Homesteading

Learn about quantum computing, superintelligence and singularity, we are told. The inevitable is coming. AI has potential to do bad things. But I am too old to worry. I still have Highway 83. Last week Shawna and I spent several days letting High Plains history swallow us.

Once in our nation’s past, western bound wagon trains passed by necessity through the High Plains on their way to a better life somewhere else: on the trail to Oregon, to the gold fields of Nevada, or later, with the 1930s Dust Bowl era Okie migration by jalopy to the land of milk and honey - the promised land of California.

But by the late 19th century, for increasing numbers, the High Plains had become a destination, not just a passage point on the nation’s journey west. The prospect of free land, through the Homestead Act of 1862, had a mass appeal to the many displaced by an American Civil War or the repressive and discriminating governments of Europe.

For the newcomers, the living conditions were primitive, many domiciles nothing more than a hovel of overturned sod. But still they came. Incredibly, for many of the settlers, it was an improvement over the economic conditions of Europe or the post-civil war American South they were escaping.

Once the move was made, a stoic resolve was required. Most had nowhere to go back to, all of their meager resources having been exhausted in the move, their future now startlingly consisting of two options: survive or parish. These 19th century Homesteaders lived in dirt houses ripe with vermin, but it was the dirt of land they now owned. Property ownership was a luxury most of the new arrivals had never known.

Now, their sacrifice and labor could create a legacy to pass down to their children, a birthright that promised a better day. It is what drove them to share their home with snakes, insects and whatever other creepy insects nested in the walls and the roofs of their sod shanty’s.

The ultimate freedom is owning nothing that owns you.

Winner, South Dakota

Driving US Highway 83 from the Canadian border to the Mexican border is as unvaried as an east-west  I-70 drive across Kansas – only north and south and four times as long. I have been on this pilgrimage since 2011. 

Like my love of faded old polaroids, if I try to rationalize it, the magic disappears. So, I do not - I just accept that is how I am. I made sure Shawna knew of my Highway 83 problem before she agreed to marry me.

Every town has a story. We have found  the best are the ones we stumble onto by chance. The nuggets buried in the landscape for people to access unexpectedly are limitless. Just drive, slowly. 

Today we eat our home made  chicken salad lunch at the Winner, South Dakota City Park. The city population is 1230 and you better top off your gas tank before you leave town. An hour ago, Shawna’s sharp eye caught a weather worn sign on the town’s main street announcing arguably the best college football coach ever,  Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy, grew up here. 

How did the Nick Sabin off the last century get from here to there? Back then, if a young man from a devout Catholic family did not enter the priesthood, the next highest calling was to study at South Bend Indiana’s Notre Dame University. 

Frank Leahy graduated from Winner High School in 1925 where he was a football standout. For the ND Irish he played football as a tackle on Knute Rockne's last three teams (1928–1930) and was part of the 1929 and 1930 National champion teams. Leahy graduated from the university in 1931. 

Leahy returned to Notre Dame to coach four undefeated national championship teams, with an unbeaten string of 39 games (37–0–2) in the late 1940s. 

His journey from the isolation of the High Plains to football sainthood is a compelling portrayal unique to America. The greatest thing you can do in life is to tell a young boy or girl that no matter where they start, they're 'the very best' at something - sports,  art, music - something to build confidence. And the greatest college football coach ever can come from Winner, SD. 

The clerk at the Super Foods grocery on Main Street gave me a simple shoulder shrug when i asked her about Leahy. The one sign on Main Street was the only local acknowledgment we saw claiming this home town Son who made it big. High Plains towns,  I have learned, are next year towns, humble about past achievements. Fortunately, if you poke around enough you will see cool things in humble places. 

All up and down Highway 83 the sense of community is palpable — neighbors helping neighbors, families bound together by like challenges and a common respect for the land they inhabit. That is why we keep coming back. 

Time now to head home.

RANDY CAYCE

It was our pleasure this afternoon in Denver, CO to have lunch with a Crystal City legend; 1966 Hornet grad Randy Cayce and his wife Deborah.

In 1965 Mr. Cayce was in my eight-year-old world a Friday Night end zone fixture, a high school football hero in a football crazy town. Time moves in one direction, memories in another. To meet him today, 60 years hence, was both surreal and an honor. 

He came of age at a tumultuous time when a young black man believing in a cause, stood for that cause with a million people or maybe by himself. But he stood. A living history lesson, he and his wife were compelling lunch time companions. 

For Randy Cayce life after football became a second peak, not a decline. Following a five-year professional NFL career as a running back with the Denver Broncos and Buffalo Bills, he leveraged his on‑field skills through networking into 38-year tenure with the Denver Fire Department. 

He also for 40 years ran a successful carpet installation business. His fire department job entailed nine monthly 24-hour shifts. He spent his off days laying carpet. While others were sleeping, he was grinding. He and his wife raised four children, all today successful adults - one a Georgetown University Law School grad and a current Colorado state court judge. 

Who would not want to lay claim to such an accomplished man as one of us? Once a Hornet, always a Hornet, right?  But tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure. It takes a concerted effort to document our heritage - all that makes us who we are.

Jawman

Once every comet or so a larger-than-life figure with a somehow even larger persona will fall amongst us mere mortals.

Long before a guy from Carolina named Michael ever dreamt of taking flight, Elroy (Jawman) Becquette was regularly denying Newtonian physics. Renowned for his leaping abilities, in the mid to late 1970s he ruled the area’s outdoor basketball courts. And he did it with style.

Becquette passed away on May 7, 2013 in Pevely, MO at the age of 55.

Elroy never played one minute of varsity basketball for Crystal City, MO High School. That is a story within itself. He and I were both members of the school’s Class of 1975. He had Moxy. In PE class Jawman would call out ‘Layup’ when he pulled up for a jumper from the top of the key. If it was the potential winning shot in a game of two goal elimination, when the ball left his hands, he announced, “NEXT.”

He never graduated from high school. He was not even close.

