuperSonics and the Storm, the Buchan Bakers, nicknamed for the Seattle bread company that sponsored them, brought basketball fame to the Emerald City. During a decade when amateur, not professional, athletics captured most of the nation's sporting attention, the Bakers won the 1956 Amateur Athletic Union national championship. They did it with a stunning, last-second victory against the dominant team of that era, the Phillips 66ers of Bartlesville, Okla. The Bakers' history, with particular attention paid to the '56 season, is chronicled in a new book by Robin Buchan and former Journal staffer Bruce Kitts titled ``Longshot: The Story of the Buchan Bakers.'' The two will show a 30-minute film of the championship game and discuss their book at 1:30 p.m. today at the Bellevue Public Library, 1111 110th Ave. N.E. Admission is free. Buchan is the son and Kitts is the grandson of the Bakers' late owner, George Buchan. The NBA was founded in 1949, but it did not emerge as the nation's pre-eminent basketball league until a decade later when it began to showcase stars such as Bill Russell, former Seattle University star Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain. Until that point, a handful of elite AAU teams dominated the sport. For a brief time, the Bakers were one of those teams. ``They're an example of how for a long, long time the model for a basketball program was the company-sponsored industrial team,'' said Kitts, a Bothell resident. ``The company would hire the players and keep them as employees. If there was a choice between two prospective employees, the company would go with the taller one. ``These big corporations took it very seriously. The 66ers had their own gym and an apartment complex for the players, and the company had a plane that flew the team around. A lot of times, these companies would get players and run them through their management-training program. That was a big draw, and it made it difficult for the NBA to get going in those early years.'' These AAU teams played a full schedule each season, typically topping 30 games, and traveled throughout the country. Some teams also helped to introduce the American style of basketball to foreign players. During and after the 1955-56 season, the Bakers played games in the Far East and Europe. They also played in Czechoslovakia and Poland, becoming the first AAU team from the United States to play behind the Iron Curtain. The Buchan Bakers were formed in 1948 after Warren ``Bud'' Howard convinced George Buchan and his Buchan Baking Company to sponsor his basketball team. Howard was player-coach at first, and he later became the team's general manager. The Bakers were immediately recognized by their signature shorts, which featured a red-and-green plaid design identical to the design on wrappers the company used on its bread products. Pronunciation of the Buchan name had changed over time. The team was known as the ``Bew-can'' Bakers, but the family name originally was pronounced ``Buck-en.'' The company eventually was purchased by Oroweat. ``The team was kind of an anomaly,'' Kitts said. ``The Buchan Baking Company was not very big and did not make a lot of money, so it did not have a lot of jobs (to offer players). Fortunately, basketball is not an expensive sport to run.'' After dominating the Class AA city league in their early years, the Bakers moved into the Northwest AAU League. The Bakers reached the national tournament for the first time in 1952, but they lost in the opening round. The 1953 University of Washington basketball team, led by All-American center Bob Houbregs, made it to the NCAA Final Four, and Howard recruited all five Husky starters. Houbregs agreed to play for the Bakers, but he changed his mind and joined the NBA's Milwaukee Hawks. Howard did sign the four remaining Huskies -- Charlie Koon, Joe Cipriano, Mike McCutcheon and Doug McClary -- and he hired Bill Morris, the UW freshmen coach, as head coach. Morris returned to the UW in 1954, and former high school coach Frank Fidler was hired as coach. The team fared better at the national tournament, winning its opener before losing in overtime in the second round. Howard brought in several key players for the Bakers' championship run in 1955-56, including Phil Jordon, a 6-foot-10 center, who would play in the NBA for several years, and George Swyers, the NAIA's leading scorer from West Virginia Tech. Dean Parsons, a 6-foot-8 power forward from the UW and Stan Glowaski, a 6-foot-5 guard from Seattle University, also joined the team. For the national tournament, the Bakers added Bruno Boin, a 6-foot-9 sophomore center from the UW. During that season, the Buchan Bakers traveled to Asia to play teams from Japan, China and the Philippines. The team chemistry developed on and off the court during that trip prepared the Bakers for their run at the national title. ``Swyers was really the final piece of the puzzle,'' said Howard, 89, who lives in Bellevue. ``We had two big guards and two quick guards, and we had good size all over.'' The Bakers opened national tournament play in Denver by defeating host Central Insurance and the Pasadena (Calif.) Mirror-Glazers to reach the semifinals against Milwaukee Allen-Bradley. Boin's long-range hook shots were the difference in an 85-75 victory that set up