by Steve Beaven
“I didn’t put any pressure on him,” Walters said afterward. “I just want to become such a close friend of his that it will be impossible for him to look me in the eye and say no.”
At 6'10", with a lithe frame and a feathery touch from twenty feet, Perry was overwhelmed by all of the attention. Hundreds of colleges sent letters and brochures, filling nearly five laundry baskets. Bob Knight drove down from Bloomington to charm Perry’s parents. Missouri’s Norm Stewart, who lost out on Mike Duff three years before, made a hard sell. Larry Brown and his assistants visited Rockport over and over. Coaches from Kentucky, Louisville, Georgia, Michigan State, and Tennessee scouted games and practices. South Spencer coach Mitch Haskins, who’d been a college recruiter before coming to Rockport, sat down with his star player and sorted through all of the mail. Perry narrowed the list to twelve schools, and Haskins sent a letter to coaches, laying down the rules: All contacts start with the South Spencer coaching staff. Recruiters could visit practice only with permission. No personal contact was allowed in the fifteen minutes following a game. Postgame visits were limited to ten minutes. Eventually, Haskins had to send a second letter, notifying coaches that personal contact was forbidden and practices were closed. That didn’t stop a few enterprising recruiters from calling Perry’s house, claiming that Haskins had given them permission.
Walters relished the competition. He loved recruiting every bit as much as he enjoyed practices and games. Ultimately, every recruiting trip was a sales job. And Walters was a master salesman. He couldn’t compete with the Charlie’s Angels and Wilt Chamberlain. But Perry was a southern Indiana boy, and Walters didn’t intend to lose him to Larry Brown or anyone else.
At 5:00 p.m. on February 28, 1980, five weeks before recruits could sign a National Letter of Intent, TV crews, newspaper photographers, and sportswriters gathered in the South Spencer gym. After Haskins introduced Curran and Joyce Perry, Kenny’s parents, he summoned the young man from a side entrance to deliver a brief, carefully prepared statement. Kenny, with prematurely thinning hair and a wispy mustache, strode onto the court in a three-piece suit. He hated public speaking. But Haskins had refused to read the statement for him.
“After many months of careful consideration,” Kenny said, “I feel it is my best interest and the interests of those very close to me that I attend the University of Evansville and play for Coach Dick Walters next season. Any questions you might have will be answered by Coach Haskins or my parents. Thank you.”
Walters watched the press conference on TV, exulting in his victory. He called it “one of the brightest days in UE history.”
Hyperbole aside, Perry’s commitment was a shot over the bow, an unmistakable warning to opposing coaches: Walters would bring the best local players to Evansville. In the fall, Perry would return to UCLA wearing a University of Evansville jersey.
FOURTEEN
Where Basketball Is King
BRAD LEAF AND THEREN Bullock were best friends and polar opposites, with games as different as their personalities. Despite their contrasting styles, though, they shared a single-minded drive to make UE basketball matter again. Walters named them cocaptains in September 1980, at the start of their junior year, and the team quickly coalesced around them. There were clear signs of a resurgence at UE. But the Aces remained a small-college curiosity in national basketball circles. That didn’t faze Leaf and Bullock. They were true believers, dead set on leading UE into the Top 20 and the NCAA tournament. After that, who knows? The Final Four? Bullock, in particular, harbored no doubts and his attitude rubbed off on Leaf and their teammates.
The cocaptains approached their leadership roles from opposite directions. Leaf left the pep talks to others, preferring to let his maniacal work habits speak for him instead. Bullock, on the other hand, was UE’s den mother, its spiritual leader. He counseled underclassmen worried about playing time and called team meetings when the Aces played poorly. After games, he greeted little kids waiting for autographs like long-lost friends. Occasionally, his intensity got the best of him. Walters kicked him out of practice once when he faced off against Kenny Perry after an errant elbow.
“I’ll knock your head off,” he shouted at Perry.
But Bullock’s intensity didn’t sour his relationships. He was also the Aces social director, hosting marathon beer-fueled backgammon tournaments and poker games. His teammates trusted him, following his lead, no questions asked.