The residential area of Crystal City that grew in the shadows of the factory smokestacks of the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company was collectively known as Old Town. Originally home to late 19^th century factory working Italian immigrants, by the 1970’s Old Town had transitioned to the de facto home of the town’s black population.

Remarkably, in the mid-to late 1970s a non-descript ramshackle playground on the south edge of Old Town hosted some of the best summer pickup basketball in the St. Louis Metro area. I don’t remember the court even having an official name. Years later it was named by the City Council Daryl Hickey White Park. That was about the only contribution the city made to its upkeep. We provided the nets.

Talent from a wide-ranging radius would descend nightly to the uneven asphalt surface featuring two bent rims. The pickup summer games were open to everyone: black or white; locals or outsiders; high school stars or high school dropouts. Many established college players would wait their turn. Even a few future NBAers, Sonny Parker for one. There could be hours of long wait if your team lost.

I recently visited the now deserted site. What makes today the empty overgrown lot so surreal to me  is in my mind a juxtaposition of past grandeur and current silence.

The local legend of Jawman Becquette is today almost mythical, even amongst those too young to have witnessed his hoops exploits in person. Ask any local who is the best street baller ever from the area and the answer is immediate and unanimous – Jawman. He was our version of the “High Priest of Hop.”

Most of Becquette’s Old Town playground feats went unchronicled, but have lived on through word of mouth, the lore sometimes perhaps flavored with embellishment. Rumored brilliance occurs when you have a stylist—with a nickname like Jawman - whose game may be more suited for playground freelance than a coach’s chalkboard. 

In organized high school, college or professional basketball, success is measured by long term team accomplishments, like a state championship. But on the playground legend is measured by a move or moment, a play that grabs the spotlight for an instant.  

Jawman’s signature move was the dunk. On a Sunday afternoon in Old Town I passed the ball to him on the wing on a fastbreak, and he threw down the nastiest dunk I’ve ever seen. He went up and with two hands, tapped the ball on the backboard, then slammed it home backwards. Play stopped. Collective silent astoundment.

Jawman’s game was multi-dimensional. He was not only a prolific scorer and dunk artist, but also a great passer. His peripheral vision was freaky good. Once we were playing indoors at the old Douglass High gym in Festus, MO.  Jaw Man was dribbling in the right corner, and two opponents double teamed him. Elroy passed to me, and I hit a wide-open layup.  And as the ball goes through the net, I glance over my shoulder at the corner the pass just came from and the defenders think Elroy still has the ball -  arms waiving, still trapping him. His open court game was a clinic on cross-over dribbles and sleight-of-hand passes.

At the time, Crystal City was hemorrhaging well-paying union factory jobs. A decade later, in 1988, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, the town’s meal ticket for over 100 years, closed. But this proud union factory town still had its Hornets. High school sports in my hometown were a big deal. I have never felt more noticed than I did playing high school sports. But the best act of the era will remain forever Off Broadway, his stage a trash littered neglected park.

School books were never his thing. Pretty girls, playing ball and wide brimmed hats were. Jawman also liked to smoke weed. But back in the 70s, who of us didn’t? It was always 4:20 somewhere.

Between 1975 and 1978 there were some brushes with the law. One was serious and it stuck. With no high school diploma, Elroy’s options were limited. Even the military was out of bounds. He was drifting. But the seeds of change are planted in the soil of desire, and Elroy Becquette’s desire was to play college basketball. So, he changed.

In the summer of 1978 Becquette was competing in an outdoor area summer league. Greg Lett had just completed an All-American career at Mineral Area Community College (MAC) in nearby Park Hills, MO and was headed to play that fall on the NCAA Division 1 level. When the two met that summer, Jawman hung 52 points on Lett’s team. Lett’s coach at MAC, Bob Seacrest, saw a diamond in a rough. He took a chance. Now 21 years of age and with a recently earned high school GED, Becquette was given a scholarship and that fall began a successful two-year run with the JUCO team.

Elroy Becquette was born to play basketball. Says longtime friend, summer teammate and fellow MAC alum, Tony Lawrence, “all that man ever wanted to do was be on the court. He was a viciously intense competitor.”

Lawrence, retired from a long career in law enforcement, says the 6’2 Jawman was a thin and athletic wing who possessed big time skills. In the pre-three point shot days of the early 80s, when a mid-range game was a necessity in any scorers’ arsenal, Jawman’s was lethal.  “He was virtually ungradable one-on-one,” says Lawrence. “His game was 12 to 15 feet.” When Becquette passed to a teammate you would pass it right back because Jawman’s J was better.

“He commanded respect,” says Lawrence. “He was older but he had that special way about him that drew teammates to him. I still consider him a role model. He never allowed me to make excuses. ‘Just do more,’ he would say. A lot guys with talent get by on just talent. What set Jawman apart was he was a student of the game. Coach Sechrist at MAC told me he was one of his all-time favorite players, and the man coached there over 30 years. He had tried to get him to come back as a coach. With his charisma and personality, he would have been a natural fit. But, I guess, it just never worked out.”

Lawrence today sees the paradox he couldn’t see 40 years ago. “Jawman was as independent as they come, and I respected that. He was his own man; he didn’t follow the crowd. But he was also a great teammate. He did his thing, but the team with him came first. Even on the playground, where most guys are more concerned with style, Jawman played to win. What a great lesson to teach young people. Don’t follow the crowd, lead the crowd. If you didn’t like Jawman, that was your problem.”

The talent flow from Crystal City in the summer of 1980 was off the charts. “That summer,” Lawrence recalls, “Coach (Rolla) Herbert ran a college summer league indoors at Crystal City High School (where he was the head coach). All the best college players from St. Louis to the bootheel were there and our Crystal City team dominated. I was playing at St. Louis University; Alan DeGeare and Tony Kinder were at UMSL (University of Missouri-St. Louis) and Maurice Mosby and Jawman were going down to Central Arkansas.  It was a great core, but we all knew Jawman was the star.”

