LOST GYMS: 'This was Hoosier Hysteria.' Tyson Auditorium was temporary home for one of Indiana's most famous teams

This is the eighth of a 10-part series featuring some of Indiana high school basketball's "Lost Gyms."

VERSAILLES – Rob Moorhead does not have to close his eyes to feel the memories. He can look around Tyson Auditorium and see them like the chapters of his life.

As a kindergartner, Moorhead carried the homecoming crown on the court to South Ripley basketball player Kelvin Comer. He can point to the spot where he sat in the front row behind the basket as an elementary kid in the 1970s, hoping the ball would roll to him so he could pounce on it and hand it back to the referee. He can hear “Sweet Georgia Brown” blaring from the corner of the gym where the South Ripley band — led by director Gary Holdsworth and wife Patsy — as he floated up the ramp from the locker room to the court for the first time as a freshman.

“That gave me chills,” Moorhead said. “It still gives me chills when I think back to it.”

Tyson Auditorium was a magical “palace” for Moorhead and hundreds of others from the night it was dedicated on Nov. 1, 1950, with a game against rival Milan, to its current state as an activity center 75 years later.

“Whether I come in here and watch the little kids play or for a reception, whatever it is, you can almost smell the popcorn, you can almost hear the band playing,” said Bob Meyer, a coach and administrator at South Ripley for more than 30 years. “It’s a place where the community would gather — and not just our community but all the communities in Ripley County — to gather and watch basketball on Friday and Saturday night. This place was just awesome. This was ‘Hoosier Hysteria.’”

Moorhead had more of a personal connection to Tyson Auditorium than most. His father, William “Gus” Moorhead, came to Versailles right out of Hanover College in 1951. The Versailles basketball program, known as the Frenchies until the students voted in 1950 to change the name to Lions, had previously played in the wood frame community building built in 1924.

Versailles hosted — and won — the sectional championship in 1928. But two years later, the gym was already too small to host the sectional tourney. A sparkling new gym was built in 1950 at a cost of $178,000 and with a seating capacity of 2,200. More than half of the of the cost was covered through the trust fund of Versailles native James Tyson, one of the founders of the Walgreens.

The capacity of the gym more than doubled the population of the Ripley County community when it was built in 1950 (about 900 residents at the time). But Gus Moorhead’s arrival signaled a change in fortune for Versailles basketball — even if the Lions were not the most famous team to play in their own gym.

The underdog Milan team that inspired the movie “Hoosiers” was a county rival of Versailles. At the end of the 1952-53 season, Milan defeated Osgood, Holton and Batesville at Tyson Auditorium to win the sectional championship. Bobby Plump, Ray Craft and the rest of the Indians then shocked the state by winning the regional and semistate, making it all the way to the state finals at Butler Fieldhouse.

“We’d never won a regional game in the history of the school and there we were all of a sudden with a new coach (Marvin Wood), 25 years old, and we were going to the Final Four,” Plump said in 2014.

With most of its players returning, the buildup for the 1953-54 season caused Milan to move its home games to Tyson Auditorium. Milan won the sectional there again, defeating Cross Plains, Osgood and host Versailles in the championship to start its famous run to the state championship that ended with Plump’s last-second shot to beat Muncie Central.

Plump later joked that Moorhead told him he was “damn sorry he loaned us that gym.” Plump thanked him for the homecourt advantage.

But Moorhead enjoyed a significant homecourt advantage at Tyson in the ensuing years. After demoralizing sectional championship losses to Milan in 1955 and ’56, the Lions won the 1957 sectional championship at Tyson — its first in 29 years. Versailles went on to win sectional titles the next three years, forever solidifying Moorhead’s coaching legacy at the school. He coached at Versailles until it consolidated to form South Ripley in 1966, then coached the new school for two more years before becoming the school’s principal for 23 years until his retirement in 1991.

“I grew up on stories of Tyson Auditorium,” said Rob Moorhead, who graduated from South Ripley in 1983. “Dad talks about when he first got the job here that this place was a palace. It was the nicest gym of its kind anywhere in the area and largest gym of its kind anywhere in the area at the time.”

