We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  The other was Arad McCutchan, and he never left Evansville.

  Johnny Wooden was born October 14, 1910—twenty-one months before McCutchan—in Hall, Indiana, a rural community about 150 miles northeast of Evansville. The Wooden family inherited a nearby farm when Johnny was six, but lost it when all thirty of their hogs died, forcing the Woodens to move back to Hall. Johnny was a basketball star at Martinsville High School, leading the Artesians to the Indiana state championship in 1927. As McCutchan’s playing career got off the ground at Evansville College, Wooden had already made a name for himself as a cat-quick guard at Purdue. He graduated in 1932, after earning all-American honors three years in a row.

  Wooden and McCutchan both apprenticed at high schools and served in the military before beginning their college coaching careers in the fall of 1946. While McCutchan took over at his alma mater, Wooden took the top job at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute. Over the next two seasons, the Sycamores won three of the four games they played against Evansville. In 1948, after two years and forty-four victories in Terre Haute, Wooden accepted the job at UCLA and moved his family to Los Angeles. It took years for the two coaches to truly master the game and separate themselves from their contemporaries. But in 1964 and 1965, they each guided dominant teams to national titles. In ’64, when the Aces finished 26–3 and won the school’s third championship in the College Division, UCLA went 30–0 and won Wooden’s first title in the University Division. The following year, as the Aces completed their undefeated season with a fourth title, the Bruins won twenty-eight and gave Wooden his second championship.

  Beyond their quaint life stories and parallel coaching careers, the two men also shared an intellectual curiosity that shaped the way they approached the game. Wooden recited poetry from memory and inspired his players with folksy aphorisms: “be quick, but don’t hurry”; “failure to prepare is preparing to fail”; “never mistake activity for achievement”; and “drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.”

  McCutchan, on the other hand, saw the game through the prism of mathematics. His philosophy paired an affinity for statistics and precision with a creative flair that influenced how he dressed his players, how they practiced, and how they played. He took every advantage he could find. His teams wore long robes on the bench instead of traditional warm-up suits because it was faster to shed a robe and enter the game. His players wore white shoes because he thought black shoes were easier for a referee to see and thus resulted in more traveling calls. They also wore short-sleeved jerseys instead of tank tops because that’s how they practiced and he wanted them to be equally comfortable in games. Plus, he said, short sleeves are “more flattering to the thin ballplayer.” McCutchan preferred orange uniforms because orange was the most visible color, making it easier for his players to keep track of each other on the floor.

  Despite all of their success, neither Wooden nor McCutchan earned handsome salaries. McCutchan’s local celebrity exceeded his income. The college didn’t pay him more than $20,000 until the mid-1960s. So he took on extra work to supplement his pay. He coached track and taught a basketball class in addition to math. He was the athletic director for many years and took on extra teaching assignments in the summer. The McCutchans didn’t live extravagantly. But they enjoyed certain perks that came with Arad’s status. Their kids went to college for free. Boosters paid for a family country club membership and gave the coach a red Chrysler 300 with gold hubcaps after he won his three hundredth game.

  UCLA won eight more national titles before Wooden retired with his tenth championship in 1975, a feat that seems unfathomable today. Four of his teams finished 30–0.

  The final years of McCutchan’s career were far less satisfying. Evansville won its fifth and final championship in 1971. But the Aces never recaptured the glory of their best years. Evansville suffered through losing seasons in 1967, 1969, and 1970. McCutchan had never been keen on hitting the road to plead for the services of top high school players. His recruiting budget for many years was $1,500. He also believed college coaches were educators who should spend more time in the classroom than on the road, which limited off-campus recruiting but reinforced the idea that academics were more important than athletics. As he got older, he left most of the recruiting to his assistants, and several of the players they brought to Evansville couldn’t meet UE’s academic requirements. One kid practiced for two years but never played because he couldn’t cut it in the classroom. Another was suspended from practice so he could improve his GPA, but dropped out amid accusations that his high school grades had been falsified. McCutchan didn’t compromise his standards. But it didn’t look good. He celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday in 1976. Boosters had grown restless.

