NEW YORK — Bobby Croft sat in a locker room inside Madison Square Garden, surrounded by reporters.

In the Mecca of basketball, Croft was the center of attention, at least for the moment.

TALK ABOUT IT IN THE ROCKY TOP FORUM

Everyone wanted to talk to the star Tennessee basketball forward. Newsmen and scribes from New York City's biggest newspapers huddled around Croft just moments after he kept the Vols' season alive in the National Invitation Tournament by scoring 21 points and knocking out favored Rutgers, 67-51 in the sold-out and barely year-old Garden on March 14, 1969.

"I told the team in our pregame meeting that Rutgers wouldn't beat us," Tennessee head coach Ray Mears told reporters after the game. "I said the pressure of the Garden and the big crowd might send us home, but Rutgers wouldn't. The response was beautiful."

Tennessee eventually went home, but not on that night. And when the Vols did make their exit, it wasn't because of the setting.

Croft's heroics sparked a run that put Tennessee within a breadth of the championship final, going blow-for-blow with eventual winner Temple on basketball's grandest stage. The Vols settled instead for a third-place finish, beating a Bobby Knight-led Army team that featured point guard Mike Krzyzewski.

The No. 1 Vols (8-0) will return to that stage for the 16th time, this time against Miami (3-6) in the Jimmy V Classic on Tuesday night (6:30 p.m. ET, ESPN).

But this story is about Tennessee's first-ever trip to the Garden, one week in New York City, setting a record and a memorable run to finish to a season that began with little expectations.

Tennessee wasn't supposed to be here.

The Vols, who lost three contributors from their 1967-68 team, were picked by the preseason pollsters to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack in the SEC.

Now here they were in midtown Manhattan, strolling Eighth Avenue in their orange blazers and the talk of the city's basketball scene after beating Rutgers in the program's first NIT appearance in nearly 25 years and their first at the new Madison Square Garden 13 months after it opened.

"There is some atmosphere, something exciting about this tournament," Marvin West wrote in an article that ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel the day that Tennessee played Rutgers. "The NCAA playoffs are for the big bag of marbles, but there are some outstanding teams here that didn't deserve to put away their shoes."

It was a first for the SEC, too after a 19-year hiatus for the league--the punishment for Kentucky's point-shaving scandal against Loyola Chicago at the third edifice of the Garden in 1949.

Tennessee and Florida, who finished second and third in the conference in 1969 were the first SEC teams admitted to the 16-team NIT field since 1950. The Vols beat Vanderbilt, 70-69 at Memorial Gymnasium in Nashville to clinch their bid and have their name slotted on the vaunted marquee outside of the Garden for a week.

Past sins--none of Tennessee's own--were on the mind of Ray Mears mind when the team arrived in New York. Outside of the Garden and their midtown Manhattan hotel, there were few restrictions given, but Mears had two rules that had to be followed.

"The Vols came to the big town with determination and a very serious outlook," West wrote. "Ray Mears warned the players about friendly strangers 'who say they know your cousin Sam.'"

That was a reference to the gamblers that hung around the Garden’s lobby and outside of its doors, looking to entice young college kids with promises of cash.

The other rule was that players had to wear their orange blazers everywhere they went and to not go anywhere that they couldn't.

They went to the top of the Empire State Building, watched a New York Knicks game, saw Broadway shows and dined in some of Manhattan's finest restaurants on the school's dime.

Bill Justus, Tennessee's All-SEC guard who was from Knoxville said the play "Cabaret" was "superb." Reserve guard Dickie Johnston liked New York but couldn't imagine himself living there. It was too fast-paced.

Point guard Bill Hahn bought a small Yankees cap for the child he and his wife Susie were expecting. He was hoping for a boy. Guard Rudy Kinard skipped the Empire State Building trip because of his fear of heights and team manager Jeff Truelove couldn’t believe it when he offered his seat on the subway to a woman too shocked by the gesture to accept his chivalry.

"We took a crowd, because it was a big deal," Bud Ford, Tennessee's young assistant sports information director and tasked that weak charge with making stayed out of trouble, told VolReport.

Among Ford's other duties were getting players to and from the Garden. He would stand in front of the Midtown Inn and flag down four or five taxi cabs, load them up with coaches and the 12 players that made the trip for the mile-long drive to the arena before tip off.

On the days that the Vols didn't play, assistant coach Stu Aberdeen, a New York native, served as the tour guide while sending friends and family to Ford's hotel room to get tickets for Tennessee's next game.

"He was a northerner and he knew a bunch of people and I was issuing tickets out of my hotel room," Ford said with a laugh. "We didn't have any other way to get them to the folks, so that's what I had to do."

On one of the Vols' off days, Aberdeen used his pull to get the team a last-second practice facility at the Loyola High School gym on Park Avenue to prepare for their quarterfinal game against Ohio.

The coach was a friend.

Not everything went smoothly. Sports information director Haywood Harris went back to Knoxville after getting sick in the middle of the trip and Johnston had his wedding ring and $30 taken from his hotel room.

On the court though, it couldn't have gone better.

The floor at Madison Square Garden had hosted its share of stars, even in the short time it had been opened. On this night, Bill Justus was one of them.

Tennessee's senior leader didn't dazzle with his field goal shooting. No one did in the NIT quarterfinal game between the Vols and the Ohio Bobcats. But it was at the free throw line where Justus kept them around at least for another day in a 74-65 triumph.