“If we’re playing lackadaisically,” Leaf said, “he gets us off our butts. If he says something is wrong, it must be wrong or he wouldn’t say it.”
When Bullock got excited, he spoke in superlatives, every sentence ending in a line of exclamation points. He was often chosen to meet with out-of-town reporters writing about the revival of the basketball program. He told them he liked to stop at the memorial as he walked through campus and always considered Mike Duff, John Ed Washington, and all of the rest as his teammates.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I talk to them because they know what’s happening and this is for them, too.”
But he also wanted to change the perception of UE’s basketball program. Bullock had grown weary of playing for a small-town underdog.
“Whenever I tell someone I play for Evansville, the first thing that comes into their mind is the plane crash,” he said. “I want to change that so they say, ‘Evansville? Weren’t they 24–4 and in the NCAAs last year?’”
On a humid afternoon in September 1980, Emir Turam landed at Dress Regional Airport following two days of travel from Zagreb, Yugoslavia, with stops in London, Boston, and Chicago. Turam was UE’s first international recruit, a 7'1" nineteen-year-old from Turkey who spoke flawless English. His arrival was big news in Evansville. When Turam stepped off the plane, accompanied by Dick Walters, he found two assistant coaches, two television crews, two sportswriters, and a new teammate waiting to greet him on the tarmac. He did his first interviews before he’d even made it inside to the terminal.
“Is this all for me?” Turam asked, wide-eyed, astonished to find himself a celebrity in a town he’d never visited and a country he’d never seen.
Gary Marriott, a UE assistant and one of Walters’s first hires, accompanied Turam from Boston and introduced him to sophomore point guard Murray Lendy.
“You must be nice to Murray,” Marriott told him. “He’s the one who passes you the ball.”
Turam didn’t miss a beat. “He must be nice to me,” he replied, “or I won’t remember him with the rebound.”
Turam was quick and agile, a prolific shot blocker who played for Turkey’s top amateur team, averaging nearly twenty-four points in an international tournament that summer. He’d caused barely a ripple among American recruiters. But Turam had made a name for himself on the youth basketball circuit in Europe. Along with Kenny Perry, he gave UE two bona fide Division I big men. He also gave Walters’s program a certain cachet in an era before international players made their mark on American basketball. In fact, the UE coaching staff had never seen Turam play before he came to Evansville and he’d never been to the United States. UE recruited him through the mail, with the help of Evansville’s miniscule Turkish population.
Marriott first heard about Turam when he was an assistant coach at Wyoming. A Turkish student came to visit the coaches’ office one day to talk about his friend Emir, the basketball player. The language barrier posed a problem, and Marriott showed little interest until the young man told him that his friend was over seven feet tall. Thus began a three-year recruiting effort that continued once Marriott came to Evansville in 1978. He wrote to Emir on a regular basis, and Turam responded by sending along clippings about his play from Turkish newspapers, which UE students translated for the coaching staff. An American friend who played with Turam told Marriott he was a smart kid and a good shot blocker with a soft touch around the basket. Emir was also a good student who spoke German and French, in addition to English. His father was a German-born attorney for a major bank, and his mother
was a British-born English teacher.
Ali Akin, a gastroenterologist from Istanbul who lived in Evansville, visited Turam on behalf of the UE coaching staff. Akin and his wife had dinner with Turam and his family, reporting later that UE’s newest recruit needed to gain weight if he hoped to hold his own against American big men. Kentucky had also expressed interest in Turam. But when Wildcats basketball came up during dinner, Akin changed the subject.
“I told him about the Aces and their five national championships,” Akin said when he returned to Evansville. “I didn’t explain they were all in Division II. But then, he didn’t ask me.”
A few weeks after he’d retired in 1977, Arad McCutchan took a seat next to his old friend John Wooden, the only college basketball coach who’d won more national championships. The “Wizard of Westwood” had retired two years before but remained one of the most recognizable faces in the game, with a thatch of graying hair parted precisely on the left and eyeglasses perched on his prominent beak. McCutchan, on the other hand, looked like everyman: unfashionable black glasses, only a few wisps of dark hair atop his head, and a face that formed a V at the tip of his chin. Two old coaches, friends for three decades, passing the time with a pleasant chat. The only distraction was the line of fans and autograph seekers waiting for a brief audience with Wooden, bypassing the amiable and anonymous fellow sitting next to him.
