Before the Spotlight

Forty-seven  years ago 6 foot, 6 inch Drew Rogers was one of the best high school basketball players in St. Louis, MO. He has written a book, "Before the Spotlight," about his basketball coming of age experience in the early 1970’s.  A good writer prods the recesses of the reader's brain’s memory bank. Rogers' prose stimulated my recall of people and events I had not thought of in years. I so thoroughly enjoyed reading his book that I read it twice.

Rogers as a senior, led the 1971-72 Kirkwood Pioneers to a 31-1 record, good for second place in the Missouri Class L state tournament. The down to the wire loss to another undefeated squad,  Raytown South of suburban Kansas City, is widely considered to be one of the top championship games in the historical annals of the state high school Missouri basketball tournament and was the only blemish on Kirkwood's remarkable season. 

I was a freshman in high school at Crystal City, MO, during Rogers’ senior year. I didn’t play on the varsity team but traveled to a lot of the games. We were a pretty good small school team, but, I distinctly remember Kirkwood ran us out of the gym in the finals of the Maplewood Tournament. After high school graduation, Rogers went on to play basketball at the University of Kansas and Meramec Community Conference. After his sophomore college season. he gave up the competive level of the game, trasferring to the University of Missouri to earn his degree. In 1978, he moved to California where he and his family continue to live. 

Nineteen seventy-two was an impressionable year and both Rogers and I were at an impressionable age. Rogers devotes a great deal of his book to the St. Louis racial climate of the the early 1970's. His suburban high school, Kirkwood, was one of the first integrated basketball teams in the St. Louis area. In 1972, the red and white clad Pioneers   started three blacks and two whites - Drew and his best friend Bill Moulder. His description and detailed account of the clashing dynamics of a society in a racial free fall are candid but very accurate and similar to my personal memories of that time. 

Growing up in the 1960s during a time of race riots and social turmoil gave Rogers and his teammates a unique experience that kids today are very unlikely to ever witness. However, the lessons from those days carry over into this century.

We ran to the bus and we got on the bus, and they started rocking the bus (and) throwing rocks," Rogers said. "Our bus driver said, 'I don't want to try to drive through these guys.' So one of our players, who was just this big, strong black guy -- he was wearing a white fur coat that night -- stands up.

"He walks to the front of the bus and sticks his head out the door. And 20 seconds later, the crowd is running away," Rogers recalled. "I don't know what he did -- if he threatened them or if he punched one of them. But we were all on the bus going, 'Holy smokes.'"

When the Kirkwood High School boys' basketball team faced off against St. Louis Northwest in a state quarterfinal game during the 1972 season, the match up featured the two top-ranked teams in Missouri.

Kirkwood, undefeated going into the contest and ranked No. 2 in the state, was a racially-integrated squad that started three black players and two white ones -- a rarity during the time period. Northwest, an all-black team, had lost just once all season and was ranked No. 1 in the state.

Approximately 10,000 fans packed the stands of Kiel Auditorium to watch the highly anticipated matchup that pitted county school against city school. Both teams had Division-I talent as Kirkwood was captained by All-State senior center Drew Rogers, who attended the University of Kansas on a full basketball scholarship after graduating from Kirkwood.

Kirkwood led Northwest for a majority of the game, but with eight seconds remaining, Northwest surged in front. But after Northwest missed a free throw, Rogers grabbed the rebound and passed to Scott Markle, who drained a layup with four seconds left.

Markle's basket proved to be the difference, as the Pioneers held on for a 68-66 win in what has since been dubbed the greatest game in Missouri high school basketball history.

As exciting as the on-court action was, however, racial tension in the stands caused the real fireworks to occur after the game concluded.

"As soon as the gun went off, I'm telling you something, (fans) just poured over the floor," Rogers said. "People were getting jerked out of their seats in the stands, hit over the head with chairs -- it was a full-on riot.

"We were lucky to get back to our locker room," Rogers continued. "We got attacked going up the tunnel. Everybody had stories the next day about how they fought their way out of that place. It was incredible."

