I’ll always be grateful to Tom Sleet for providing me with guidance. He supported my desire to escape what seemed to be my fate and helped me refine and develop the skills that would help me accomplish my dreams. Basically, the man worked with a bunch of inner-city kids who took life one day at a time and had no dreams for the future, he helped mold us into good citizens, and he gave us self-confidence, a winning attitude, and the encouragement to believe we would succeed on the court and in other facets of life. This encouragement probably proved to be the most important thing of all.
My eighth-grade team played in the Capitol City’s first junior high school tournament. Reports have it that during the last minute of every quarter, guys would pass the ball around the perimeter, until it reached me. Then, with the clock running out, I would shoot. I don’t remember this happening. But I do know that long before that tournament, when our team from P.S. 17 swept through the competition and took the Indianapolis city championship, Ray “the Razor” Crowe was in the stands. The future was watching, making its own plans.
Playing other teams from throughout the city provided my first exposure to organized games. And more. Aside from my visits to Tennessee, when I’d see my grandfather’s neighbors and say hi, this was my first real exposure to white people. Certainly, it was the first time I’d ever been on the same basketball court as any of them.
The funny thing about racism is that when you’re young and growing up and you go to an all-black school and have friends all around you, you don’t think about race. Oh sure, racism was present in my life, but it was sort of like polluted air. I inhaled it and did not realize the damage it was doing.
In Indianapolis, about eight hundred black students attended integrated schools until the early 1920s, when a wave of fear-mongering, racial hatred, and opportunism swept the state. The Indianapolis school board was dominated by members of the Ku Klux Klan, and throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, they passed zoning ordinances for the express reason of keeping blacks out of white high schools. And while integrated high schools and varsity athletics came to rural Indiana fairly early—with Muncie’s championship squads featuring black players as far back as 1930 and 1931—in the capital city, voters approved the building of a segregated high school. (In due time, other Indiana cities followed suit, opening Lincoln High in Evansville and Roosevelt High in Gary.) Originally, the Indianapolis school was going to be named after Thomas Jefferson, but wiser heads prevailed, and Crispus Attucks became its given name.
According to some historians, Crispus Attucks was little more than a waterfront worker. Called “the Mulatto,” Attucks was a black man with liberal doses of Indian blood. He was born in 1723, and late in his teen years slipped loose from slavery, to become a sea tough prowling lower Boston’s waterfront, where he acquired a reputation for brutality. This man became a central figure and hero on the night of March 5, 1770, when British soldiers fought with three groups of Boston street fighters. The evening ended with Attucks and three others bleeding to death in the snow in what history now labels the “Boston Massacre.” Daniel Webster, the famous patriot, and John Adams, the second president of the United States, both singled out this night as a pivotal moment in the American Revolution.
In 1930, at the age of thirty-two, a black man named Dr. Russell A. Lane left his position on the faculty of Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, and took over as Crispus Attucks’s principal. Lane had a law degree from the University of Dayton and a doctorate in education from Indiana University, and he insisted that his teachers have at least a master’s degree if they wanted to stay at Attucks. These were teachers who, solely because of their skin color, could not teach at white colleges, who had gone through trials and tribulations to become educated. They suffered and were discriminated against, and yet for all their suffering were still educated and dignified—men and women who knew that it was education that would help you improve your life, would get you out of the ghetto. That was the imperative at Attucks. Getting kids educated.
I think that Principal Lane and the other school administrators believed in using sports as a corollary to their concept of black education and dignity. Their idea was to grow smart, polite, educated citizens, while also showing the white community that these citizens were good, decent young men who could compete on athletic fields without any problem. Along these lines, Principal Lane and the other administrators believed that Attucks’s sports teams were best used to help build relationships with the white community. So basketball coach Fitzhugh Lyons selected his players more for their manners than their athleticism. Then he taught them polite basketball. “Keep your feet on the floor when you shoot and pass,” he told them. “Don’t get too close to your man on defense.” Lyons even gave speeches before games about how losing now might give way to winning in the long run. Still, seeing how the state high school athletic association wouldn’t admit black schools to its membership, the mandates of politesse did not help much. The school didn’t have a regulation gymnasium, or even a decent track or football field. All basketball games were played on the road, very few of them against white competition except for the occasional small rural school or Catholic academy (the Klan had also made sure to ban Catholics).
Finally, in 1942, the wartime effort began a shift in the state’s political mood. Some city schools, like Howe High, started winking at the Klan’s zoning laws and accepted black students. Soon after, a meeting of the Council of the Indiana High School Athletic Association allowed for white schools to play black schools and share revenues from games. Attucks may not have had a gym, but the Tigers started playing a few home games nonetheless—at Tech High School, a cross-town integrated school that would become our rival, and at Butler University.