“But finally,” McCutchan recalled with delight several years later, “one youngster approached us and held out his program for me to sign, not John. That was one of my greatest moments.”
The basketball programs the two men left behind would never recapture the national dominance they’d enjoyed when Wooden and McCutchan were at their peaks. But by late 1980, when the Aces traveled to Los Angeles in mid-December to face UCLA, the Bruins remained among the elite. UCLA was undefeated and ranked third, nine months after losing to Louisville in the previous season’s NCAA championship game. For UCLA, UE was little more than an early-season speed bump, a final chore before leaving for Tokyo to play a team of Japanese all-stars. The Bruins were favored to beat the Aces by twenty-one.
For UE, however, the glamour of a trip to UCLA was intoxicating. A luxurious hotel. An afternoon at the beach. And then on to the hallowed ground of Pauley Pavilion, ancestral home of Walton and Kareem, the pinnacle of college basketball. In their dispatches back home, Evansville sportswriters marveled at the weather. Kenny Perry recalled his star-studded recruiting visit. Several Aces out for a walk stumbled upon a TV crew shooting an episode of Solid Gold and performed an impromptu dance routine to a Donna Summer song as the cameras rolled. The crowd on the sidewalk gave them a round of applause. This sort of thing didn’t happen when UE played in Terre Haute and Peoria.
UCLA players were pampered in ways the Aces could only imagine, with luxuries that left Brad Leaf in awe.
“We saw them come into the hotel,” Leaf recalls. “They’re all driving these really nice cars, these college kids. This was a whole other world.”
The Aces kept it close, but lost 69–62. Perry called it a moral victory. But the score wasn’t the point. The game reflected Walters’s aspirations for the program. It was a powerful recruiting tool, certain to impress small-town kids from Indiana and Illinois. It made the boosters happy, providing a select few with a forty-eight-hour respite from the December chill of southern Indiana. It was also a measure of how far the UE program had come in less than three years. Playing a midwinter game against DePaul in Chicago was one thing. Traveling to Los Angeles to face UCLA was something else entirely. In fact, Walters was so eager to get on UCLA’s schedule that he agreed to play the Bruins in LA despite UCLA’s refusal to reciprocate by coming to Roberts Stadium the following season. Walters had previously declined to play Kentucky in Lexington because the Wildcats didn’t want to play in Evansville in return. But he’d always been drawn to Southern California, and he admired Wooden. While he was at the College of DuPage, Walters once flew out to visit Wooden on his own dime. He joined the coach for lunch at Wooden’s favorite neighborhood lunch counter, savoring every moment.
Walters revered older coaches and enjoyed a warm relationship with Arad McCutchan. Mac vowed at his retirement that he’d keep a polite distance from the program so Bobby Watson could create a team in his own likeness. But in Evansville, Arad and the Aces were like a single entity that couldn’t be separated. He continued to teach for several years after Walters arrived and later did commentary on UE television broadcasts. On the road, Walters invited him to practice the night before the game and they’d sit in the bleachers together, two coaches from two generations talking basketball. Walters absorbed criticism from every corner of the community, but always appreciated McCutchan’s support.
“He was wonderful,” Walters recalls, “a perfect gentleman.”
When Jimmy Carter sat at his Oval Office desk on a Sunday night in July 1979 and told a national television audience that the United States suffered from a “crisis of confidence,” it sounded as if he was speaking directly to the people of Evansville. At the turn of the decade, the city was a microcosm of the nation’s limping economy.
In the midst of a faltering presidency, Carter had initially planned to speak to the country that night about the energy crisis. As he prepared to face the nation, Carter spent ten days talking with business leaders, labor chiefs, teachers, private citizens, mayors, and governors. He came away from those meetings believing the country needed more than a point-by-point plan for energy independence. He realized that the problems the United States faced were far deeper than the country’s dependence on foreign oil.
“I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy,” Carter said during his somber thirty-three-minute address. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.”