Moorhead grew up just down the street from Tyson Auditorium, where he could often find his father scouting other Ripley County teams — like Milan — that would use the gym for home games. “He talked about how he could run home and get a sandwich and then scout right here at Tyson,” Moorhead said.

The consolidation originally brought the schools of Versailles, New Marion and Cross Plains together in 1966. When the nearby Holton Warhorses were absorbed in 1969, the combination brought a magical undefeated season.

Coach Dale Ricketts, a member of the 1959 Versailles team, returned five starters that season and brought on three more from Holton, including leading scorer Comer. South Ripley knocked off Batesville in double overtime in the sectional championship at Batesville, then defeated North Decatur and Lawrenceburg to win the regional. The road ended there with a loss to Crispus Attucks in the first game of the semistate at Hinkle Fieldhouse, but the 25-1 season and tournament run by a school of 418 students at the time is still remembered fondly.

“We idolized those guys who were out there on the playing floor,” Moorhead said.

Even years later, by the time Meyer arrived as an assistant coach in 1979 to Ted Ahaus, the fans of the communities that made up South Ripley would sit together in Tyson Auditorium.

“The Holton people sat close to the bench, the Versailles people sat here on the end and the Cross Plains and New Marion people sat over here,” Meyer said, pointing to different sections of the bleachers. “… The thing to do at South Ripley was to go the basketball games.”

By 1981, the sectional had moved to East Central. But there was more magic that season. IndyStar reporter Bob Williams called “old Tyson Auditorium one of Southern Indiana’s best known hardwood arenas” in his report on South Ripley after the Raiders knocked off Greensburg and Lawrenceburg — two teams that beat them during the season — by a combined three points in the Connersville Regional. After the 63-62 win over Lawrenceburg, Tyson was packed with celebrating fans.

“We were supposed to stay in Connersville after we won the regional,” said Stanley Lay, a senior that season. “We all came back. We left that little hotel we were in and came back and when we came back (into Tyson Auditorium) there were so many people here. Sitting out in front of everybody, there was just this feeling that, ‘This is what stardom looks like.’ After that, every business in town was like, ‘Come see us and we’ll give you free candy bars.’”

Mike Meisberger, also a senior that season, said the caravan of cars to and from Connersville — followed by the semistate the following week at Hinkle Fieldhouse — brought comparisons of the 1954 Milan team, just a few years before “Hoosiers” was released.

“There was an eerie resemblance from the movie that brought back special memories,” said Meisberger, whose three-point play with 6 seconds remaining was the difference in the 76-74 comeback win over Greensburg in the regional.

For Meisberger and nearly all of his teammates, Tyson Auditorium was like a second home. Through elementary school, recess in the winter and other rainy days were often spent on the gym floor. “You can imagine 100 to 120 kids in the gym and we’re attempting to play full-court basketball,” Meisberger said with a laugh.

Meisberger’s father, later a principal at nearby Sunman, played at New Marion prior to the consolidation. His family moved from a rural farm into Versailles prior to his freshman year.

“(My dad) never pushed me into basketball,” Meisberger said. “But growing up in a small community, I had a love of basketball as early as I can remember. Like the movie ‘Hoosiers’ we had an old wooden backboard and shot in the gravel. That was our court. All the neighborhood kids would get together and play games on the weekends.”

Meisberger was a freshman in 1977-78 when South Ripley won its first sectional in eight years under coach Stan Weber, who would go on to coach at Brownstown Central and won more than 400 games in his long career. Jeff Buchanan, a senior on that 1978 team, wore No. 24 before Meisberger. Buchanan pulled Meisberger aside after the season outside the gym doors.

“He said, ‘I guess it’s time for you to know where the basketball team key is,’” Meisberger said. “He said, ‘It’s over here under the shrubs outside the door.’ You could take the coat hanger and hook it through the door and open the door. If you wanted to come in here on the weekends, or come in on break, you could come in here and play basketball, unbeknownst to most and not condoned.”

Dale Hankins, the school custodian, would occasionally “catch” Meisberger and others shooting or playing in the gym. “Just make sure you turn the lights off and lock the door,” Hankins told them.

