It was the start of a long, slow fade for Sparky Stalcup. In his first ten years at Missouri, his teams finished second in the conference five times. But after Norm Stewart's graduation, they would never again place higher than fourth. Though his clubs were not devoid of talent, Stalcup could not match the enormous firepower that found its way to Lawrence and Manhattan. Part of that was due to his personal fabric. When it came to recruiting, Stalcup was ethical to a fault and even a bit naïve to the way the game was changing. He believed to his core that basketball should be just one piece of the university experience. He believed in students who played basketball, not basketball players who dabbled in education. "A school like Missouri will not relax its educational requirements for the sake of getting an exceptional athlete," he said. "The era of the dumb athlete is fast drawing to a close." He abhorred the corrupt recruiting practices that became more prevalent in the 1950s and railed against them. He believed that under-the-table payments were being made to the best big men, the kinds of players that were changing the game. He blamed alumni for brokering deals and blamed coaches for turning a blind eye. He feared for the integrity of the game.

In addition to losing out on top talent, Sparky lost his biggest rival. Stalcup had been a foil to Phog Allen since their first meeting in 1947, when the Kansas coach stormed the Missouri bench. When Allen went into retirement, Stalcup's program went into decline. Still, in that time of remarkable cultural transformation, the greatest challenges facing Stalcup came off the court, where the veteran coach helped to remake the image of Mizzou and its athletics programs.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the University of Missouri had many things to be proud of. Its record on racial integration was not among them. Missouri's Constitution of 1875 mandated "separate but equal" education that was anything but. White students were welcome at Mizzou while blacks were restricted to Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Black students who wished to take courses offered only in Columbia were not admitted to the university; rather, they were shipped out of state to integrated schools, with the state of Missouri paying their tuition. In fact, Mizzou was not integrated in any meaningful way until the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ended segregation in public education.

This institutional prejudice extended to sports, where "Dixie" had served as Missouri's fight song until "Fight Tiger" debuted in 1946. The schools of the Big Six had informally agreed not to integrate their teams, and for a time the University of Missouri's official policy prohibited competition against teams that included nonwhite members.

In truth, Mizzou did not lag far behind other schools. Integration slowly moved across the country region by region. Most Midwestern schools first integrated their rosters in the 1950s, while southern universities took longer, with Mississippi State bringing up the rear in 1972.

The face of Missouri basketball, and all Mizzou sports, changed in early 1956. Alfred Abram Jr., a seventeen-year-old from Sumner High in St. Louis, became the university's first black scholarship athlete. Sparky Stalcup could hardly have chosen a better candidate to break Missouri's color barrier. At six-foot-five and 198 pounds, Al Abram was a model athlete and citizen. An exemplary student, Abram was president of his senior class, yearbook editor, choir member, and National Honor Society inductee, and he compiled a perfect attendance record through all his years in high school. Abram even earned his diploma a semester early and enrolled at Mizzou in January 1956. In choosing Missouri, he turned down offers from Purdue, St. Louis University, and others. He did not make his choice to be a pioneer, but he did not shrink from that role either. "The chance to be the first of my race ever to be awarded an athletic scholarship at Missouri didn't sway me one way or the other," he said, "but now that I'm here, I'm going to try my best to be worthy of the honor." Because of freshman ineligibility, Abram had to bide his time on coach Clay Cooper's freshman team. His varsity career would have to wait until the second semester of the 1956–57 school year.

Just before that varsity career began, Sparky Stalcup found himself in a very public snit with an icon of wholesome Americana, the Saturday Evening Post. At a time when Mizzou was beginning to make strides toward equality, the Post ran an article that painted the university and Stalcup in an unflattering light. One semester before Al Abram enrolled at Mizzou, a young man-myth arrived at the University of Kansas. Before he ever suited up for the Jayhawks, Wilt Chamberlain was generally regarded as the most gifted player of his generation. Rumors swirled that the seven-foot kid from Philadelphia was lured to the dusty plains by something far greener than the scenery, and a consensus grew that he would turn Kansas into an unstoppable juggernaut. The Post sent sportswriter Jimmy Breslin to Lawrence to see what all the fuss was about.

Breslin's piece focused, in part, on how the eastern, urban black kid would be received in the conservative burgs that dotted America's midsection. Mizzou, in particular, received the back of Breslin's hand: "Testing points this year will be the Kansas away games with Missouri and Oklahoma—both in sectors where the prevailing attitude on the race question differs considerably from the Eastern outlook to which Wilt is accustomed."

