Everything They Had (25 page)

Over the years people have waited for it to happen again. It is harder now. The world has changed. The state has undergone a major reorganization and consolidation of its school districts (there was fierce opposition to the consolidation, not because it meant lesser education for the young people of Indiana but because it diluted precisely the kind of loyalties and identities that Milan represented). Some of the consolidated schools now have names like Southeast Central. The kids do not know one another as the kids in Milan once did; they are not as likely, in Marvin Wood's phrase, to be like brothers. The game has changed as well. The next year Oscar Robertson took his Attucks team to the championship. His team beat an all-black team from Gary. “Watch our colored boys beat the hell out of those Gary niggers,” went the joke in white Indianapolis. Robertson's team repeated in 1956. Gradually, with the coming of teams like Attucks, the nature of the game had changed. The players were bigger, stronger, and faster, and they played above the rim. In the past, when the Milans of the world had conjured up big city schools, they had thought of schools with larger enrollments but the same kinds of kids. Now they had to envision bigger schools with bigger, stronger players.

It was harder now for the rural game to beat the city game. One moment brings it home: In the 1956 championship game, the second one for Robertson's team, Attucks played Lafayette Jefferson. Lafayette was a very good team of the old order, not unlike Milan; it played intelligent, controlled, careful basketball. Its players were good shooters. They shot their free throws underhand. In the championship game they did everything right. But it made no difference. Attucks was playing in the air. Blacks, according to the myth then, were supposed to come apart under pressure, but Robertson played like a professional—cool, methodical, almost flawless. If he was double-teamed, he always found an open man. If he was played tightly on defense, he deftly faked and drove to the basket. All that raw talent at Attucks had suddenly been disciplined. It was like having an old man in a young body running a team. That night Robertson scored thirty-nine points. The old order had ended.

For Attucks, the hardest thing at first had been getting games. Until 1943, when the black schools were allowed into the Indiana High School Athletic Association, Attucks's teams could play only other black schools and had to go out of state to get enough games. Even when Attucks was finally a member of the association, the big powerhouse schools were wary of playing them, for there was nothing to be gained and a great deal to be lost. So in the beginning only smaller schools anxious to fill their gyms had been willing to schedule them. Nothing had been easy.

If Attucks played on the road, the team had a hard time finding places to eat. Attucks was so poor a school that it did not have a real gym; in desperation, it played most of its home games at Butler Fieldhouse. In those early days, as the team traveled through rural Indiana, the crowds were often hostile. The opposing players themselves were fairly well behaved; an odd kind of basketball etiquette raised sport above native prejudice. If anything, the bias showed more in the referees. It may not have been deliberate, but it was there. Close calls always went the other way, particularly if Attucks was ahead, which it usually was. Coach Ray Crowe told his players that the referees were worth ten points for the other teams, therefore they had to be that much more disciplined and had to work to get a sizable lead. Otherwise, the game would go the other way in the last few minutes. “If you have a big enough lead,” he would tell them, “they'll leave you alone. Otherwise they'll referee the score and you won't win.” He drilled them, as Branch Rickey had drilled Jackie Robinson, to be disciplined, not to respond to provocation, not to hear racial epithets, of which he thought there were surprisingly few. Talent was not a problem. All the Attucks players came from the “Dust Bowl,” the playground nearby, where black kids played day and night, staying on the court only if they won. Years later, Robertson said that playing against white teams had not been particularly hard; what had been
hard
was making the Attucks team. Basketball was already a focal point of black talent, the one thing that all black kids wanted to do, and the competition within the school to make the team was fierce.