After completing his career at MAC, Becquette followed up with two years playing for Central Arkansas University. On the team roster the previous season at the NCAA Division1 school was future Chicago Bulls superstar and Michael Jordan wing mate, Scotty Pipen.  Jawman was a two-year starter and a solid contributor. His senior year he averaged five offensive rebounds per game, one of the top marks in the nation.

But, at 25 years of age, Jawman’s organized competitive basketball career was now over. For the next twenty years he was a respected OG regular in pickup games at Old Town’s now designated Hickey White Park.

Tee Marshall is the second oldest of Elroy’s nine kids. “My mom, Kim Marshal and my dad  never had a relationship as a couple that I can ever remember,” Marshall recalls. “But what they did do is they got along very well and always made me the number one priority. I knew they were friends. I was very fortunate in that sense.”

Her immediate family may not have been the Walton’s, but Marshall says she never experienced anything growing up but parental love and support. “Dad always said (his love life) was complicated,” Marshall said with a laugh.

Marshall stays connected to her eight half siblings spread over four states.  “My daddy had a way with the ladies,” she says. But she is adamant that Elroy Bequette was no Rolling Stone. “No, no, no. Being a father and a grandfather is what he lived for. I could not have asked for better parents. He had a magic touch with kids. His oldest daughter Amy is two years older than I am and we are close. His personality was to pull people together.”

As Simba once told us: It's the circle of life. If you hang around long enough in a small town you see how things come full circle. “My son, Donnivan Tullock was a senior in 2021,” Marshall says. “Crystal City hired Phil Tessereau to come back and coach. Phil and my dad grew up together. Dad even played on Phil’s dad’s (Bob) Little League baseball team that he coached. His dad later helped my dad when he was trying to get into college. Forty years later, his son was able to coach my son, and it was wonderful. We won the district championship. I would have given anything if daddy could have been there to see it. He would have been so proud.”

Back in the 70’s we knew him as Alroy. His dad was Alroy Becquette, SR. In both of his online college bios he is listed as Alroy. I ask Marshall when and why did her dad change his name to Elroy?” I have no idea,” she shrugged. “He has always been Elroy to me.”  And, the origins of the nickname Jawman? Simple, that was his dad’s nickname. Many local old-timers still refer to Big Jawman and Little Jawman. Why was Senior nicknamed Jawman? Once again, no one still around seems to know.

Marshall shares that her dad was sick for a long time but hid it well. “He had liver problems going back into his 20s. Eventually it turned into cancer. He was the kind of guy that never wanted anybody to fuss over him, so until he started losing weight, we didn’t realize how sick he was. The man still played basketball at Hickey White Park on a regular basis until he was almost 50 years old. One of my fondest memories was taking my young son to watch his grandfather play.”

Still, Marshall says that her dad’s death was a shock. “We went to check on him one morning and he was just gone. Maybe I was in denial, he was so physical, so strong and always in control; he was my hero and your hero is never supposed to die. His funeral was standing room only, which I would’ve expected. Everybody loved my dad. When he was buried, he was buried in purple and gold, which were his fraternity colors from Central Arkansas University. I think he was so proud of the fraternity because it represented that he had overcome so much - that now he belonged. There was a time in his life, he could have fallen on the wrong side, but he willed himself, because he loved basketball, to get his high school GED and to successfully go to college. To straighten out his behavior and his life.”

How do you honor and say goodbye to a man who never met a stranger? I asked Marshall what she remembered about her dad’s visitation. To paraphrase: It was poignant. Nostalgic. Amusing. And though understandably twinged with momentary sadness, entertaining. Just the type of farewell Jawman would have wanted.

“He was the kind of person that loved to see people succeed,” Marshall says. “And his reputation, even when he got too old and too sick to play was still one of immense respect within the basketball community. People were just attracted to him. He was a natural mentor. I’ve spoken with numerous young men over the years that say he inspired them to not only exceed in basketball but also at fife. That is my daddy’s legacy.”

“He had a great life in ways some might not get,” Marshall shares. “He was so upbeat, he had that smile and you never got away from him without a hug. To the end, he said he liked waking up each new day. I think he expected some type of miracle that never came. And darn, he had some stories.”

Charles Barkley said just because I can dunk a basketball does not mean I should raise your kids. However, our culture has given the athlete a huge leadership position — an opportunity to be a role model. Jawman became a role model, and over time, an impacting one. He chose the mantle of leadership that had been offered to him.

Dewhitt Bingham is a Probation Officer-Retired at McLean County, IL Court Services. He was also a long-time college professor of criminal justice. He grew up in Crystal City and graduated from Festus High School. Bingham is five years Elroy’s junior.

“Jawman was one of the nicest men you would ever meet,” says Bingham from his Bloomington, Illinois home.

As a professional probation officer, a big part of Bingham’s job was to rehabilitate wayward youth. He appreciates and recognizes, Barkley’s thoughts notwithstanding,  small-town athletes as role models.

“I like stories about young people who fight adversity, often because of poor (youthful) decisions, and then make something out of themselves,” says Bingham. “That was Jawman. He showed great perseverance by not giving up. He was a non-traditional student. He was 21 when he started college." He was a role model for kids who were not on the right path.

Bingham appreciates Elroy Bequette’s bloodline. “His mom Shirley was a Kinder. She was  the sister of Mr. John Wayne Kinder who was an outstanding athlete for Herculaneum and Mr. Donald Gene Kinder who was the father of Tony Kinder who was on the 1979 31-1 CCHS basketball team. 

"Elroy was just a really close friend of my family who literally would do anything within his power to help us.”

Bingham points out Becquette has not played ball for years and he passed from this earth over a decade ago, but his reputation just keeps growing and growing. “That says a lot about him. I just loved the man.”

No blood, no foul - a game was played to 12 by ones. The winner stayed, losers took a seat. Playground basketball was the distinctive sound of slip-slide worn canvas sneakers on asphalt. The sound matched the weather—hot, humid, relentless. Basketball’s creative origins go back to the outdoor playgrounds- hot asphalt in community parks where legends were created. 

