We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  UE offered Walters its coaching job in late February 1978, and he agreed to the terms of the deal over the telephone, with no agent and no negotiation. It wasn’t a long conversation. He’d wanted a job at a Division I school, and now he had it. Finally, at the age of thirty.

  Walters came to Evansville on February 28 and signed the contract the next day—for three years and $25,000 annually. Then he met the media for the first time, nattily attired in a tan pin-striped three-piece suit. His hair was perfect.

  “I have a monstrous rebuilding job ahead of me,” Walters said. “But with a great recruiting effort and the help of the Evansville community, I see no reason the program couldn’t be rebuilt quickly.”

  Walters lacked McCutchan’s hometown familiarity and Watson’s military gravitas. But at that moment, he embodied everything Evansville wanted. And he said all the right things on that first day. He was a winner with an old-school coaching philosophy built on discipline and defense. He would not tolerate tardiness. When his leading scorer at DuPage was late for the team bus before a road game that season, Walters left without him and his team lost. He promised reporters that his teams would play suffocating defense and run a fast-break offense. He accepted neither long hair nor beards during the season. A young man’s jersey was meant to be tucked in, even during practice. He wanted a close-knit team culture and demanded his players spend nearly every hour of every day together, in the same apartments, at meals, and at study tables.

  “That’s what Bobby was building and what I’ll continue,” he said.

  Walters promised a roster with an equal mix of high school players, transfers from major colleges, and junior college recruits, including some from the College of DuPage. Bringing in his own players would give Walters a head start. They understood his expectations, his offensive strategies, the way he ran practice. Transfers would also be an immediate help. To aid UE, the NCAA waived its rule requiring Division I transfers to sit out a year once they arrived at a new school, creating an appealing opportunity for upperclassmen who’d been stuck on the bench elsewhere. In his first months on the job, Walters signed transfers from Kansas, Arkansas, and Iowa. But to build a program for lasting success, Walters knew he had to attract high school kids he could work with and develop for four years.

  Walters announced at that opening press conference that he would retain Stafford Stephenson and Ernie Simpson. Stephenson was disappointed but not bitter about being passed over for the head-coaching job and soon returned to recruiting. Once his final season at the College of DuPage ended, Walters hit the road as well.

  But after less than two months on the job, Walters stumbled upon an obstacle he hadn’t considered when devising a recruiting strategy: Evansville’s checkered history of race relations, its proximity to the South, and the lack of black students on campus. A Chicago-area recruit turned down a scholarship to Evansville, in part, because of low African American enrollment at the university and the city’s small black population, which was about 9 percent.

  In an interview with a Chicago journalist at about the same time, UE’s director of admissions blamed the lack of diversity on the fact that Kentucky was just across the river and “there’s still a lot of rednecks there.” This assertion deeply wounded an Evansville sports columnist, but not because he felt it discredited Evansville. He found it insulting to Kentucky.

  The reluctance of African American recruits to play in Evansville reflected a hard truth about the university and its hometown: more than a half century after the first black student was admitted to Evansville College in the mid-1930s, and despite a concerted effort by the UE administration, black enrollment represented a miniscule fraction of the student body.

  More than a dozen black players suited up for the Aces in the quarter century before Walters took over. Black students, however, remained a small minority on campus even after Graves arrived in 1967 and promised to make changes. Graves envisioned a university that admitted students from all backgrounds and prepared them to live in a world that stretched far beyond Evansville’s city limits. In the first years after Graves was hired, UE created an urban affairs program. Black professional development scholarships were given to students interested in careers in law, medicine, business, and engineering. The university said it would try to recruit seventy-five black students in 1968 and three hundred in 1969. These were ambitious goals. In 1968, enrollment included about fifty black students out of three thousand. Despite these promises, the university could never achieve the enrollment targets Graves had set. Recruiters from the admissions office found it difficult to convince black teenagers to move to southern Indiana.