While the article painted the university, in general, as a bastion of Jim Crow sentiment, it skewered Stalcup more specifically, suggesting that the coach had engaged in some opportunistic and perhaps unethical recruiting when Chamberlain came to the heartland to visit Kansas. The following, a quote attributed to Chamberlain, is the controversial passage exactly as printed in the Post: "The first time I went to Kansas, the Missouri coach"—Wilbur Stalcup—"met me at the airport—he was kind of cutting in—and asked me if I wanted to be the first Negro to play at his school."

When the article hit newsstands in late 1956, Stalcup was livid, and he had reason to be. At the time of publication, Sparky had never met Chamberlain, not in an airport, not on a basketball court, not anywhere. Stalcup immediately sent a telegram to the Post and demanded a retraction.

Chamberlain did not specifically identify Stalcup as the person he met in Kansas City's airport. Rather, Breslin inserted the Missouri mentor's name when Chamberlain referred to "the Missouri coach." In fact, the person Chamberlain encountered was William Toler, president of Kansas City's chapter of the Missouri Quarterback Club. When the controversy erupted, Toler explained that he was preparing to catch a flight when he bumped into a KU contingent, including Phog Allen's son, Bob, on hand to meet Chamberlain. When the group introduced Toler to Wilt, Toler asked him where he would attend college. Chamberlain replied, "It won't be the University of Missouri, Mr. Toler."

When the Post declined Stalcup's demand for a retraction, both Chamberlain and Kansas coach Dick Harp submitted letters confirming that Sparky had never met Wilt, and verifying Toler's account. And Phog Allen, who had great affection for Stalcup, said simply, "Whoever supports Breslin will be a sad sister." Still, the Post made no retraction, only an offer to print Stalcup's version of the incident. Sparky remained steadfast. "I have no version," he said. "I wasn't there."

While facing the challenges of integration, Stalcup confronted the challenge of replacing Norm Stewart. The man tagged with that daunting responsibility was a six-foot-three sophomore from Bayless High School in St. Louis. The job, of course, was impossible, but Sonny Siebert, with his soft shooting touch, gave an impressive effort.

Bill Ross returned after an impressive junior campaign, while baby-faced senior Lionel Smith was one of the most natural scorers of the Stalcup era. Ross, Smith, and Siebert formed a three-headed monster for the Tigers, who did most of their damage from the perimeter. Early on, Mizzou's assault from the edges paid dividends. Siebert and Smith each scored twenty-two in a win over South Dakota, and Ross and Siebert scored nineteen apiece (Smith added eighteen) to beat Southern California. Game after game, Missouri leaned on the trio for the bulk of its offense. By the time the Big Seven tournament rolled around, the Tigers sported an improbable 5–2 record.

That was the season's high-water mark. The Tigers went winless in Kansas City, then traveled to Lawrence to face Wilt Chamberlain and the nation's top-ranked team. When Chamberlain recorded fifty-two points and thirty-one rebounds weeks earlier in his varsity debut, his aura of invincibility was cemented. By the time Mizzou faced Wilt and company, the goal wasn't to win, it was to avoid humiliation. Indeed, the day after Kansas topped the Tigers 92–79, the headline in the Columbia Daily Tribune didn't mention the outcome; instead, it read simply, "Tiger Zone Slows Wilt," as if holding Chamberlain to twenty-three points (eleven below his average) was a victory in and of itself. After Chamberlain scored thirty-two in the rematch, the writers at the Savitar recognized that "until someone comes up with an idea to stop Wilt, the Tigers are going to have to settle for some position besides first in the basketball race."

The insinuations surrounding the Saturday Evening Post controversy had been particularly troubling to Stalcup at a time when he was preparing to add the first black athlete to the Tiger roster. In February 1957, Al Abram's year in the purgatory of freshman ineligibility came to a close. His arrival on the varsity came not a minute too soon. The Tigers had lost six of eight. Amid little fanfare, Abram made his debut in a 74–56 win over Oklahoma. He came off the bench with Mizzou trailing by three, and his eight points helped propel the Tigers to victory. "It has been a long time since a first-game sophomore got anything like the ovation which the M.U. student rooters gave Abram when he hit his first basket," wrote the Tribune's J. P. Hamel.

Unfortunately, Abram's arrival provided no real spark to the struggling Tigers. Missouri went on to lose five of its remaining seven games, stumbling to a 10–13 record and a sixth-place finish in the Big Seven. Still, that futile stretch provided one of the great individual displays in Tiger history. During the season, Lionel Smith had emerged from the long shadows of former teammates Stewart, Reiter, and Park, and on February 18, 1957, he delivered a performance that surpassed all that had come before. Smith lit up Marquette for forty-four points in a 98–76 Tiger win. Two weeks later, he finished his career with 992 points, then the third-highest total in Tiger history. His graduation would leave a mammoth void for a team that already found itself struggling to compete.