By contrast the indoor winter game has a more YMCA feel - the sound of squeak when Nike’s meet wood - more organized, less frenetic, less intense.

Just as countries have their social and political systems, so too did 1970s outdoor summer basketball. It was the unwritten rules of a sport where you call your own fouls that mattered. And it holds true whether the game was one-on-one, three-on-three, or five-on-five. It was as equal opportunity and as democratic as a game of H-O-R-S-E. At its zenith, summer playground basketball was more than a simple game; it was an art form with its own language.

With the onslaught of organized AAU options, summer basketball in Crystal City - like the rest of the country - has moved steadily indoors. So, retire the crown. There will never be another local playground G.O.A.T. like Elroy “Jawman” Becquette.

Maurice Mosby has spent most of his adult life chasing a bouncing basketball throughout South America. Inquisitive by nature, an athlete by instinct, an expatriate by choice.  

Mosby was a 1979 graduate of Crystal City High School and a dominant 6’8 post player on a team that finished his senior season at 31-1. He spent his collegiate freshman and sophomore years at Mineral Area Community College in Park Hills, MO, and then transferred to the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), in Conway, AR.

For three years, he and Jawman were inseparable teammates - two years at MAC and one year at UCA.  While Becquette stayed for a final year in Arkansas, Mosby finished his collegiate career at Missouri Baptist University in St. Louis, MO.

Mosby played professionally for eight years in Argentina, reportedly making “a boatload of money.”  He has been teaching Physical Education in an international school in Paraguay now for over 30 years. The school caters to wealthy students from all over the globe. He has been married for 38 years to a local woman.

I asked Mosby if Becquette as a court mentor, challenged him to improve? His response was as rhetorical as ‘does the musher suddenly pull the sled and let the husky ride?’ Like the forward scout for the wagon train, Mosby says Bequette was out front, willing to fall off a cliff so the rest would know when to turn back. Mosby calls Becquette a standup guy.  “We knew the coaches respected him, so he was the one who was the spokesman from the team to (the) coach."

At 6’1” Mosby was a gangly lowly thought of high school junior who seldom played. Over a six month span he shot up 7 inches to 6’8. That is when Becquette stepped in.

“Jawman took me under his wing between my junior and senior year of high school,” Mosby relates in an interview from his South American home. “Because I grew so fast, I was pretty clumsy. Jawman was 20 years old at the time and was just kind of hanging around Crystal City, but everyone respected him as a player. It was his life. We went to the park every day. He drilled and drilled me, made me work as hard at my game as he did his. He taught me basketball. He pushed me hard.”

The two became inseparable. “We played together so long we just knew each other‘s moves. It was instinctive. We had two very good teams at MAC. Believe it or not when UCA recruited me they didn’t want to take Jawman. I said you guys are nuts. He don’t go I don’t go. He was like my brother, and we were going together or we’re not going. They gave Jawman a scholarship. He played there for two years and led the team in scoring both years. I led the team in rebounding the year I played. They got a pretty good two for one deal, I would say,” Mosby shares with a laugh.

“When I first got to Central Arkansas,” Mosby continues, “I partied too much and they were going to put me on academic probation after the first semester. I don’t know if the coach put him up to him or not, but Jawman was all over me about my grades. He made me go to study hall and my grades second semester went from a 1.8 to almost a 4.0. Whoever thought Jawman would be such a great academic advisor, a guy who had to get his GED coming out of high school?  But by this time he was mature and he had goals and he wasn’t going to let me fail. I can honestly say, he made me the man I became. I can never pay him back for all he did for me. I think about him everyday.”

The 64-year-old Mosby speaks of his basketball life with pride and of his future with confidence.  “I wish I could get back home more, but its hard. I don’t see myself ever leaving here. My wife and I have no kids together. I do have a couple of kids back in the States; one in Farmington and one in Festus from a relationship I had when I was young. I do get back to see them periodically, but my life is here.”

Mosby says Elroy Becquette taught him more than basketball. “I looked up to him. Heck, we all did.” Mosby says his teammate modeled purpose, resilience and lasting strength. “I don’t know where I would be today if it hadn’t been for Jawman.”.

It has been said one should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. According to his daughter Tee Marshall, that is what her dad did. “He found this little out of the way one bedroom bachelor pad apartment in Pevely. He lived there by himself. It was tucked so far back if you didn’t have good directions, you would not find it. It was all he needed and I think he knew it was his last stop. He decorated it himself and I was impressed,” she says with a laugh. It was a perfect fit for how he lived his life: functional, low maintenance, warm, welcoming and comfortable. “I know he died at peace with his life,” his beloved daughter concluded.

When you look at it, life often has a mysterious way of unfurling. What if he had not had that 52 point summer league game?

He didn’t walk through life just playing basketball. Vertical leap will fade. Character will not. In his 55 years Jawman made a difference - put a dent in his little part of the universe. That's the ultimate goal. That is what goes on your tombstone.

Elroy Becquette’s early years were marked by self-imposed roadblocks. But as he grew out of his feisty youthful rebellion and his infectious personality slowly nudged him to within the parameters of accepted social norms, the once high-flying baller transitioned into the OG of the local hardwoods, a respected legend.

In the humbling way that impending mortality brings to us all, at the end, I have no doubt Jawman quietly embraced all the fuss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The 48 State Club

When we married over nine years ago, we committed to explore some side roads in life while still in good health and good spirits.

Our goal was to spend at least one night together within every state's boarder and while there, to have fun, at least once. Boarding now at Philadelphia International a homebound flight, Pennsylvania successfully checked off as the last of the lower 48. Mission accomplished.

When locked in on the incessant 24-hour news cycle, one would think our country is in terrible trouble. On our travels, we did not get that impression. It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people out there besides politicians, celebrities and criminals. We cut trail with many - a multitude of simple people doing good for their neighbors with no expectation of reward or recognition. I like uncovering their stories. I have enough inspiring material for three future books.