In Evansville, the response to Carter’s address was tepid. Dairy farmer Lee Riggs wasn’t impressed with the president’s speech or the fuel efficiency proposals that followed.
“The best thing the government can do for me,” Riggs declared, “is to leave me alone.”
Carter had never been especially popular with Evansville voters. Despite long-standing union support for Democrats, the political climate in the city had moved toward the center in the 1970s. Mayor Russell Lloyd was a moderate Republican, and in Vanderburgh County, Gerald Ford beat Carter by four points in 1976. When Senator Edward Kennedy campaigned for president at the Whirlpool Local 808 headquarters four years later, he told the union workers that Carter didn’t care about the working class. That November, Carter lost Vanderburgh County to Ronald Reagan by nine points.
Evansville reflected the nation’s mood. That summer, service stations closed on the weekends as their fuel supplies ran low. Striking truckers protested rising diesel fuel costs. And in February 1980, nearly forty-two hundred members of Local 808 again filed into Roberts Stadium to vote on a Whirlpool contract that union leaders told them wasn’t enough. Many who raised their hands in favor of the deal recalled the fear and uncertainty of the strikes in 1971 and ’74 and decided to cut their losses and accept a raise of thirty-five cents an hour. After peaking at nearly ten thousand in 1973, the hourly workforce at Whirlpool now totaled half of that.
Elmer Hall ignored his misgivings and voted “yea” that day, the first time he had ever supported a contract offer from Whirlpool. He felt like he had no choice.
“You can’t beat them,” he said afterward.
The new contract wasn’t enough to slow the spiral at Whirlpool. Two months later, amid high interest rates and sagging new home construction, the company cut production of refrigerators, freezers, and dehumidifiers at the plant near the airport. Union employment that year fell to forty-one hundred and continued to decline, one year after the next.
Elmer Hall was right. You can’t beat them.
FIFTEEN
A Coach Reborn
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IN EARLY 1980, BARELY two years after his son had perished near Dress Regional Airport, Ed Siegel rode the school bus with his Marion County Championship Pike High School basketball team as an escort of fire trucks and police cruisers led them back home. When they reached the Pike parking lot, Ed hustled his boys through the winter chill and into the packed gym, where they were met by the pep band, cheerleaders, and an electric wall of noise. The players filled a row of chairs at midcourt as Siegel grabbed the microphone. He was forty-eight years old, portly, and graying, savoring this moment and beaming at the boys who had restored his passion for coaching. He introduced each kid, from the starters to the youngsters at the end of the bench, detailing their individual contributions to Pike’s success. David Gadis was a senior, and he’d never seen his coach so happy.
When David was a freshman, in the final weeks of the 1977 season, Ed called him up to practice with the varsity. It was a singular honor for an Indiana kid, like a rookie being summoned to a big-league baseball club in September for a brief chance to prove his worth. David guarded Mark Siegel every day, challenging him even as he tried to emulate his game. Mark told his dad that David was the quickest kid he’d played all season. After Mark graduated, David took over at point guard, leading Ed’s team with the same natural poise and confidence Mark had always shown. Ed rode his ass in practice. But David never flinched. He understood. The coach and his point guard had come a long way together.
During that awful Christmas break after the crash, David and four of his teammates paid Ed a visit. When Carmen Siegel opened the door and led them into the den, they found her husband sitting in a rocking chair, shrunken and diminished beneath a blanket, one of the only times in their lives they had seen him quiet. Pike had postponed two games after the crash, and Ed hadn’t returned to practice, leading his players to fear he would quit. They sat with him for an hour that day, told him about what he’d missed, and asked him to come back: “We need you.” Ed thanked them for stopping by, for coming to the funeral, and said he’d think about it. But he wasn’t sure. He’d spent so much time with Mark in the Pike gym, so many evenings in the car after practice, talking basketball as they headed home, passing the strip malls on the west side of Indianapolis. How could he face those painful memories, day after day? Ed visited his pastor and prayed for guidance. He decided, after a few weeks, that Mark would want him to keep coaching. When Ed returned to the bench in early January 1978, Pike High School retired Mark’s jersey—number 14—in a pregame tribute.