  On Arad McCutchan Recognition Night in January 1977, the old coach received $15,000 in gifts, including a television set and a new Chevrolet parked courtside. McCutchan, dapper in a red tie and red pocket square, accepted the gifts with characteristic humility after a win over Valparaiso, standing on the court near Virginia and their three grown children. Then, shortly after 8:00 p.m., he stepped to the microphone.

  “Because you are my very dear friends,” he said, “I have chosen this moment to give you a bit of information I think you’d like to know now. I will work for the University of Evansville next year. But I will not work as basketball coach.”

  McCutchan’s simple retirement speech landed with a thud, stunning the crowd. He had won 514 games in thirty-one years. But the transformation of college sports had begun, and the University of Evansville wouldn’t be left behind. Mac was no longer the young, maverick coach who worked miracles with local farm boys. It was time to step aside.

  As one era ended, another would soon begin.

  FIVE

  Mr. Watson

  A WEEK AFTER BOBBY Watson arrived on campus, Chris Weaver, the vice president of the University of Evansville Student Association, got a call in his office from the athletic department: the new coach wanted a meeting. Weaver was a straight-arrow kid with big glasses and shaggy blond hair who grew up in a small farming community in northern Indiana. He spent most of his waking hours at the student government offices in the back of the union building, just down the hall from the campus newspaper, the Crescent. Weaver enjoyed a particularly spacious and well-appointed office, with a large desk, a meeting table, a credenza, and a sitting area with two chairs for visitors. Two windows behind his desk overlooked the rose garden at the president’s residence. Weaver was on the phone when Watson walked in, but ended the call while hurriedly ushering the new coach over to the sitting area. Instead of a firm handshake, Watson unexpectedly enveloped Weaver in a hug, as if they’d met a thousand times before. Weaver was a big kid, six feet tall and 185 pounds. But Watson was massive, with a personality as big as the Ohio River, leaving the impression everywhere he went that he stood seven feet and not 6'8".

  Soon, Watson and Weaver settled into the visitors’ chairs and the coach made his pitch.

  It was a variation of the sermon he had delivered over and over, every day, to anyone who would have him. He spoke to the Jaycees and the Boys Club. He met with a Sunday school class to talk about “Christian Attitudes in Athletics.” He called everybody “big guy”—“How ya doin’, big guy?”—and worked every room he entered with a disarming magnetism. His plans for the program were every bit as big as his personality. He wanted to change hearts and minds, to create the aura of a true Division I program, with all of the amenities that other schools enjoyed. Travel, for one thing, would be upgraded. With the exception of games in Colorado and California, Arad McCutchan’s team rarely flew. Most of its opponents were regional schools, and buses were fine for such short trips. But under Watson, the Aces would travel in style, on private, chartered jets.

  It wasn’t that Watson was going soft. Quite the contrary. At a Lions Club luncheon, he towered over a waist-high lectern and sold, in a deep baritone, his vision of UE basketball: He would run a tight program, he said, co
nsistent with his strict, all-for-one military background. No bushy mustaches. No beards. No long hair.

  “Now, people say hair length has no bearing on a guy’s ability to play. To play for me, you will sacrifice. To dive on the floor or grab that last-second rebound,” he said, “you must sacrifice. Hair length is that first step towards sacrificing to my rules.”

  Watson considered academics equal in importance to basketball and a pathway to lifetime success. He had written a letter to the faculty outlining academic expectations for his players. They would not be allowed unauthorized absences from class and were required to eat breakfast with the coaching staff every morning. “If they get out of bed,” Watson wrote, “they will go to class.”

  Watson’s disciplined approach would extend beyond the players, the coaches, and the student managers, all the way to the office staff.

  “The most important person in those offices will be the receptionist,” he told a reporter. “Hers is the first University of Evansville voice a caller will hear. She has to be sharp. If I’m in conference and a prospect calls, she must know that it’s far more important to interrupt me than put him on hold for five minutes.”