Our plan is to now circle back and revisit our favorites, digging deeper; seeking always fun in unforeseen e
ncounters, unexpected sights and future passing fancies.

The Game of Change

“From our side of things, the college basketball standpoint, this game is equivalent to the march on Washington, or to Little Rock. How powerful is that?”

Shaka Smart

This is a nice little story about defying  tyranny, of good triumphing over the iniquity of evil; with a small slice of pathos to arouse one’s sense of fair play, served up by the most unlikely of heroes – a segregation busting tobacco chewing self-professed Mississippi Redneck with the apt nickname of Old Magnolia Mouth.

Finally, the Game

The world of modern major college athletics, especially the cash cows of every major collegiate athletic department - football and men’s basketball – are today all about big business and big money. To deny so is just refusing to face reality. The term student-athlete on most NCAA Division 1 campuses is an oxymoron.

However, even against such a callous backdrop of cynicism, through the NCAA’s thick layer of cash, will ever so often pop through a reminder of how powerful for the good of humanity athletics can be, defying cultural gridlock by unifying diverse groups on the level playing fields of athletic competition.

Before Madness took control of March, the NCAA basketball tournament was just a nice cozy little post season get together to honor teams who had completed good conference seasons. No national TV, no insane fanatic adulation by the masses, no million dollar payouts to universities and coaches, no coach losing his job for failure to garner an invitation to “the big dance;” just a nice little tournament. Back in 1963 the National Invitational Tournament held at Madison Square Garden - today reserved for those losers not invited to the NCAA post season party – was held by many in higher esteem than the NCAA’s event.

Close from tip to buzzer

Mississippi State’s University’s outstanding men’s basketball teams of 1959, 1961 and 1962, nationally ranked and Southeast Conference Champions of each year, victorious over the legendary Adolph Rupp coached Kentucky Wildcats, had turned down invitations to the NCAA tournament and thus the chance to compete for a national title, giving the NCAA selection committee a blow off that seems hard to believe by today’s standards. The reason: the state of Mississippi, at that time, did not allow its student athletes to participate against racially integrated teams. The segregationist state leaders considered allowing whites and blacks to compete against each other in a basketball contest morally corrupt.

Rupp, ironically a known segregationist himself, had with the blessing of the state of Kentucky, no problem waltzing his second place team in through the back door and into the NCAA dance as the Southeast Conference representative - a replacement on the bracket for the balking Mississippi State Bulldogs.

In the Deep South of the early 1960’s, the gauntlet of racism had been dropped and the line of discrimination clearly drawn; segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. To take a stance less conservative was viewed as political suicide for a southern politician. Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, an avowed segregationist, was too astute of a politician not to hang his hat with the popular racist views of the time. It would be 1967 before the Southeast Conference had it first black basketball player and 1968 before any league school gave a football scholarship to a black athlete.

 Kentucky's Adolph Rupp

However, by 1963, even in the most entrenched bastion of segregation – Mississippi - the winds of racial inclusion were beginning to blow. They would soon reach full mast. The previous fall, in 1962, black student James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, albeit with the help of the US Army and the state national guard, integrating Mississippi’s flag ship and previously all white university, located in Oxford, 90 miles south of the Mississippi State campus in Starkville. Less than a month after the completion of the 1963 NCAA basketball national tournament, Martin Luther King Jr. would write his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," an essay that became an anthem for the civil rights movement.

Then along came Babe “Old Magnolia Mouth” McCarthy to set the athletic world of Jim Crow segregation on its ear.

Babe McCarthy, with his so-called "honey-dew Mississippi drawl,” had carved out a niche for his basketball Mississippi State Bulldogs in a state that had previously given faint notice to the sport, relegating round ball to a mere winter diversion in the eyes of the state’s fanatical football fans. Three times previous, in four years, Babe and his team had been left on the sidelines seething when denied their due by the segregation laws of the state, forced to watch his personal nemesis, Adolph Rupp and his runner up Wildcats seize the playoff spot his Bulldogs had rightly won on the court. McCarthy vowed to his team it would not happen again in 1963. “Win your way onto to the bracket again and this time I will take care of getting you there,” was his pre-season promise to his tall and talented cagers.

Race mixing 

McCarthy had always been the happy go lucky type, the guy who could come into a small southern farm town as a stranger and within weeks have a seat of honor around the wood stove down at the local feed store. Born in 1923, raised in the depths of
the Great Depression in one of the poorest states’ in the Union, Babe had the gift of gab, dripping with rural Mississippi charm. But, dismissing him as just another good ole boy looking for an easy job in the shade would be a gross under calculation of the slick McCarthy’s grit and ambition. 

A right out of college job as an oil salesman didn’t turn out to be McCarty’s appropriate life’s calling. All his life, Babe never was one to have much luck with money. He had little time for such picayune concerns. He was the kind of guy that could go into Fort Knox with a grain scoop and a gunnysack and come out with his wallet missing.

But Ole Babe did turn out to be a fine basketball coach for the town of Tupelo, MS, about the time another young local boy with long sideburns and gyrating hips, singing about a hound dog, was just starting to make a name for himself playing that fancy guitar of his down at the skating rink on Saturday nights. Yes, Babe was a fine coach in Tupelo --for the junior high team.

 1963 National Champs

A graduate of Baldwyn, Mississippi High School, class of 1940, Babe spent three years as a student at Mississippi State University. Upon early graduation in 1943, McCarthy volunteered for the Army and service in World War II as a transport pilot. He returned to Baldwyn following the war’s 1945 conclusion to coach the local high school basketball team from 1946 to 1950, his team winning the state championship in 1948.   

McCarthy cut his coaching teeth as a young 20 something gung-ho pied piper for his hometown high school. He preached effort, team work and accountability. No excuses. The play of his Bearcats became for McCarthy a reflection upon his performance as a coach. It may be an imperfect world, he told his boys, but within the confines of the Baldwyn gymnasium, Babe would accept nothing short of perfection.

