Top Cats: A Golden Era for College Basketball

by Tom Jones

Stockton, California experienced a high-voltage jolt of enthusiasm during the 1960s when a young basketball coach named Dick Edwards brought a city together. Hired by the University of the Pacific to coach its team, Edwards had an ability to go "outside the campus gates" and capture the support of the city of Stockton and the outlying community. He built a rabid fan base that became honorary Pacific alumni and they all turned an old opera house in downtown Stockton into a "capitol" of basketball. The enthusiasm of the city helped Edwards develop a nationally-ranked program that the University of the Pacific, the city of Stockton, the county of San Joaquin, and the core of California's great Central Valley would grow to give unconditional support and interest. Read how a fiery coach and a small group of dedicated assistants used a hardscrabble approach with a bunch of driven athletes to make Stockton and the University of the Pacific shine.

440 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2020

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Jones has a well done history of a key era in University of the Pacific’s basketball program. I am not sure how he got all those details for all those years but he did. The afterword is worth the price of the book. It is a set of reflections on college sports then and now.

[Walt · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful local history

Tom Jones did a masterful job of putting together a recount of an exciting and stimulating era of sport for the University of the Pacific and Stockton, California. He painted a fine portrait of Coach Dick Edwards. I would really like to get more detail on Coach Edward’s subsequent career. I relived many exciting sporting moments reading this book.