the championship game with the Phillips 66ers, the defending champion. The Bakers trailed 23-12 in the first half, but they battled back to take a 31-30 half-time lead. Neither team led by more than three points in the second half. The 66ers tied the game at 57-57 with two minutes remaining. With no shot clock to dictate the tempo of the game, the Bakers elected to play for one last shot and took a timeout in the final seconds to set up their last shot. Appropriately, the ball wound up in the hands of Swyers, who drove into the lane, spun around a defender and threw up a one-handed shot that bounced off the backboard and into the basket as time expired. The victory got front-page headlines in Seattle newspapers, and, while there was no victory rally as the Storm enjoyed after their recent WNBA championship, the Bakers were treated to a banquet when they returned from Denver. The championship earned the Bakers two other honors. Almost immediately after the season, they traveled to Europe. Later, the Bakers and the 66ers participated in the U.S. Olympic Trials. No Bakers were invited to join the U.S. team that played in the '56 Games in Australia. The Bakers joined many of the teams it faced in the '56 AAU tournament to form the National Industrial Basketball League, but the league eventually folded in the face of a growing NBA. The reason for the NIBL's demise was simple: The best African-American players were heading to the NBA. ``In the 1950s, many of the companies that sponsored these teams did not consider recruiting African-Americans for their management training programs,'' Kitts said. ``That idea was still 20 years away. As the NBA got better, largely through integration, the industrial teams sat back and became stagnant.'' The Bakers' one African-American player was Tucker, who was stationed at Fort Lewis and taking pre-med classes at the UW. Though he was treated as just another player anywhere the team traveled in the Northwest, he was treated with great indignity during a 1955 team trip to Houston, Texas. Because of the ``separate-but-equal'' racism of the day, Tucker stayed at a local black college instead of the team hotel and could not use the same facilities as his white teammates did. ``Seattle was isolated at that time, so it did not have all the emotional racial baggage that other areas of the country did,'' Kitts said. ``You talk to former coaches and players about that, and even today there is a sense of shock about it. ``Ironically, Tucker had the game of his life down there, and he got a standing ovation.'' Robin Buchan had researched the Bakers' story for several years before asking Kitts to join the project. The two collaborated on some of the research and many interviews, and they wrote the final draft of what eventually became the 185-page paperback book printed by Classic Day Publishing. Howard said he has read the book and is impressed with its detail. The black-and-white film that will be show this afternoon originally was made to promote the Buchan Bread Company, and it is newsreel quality with a voice-over. It is being shown publicly for the first time since the 1950s, Kitts said. ``When I was doing the research, I came to realize that there is such a lack of information about this type of basketball,'' Kitts said. ``This helps to keep the story alive.''   From the Peoria, Ill., Journal Star, February 21, 2005: Seattle-Based Team Eventually cooked up Successful Recipe By JOE SPENCER of the Journal Star BOOK REVIEW What started as a gimmick for a regional bakery to sell more bread in Seattle blossomed into one of the great underdog stories in the history of Amateur Athletic Union basketball. "Longshot: The Story of the Buchan Bakers," by Robin Buchan and Bruce Kitts (Classic Day Publishing), provides a unique glimpse into one of the winningest teams at the height of amateur basketball's national prominence during the 1950s. In a bid to expand distribution routes around Seattle, the Buchan bakery decided to sponsor a basketball team. Using a mix of in-state college talent, the Bakers - who represented a small company of a few hundred employees - battled teams from multi-million dollar corporations like Oklahoma's Phillips Petroleuma, Caterpillar of Peoria and Goodyear of Akron, Ohio, for years with limited success. But they beat Phillips for the 1956 national AAU title in Denver. The authors, both relatives of Buchan Baking Company founder George Buchan, collaborate to deliver readers "a blend of company, family and team history." "This was a way of basketball that was just as strong as the pros back in the early 1950s," Kitts said. "Robin and I felt strongly that we needed to preserve the story of the Buchan Bakers because there is very little preservation of this type of basketball out there. "Sure, both of us had a family interest - Robin is George's son and I am George's grandson - but we are happy that there is some record of this significant time in basketball history. "The NBA prevailed after the 1960s. But this type of basketball is just as important to the history of the sport. There is really no one left to speak for this type of basketball that was played for a half-century before the NBA, so we spoke up." The highly readable book chronicles how Colin Buchan convinced his father, George Buchan, that