Ray Crowe was hired as an assistant basketball coach in 1948. The eldest of ten children, Ray had a younger brother, George, who had played pro baseball on the New York Renaissance with Jackie Robinson. Eventually, George would go on to a ten-year career with the Braves, Reds, and Cardinals, and was involved in a minor scandal when the baseball commissioner ordered that Stan Musial start the all-star game ahead of him. As an assistant, Ray Crowe was influenced by Lyons’s approach of capitulating and making sure not to make waves. And in 1950, when Lyons stepped down and Crowe became Attucks’s head coach, he continued that nonaggressive style.
Looking back to the year Flap hit his big shot, I think this tendency toward capitulation and nonaggressiveness probably played a large role in Attucks’s loss to Evansville Reitz in the state title game, in which Bailey Robertson would not play. Evansville Reitz’s starters also started on their team’s state championship football team, so they were big and physical and athletic enough to win on their own. But I know that in the days before the game, the mayor of Indianapolis met with Principal Lane and Coach Crowe, worried about blacks starting a riot in the streets in the event of an Attucks victory. I also know that Ray Crowe told people that he didn’t like Bailey’s attitude, and Bailey was kept out of the state finals for reasons that never were publicly explained. (Bailey didn’t even dress for that final game.)
It does seem that a lot of factors came into play that night that all added up to an Attucks loss. For instance: With two minutes left, our star forward, Willie Gardner, jumped between two players and double-clutched and hit a reverse layup. The official called charge. Evansville made the foul shot, then stole Attucks’s inbounds pass and scored a layup. This was the key moment in Evansville’s 66–59 win. The next day, an editorial signed by the five-man sports staff of the Indianapolis News, the highest circulation newspaper in the state, termed it a “highly questionable and challengeable call.” For a week after that, a bitter debate ensued. And while Coach Crowe never uttered one word of criticism—he wasn’t about to let himself be called an uppity nigger—in later years, he told people the charge was “the worst call I ever saw in a lifetime of sports.”
Look at the box score from that night. You’ll see that referees had called fourteen personals on Cri
spus Attucks, seven on Evansville. To me it all adds up.
I know Ray sees things differently. Later on, he looked back on the loss and said it was his own fault. “It was my first year of varsity coaching. Here we were, suddenly in the final four with a shot at it all. It was unreal. I didn’t know how to get the team up for such a test. Evansville had scouted us real well, and they picked our little, simple zone defense to tatters. That’s all we had, because that’s all I taught them. If I had gained the experience to vary the defense a little on the week before, we might have won it. It was my fault, but I learned a lot.”
One of the big lessons the loss must have taught Crowe was that incompetent and malicious refs could cost you a close ball game; the alternative was to play over and beyond their calls, to try to keep things from getting so close that the refs could determine the outcome. I say this because it’s one of the things Coach passed down to me. And it would be easy to take this lesson and say, well, lesson learned, all’s well that ends well, and let it go at that. The only problem is that things don’t necessarily end here.
Understand, all this was not happening in a vacuum. No black man suited up for a Big Ten basketball team until 1949. When it finally happened, it was because a white booster and part-time referee named Nate Kaufman was on the board of trustees at Indiana University. Kaufman basically told the university he would withdraw his financial support if the school did not offer a scholarship to a kid named Bill Garrett, a black star from Kaufman’s hometown of Shelbyville. That’s how Garrett got offered a scholarship to the state school supported in part by his parents’ annual tax money. And while Garrett ended up being a star at Indiana, that didn’t mean that blacks were necessarily accepted, or even wanted, at that university. I say this for a reason. If you grow up in Indiana, you live basketball and dream of playing for the Hoosiers. But the coach at Indiana back then, Branch “the Sheriff” McCracken, had his own priorities. He might recruit four or five black kids for a team, but he’d only play one at a time.
McCracken was riding the crest of his second national championship, so he was a winner as a coach, there’s no denying that. And when McCracken passed away in 1970, his funeral was attended by dozens of former players, both white and black, including Walt Bellamy, Bobby “Slick” Leonard, and the Van Arsdale twins. But there’s also no denying some of the bull he pulled, or that the way he coached was part of the reason for the old joke about blacks—Put one in the game when you are at home, two when you are on the road, and all five when you’re down fourteen at the half.
There wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Bailey’s talents and those of Attucks’s star center, Hallie Bryant. And both of them wanted desperately to go to Indiana University and play for the Hoosiers. McCracken signed Bryant. But he did not so much as recruit Bailey. Now, maybe he didn’t have a place for Bailey, maybe he simply had enough guards. Could be. But it’s just as possible that McCracken decided that Hallie Bryant could assimilate better into a predominantly white college than Bailey. His sitting on the bench for the championship game couldn’t have helped things.
I know that Bailey was shut out from both the Indiana all-star team and Indiana University. Instead, he went to Indiana Central College, a small school on Indianapolis’s south side, where he was one of nine black students. By 1957 Bailey would help the Greyhounds vault into the top ten of the small college rankings. He’d consistently rank among the top five in the nation in scoring. I would watch him score forty-five points one night. I know that Butler University consistently refused to play their cross-town rival while Bailey was at Indiana Central.