In a sense, Robertson thought, he was lucky in the way he grew up. His family was very stable. His father was a butcher. It was a disciplined life. The teachers at Attucks were first-rate. If anything, because there were so few outlets for educated middle-class blacks, they were overqualified. They were strong and sensitive men and women who in many ways could open doors for the children that the parents themselves could not. Crowe was shrewd and strong, Robertson thought. He emphasized to the players that in every game they would be on exhibit. At the same time he kept the dope dealers and the numbers men away from the school; his kids were going to have a chance to go to college if they could possibly make it. Some of them tended to slide away from classes; Crowe would have none of that. He was the homeroom teacher for most of them, and he posted their grades so that everyone could see who was not working. He also allowed Robertson to grow to stardom without feeling too much pressure. Robertson himself was beginning to realize that, in some way he had never understood before, he was special at this sport. He was growing taller, from six two to six four, and he could do things that other players could not. His game was never fancy. In fact, some people complained that it was almost machinelike, as free of mistakes as it was of excess. It was as if Oscar had taken the game and reduced it to its fundamentals. Slowly that came through to the fans.

If any one player changed how basketball was perceived in Indiana, it was Oscar Robertson. Attucks's winning a title might have meant a lot of talented but faceless black kids, but Oscar somehow stood out; he was doing what they had always done and admired, and doing it better. It was not possible to love basketball and not appreciate him. Where there might have been deep resentment, there was finally acceptance and admiration, and there was acceptance because there was not the possibility of denial. The Indiana fans were hip and they could understand, long before he went on to excel in both college and the pros, Oscar's true greatness. When Attucks won their first championship, Robertson thought thirty years later, he had been too young to understand it. He had thought it was a game at first. Later he realized it was a piece of history. He remembered there was to be a parade through the downtown, and that thousands of people—black and white—turned out. The route was prescribed, and the officials had been very careful about seeing that it ended up in the northwest section of Indianapolis for the bonfire there; they did not want blacks getting out of control in other white sections of town.

There was one other upshot of the game. In the past, even though there were certain school-district lines that ran throughout the city, blacks, no matter where they lived, were allowed to go to Attucks. After that championship the various coaches had stopped the blacks in their areas from going to Attucks. Robertson, in more ways than he had realized, had helped integrate Indianapolis.

This season, though, for the first time in years, going into the regional finals there was the chance of another tiny rural school winning the championship. A small consolidated school named L&M, or officially Lyons and Marco, with a total enrollment of 132 students in the top four grades and seventy-two boys, fielded a very good team (not lightly put together, either—a good deal of political engineering went into it). Lyons, which is listed on the road map of Indiana (population: 782), is larger than Marco, which is not listed at all and now has a population of about three hundred.

On this night in December, Bobby Knight is driving down to Elnora to recruit Jeff Oliphant, a top player for the L&M team, which is coached by his father, Tom. Actually, the recruitment is more or less completed. Knight absolutely dominates this territory, and there are very few kids whom he wants who do not want to go to Indiana (he lost a young black center from an Indiana parochial school to Notre Dame a few years ago, in part because, as one friend said later, he failed to understand that in conflicts in modern America between church and state, state does not always win). They are playing at a neutral gym in Elnora, partially to accommodate the overflow crowd and partially because the L&M coach wants to get his team ready for bigger tournament games and hostile crowds; this gym is said to seat 4,200, while the L&M gym seats only 1,250. L&M is playing Terre Haute North, which in the glory days used to be known as Terre Haute Gerstmeyer.