“So many weekends were spent in here just shooting and working on our game,” Meisberger said. “I guess it was a tradition passed down to a few from the upperclassmen. That was a pretty cool deal.”

Coaching against South Ripley in Tyson Auditorium could be a nightmare for opposing coaches. Rob Moorhead experienced the other side as the coach at South Dearborn in the early 1990s. In late January of 1987, undefeated East Central visited South Ripley with a 14-0 record and state ranking. It left with a 47-41 loss in Meyer’s second season as coach.

“I’m standing over here and (East Central coach Steve Brunes) walked by me and he said, ‘I just hate this place — I can’t win here,’” said Meyer, who played in the gym as an opposing player at Aurora. “And they didn’t win that night either. Area coaches loved to play here, even though they said they didn’t. They didn’t because they knew they were probably going to walk out of here with a loss.”

It was not always fun for the home team. Moorhead remembers commenting to Meyer, then an assistant, about how cold the gym was before a practice over Christmas break. He had barely finished his sentence when Meyer blurted out “On the line!”

“We got him warmed up real quick,” Meyer said.

Another time, in a game against Madison Shawe that South Ripley led handily, Moorhead got a steal on the press with nothing between him and the basket. “Dunk time,” he thought. He went up with a left hand and … boom. Except the ball went off the back of the rim and soared into the air for what seemed like an eternity.

“The only thing that went higher was the folding chair that my dad was sitting in as he turned and kicked it against the wall,” Moorhead said of his father, who was then the school principal. “He was not happy with my choice to try and dunk the basketball. By the time the ball and the chair hit the ground, coach Ahaus had a sub waiting for me.”

Moorhead called home from the school that night to ask his mom if his dad had gone to bed. “He’s not going to bed until you get here,” his mother told him.

They had “Oscar Robertson conversation” that night. “You take the easiest shot you can get in any situation,” Gus Moorhead told him. When Rob contested that the crowd would have loved it, the ol’ coach responded: “Yeah … if you would have made it.”

South Ripley continued to play its games at Tyson Auditorium through the 2007-08 season before moving into a new gym at the high school.

“They did a really nice job of sending Tyson out in style,” Moorhead said. “They had several nights where they recognized past teams that had played here that won sectional championships. A lot of us were back for the final home game here. It was bittersweet, but I think people realized this place had served its purpose for our schools for a number of years … but the nostalgia and the memories here at Tyson just can’t be replicated.”

Tyson — a gym Plump once called “one of the marvels of the world” — mostly sat empty in the ensuing years. It was named one of Indiana Landmarks’ “10 most endangered historic places in Indiana.” But a group of three couples, led by Jeff and Aimee Cornett, started a non-profit called the Tyson Community Advancement Foundation after purchasing the gym from the school and renamed it the Tyson Activities Center.

Jeff Cornett, a 1991 South Ripley graduate, said the gym has served many purposes for the past decade-plus, including camps, parties, weightlifting, volleyball and various other community events. In 2021, high school basketball returned to Tyson Auditorium for the ‘Ol’ Coach Classic’, a junior varsity tournament in honor of Gus Moorhead, who was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980. Two of the JV teams were coached by grandsons of the former coach — Brad Moorhead of Edgewood and Trent Moorhead of Hauser.

“A lot of the older folks that I remember going to games love to come in here,” Cornett said. “It’s a joy to see them in here. It’s a joy to see the young kids in here, too, because they are going to experience a little bit of what it was.”

There are tentative plans to play a varsity game at Tyson Auditorium, perhaps as early as this season. Through grants — primarily from the James Tyson fund — the non-profit group has been able to make necessary upgrades to the exterior and interior of the gym, which still sparkles after 75 years. Hopefully, it can serve the community for at least 75 more.

“I think that’s what Mr. Tyson’s vision was for this place,” Lay said. “A community facility for people to share with one another and talk with one another. It’s another awesome piece of what he meant to this town and this place … I’m so glad it’s still here.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.Get IndyStar's high school coverage sent directly to your inbox with the High School Sports newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball old gyms: Tyson Auditorium was home to Ripley County hoops' heroes