  Evansville’s reputation almost cost Walters a second recruit that spring. Theren Bullock was a slashing forward from Blue Island, Illinois, just south of Chicago. When it came time to decide between UE and Northwestern, he worried about the lack of black students on campus in Evansville. Upon hearing Bullock’s reservations, Walters asked the university’s most venerated alum to reassure his recruit that basketball players, no matter their race, were treated as royalty in Evansville.

  “I was happy when Jerry Sloan called me and told me that in his time there, blacks and whites were treated the same,” Bullock said after he had chosen UE. “He said there may be some people who get out of hand, but no more than anywhere else.”

  The irony—that it took a white alum to convince a black recruit to choose UE—went unmentioned. But Bullock’s commitment was a boon for Walters’s fledgling program. For the next four years, Theren would be a cornerstone of Aces basketball.

  As Walters assembled his team and prepared for the coming season, the university scrambled to contain growing resentment among the families of players who died in the crash.

  An unexpected by-product of the condolences that poured in after the crash was a pile of checks and cash that accompanied the sympathy cards and letters. The university didn’t ask for a penny. But fans, students, and boosters began raising money for scholarships, a memorial plaza on campus, and other rebuilding expenses. The student association collected money from the sale of bumper stickers. Indiana fans contributed $5,100 when the Hoosiers played Alabama in Bloomington. St. Joseph’s College, in northern Indiana, collected $341 at its game against Montana State. Ross Theater in Evansville pledged proceeds from a showing of The Billion Dollar Hobo. Total strangers from across the country sent checks. Within two weeks, the university had collected nearly $60,000. Ultimately, the memorial fund totaled more than $330,000. The support was heartening for a university faced with rebuilding its basketball program from scratch.

  In the year after the crash, Graves convened families of the victims for their input on how the money should be spent. But the parents of six victims—Bryan Taylor, Ray Comandella, Mark Kniese, Mark Kirkpatrick, Mark Siegel, and Jeff Bohnert—later accused the university of paying their wishes little heed. These parents hired an attorney and demanded an independent audit of the fund. It was a nasty dispute, played out in public and fueled by Graves’s uncharacteristically tone-deaf argument that UE was a private institution that wasn’t required to open its books to the community. Donald Moon, whose son Keith was a sophomore forward, eventually asked the university to give him the money donated in Keith’s name so he could grant his own scholarships in his son’s honor. UE agreed, but told Moon it required permission in writing from each donor who had given in Keith’s name. Moon felt UE’s letter to these donors portrayed him unfavorably. After he received about $3,000 given in his son’s name, he told a reporter that UE’s actions reflect a “tragic lack of sensitivity on the part of the university, particularly Mr. Graves.”

  Ultimately, after investigative stories about the fund-raising appeared in the Evansville Courier in late 1978, Graves agreed to release a breakdown of how the money was spent. It included more than $110,000 for construction of a memorial plaza on campus and only $26,000 for scholarships. The bill for the funerals was $58,000 and the cost of stadium renovations was $5,600. The univer
sity spent more than $17,000 on a bus to ferry the team to road games. But it was too small and thus used mostly to impress visiting high school recruits. Seven-foot beds for the new players and a costume for Ace Purple, the school mascot, each cost $500. Such trifling expenditures seemed disproportionate to the magnitude of the tragedy.

  In an editorial, the newspaper criticized Graves for his reluctance to release details about the fund and an attitude that “smacks of imperiousness.” It was an unusually public and painful rebuke for a man accustomed to unanimous support from the city’s leadership class, support he had carefully cultivated for more than a decade.

  Graves lashed out at the Courier, writing in a letter to readers that its investigation “inflicted injury to an institution which has for many years faithfully served the educational requirements of its community.”

  The university’s response did little to satisfy some of the families, and hard feelings lingered for decades, to Graves’s great dismay. The suggestion that he didn’t do enough on behalf of the victims and their relatives troubled him until his death in 2011.

  “I did care terribly about it all,” Graves said three decades after the crash, sounding as if it had all transpired only recently.