  Watson took a big-picture perspective on his role at the university. He knew he had to sell the program to the students as well as the boosters. That’s why his meeting with Chris Weaver at the student government offices was so important. Watson needed Weaver’s help. Even on a good day, student support for UE basketball was lukewarm. It was a matter of simple mathematics: UE’s full-time enrollment was about three thousand, and capacity at Roberts Stadium was nearly four times that. The stadium was a mile and a half from campus, making it an inconvenient walk on bitter-cold winter nights for students without cars. The team’s descent into mediocrity in the final years of McCutchan’s watch hadn’t helped.

  Watson wanted to build a deeper bond between students and their basketball team, no matter whether they lived in fraternities, in the dorms, or at home with their mom and dad. He told Weaver the Aces would play on TV and in the NCAA tournament. He told him the offense would be aggressive and fast-paced. And he promised that if Weaver could get three people in a room, he’d be there to sell them on Evansville basketball. The timbre of Watson’s voice changed as he got excited. He was an evangelist for Aces basketball, bringing every crowd to its feet and making everyone he met a true believer. Left in Watson’s wake, Weaver felt like he’d been lifted up and swept away by the new coach’s passion. In less than a half hour, Watson convinced Weaver that he was essential to the program, crucial to its success, that if he did not fully commit himself to Watson and his players, he would disappoint the entire university.

  “He had this ability to personalize the basketball program so you felt like you had ownership in its success,” Weaver says. “He was masterful in getting people vested in the program from very early on.”

  Mike Duff was just seventeen years old when he moved to Evansville in the summer of 1977, a mama’s boy who’d never been away from home for more than a week or two. Now he had to make the transition to college, leaving the cocoon of Eldorado for a big city full of strangers with soaring expectations. The pickup games at Carson Center hadn’t even started yet, and already Mike felt the pressure to restore the glory of UE basketball.

  “Don’t expect too much just yet,” he cautioned reporters. “I’ll have to adjust to being away from home. I’ll have to spend more time with the books than before. I’ll have to get used to better competition and work on certain things—strength, dribbling, my defense.”

  That summer, Mike worked a construction job during the day and played ball at night. That left little time for Cherie Bougas, his girlfriend, who’d stayed behind in Eldorado to finish high school. Mike and Cherie had lived a few blocks from one another in Eldorado and started dating when he was a junior and she was a sophomore. They went to homecoming dances and the prom and spent long lazy days at the indoor pool at Mike’s house. They cruised around in Mike’s purple van, maybe meeting up with friends in the Dairy Queen parking lot or stopping for a burger at Hardee’s. They broke up for who knows what and then got back together. Mike was quite a catch. But so was Cherie. She was beautiful and petite, with long silky brown hair and fine cheekbones, and the top of her head barely reached Mike’s shoulders. They had plans to get married someday and had already talked about moving into married student housing at UE once Cherie graduated from high school and joined Mike in Evansville.

  But once Mike moved away, they spent the summer trying to bridge the fifty-mile gap between them. Mike drove home when he could, and they talked for hours on the phone. He also sent Cherie love letters nearly every week in big, loopy handwriting, each one earnest and filled with promises and yearning.

  “How’s no. 1 doing? That’s you dummy,” he wrote one morning that summer. “I had a good dream about us last night. But I have them all the time. It’s hard to keep my mind off of you. Don’t forget to ask your mom if you can go to Kentucky Lake with me for the weekend. I’ll teach you how to ski if you’ll get in the water. I won’t go without you so you better be able to go. OK, sugar? Well, honey I’m going back to bed. See ya Friday. Love always, Mike. PS: I hope you can make something out of this letter. It’s still early. PSS: I LOVE YOU.”