In 1951, during the hot days of the escalating Korean War, Babe joined the newly established military branch of the Air Force. Over a three year hitch, Babe coached a Memphis Air Force basketball team to third place in the worldwide Air Force tournament. From 1953-1955, returning to civilian life, Babe bade his time as coach of the Junior High team in Tupelo.

It seemed a long shot in 1955, when at age 31, a man who had never played college basketball and whose last coaching experience had been at the junior high level, applied for the head basketball coaching position at Mississippi State University. But that didn’t deter the confident McCarthy. Still, Babe’s ebullience and self-salesmanship, aside, it was a surprise when the Bulldogs’ Athletic Director Dudy Noble hired Babe, claiming later that he admired and was sold by the fast talking McCarthy’s boldness. Babe had told Noble at that 1955 interview, “if I don’t win big within three years, you don’t have to fire me, I will quit.” Noble told several in the athletic department that the new hoops coach he had just hired, “sure does have a mouth on him.”

The walls tumble

But, with the squalid condition of the basketball program at a college with an already inferiority complex over Ole Miss, the state’s rich man’s University over in Oxford, hiring such an unlikely candidate really wasn’t that far-fetched. Applicants were not lining up three deep in 1955 to be the basketball coach at Mississippi State. When Noble’s judgment was challenged on why he hired a coach with such limited on court coaching experience, the AD replied: “The team is playing like junior high players; I thought they needed a junior high coach.”

Babe hit the ground running, holding true to his promise to quickly build a winner in Starkville. His teams showed steady improvement. A 12-12 record in Babe’s rookie season of 1956 was a harbinger of good times to come.

 More than a game

McCarthy’s Bulldogs followed the promising start with marks of 17-8 in 1957 and 20-5 in 1958. MSU moved from a sixth place SEC finish in 1956 to 3^rd in both 1957 and 1958. He had the Bulldogs poised perfectly for a big year in 1959 and pounce they did. Lead by future Boston Celtics star Bailey Howell, the Bulldogs rolled to  a 24-1 record, a top five national ranking and the securing of an undisputed Southeastern Conference Championship, rarefied company for such a previously unheralded program. 

Before sending his team onto the floor for the decisive 1959 conference showdown with the arrogant Kentucky five, Babe told his confident team, "Now, let's cloud up and rain all over 'em." The college basketball world was in awe of how quickly “Old Magnolia Mouth” had delivered on his seemingly outlandish promises of four years before. After his team’s impressive 65-58 defeat of Kentucky, clinching for MSU the SEC championship, Babe boasted to the national press, “We can beat anybody in the country on our home court.”

The crusty old Rupp took from the start exception to the boasting of the cock-sure upstart young coach over at Starkville, taking personal affront to his impetuous barbs. McCarthy became a pain in the backside of the Baron of the Bluegrass, a man who had over the previous 30 years built at Kentucky the nation’s unquestioned top program. Always maintaining a saturnine and brooding front, Rupp’s aloofness intimidated many a coach, but not the spotlight loving and free swinging Babe who showed no respect or fear of the Adolph Rupp mystique. Contrary, he went out of his way in his gamesmanship to irritate Rupp.

In 1958, when Rupp’s Kentucky team beat Mississippi State in Lexington, the Baron ordered a black wreath nailed to the door of the visiting team’s dressing room. After the game, Babe smiled and then removed the wreath, taking it with him on the return trip back to Starkville. He told his team, we will just file this one away for future reference.

The next season, McCarthy had the home crowd whipped to a frenzy for Kentucky’s visit to Starkville for a rematch. The inspired MSU crowd (mob) did its part from the opening tip, harassing Kentucky with cowbells and students beating on plow shares. The clamorous cheering section, like none ever seen before in Starkville for a basketball game, had rowdy students jammed into the old MSU field house from the floor to the rafters.

Mississippi State won the game and Babe ordered the wreath he had taken in defeat off his team’s locker room door in Lexington the previous year to now be nailed to the dressing room door of the vanquished and dethroned Wildcats. The next year, in Lexington, MSU would beat Kentucky again. The State students, showing no respect in his home arena for the man considered the day’s top college hoops mentor, left a dead skunk under Rupp’s chair.

McCarthy followed up the breakthrough season in 1959 with Southeastern Conference titles in both 1961 and 1962. In all three seasons’, MSU turned down the invitation to represent the SEC as its representative to the NCAA’s National Tournament.

 Babe McCarthy

The following March, Governor Barnett’s marching orders to the President of Mississippi State University, Dean Colvard, were once again clear and cut to the racist bone: the again Southeastern Conference champion Bulldogs, with a sparkling 1963 regular season record of 24-1 and a number 6 national ranking, were forbidden to cross the state lines of Mississippi with the intent of playing a basketball game against an integrated team. To give some judicial muscle to his directive, one widely rumored that McCarthy’s team this time intended to defy, the Governor enlisted the help of another powerful state segregationist, Sen. Billy Mitts, a former Mississippi State student body president. Mitts was instrumental in securing a willing state judge to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the team from leaving the State.

But, back in Starkville a plan of defiance was brewing. McCarthy needed a deceptive scheme to get his team out of the state of Mississippi and to East Lansing, MI and a NCAA Regional match with the Chicago’s University of Loyola and its four black starters.

Tired of his nationally ranked team becoming an annual sacrificial offering on the Segregationist alter of bigotry, McCarthy focused his legendary determination on finding a way of getting around his racist bosses’ edicts. He would, “come hell or high water,” he told his players, find a way to get his 1963 team into the NCAA’s integrated tournament. Borrowing from football’s playbook, Babe pulled off one of the   greatest end runs in sports history and in doing so struck a mighty and symbolic blow to the crumbling Jim Crow laws of the Deep South.

McCarthy would share after the game that he never could have gotten his team out of Mississippi ahead of the serving of the trip quashing subpoena if not for the resolve and courage of a sympathetic University President Dean Colvard, a man determined to take a stand against Jim Crow. To not actively use his position to integrate his University, he believed, made him culpable for the injustice of segregation.

