Rumors

The University of Hawaii’s men’s basketball program had a dismal 6-20 record during the 1969-70 season. Coach Red Rocha turned the program around by adding a strong recruiting class with Dwight Holiday, Freeman, Nash, Penebacker and Davis. Dwight Holiday was a junior college star at Hartnell College in Salinas, California, who said he once scored 56 points. Holiday said he received scholarship offers from La Salle University in Philadelphia and the University of Detroit, but didn’t want to leave California. While working at Dick Bruhn Family of Stores in Salinas, then-Hawaii assistant coach Bruce O’Neal called him there trying to convince him to play for the Rainbows. “[O’Neal] kept calling the store,” Dwight Holiday, 71, recalled. “And this old white man that worked there said, ‘Who’s this man that keeps calling the store from Hawaii?’ I said, ‘They want me to play there.’ And he said, ‘If I could go to Hawaii, I would go.’ So, I went. I didn’t think about it that deeply. I didn’t know it was that far and across water.” Holiday, Nash, Freeman, Davis and Penebacker became the starting five of the most beloved Hawaii basketball team after it put the program on the map nationally. They also happened to be the school’s first all-Black starting five.

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