Rogers discusses in his book what it was like playing on a racially-diverse basketball team that competed against mostly all-white or all-black squads. That was the case in the '72 state championship game, when Kirkwood lost its first and only game of the season to Kansas City's Raytown South, an all-white team.

Like Kirkwood, Raytown South had to overcome a race riot of its own after the team's state quarterfinal victory over Kansas City Central.

Despite the adversity and animosity the Pioneers faced, not one member of the team -- black or white -- wanted to quit playing, Rogers said.

"(Basketball) was an escape for a lot of people to get away from politics and society and just play a game," Rogers said. "In fact, that's a big theme of the book -- the way the game was sort of a bond but also an escape from a current-day event.

"We had played together up at the (Kirkwood) Community Center for years. We knew each other on a basketball basis, we trusted each other on a basketball basis and we really stuck together on that basis," he added.

Rogers weaves a compelling tale of the beauty of the game at its most basic level. "Basketball was an escape for a lot of people to get away from politics and society and just play a game," Rogers said. "In fact, that's a big theme of the book -- the way the game was sort of a bond but also an escape from a current-day event. We had played together up at the (Kirkwood) Community Center for years. We knew each other on a basketball basis, we trusted each other on a basketball basis and we really stuck together on that basis," he added.

“To me the value and wonder of playing ball was off the big court. It was about playing pick-up ball, playing at the gym and meeting people,” Rogers said. “My team in high school was an integrated team during the time that civil rights movement was just getting started and society was not too sure what to do about that. It was the game that was that thread that kept us together.”

A personal sidelight: Drew’s high school coach, Denver Miller, and my high school coach Arvel Popp, were big buddies. Once, a teammate and I, forged IDs in tow, stopped by the Trophy Inn off Highway 61 in Kimmswick to have a couple of beers. As we walked in, sitting  front and center at the bar was Coach Miller and Coach Popp. Being the bar was poorly lit and the hasty retreat we beat, I thought we had escaped  undetected. The next day Coach Popp called us into his office before practice and said, “I been drinking at the Trophy Inn for 20 years, you boys need to find a different bar.”

Coach Popp won over 700 games in his long career. He gave the same half time speech for every game I ever played for him, “now remember boys we are going the other way this half and let’s get the tip.” He would then leave the locker room to go smoke a cigarette. Several of my teammates would do the same as we waited out the 10 minute half time intermission.

My favorite part of Before the Spotlight entails Rogers' detailed memories  of playing pickup games at the Kirkwood City Rec Center. All social pretenses were dropped. White or black; didn’t matter. What did matter was “The Game” and one’s ability to stand his ground. Many of the players were older, Rogers recalls; 90% were black and the success of a previous night’s high school game held no sway with the street-ballers who claimed squatters’ rights at the dimly lit band box of a gym. It is where Rogers tested his mettle, developed his “game.” The magnificent basketball magician of the 1970's, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, said, “if you want to hang out, you has to have game.” Over time, Rogers  tenacity and grit- not a high school scrapbook full of newspaper clippings - earned him the right to “hang out” at the Center.

Rogers’s poignant and colorful description of the basketball sub culture of the playground  he knew is dead on accurate to my. own memories. We played pickup basketball games every Saturday morning during the season in our high school gym, with a strong representation of area high school players. We would have a school game on Friday night and match up again on Saturday morning. The trash talk from the previous night’s game would carry over. And of course, the disrespecting older players who were not giving up the top of the local hierarchy of hoops to any young punks, the "let's see what you got, boy," trash talkers.

Players from all over the area would come. Sonny Parker, who later played for Golden State would be there along with a lot of area college players. I remember the Williams brothers from Kirkwood, Robert “Rock” and Donny “Duck“ – both who played with Rogers at KHS - were regulars down often. So was Cookie Thornton, notorious today as the mass murderer that shot up Kirkwood city hall a few years ago, but in the 70's, a great athlete and a likeable person.  Cookie always had with him a few of his brothers and cousins. A lot of street guys would drift in, some who never played a minute of organized ball but were great playground players with pedigrees demanding respect. Mark Alcorn from DeSmet High School and later LSU, was another future D 1 player, who would at times bring some good STL players down to our basketball world. 