Marion A. Ellis in the 2004 book Dean W. Colvard: Quiet Leader, wrote: "Colvard had several reasons for wanting the team to compete. First of all, it would give a positive boost to the MSU and Mississippi image. Second, he felt the four seniors on the team deserved a chance after having played together for three years and having won the SEC championship all three years."

 Mississippi Gov. Barnett

The progressive thinking Colvard was determined to bring the university out of the Neanderthal days of the Civil War and into the Space age of the 1960’s. He was, however, going to use wise caution in choosing the ground for his upcoming battle with the state’s segregationist politicians. "It had begun to look as if our first major racial issue might pertain to basketball rather than to admissions," Colvard later said. "Although I knew opinion would be divided and feelings would be intense because of the law, I thought I had gained sufficient following that, win or lose, I should take decisive action."

To get their team to Michigan and into the NCAA Regional Tournament, Colvard supported McCarthy in a plan of deception right out of a James Bond movie. He agreed to have McCarthy leave the state a day early, crossing over the Tennessee state line, thus out of the jurisdiction of any Mississippi state court injunction. While McCarthy was laid up in Memphis for the evening, Colvard discreetly traveled to Alabama for a speaking engagement, also conveniently placing him out of the reach of the serving of any legal injunction.

The plan then called for the coach and the university president to meet up the next day in Nashville where the team’s plane would make a quick landing to pick them up for the last leg of the trip to Michigan.

The following morning, in a cloak and dagger move, an MSU assistant coach transported the freshmen basketball team, disguised as the varsity, to the Starkville Airport.

 Right Wing Resistance

The local politician and law enforcement guardians of segregation swallowed the bait, rushing to the public airport, attempting to issue a futile injunction to a freshman team who had no intention of leaving the state. Meanwhile, the real varsity starting five was secretly shuttled to a private undisclosed airport where waiting was a private plane to wing the athletes to East Lansing and a date with destiny. Once the starting five were safely in the air, a call was made to send the reserves to the same secret airport as a second plane was idling in wait for the trip to Michigan.

"Being split up was the nerve-racking part," Mississippi State player Bobby Shows, one of the five starters, remembers. "We didn't have our coach. We didn't have half our team. We didn't know if we were going to be able to play the game. But it wasn't us boys. Don't build us up. It was Dr. Colvard and Coach McCarthy. Those two men had the backbone. When coach told us to jump, we said, ‘how high.’ We were just kids. We obeyed our coaches. So when Babe said, ‘boys if we win it again, we are playing in the tournament, come hell or high water,’ we believed him."

The team had help from an unexpected source. “We didn’t understand the politics,” said Shows. “But we were on pins and needles. Just as we took off, the sheriff drove through the gate. He waited until we were in the air, cause he knew we had switched airports, but turns out he wanted us to go so he was in no hurry to get there before we were in the air.”

 MSU President Colvard

On March 22, 1963, in East Lansing, MI, Jerry Harkness, the African American center for Chicago’s Loyola University Ramblers, stepped into the center jump circle and extended his hand to the waiting Joe Dan Gold, center for the Mississippi State Bulldogs. As the two shook hands, the glare of the popping flashbulbs of the media photographer’s cameras momentarily blinded both men. The official tossed the ball between the two 6’9 players and what was to become known as “the Game of Change” had finally began.

"When those flashbulbs went off -- boom, boom, pop, pop -- you felt the history of it right there," Harkness told ESPN in a 2012 interview, "but I don't think many people even know about it now. That game, if you ask me, was key. I felt like it was the beginning of things turning around in college basketball. I truly believe that. I just don't know how many other people know about it."

For the all-white Bulldog team, the trip to East Lansing and the NCAA Midwest Regional Tournament had followed a twisted path.  The long anticipated game now almost became an afterthought. So relieved to finally be able to compete in the NCAA Tournament, 50 years later, MSU players feel all the drama to just get to the tip off had mentally worn out the Bulldogs, taking the edge off of their game, thus their performance that day was uninspired. “We just put on our tennis shoes and went to go play," said Mississippi State player Bobby Shows.

A Loyola team with four African American starters and ranked at the time 3^rd in the nation had been well prepared and understood the Jim Crow system that their opponents were defying. Later, the Chicago school’s black players said that they respected the resolve of their Dixie opponents.

 You can kill a man
but not an idea

Loyola coach George Ireland, to educate his northern team, had taken his team during the 1962-63 regular season on road trips to the Deep South, entering white only tournaments in Houston and New Orleans. The Ramblers players witnessed discrimination firsthand at restaurants that refused to serve their black members and hotels that refused to house them. In Houston, the team was taunted with chants of “nigger” that cascaded down from the stands. In New Orleans, the team’s black players were not allowed to stay in the same hotel with their white teammates, forced instead to bunk in the homes of black families on the “colored” side of town.

The Ramblers - both black and white alike – used the ugly experience to help them remain focused on their goal, winning a national title. In 1963, Loyola head coach George Ireland said: "I feel Mississippi State has a right to be here, no matter what the segregationists say. They may be the best basketball team in the nation and if they are, they have a right to prove it."

Mississippi State jump to any early lead, but soon the superior floor game of the Ramblers took over. Loyola led 26-19 at the half. Mississippi State went on an 8-4 run to pull to within 30-27 early in the second half but would get no closer. State did make one more sustained run at Loyola. Cutting the lead to four with two minutes to go in the game, the Bulldogs missed on an open field goal attempt. The missed shot was a turning point in the game’s eventual outcome. Bulldog’s radio play by play man Jack Cristil remembered in 2011 that it was "a good shot that just didn't go down. We had to start shooting, and Loyola beat us by 10, 61-51. It was a disappointing loss, but it had been a marvelous opportunity for the young men."

Loyola followed the historically significant win over Mississippi State with another victory in the Regional finals the next evening. The next week they would go on to win the 1963 NCAA national championship, upsetting the defending champion and heavy favorite, the University of Cincinnati and their star black player, Oscar Robertson, in a thrilling 60-58 overtime win.