Bobby is here scouting. His team is playing better, he has won a couple of close games, but it has been a hard season. He is exhausted from the Olympic Games, embittered by the recruiting violations he feels exist in the Big Ten, and his team is almost always less athletically skilled than its opponents. We enter at Elnora. He looks around the gym and nudges me. “Harley and Arley are here,” he says. He is exultant. I have not seen him so pleased since he won the battle of restaurant prices several days ago. “Who are Arley and Harley?” I ask. He points to two middle-aged men sitting together on the other side of the court. He is delighted: Indiana basketball history is with us tonight, and he is about to give me a further indoctrination into schoolboy legends. Harley and Arley Andrews are identical twins, and in the early Fifties, rural families being larger than most city ones, they played on the same Gerstmeyer team as their uncle Harold Andrews. The team was known, naturally enough, as “Harley, Arley, and Uncle Harold.” In order to confuse referees further as to which Andrews had committed a foul, Howard Sharpe, their coach, made one wear “43” and the other “34.” People claimed that at half time, Sharpe would have them trade jerseys if one of them was in foul trouble. (Often they'd switch jerseys from game to game to confuse other teams' scouts as well.) If that worked for Sharpe most of the time, it went against him in the championship game in 1953. “They called a foul that Harley committed and marked it against Arley,” says Bobby. “The coach protested, but they wouldn't change it. Arley was their best shooter, and he fouled out in the fourth quarter. Terre Haute lost.” He looks at me with slight condescension because I need a fill-in on something so basic as this. “Everyone in Indiana knows that,” he says. Someone adds that Harley and Arley turned fifty the day before. People in Indiana
know
things like this; they can mark their own ages and their own expanding waistlines by those of the Andrews twins.

The L&M team is deftly put together. Lyons, undergoing something of a revitalization, may now have as many as one thousand people, although it was down to five hundred fifteen years ago. It is hardly an affluent area; there was some marginal coal mining, some small farming, and a little bit of local commerce. Then Dr. Bill Powers, a hometown boy, and a few friends decided to start a clinic. Powers is what is called an activist in big cities, and a doer in small towns. Gradually the clinic has grown, and so has the town: the clinic has three doctors, two dentists, an optometrist, an audiologist, and several other professionals, plus a nursing staff. It serves not just the town but a region with a radius of fifty miles. In a way, its presence is like having a small industry in a town largely neglected by the industrial revolution. Because of the clinic, other stores opened.

Dr. Powers also cares about the identity of Lyons, and about basketball. In a town this size, he says, the priorities are different from those elsewhere. A crisis is someone getting sick with a lingering illness such as lung cancer; it is hard on the community, because everyone here knows everyone else. Powers played at Lyons years ago, and though the teams were all right back then, they were nothing special. Powers was also the family doctor to both the Oliphant and the Patterson families. The Oliphant family is headed by Tom Oliphant, a Lyons boy who ended up coaching at nearby Worthington. Jeff, in the American tradition of coaches' sons, is a very good prospect, albeit most likely for the dread Worthington High. Meanwhile, Tony Patterson, also an excellent prospect, attended L&M. Patterson was as good a player as the town had boasted in years. Mrs. Oliphant, by even greater chance, worked as a receptionist at Powers's clinic. Gradually Powers began to talk up the idea that Tom might want to come over to coach at L&M and bring Jeff with him. Jeff could play for L&M in his junior and senior years. That meant the Oliphant boy could play with the Patterson boy. Jeff knew about Tony Patterson and Patterson knew of Jeff; the idea of playing together was a powerful magnet.

By coincidence, one of the nurses in Powers's clinic was on the Lyons school board and was amenable to a change in coaches; it was not hard to find others who were sympathetic to the idea, including Robert Patterson, Tony's father, who was also on the board. It was well within the established priority of small Indiana towns, where the requirements were first for a good doctor and second (though the order
could
be reversed) for a good high school basketball coach. Soon the deal was done; the old coach was let go, and Tom was hired to replace him. Someone said, however, that the Oliphants were having trouble finding a house in Lyons. “Hell, in that case we'll build them one,” a local banker was reported to have said.

On this night it is like going back in time. Every seat in the Elnora gym is taken. Terre Haute is the much-feared big city to these fans. The crowd is certifiably rural. It is a surprisingly old crowd, not just high school kids. Terre Haute is bigger and faster. There are three black starters, and the center looks a good six feet nine. L&M is much shorter—Oliphant is six six and a half, Patterson six five and a half. But slowly L&M pulls away, more by not making mistakes than by anything else. Bobby is studying Oliphant, who moves nicely around the basket and always seems to be in position.