  The Pittsburgh Steelers touched down at Dress Regional Airport on February 11, 1978, two months after the crash. Greeted by Aces fans and a national TV crew, the Steelers stepped off the plane and climbed aboard a double-decker bus headed for Roberts Stadium, a police escort leading the way.

  The Steelers’ off-season basketball team, led by all-pro running back Franco Harris, had come to Evansville for a benefit game to support the UE memorial fund. The Steelers, who had won the Super Bowl in 1975 and 1976, represented the sort of gritty, blue-collar ethos that Aces fans could appreciate. Normally, the Steelers played charity games in and around Pittsburgh. But when a local judge who managed the team heard about the crash, he asked Harris whether he’d play and then contacted the university.

  The memorial fund grew day by day in the early weeks of 1978, with hundreds of checks from families, civic groups, and businesses stretching from Oolitic, Indiana, to Tasmania, Australia. The Atlantic Coast Conference and the Rose Bowl committee both chipped in $10,000. Benefit concerts by the Oak Ridge Boys and impressionist Rich Little raised $15,000. But the Steelers were the biggest celebrities to lend a hand.

  After a pregame meal donated by McDonald’s, Harris and his teammates took the court. Their opponents: alumni from Arad McCutchan’s old squads. But it was more like a circus than an Aces game, with musical guests, dancers, and trick-shot artists taking their turns on the court. The Big Red Line, cheerleaders for the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals, performed with the UE pep band. Then came a free throw competition, a Ping-Pong exhibition, and a nine-year-old dribbling whiz.

  The shock that had gripped Evansville in the weeks after the Aces’ plane went down had begun to subside. Classes resumed. A blizzard at the end of January paralyzed the city and provided a welcome distraction. The crash no longer dominated the evening news or the front pages of Evansville’s newspapers. But the empty parking lot at Roberts Stadium on Saturday nights was a painful reminder of December 13. The buses no longer idled outside the Oak Meadow Country Club, waiting to whisk well-heeled UE fans to games. There was no socializing at halftime in the courtside seats. Fathers and sons who’d tuned in to Marv Bates’s radio broadcasts had to look elsewhere on the dial.

  High schools still played at Roberts Stadium, and UE hosted its annual holiday tournament at the end of December, after Southern Illinois rearranged its schedule to serve as a substitute for the Aces. But it wasn’t until the Steelers arrived that the cavernous old arena felt alive again. Nearly eleven thousand fans braved deep snow, filling row after row all the way up to the bleachers. The exhibition they saw was so awful, it was entertaining, more like comic relief than a basketball game. Paunchy Aces stars from the old days huffed and puffed up and down the court in an old-timers’ game featuring two alumni teams. Then, Arad McCutchan came out of retirement to lead a team of middle-aged Aces all-stars against the Steelers, a game that no one took seriously. Harold and Clyde Cox, brothers who played at Evansville College back in the day, wore Halloween masks that made them look like elderly gentlemen who’d wandered away from the nursing home. Franco Harris mingled with fans. He and his teammates, professional athletes and recent Super Bowl champs, took it easy on the home team. Final score: Aces 42, Steelers 38. Afterward, the alumni team gave each other awards for poorest sport, oldest old-timer, and least valuable player. Hundreds of kids crowded the hallway outside the Steelers’ locker room, collecting autographs from Harris and his teammates. Stafford Stephenson led the young son of booster Maury King, who died in the crash, into the locker room to meet his heroes.

  UE raised about $50,000 that night. But the true impact of the evening couldn’t be quantified by donations or ticket sales. As Aces fans filed out of the stadium and drove home on snowy streets, it felt as if a great burden had been lifted, as if all of Evansville had taken its first steps forward.

  Edie Bates, who’d spent so many nights at Roberts Stadium with Marv, soaked in every joyous moment. “Wasn’t it wonderful?”

  TEN

  Edie

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for construction crews to fill up the big suburban lots around Bobby and Deidra Watson’s house on Bunker Hill Court, five miles east of campus. Within months, a dozen homes were built on the flat treeless lots, two-story houses with two-car garages, long sloping driveways, and lawns so perfect and green they looked like an artist’s rendering. Deidra and Bobby had planned to raise their three daughters on Bunker Hill Court, among the pioneering families that had joined them in the rural landscape of Warrick County.

