Ray Laborde knew what he was getting into: He was going to be an end-of-the-bench guy on a club whose members supplied everything.

“I was like a sub’s sub,” he chuckles. “It was a shoestring operation – after practice, we got clean socks. But we furnished everything else.”

Laborde, a guard, scored one point for the 1945 Loyola team that won the NAIA national championship.

He came from the farms of Marksville, La., to the Uptown New Orleans concrete pasture. He lived on 1475 Calhoun St., a boarding house that catered to several dental students.

A championship basketball team living together had to be a sure recipe for wild anecdotes.

“Several of us ate and lived there,” Laborde said.

Laborde later became involved in politics, serving on the Louisiana House of Representatives.

The national crown did not earn Laborde any star treatment worth much more than socks after practice.

“Nah,” he said. “A lot of people didn’t even know I played ball during my political career. When I was being inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame, someone saw a picture of the team hanging in there. They recognized me and said, ‘Well, I’ll be.'”