At this holiday time I thought maybe you would like a couple of stories about other Iowa basketball coaches who were asked to leave the arena after a couple of technical fouls, as Fran McCaffery was in the Iowa-Northern Iowa game.

We're going back to the days of Ralph Miller and George Raveling. So far those are the only two coaches that we can think of in Iowa's past who got tossed out of a game.

The Miller incident was unusual. It happened in the 1968-69 season at Jenison Fieldhouse on the Michigan State campus. Iowa had the likes of John Johnson, Chad Calabria and Glenn Vidnovic playing for them, so they had a fine basketball team.

The coach at Michigan State was John Bennington, who had been the coach at Drake, a man with a great sense of humor to go along with his basketball acumen. In the second half, the fouls were going against the Hawks and Ralph had had enough.

In those days, you could get three technical fouls before you had to leave, and with 10 minutes left in the game Ralph had drawn his third. The Fieldhouse at Michigan State had radio booths for broadcasting the games near the ceiling of the old place, and it was on the opposite side of the court from the press area.

To tell you how antiquated it was, the game statistics were put in a basket in a trolley and sent across the roof to the broadcast booth. Miller was looking for a place to hide, and since he certainly didn't want to go to the press section he wound up climbing up to the radio booth. All of a sudden my door opened and there was Ralph, breathing fire, coming in the door.

I quickly thought, "Boy, I'm going to get a few good quotes out of Miller out of this," but as some of you may remember Ralph was a chain smoker and his expression told me that both ends of the cigarette were lighted. I took one look at him and I thought, "No, I better not approach him now."

He spent the rest of the game in the booth, just pacing back and forth as Iowa lost to Michigan State, 78-60. Ralph remained hidden until they turned out the lights in the Fieldhouse.

Down below, Bennington was walking across the court and saw Ralph still up in the rafters. "Hey Ralph," Bennington yelled, cupping his hands to be heard in the arena, "Don't jump!"

Some years later, Raveling was asked to leave the Iowa arena when he became hot under the collar. Raveling, known as "The Rav" in our circles, was about to be ejected when he rapidly left the arena on his own and headed to the Iowa locker room. He later claimed he had to use the restroom, but he never returned to the arena.

FINAL NOTE: We attended last Friday's basketball game at Linn-Mar when Matt Lassen suffered a head injury. We're glad to hear that Matt is resting at home and on the road to recovery. We wish Matt and his entire family our best wishes.

(Bob Brooks is sports director at KMRY and has been one of the leading voices of college and prep sports in Eastern Iowa for more than 65 years. He is a 10-time winner of the Iowa Sportscaster of the Year Award, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana in 2004. His sports reports can be heard weekday afternoons at 4:30 and 5:30, and Saturdays at 6:40 for the Hawkeye football wrap-up.)