Dan Mudd and Holy Rosary 1962

Part 1

The town has changed. The game has changed. Almost everything has changed really. When Dan Mudd played basketball at Holy Rosary High School in Monroe City, MO the gym ceiling hung at 14 feet above the well-worn floor and had sizzling steam radiators on a wall under each goal. Forget about any shot farther out than 10 feet unless you banked a laser off the metal backboard. And a hard drive to the basket without the ability to stop on a dime ended with a scorched butt.

When he returned to work at the school in 1959, a new gym had been built, one good enough to host a Regional Tournament. Mudd coached the basketball team, the baseball team, taught history and hygiene, and he made $300.33 a month. He held the job until the spring of 1966 when the school unexpectedly closed its doors.

What is the same is a now 85-year-old man who has remained not only true to his town and his profession but also to himself and his family, a consistency of character shaped by a burning ambition to lead young athletes. If you will listen close you can still hear it in his words. 

I had not spoken to Coach Mudd in almost 25 years.

“Doubt I have much that can be of any help to you,” Coach Mudd said upon greetings, “but let’s see what we can do.” We talked for over two hours.  

Until 1966, the Trojans of the Monroe City Catholic Church Holy Rosary fielded their own high school team, one with long and rich traditions. Many, now aging alumni keep the pride alive. The team Purple and Gold can trace their basketball playing roots as far back as the public school. In 1926, Monsignor E. Connolly led the first recorded edition of the Trojans.

Connolly, a native of Ireland, became a legend in his own right, arriving to open the school in 1919 and leading the parish for 55 years. In 1966, when the final graduating class marched out into the real world, the school had handed out its last of 668 diplomas.

Connolly left and indomitable mark on many Monroe City youngsters. One was Dan Mudd.

“Father Connelly was a man who just loved athletics,” Coach Mudd states, “If you would go over and check the trophy case in the old school, you will find pictures of him coaching football at Holy Rosary at what had to be back in the 1920s. I remember he was also a great golfer. He was the kind of guy that a young boy looks up to, turns into a hero.”

Seventy-five years later Mudd still recalls vividly the first time the Priest showed an interest in him - and it changed the trajectory of his life. “When I was in 5th grade,” Mudd recently shared with me, “My brother bought me a baseball glove for my birthday. We were out in the open field at recess and Fr. Connelly had a fungo bat,” Mudd remembers. “And I had my new glove. He said, ‘get out there in the field and let's see if you can catch a flyball.’ I was hooked after that. I knew I wanted to be a coach and I knew I wanted to be a teacher, just like Father Connolly.”

The Trojan basketball legacy is a shroud of myths. Such as the Archbishop himself decreed, after a fight during a Sunday afternoon game in the fall of 1959, that Holy Rosary and McCooey Catholic of Hannibal would no longer play. Or veteran official Bill Leaser barely escaped with his life from a charging Coach Ozzie Osborn after swallowing his whistle as Charles Kendrick was mugged on a layup as the buzzer sounded to end a one-point 1958 Regional Championship overtime loss to Madison, who would finish second in the Class S state tournament. Or Fr. Connolly was personal friends with Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. In 1925 the Trojans’ sent their star player, Lowell “Red” Hagan to South Bend to play for the Rock. In 1927 in a hotel room the night before the Fighting Irish tangled with the Iowa Hawkeyes, Ft. Connolly showed Rockne a trick play he had designed called the Flipper. Rockne used the play the next day and it became a staple of his playbook. He also took credit for designing it. Today the trickery is known as the widely used “flea flicker.” Or so the story goes.

Mudd would graduate from Holy Rosary with the class of 1955. After earning his teaching degree at Northeast Missouri State College in nearby Kirksville, Mudd became, in 1959, a trailblazer of sorts. “I was the first lay teacher ever hired by the school,” Mudd recalls, using a term for a teacher not belonging to a religious order; neither a nun or a priest. “There was a man in town named Maurice Ritter, we didn't have a school board. But he was kind of the guy in the Parish that oversaw the school. Holy Rosary had never had a teacher contract before. All the teachers had always been nuns and they didn't need contracts. Mr. Ritter went over to Mr. (Galen) Lankford, the Superintendent of the Monroe City public schools, and got one of their contracts. They crossed out Monroe City at the top and put in Holy Rosary. Filled in the amount $3601 and I signed it. That was the summer of 1959.” Mudd lived next door to the school.

In 1962, Coach Mudd and HR would produce the best one season record in school history, finishing 29-4. The team was led by John Thomas, the school’s career total points record holder with a total of 1,936.

“We had some really good teams at Holy Rosary,” Mudd states, “but my best team, by a whisker, was 1962. That was John Thomas’ senior year. I hope this doesn't make anybody mad, but John was the best player Holy Rosary ever had. He was the school's all-time leading scorer.”

Mudd recalls a fortuitus break in the summer of 1961 that helped stack even more talent at the small school. “The year before there had been a high school over at Indian Creek called St. Stephens. They closed and we had several of their boys move in. We were going to have a good team anyway, but they made us even better. And I remember there was a big commotion over whether they would be eligible or not. Eventually, the State Association said they were.”

A total of seven boys transferred from Indian Creek to Holy Rosary. Five played on the basketball team. For a school that finished the 1961 school year with only 17 boys enrolled, the St. Stephens additions were a windfall for HR.

The 1962 team was dominated by a strong senior class made even deeper by the Indian Creek additions. “I averaged 26 points a game my junior year,” stated John Thomas. “My senior year it was down to 21. We had a lot more help.”

TO BE CONTINUED AN NOON NEXT SUNDAY