On March 5, 1976, the Galesburg Silver Streaks walked into Thiel Gym and did something nobody outside their locker room thought was possible. They beat undefeated, No. 1-ranked Peoria Richwoods 85-79 in overtime — a regional championship game that Galesburg has never stopped talking about.
Fifty years later, two of the players who made it happen joined Jay Redfern on Galesburg In Focus to tell the story the way only they can tell it.
Mike Campbell and Scott Kelley were the "Twin Towers" of that 1976 team — Campbell at 6-foot-10, Kelley at 6-foot-9 — and they were as different as they were complementary. Campbell went on to Northwestern, was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, and chose Harvard Law over the NBA. Kelley went to Iowa, transferred to Evansville in the wake of the 1977 plane tragedy, and became a professor of marketing and executive associate dean at the University of Kentucky. But 50 years before any of that, they were 17- and 18-year-old kids in Galesburg playing the game of their lives.
The year before, Richwoods had beaten Galesburg 103-51. Fifty-two points. In this interview, Campbell and Kelley talk about what it was like to absorb that loss, come back the following season, and face the same team in the regional championship — undefeated, ranked No. 1 in Illinois, with Division I talent at every position.
"I remember feeling like we were in control of that game from start to finish," Campbell said of the 1976 rematch. The crowd was standing room only. College coaches—including Lou Henson—were in the building. And when the final buzzer sounded in overtime, the fans rushed the court.
In nearly an hour of conversation, Campbell and Kelley also talk about growing up in Galesburg as basketball was the center of the community's identity, the influence of coach Mike Owens, the open gym sessions that made them who they were, what it was like to be high school celebrities in a basketball-crazy town, and whether that era of Galesburg basketball can ever come back.
The interview opens with 40 seconds of game audio from the final moments of the 1976 regional championship, as called by Mike White and the late Tom Wilson on Galesburg Cable TV.
Watch the entire 1976 Galesburg-Richwoods game: Watch on YouTube
Evan Massey on the '76 Streaks: Click here for the 5-part series
Previously on WGIL: Scott Kelley on the ’76 upset of Richwoods