  Mike roomed that summer with Kevin Kingston, another Eldorado boy on a basketball scholarship at UE. Kevin was three years older than Mike and had graduated from Eldorado High School in 1974, three months before Mike enrolled as a sophomore. But they’d become friends during the summers, working together at Bob Brown’s youth basketball camps in the mornings and hauling hay in the afternoons, heaving huge bales into the back of a truck as it rolled slowly through a farm field and then unloading the bales into a barn loft. When they played on summer nights at Carson Center, it was obvious that Mike was a natural. But Kevin’s game wasn’t so pretty. At 6'2", he lacked Mike’s size and finesse. He made up for his deficiencies with a fearless, blunt-force playing style. Kevin was an agile defender with quick feet who wasn’t afraid to step in front of bigger rivals as they barreled to the basket. That fall, during pickup games, he suffered a busted lip, a ruptured blister, and a gash in his face that required seven stitches.

  Kevin came to UE as a walk-on in 1976, Mac’s final season, and played in only a half dozen games. But Watson noticed him in game films, harassing ball handlers and skidding headlong across the floor. The new coach wanted a tough kid who could show his team the commitment required to defend Division I players. He decided that Kevin would be that kid and offered him a scholarship for his senior year. He also told Kevin that once he graduated from UE, he could join the Aces coaching staff as a graduate assistant. It was almost as if Watson had descended from the heavens to fulfill Kevin’s greatest ambitions: he had always wanted, his entire life, to play basketball at the University of Evansville and follow his dad into coaching.

  Evansville was like a second home to Kevin Kingston. Don, his father, earned a degree at Evansville College in 1957 while working full-time at the Chrysler plant to support his family. Don had planned to go to law school after graduation. But when his old football coach at Eldorado High School offered him an assistant’s job, he moved back for a long career at his alma mater. He taught history, government, and driver’s education and coached basketball and track, in addition to football. He also served as athletic director. In 1962, his wife, Wanda, gave birth to a girl they named Valery, and the Kingston family settled in Eldorado for good. But through the years, the Kingstons visited Evansville often because that’s where Don’s siblings lived. By the time Kevin was in high school, he would come to UE with his friends during the summer. One year, they played pickup ball at Carson Center and hung out with Jerry Sloan and Don Buse, another of Arad McCutchan’s greatest players and a point guard for the Indiana Pacers. Kingston tacked autographed photos of Sloan and Buse on his bedroom wall. They were his heroes.

  In high school, Kevin earned honorable mentions on the all-state football
and basketball teams. But because he didn’t draw much interest from college recruiters, he and Don plotted his path to the University of Evansville. Kevin honed his skills for two seasons at a junior college and then spent the entire summer of 1976 training with his dad to impress Arad McCutchan. The Kingstons lived on ten acres on the edge of town, and Don worked with Kevin on the concrete court he’d poured outside the old barn on their property. They played one-on-one. Don put Kevin through ball-handling, shooting, and defensive drills. And they rode bicycles for ten miles on the hot blacktop roads out in the country. Don taught Kevin to focus on the game, maintain his poise, and tune everything else out. He reminded him often of everything he could accomplish through grit and hard work. Watson shared Don’s philosophy, and Kevin embodied the tenacity his new coach sought from all of the Aces.

  “Kingston will show them how I want it done,” Watson said. “When he gets finished with them in practice, they’ll be ready to play the game.”

  Bobby Watson’s path to Evansville zigzagged through military school, army bases in Texas and Missouri, the rice paddies of Vietnam, and a series of low-profile coaching gigs in high school and college. His military pedigree was especially impressive to Aces fans. Evansville was a conservative town, patriotic even during the worst of Vietnam. ROTC was a popular program at the university and the anti-war movement made barely a ripple on its small campus. Evansville sportswriters made much of Watson’s service in Vietnam, consistently reporting erroneously that he’d won five Purple Hearts. The city wanted a God’s-honest G.I. Joe hero and made one out of Watson, no matter the details. But Watson never flaunted his war experience, and the reality of his time in Vietnam was more complicated than anyone knew. The war marked Watson in ways that he was reluctant to share, even with his family. His experience in Vietnam informed his coaching philosophy, especially in his final days in Evansville, when grit and fortitude were at a premium.