a team would be "the best advertising the company could hope for." After making a commitment to attract Washington's top-tier collegiate talent, Colin Buchan proved to be right. The company became one of Seattle's largest bread wholesalers. "Both the team and the company really took off after we got players from the University of Washington's third-place team from the 1953 NCAA tournament and others from Seattle University, who had an NCAA runner-up in 1958," Kitts said. The book mentions "limits on jet transportation to the Pacific Northwest made it hard for the Bakers to face competition to prepare them for what they would face in the national tournament." However, Elgin Baylor's transfer to Seattle University and subsequent participation with a rival amateur team in the city sparked a number of highly competitive games. The Bakers eventually beat their reputation as just a small, West Coast team. They joined the National Industrial Basketball League in the late 1950s and competed against Phillips, the Peoria Cats, the Akron Goodyear-Wingfoots, New York Tuck Tapers and Cleveland Pipers. Robin Buchan also provides a number of funny anecdotes from experiences he shared with players on road trips and the team's frustration after three unsuccessful attempts to recruit Baylor to the Bakers. Escalating pro salaries and the collapse of the NIBL eventually caused the Buchan bakery to disband its team in the early 1960s. Ironically, the bakery began to lose money at about the same time, thanks in part to increased competition from national brands like Wonder Bread. Buchan sold his business in 1966.     From the Skagit Valley Herald, 10/24/04:   For the love of the game By Dan Ruthemeyer   They had no delusions of making it to the NBA. The Skagit Valley men who played for the Buchan Bakers teams of the 1950s simply wanted to play a little basketball.             "I was dedicated to finishing my education," said Duane Berentson, a player for the Bakers in the 1951-52 season.             "It was an opportunity for some people to try to get to that next step. I wanted to play, but I didn't look at it as a way to get to the NBA."             The Bakers were an amateur team in Seattle that played from 1948 to 1961.             They drew some of the best talent from the Northwest, helping them to a national Amateur Athletic Union title in 1956.             "They were that big a deal," said Gene Lundgaard, a classmate of Berentson's at Anacortes High School and Pacific Lutheran University who also played a season for the Bakers. "They had good athletes and people around the country weren't any better."             Berentson, Lundgaard and Mount Vernon's Don Tripp are part of the Buchan Bakers history.             That history is detailed in "Longshot: The Story of the Buchan Bakers," a book by Robin Buchan and Bruce Kitts.             Five players from the team made it to the NBA. Another handful went to the American Basketball League.             But for Berentson, Lundgaard and Tripp, playing for the Bakers was more of a hobby.             While Berentson took graduate classes at the University of Washington during his season with the Bakers, Lundgaard taught school.             "It was tiring, but I was young at the time," said the 75-year-old Lundgaard.             Because they were amateurs, the Bakers didn't get paid for playing basketball.             Some worked for the sponsor — the Buchan Baking Company — while others, such as Berentson and Lundgaard, had other things going on.             Berentson said all he ever got from the team were a pair of basketball shoes and a jersey.             The team played two or three nights a week, usually at gyms in Seattle.             One night it might be the University of Washington. The next Seattle University. And the next Seattle Pacific.             "I think we played wherever there was an open gym," said Berentson.             There were some good players who played for and against the Bakers.             The best may have been a young Elgin Baylor.             Lundgaard, who spent several seasons with the rival Darigold Farms team before joining the Bakers, remembers Baylor well.             "He was very mean, he was very good and he was very physical," said Lundgaard.             The 6-foot-4 Lundgaard even had chances to help guard the future NBA star.             "I can still feel the bruises from taking charges," said Lundgaard.             For Berentson and Lundgaard, playing for the Bakers came before heading into coaching.             Berentson coached at Mount Baker and Burlington-Edison high schools, while Lundgaard followed his college coach, Marv Harshman, at Pacific Lutheran University.             Lundgaard coached at PLU for 17 years, and Berentson went on to serve in the state legislature and as the state secretary of transportation             "Longshot: The story of the Buchan Bakers," was a labor of love for the authors. One is the son of the bakery founder, George Buchan, and the other a grandson.             "One of the things that came to me early was that this was one of those stories that was in danger of being lost forever," said Bruce Kitts.             "There was a lot of basketball played before the NBA became big, and much of it was this type of basketball."