I also know that Bailey never got a real chance at the pros. Although he was drafted by Syracuse’s NBA franchise, they still had a quota system back then. Instead, Bailey opted first to play with the Harlem Ambassadors, then with the Harlem Globetrotters, touring Europe and South America with Abe Saperstein’s crew. Later he played ball with a Special Services Army unit in Germany, then settled in Cincinnati and worked for the city. My brother died a few years ago, and I know all the trouble I had trying to get him into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, let alone gain any consideration from the National Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. I know that it’s not absurd to look back and wonder if my older brother could have had a career like mine.
I also know that this was nothing exceptional at the time. Ten million other guys were coming up the same way at the same time, having the same shit happen to them.
In the summer of 1953, I was thanking my lucky stars because puberty had kicked in. I’d ended my freshman season of high school standing about five feet eight inches and looking younger than my fourteen years. By the time my sophomore year started and basketball tryouts came around, I had grown almost seven inches after a summer on the farm. I still looked young, but I wasn’t lanky anymore. All that farm work had put some breadth in my chest and some meat on my arms. All summer I’d picked tobacco and put up hay, shucked corn and worked in the gardens. I’d followed that hay wagon and tossed up those bales and gotten myself one brutal workout, one day after another, one bale after another.
When I left Tennessee, went back to the city, and showed up again at the Dust Bowl and the Y, I was almost six feet three—stronger, taller, and faster than guys who used to push me around. Now I was the size of a post player—large enough to play down low, with my back to the basket—with all the coordination and ball-handling skills that had kept me on the courts back when I was physically overmatched. Guys were looking at me like, “What happened? You really grew a lot.”
On the first day of tryouts for the high school team after my freshman year, the players were divided into two groups on the court. The first group was thirty or forty juniors and seniors trying out for the varsity team. The second group had about as many guys, but they were younger, sophomores mostly, plus a few juniors who didn’t have a shot at varsity, but figured they could play on the junior varsity squad. I sat with the other sophomores. After all, Attucks was establishing itself as an emerging athletic power—even without Bailey and Hallie Bryant, the varsity squad had a bunch of returning players, and, forty guys trying out or not, you pretty much knew which guys were going to make the team. Besides, everyone knew varsity Coach Crowe and his cuts. That’s why people called him Razor.
But Bill Mason kept gesturing to me from the varsity group. Bill was a senior, a returning letterman, and a friend of mine from the courts. “Come on over here,” he said, and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.
If I’d opted for junior varsity, it would have probably been my show to run. But who knows? The experience might have hurt me later on, made me less prepared to deal with competition.
I went over to the varsity side of the court.
Coach Crowe hadn’t said a word to me about trying out. That was strange. In fact, I don’t think he’d said a word to me, period. Just the other day I found out that during the tryouts, Coach Crowe told his seniors to work me over and see what I could do. I couldn’t believe it. Crowe later said in interviews that he liked the way I didn’t try to do too much, but just played the game naturally. It wasn’t my basketball ability which impressed him during those tryouts, he would say, but my leadership ability, that it was as if I knew things about the game that the other kids out there would never know enough to even think about. I remember that he put me with a group of second stringers; we were matched in a pickup game against the regulars. But I’d been playing against most of those varsity guys on the playgrounds. This was a competitive situation and I liked to compete. I figured, why not now?
When the Razor made his final cuts that day, I was still on the squad. I walked home in a daze and about burst with pride when I told Bill Swatts, my friend.
Every morning, I’d get up before seven, wash and get dressed, and walk to school. Classes started at eight, and every kid who played on any basketball team, from ninth grade to twelfth, met in Coach Crowe’s homeroom. We talked about our studies, how we were going
to get the night’s work done. I think back then he still thought of me as Li’l Flap, Bailey’s little brother. He wasn’t alone; I was shy enough that I wouldn’t say anything to anybody I did not know.
At the same time, little by little, I was starting to come into my own. Around friends, I could let loose some, talk without questioning myself. In the hallways and at lunchtime, I’d be natural and crack jokes. Honestly—and it may not be fashionable or politically correct to say this—I don’t think I would have done nearly as well or been nearly as comfortable at an integrated school, not when I’d grown up in such a rigidly segregated world, anyway. But the halls and classrooms at Attucks were natural to me; they were like home.
Coach was about average height, a strong-built guy. He used to style his hair in an ordered fashion, kind of a box cut. He always wore pressed suits and bow ties, and basically presented himself as the stern but fair principal type. Every now and then, Coach and his wife would prepare picnics and outings for the program members.
Coach also had an unusual habit. In practice and in games, his cheeks would protrude sometimes, like he was clenching his teeth. Looking back, it’s easy to see that he was controlling his impulses and natural reactions, then thinking through how to address a problem. He had a pair of assistants in my eighth-grade coach, Tom Sleet, and Al Spurlock, an industrial arts teacher who had coached my freshman team and later would coach me in track as well. The two of them used to walk around the edges of the court during practice, acting as second and third pairs of eyes and ears, helping out on drills and fundamentals. In direct contrast to all stereotypes about black players, our team played a disciplined offense, with three or four passes around the perimeter before anyone could shoot.
The Big O Page 4