Justus scored 34 points and made 22 shots from the charity stripe, including 18-straight--both NIT and Tennessee program records. In the Vols' annals, it stood for 50 years, broken by Grant Williams with 23 made free throws against Vanderbilt on Jan. 23, 2019.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. Justus was a 90% free throw shooter that season and averaged 16.6 points per game. But this performance, in this setting with the season on the line was the kind of story that only the Garden could create. It was told in all of the New York City papers the next day.

The famous back page of the Daily News featured it and Neil Amdur wrote about it for the New York Times.

"Ohio University violated one of basketball's basic rules last night," Amdur penned. "The Bobcats fouled the wrong guy."

Ohio, playing for its own season after outlasting West Texas A&M, 82-80 two nights before, trailed by 12 point at halftime and then by 13 near the 10-minute mark. The Bobcats trimmed that deficit to five late.

Mears' patented 1-3-1 defense was the other headliner that night, holding off Ohio down the stretch while Justus put it away for good.

That zone defense, introduced by Mears to the SEC when he arrived at Tennessee from Wittenberg University in Ohio in 1962, had helped carry the Vols this far. It gave Pete Maravich fits when Tennessee beat LSU in Baton Rouge twice during the regular season.

Mears fielded questions about it all week and Sports Illustrated, which had previously tabbed Mears, "Mr. Wonderful of Wittenberg" seven years earlier, was in town to do a feature on how his defensive philosophy had translated to Tennessee.

In a coaching contingent in New York City for the NIT that included Boston Celtics great-turned-Boston College head coach Bob Cousy, who had the Eagles on an 18-game win streak during his farewell tour, it was Mears that the writers wanted to hear from the most.

"Mears has made a big impression on Eastern writers," Marvin West wrote. "He has spent more time answering questions than anybody at the National Invitation Tournament...unless it's the guide in the lobby of Madison Square Garden."

Even Red Auerbach, the former Celtics coach, who had led the franchise to nine NBA championship before becoming its general manager, was impressed with Mears. He took in a few Tennessee practices inside the Garden, too.

"The name of this game is W-I-N and Ray Mears does it," Auerbach told a pool of reporters after the Vols beat Ohio. "He's a winner. He works hard at it. I guess there aren't many coaches-when-I-feel-like-it people left in college basketball. Men like Mears would run 'em out."

A little more than 30 miles separated Ray Mears and Bobby Knight's hometowns in Ohio. Now it was a scorers table inside Madison Square Garden.

Mears' words at the beginning of the tournament, about the grandeur of the Garden, echoed on that Thursday night. The 18,000-plus in attendance was the most to ever watch Tennessee play a game at the time and maybe the stage the was too big. Maybe Temple, which went on to win the whole thing was just better.

Either way, the Vols were sluggish in the first half. Bobby Croft, who sat much of the half because he "wasn't getting anything done," according to Mears, brought Tennessee back to life late and even put it in front before the Owls' used a push of their own to win, 63-58.

Later that night, Boston College beat Army to set up an NIT championship bout with Temple in Bob Cousy's final game. But the third place game, the consolation prize for the Vols or the Black Knights wasn't void of an interesting storyline or two.

Knight, Army's 29-year-old head coach, grew up in Orrville, Ohio--a 45 minute drive from Dover, where Mears, 43, was from.

Knight was a standout high school player at Orrville High School when Mears was getting his head coaching start at Wittenberg, where he coached three NCAA Tournament teams between 1956-62.

"I was watching Coach Mears' Wittenberg teams pick people apart when I was a junior in high school," Knight said. "(He is) way ahead of me."

Like Mears, defense was Knight's forte. The two talked strategy and philosophy numerous times throughout the week. Now they were pitting those strategies and philosophies against each other.

Knight was 18-9 in Knight's fourth season and boasted the No. 1 defense in college basketball, one spot ahead of Tennessee.

The Black Knights rode that defense to wins over Wyoming and South Carolina in the NIT, but wasn't enough in the loss to Boston College in the semifinals. Mike Krzyzewski, a 6-foot-1 point guard that averaged 6.7 points per game, was one of Army's captains, six years before he took his first head coaching job at his alma mater and then eventually Duke.

He was one of a few players Mears had in mind when he strode into the Vols’ locker room before they took the court for the final time at the Garden.

The West Point cadets, he told the team, know how to fight and loved doing it. Tennessee was going to have to match that, and "play without fear."

For more than a half that's what it was--a fight.

The two teams went back-and-forth as if it was the championship final and not a glorified exhibition. Then Croft, who jump-started the Vols' against Rutgers nine days earlier, appropriately provided the knockout blow. He scored 16 points and highlighted the second half scoring stretch that gave Tennessee a 64-52 victory.

The Vols finished third, but there was no convincing Mears by the end of it that his team didn't play well enough to win the NIT.

This group, not expected to be much by nearly everyone but themselves before the season started, were overachievers.

"This has been one of the most rewarding seasons I've ever had," Mears said after the game. "And we've got a lot to look forward to next year."

Editor's note: Some details and quotes in this story are based on archived newspaper accounts

– TALK ABOUT IT IN THE ROCKY TOP FORUM.

– ENJOY VOLREPORT WITH A PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION.

– SUBSCRIBE TO THE VOLREPORT YOUTUBE CHANNEL.

– FOLLOW VOLREPORT ON TWITTER: @TennesseeRivals, @ByNoahTaylor, @RyanTSylvia, @Dale_Dowden, @ShayneP_Media.