  But Bobby was gone, leaving Deidra and the girls to stumble along in shock and uncertainty. Deidra had enjoyed a traditional family life with Bobby. She didn’t love basketball. She loved him and considered his career central to everything they did. She invited players and their girlfriends over for cookouts and holidays. She ran the house and raised the girls, especially with Bobby on the road so much. She had a daughter before she met Bobby, and making all of the decisions had weighed on her. Once they met, Bobby had eased that pressure. He was so strong, a natural leader. He filled up the house every time he walked in the door. Now, here she was, a single mom again, lonely and on her own. Deidra had appreciated the outpouring of support, from Evansville and across the country. Nearly every day, she received letters from coaches Bobby had met over the years, veterans who had served with him in Vietnam, and former teammates at the Virginia Military Institute. It was comforting. But most of these people were strangers to her. Deidra’s mom and sister—her nearest family—lived two hours away in Louisville. Deidra was private, not as naturally outgoing as Bobby. They’d lived in Evansville for less than a year, hardly enough time to develop deep, lasting friendships.

  Then, early on New Year’s Eve, less than three weeks after the bodies were pulled from the mud, Edie Bates called. Edie was fifty-six, gracious and warm, with steel-gray hair that framed the soft features of her face. She wore big round eyeglasses, ruffled blouses, and hemlines below the knee. Edie missed Marv desperately, mourned his loss and the end of the life they’d built, the nights she’d spent with him at the broadcast table. She had no children or grandchildren, but assumed a maternal role with Deidra and her girls.

  Edie knew the holidays would be especially difficult for Bobby’s family and wanted Deidra to know she’d been thinking of them. Not long after, Deidra invited Edie to her home for dinner. Later, she invited Jennifer Kuster to join them. Jennifer, Bryan Taylor’s girlfriend, had stayed in Evansville to finish her nursing degree. Their dinners were sporadic and tearful at first. But the mood lightened as their gatherings evolved into a weekly tradition. The three women usually met at Deidra’s house, because she loved to cook. Then she bought a piano, and Jennifer led the women—and Deidra’s girls—in sing-alongs. Edie and Deidra traveled to
Tell City—where Bryan and Jennifer had grown up—to celebrate Jennifer’s twenty-second birthday. And when Edie was whisked to the hospital with a heart ailment, Deidra and Jennifer sat with her in the intensive care unit, an area reserved only for immediate family, holding her hands.

  “I knew they would come,” Edie said.

  Doctors had diagnosed Edie with chronic heart disease before the crash, suggesting that she would eventually need a transplant. She and Marv had been making plans to see a specialist in Houston, and her friends feared that his death would weaken her fragile health. But it was just the opposite. Edie felt compelled to live the kind of life that Marv had lived, with the determined optimism and work ethic that drove him each time he sat down behind the microphone at a dimly lit high school football field or a cramped college gym. Marv never made it as a big-league play-by-play man. But in Evansville, he represented more than any single team or school, and Edie assumed this same role in the years after the crash. As the days and weeks passed and the initial shock faded, she drew strength from the public tributes to her late husband. When the Society of Professional Journalists honored Marv, Edie spoke on his behalf. When they unveiled a portrait of Marv during a baseball game at Bosse Field, Edie was there, taking in Marv’s image with such transparent joy that it seemed as if he were standing there before her in the flesh. When the reporters needed to interview crash survivors each December, Edie always said yes, patiently answering the same questions over and over again. When the society page editor wrote a story about women challenging the stereotypes of widowhood, she wrote about Edie’s transition since the crash. Edie was a fixture at Aces games at Roberts Stadium, as much a link to the program’s past as Arad McCutchan and Jerry Sloan. She was elected to the UE board of trustees and joined the alumni board. When critics wondered how she could devote herself to an institution so closely associated with Marv’s death, Edie didn’t hesitate to put them in their place.