In every David and Goliath story somebody has to play Goliath. At some point, there was somebody rooting for the preening giant, only to watch the smaller, outmatched opponent leave victorious. 

The story of the 1969 Flathead Braves basketball team isn’t one with a happy ending. 

Flathead entered Montana’s Class A Big 32 championship game that season with a 20-2 record and the most talented team in the state. It had finished second at state the year before and certainly resembled the giants in the matchup, towering over Laurel, a team with no players taller than 6-foot-2. In contrast, the Braves were led by 6-11 junior center Brent Wilson, and featured a pair of tall forwards in 6-7 Don Groven and 6-4 Greg Ellingson along with 6-2 future pro baseball pitcher Jim Otten, a sharp-shooter from deep. Gerry Hall would go on play for Rocky Mountain and Gary Stoick was a high school all-American quarterback for the Braves.

“You got some great athletes,” Ellingson said. 

“It was pass the ball to Brent. Either that or you had to be able to bury a corner shot when you couldn’t pass it to him. We had some great shooters.

“If there would’ve been 3-pointers, I don’t think anybody would have touched us.”

By every metric, Flathead seemed to be a favorite in the game. 

But it’s toughest opponent that night may not have been in purple and gold. As it turned out, the Locomotives found their slingshot at the free-throw line.

In front of a capacity crowd of 10,700 fans at the Montana State University Fieldhouse in Bozeman, with another 1,000 waiting outside the gates, Flathead fell quickly into foul trouble. 

Wilson picked up his third foul 56 seconds into the second quarter, and by the time Laurel brought out its stalling tactics in the fourth quarter, many of the Braves were on the verge of leaving the game. 

With a four-point lead, the Locomotives held the ball with five minutes to play, forcing Flathead to foul to get the ball back. Groven tied the game at 51-51 with 3:25 to play but fouled out with 2:15 left in regulation. Following an errant pass that went off the hands of Ellingson, Wilson fouled out with two seconds to play. Ellingson would foul out in overtime with 49 seconds to play, scoring the only point for the suddenly cold-shooting Braves team in the extra session.

“The last foul called on Brent Wilson, I had been bumped out of the play and I was right underneath the bucket and I was looking at it,” Ellingson said. “I don’t think (Wilson) was within five feet of the guy when they blew the whistle.”

 “We went into overtime. I looked around and I was the only guy that could score from the inside on the floor. (Laurel) let me go and hacked me, figuring to put me on the line. It worked. 

“They had all their players on the floor and they could handle the ball really well. They just sat on the ball.”

The Locomotives salted away the game and won what would be the final game in the Big 32 format. 

In the game story the next day, the Daily Inter Lake wrote, “The officiating was weak to say the least,” only to offer condolences by saying, “They deserved to win but they didn't. And that sometimes is the game of basketball as well as life.”

The next season, Flathead split off with the largest 16 schools in the state to form the new Class AA. The Braves, with Wilson leading the way in a season he set every school scoring and rebounding record, would win the title in 1970 in the newly formed division. 

Ellingson, a senior on the 1969 runner-up team, didn’t get to enjoy that win as a member of the team. Instead he caught it from the next best seat. On a track scholarship at Montana State, he was a ball boy in the game calling out to Wilson from under the basket as he went on to set a scoring record for the state tournament. 

For him, Goliath won a year too late. 

“I got two silver balls for finishing second,” Ellingson said. “I gave them to my mom as earrings.”