Loyola guard Ron Miller, in a 2013 interview, reminisced with writer John Thomas: "I remember the (Mississippi State) guys being nice. I remember the guys wishing us luck (after the game), and wanting us to win (the national championship). And during the game it was polite. They played a very hard, very aggressive, very strong defensive game, very clean, and they didn't back off."

In reality, the game itself proved to be anti-climactic. Mixing the two races on the basketball court had resulted in no breakdown of America’s moral fiber; no fights or riots, only the intense play of two teams dueling for post season advancement.

Back in 1963, the NCAA played a third place game in their Regional Tournaments. The Bulldogs reclaimed some pride by defeating another integrated team from the north, Bowling Green of Ohio and their African American star player, Nate Bowman, securing for a trip back to Starkville the consolation trophy. “We are not going home empty handed,” McCarthy told his team.

They for surely were not.

When the team returned to Starkville, MS, they found their reception to be surprisingly warm, almost joyous for a team who had failed. The team’s plane, after sneaking off undercover just several days prior, now landed at an airport packed with cheering fans. Polls taken that spring showed overwhelming support for the team’s defiance of the state law. It was, many now say, the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. “When we got back the cars were lined up for 20 miles with thousands of kids there to see us,” remembers Shows. “The KKK boys were pretty nasty, ugly minority. Most people were not like that. And even though we lost, we came home winners. All of us did.”

The MSU players did not recognize in 1963 that what they had just done was more than a game but an impacting catalysis to a changing way of life in Mississippi. "My dad was pretty much a segregationist until the latter part of my college career," remembered Mississippi State player Bobby Shows. "He wasn't Ku Klux Klan or anything, but he used the N-word in the house. He didn't know any better. But he was 100 percent in favor of me playing in that game. He wanted me to have a chance, and after it was over, I can't remember him ever saying anything derogatory after that."

Both the Coach and the President kept their jobs; no formal censure for their insubordination was ever issued. McCarthy stayed at MSU through the 1966 season, but never again qualified the Bulldogs for the NCAA Tournament. His teams won four SEC titles and he was named SEC coach of the year four times.

For a state that has a long and miserable record on civil rights, the courage that Colvard and McCarthy displayed in their daring defiance of the Mississippi Legislature and diehard segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett; is in many ways one of the states’ few shining historical moments of race based righteousness.

“They say athletics can break down barriers and that game did,” said Chuck Wood, a reserve on the 1963 Loyola team. “That game had a social implication on the south and the state of Mississippi. That tournament game was in March. In August, blacks registered at the school for the first time and we had no incidents. They didn’t need the National Guard. They didn’t have any problems like they did before.”

After one unfulfilling year coaching George Washington University in the nation’s capital to a forgettable record of 6-18, McCarthy was finished as a college coach. Out of his element in the District of Columbia, McCarthy’s career overall college coaching record settled at a final total of 175 wins and 103 losses. "Coach McCarthy was really ahead of his time," remembered Cristil in 2011. "He was a great innovator and a great motivator. McCarthy could get players to play above their talent level in the system they ran. McCarthy's teams challenged the best and generally came out on top."

Babe spent the rest of his coaching years in the professional ranks of the newly formed American Basketball Association. In 1968, as head coach of the New Orleans Buccaneers, McCarthy had two future coaching legends on his player’s roster, Larry Brown and Doug Moe. Morten Downey, Sr., father of the future talk show host, was the team’s President.

Coaching six pro ABA teams in a seven year period, the wacky and unpredictable maverick league fit Old Magnolia Mouth’s sense of the insolent. The ABA is remembered for its trademark red, white and blue ball and the introduction to basketball of the 3 point line. The short lived league was also infamous for bounced pay checks, folding franchises and shifting rosters. McCarthy called his years in the pro circuit his most enjoyable on the bench. McCarthy was twice named the ABA Coach of the year, in 1969 and 1974. He was the first coach in the history of the league to reach 200 wins.

Fittingly for a man who had always enjoyed his slightly off kilter reputation, after winning the league’s top coaching award in 1974, McCarthy was fired by the Kentucky Colonels. He never coached again.

Award winning sportswriter Bob Ryan covered McCarthy when he coached in the ABA. Ryan told Terry Pluto in the book Loose Balls, a definitive history of the ABA, “This guy was special. He had that wonderful southern accent that made him sound like Charles Loughton in Advice and Consent.” Long time editor of the magazine Basketball Times, Larry Donald, has many memories of McCarthy from back in the ABA days, most centering on his outgoing behavior. “He loved to talk and tell stories. When he coached the Kentucky Colonels, he had a suite at the Executive Inn, which was right across the street from the Arena. After games, he would invite the reporters over, open up a bottle of Jack Daniels and then talk until the break of day, so long as there was someone around to listen.”

McCarthy was a player’s coach. Doug Moe remembers how Babe, as his coach in New Orleans, could sense when to lay down the hammer, but also when to back off. “He worked us hard, but he knew not to take practice too serious. A couple of times he would bring us to the gym to practice and then he would say, ‘boys the doors are locked and I don’t have a key. Why don’t we just take it easy today.’”

On March 17, 1975, Babe “Old Magnolia Mouth” McCarty died after a short battle with colon cancer. He was 51 years of age and was laid to eternal rest under the Pine trees in the pastoral setting of the country cemetery of his home town of Baldwyn, MS. His pallbearers on that unseasonably warm spring day were members of his 1948 Baldwyn Bearcats state championship basketball team.

McCarthy faced death with the same “bring it on” attitude he displayed when staring down the likes of Adolph Rupp and the Governor of Mississippi. “Why panic at 5 in the morning because it’s still dark outside,” he reasoned, days before his death.

It was reported in the local paper that the overflow crowd attending the funeral of the smooth talking local boy who had snookered the conservative state establishment while spitting in the eye of the segregationists; was composed of mourners in the comfort of bib overalls that far outnumbered those attired in stiff shirt and tie.