Come summer, we would move outdoors.  We would gather early evening at “Old Town” Park, playing until it got dark and then move to Crystal Park, in the nicer part of town. Under the lights, we would run off the younger kids and resume “The Game.” We had none of today's options, no organized adult supervision, no AAU select teams backed by shoe company blood money, no Summer Camps; only  the outdoor blacktop and bent rims. We made our own rules. Due to the over-structure laid out by adults, today's players have been robbed of a truly special part of the basketball experience, the non-pretentious of "whose got next." 

"As 18-year-old kids, we didn't look at it as though we were doing anything for society or anything like that. We were just trying to play a game," Rogers said. "And I say in my book, when you go play a game and you kick away the gravel and you bounce the ball over the other guy, nothing else matters -- social status, money -- it's just you and me and a ball, and that's a level playing field. That's the way people can connect, and I think that's continued in many ways. It's been a connecting force for racial differences and economic differences for decades."

Before the Spotlight details the 60 year old Rogers’ lifelong love affair with basketball. Not only the contests played “under the spotlight" by his nearly unbeatable high school juggernaut, but, also, the beauty of "the game" Rogers learned “before the spotlight.”

Oblivious and detached from the glory heaped upon him as a 18 year old high school star, the tale Rogers weaves so well is how the 1972 Kirkwood Pioneers used a common love for "The Game" to come together as a cohesive unit; overcoming their varied and many backgrounds. It is a compelling story. It is the pure sport basketball at its grassroots best.

Rogers rhetorically asks, “What is stronger than racism, as enduring as life, addictive enough to grind one’s knees to sawdust and pervasive enough to haunt a middle aged man’s dreams?” His answer is, of course; “The Game.”

Second Chance

Last summer I wrote about Niko Vasquez on my blog. A former can’t miss project of the St. Louis Cardinals, we crossed paths as I was covering the lowest of the low of pro baseball, the Independent Frontier League.

 

Vasquez hit the longest home run I have ever seen. I can’t estimate its landing distance as it was still rising when it cleared the 375 foot left center field sign and disappeared into the night. I asked him, “what in the hell are you doing in this bush league?”

 

As most who can’t miss but somehow do his road to obscurity has not been a smooth one. He claimed last summer to still possess the tools of a major league infielder. “I have it in me just as I did when I was 18. I just need a second chance.” He now has it. He has signed with the Cincinnati Reds and will report next week to spring training with their minor league affiliate Dayton. Vasquez will turn 27 years of age later this month. 2016 will be his 9th season to labor in the minor leagues.

 

 

After Southern Illinois sets down the Rascals in the bottom of the 9^th inning the quiet but well liked Vasquez is congratulated by his teammates; the hero who has dramatically averted a three game sweep by the hated Rascals. The award for his heroics - a quick shower in the cramped visitor’s cinder block clubhouse, an even quicker midnight meal at a lonely 24 hour Denny’s followed by a 429 mile all night bus ride to Avon, OH. The next evening, the Miners will begin a three game weekend series with the Lake Erie Crushers. Memories of a clutch double, Vasquez tells me, helps for the development of a tolerance, if not a taste, for the Denny’s menu.

 

After 8 years in the bush leagues of pro ball, Vasquez has passed to the far side of innocence. Is it worth it? For the moment, Vasquez nods yes. While most 26 year olds will be tomorrow morning hitting the 6 am snooze button, after an evening dominated by mundane adult “stuff,” Vasquez will be bus bouncing along Lake Erie dreaming of a two strike, two out, ninth inning fortuitous hanging slider. He may not have a college education - sacrificed for now for the dream - but Vasquez knows, as only few do, the batsman’s magical sensation of electric impulses shooting through the forearms as the wrists turnover after solid contact; followed by the sweet cracking sound of wood on horsehide. For a true hitter, it is a sound and sensation to live for. Niko Vasquez, once pegged as a first round major league draft choice, for at least a few more weeks, is a professional baseball player with a flickering dream on life support. For now, that is enough.