From Glory to Grief: the early deaths of so many 1970s Indiana high school basketball stars

When you're a Hoosier, you forget all your cares by walking into a gym for a basketball game.

In high schools of all sizes, from Indiana's inner cities to its rural hamlets, the talents of players and the passion of fans of the game called "Hoosier Hysteria" erase from the mind such matters as the inclement weather, Monday's math test, past due bills, crime, and politics. And, certainly, life's tragedies - that's the last thing you think of at a basketball game.

JOY BEFORE TEARS: Terre Haute
South fans hoist Mike Joyner after
a 1977 tourney win. By year's end,
he was dead in an aviation disaster. 

The finesse, fundamental soundness and enthusiasm of those young players seemed to spell long lives ahead, particularly when you're watching the Indiana state championship Final 4, the command performance of high school play nationwide.

And yet -- when I have done online searches to find what became of some of those revered athletes I recall watching on television or in person at the Final 4 and elsewhere during the '70s and hence, I have often been stunned and saddened to find that their fates were that last thing you think of when watching the game that means life, youth and fun.

In events mostly involving vehicles, or sometimes illnesses, so many of my favorite Hoosier hardcourt luminaries had their lives cut short, often dying while still in their 20s. Their deaths were generally from unforeseeable accidents -- being in the wrong car or airplane at the wrong time. Check a YouTube on an Indiana basketball player from my high school and college years in the '70s and you just may see RIP in the comments, along with tear emoticons.

Here is the list of known deaths of standout players from the 1970s and early '80s who starred at Indiana's Final 4 or otherwise attained Hoosier high school basketball prominence:

Stacey Toran, a likeable, quiet Los Angeles Raiders defensive back who in 1980 had hit the 57-foot shot shown above in leading Indianapolis Broad Ripple High School to the state title game, died at 27 on August 5, 1989 when his car flipped over near his home in Marina Del Rey, Calif. He he was returning from a team open house at a high school in Oxnard which followed a pre-season practice with the NFL team.

Toran was engaged to be married when he died and described by Raiders teammates as pleasant and positive during the practice and open house. Still, he was well over the legal alcohol limit when his car crashed, but police said there were no skid marks or other indications of speeding.

  
        A court level view of the great shot, which Stacey then describes.

His former high school formed a Stacey Toran Foundation to raise money for college scholarships for financially challenged Indianapolis public school students. The foundation also runs youth mentoring and leadership training programs.

 

Jack Moore, a 5-foot-8 guard whose outsized skills surprised opponents at the 1978 Final 4 as he led Muncie Central to a state championship, died in a private plane crash on March 3, 1984, two years after graduating from the University of Nebraska.

 
Moore and a business partner, stockbroker Gary Johnson of North Platte, Neb. were flying back from Indiana, where they had watched Moore's former high school team play. Johnson was piloting the plane, which ran into unexpected storms and fog over central Nebraska, then crashed on a ranch.

Twenty-five years after their deaths, the Lincoln, Neb. campus saluted the popular player and straight-A student with Jack Moore Day coinciding with a Cornhusker basketball home game. Halftime featured appearances by Jack Moore's mother and his sisters, one of whom, Jane Ann Giles, still kept a small piece of the plane in which her brother had died as a memento; she said it gave her consolation.

During his playing days, Moore's athletic frame was ideal for sports in general, but appeared simply too short for Division 1 college basketball; still, using the same finesse and daring that wowed Final 4 fans in Indiana, he stood out nationally at Nebraska, winning the 1982 Pomeroy-Naismith Award for the nation's best senior player under six feet tall.

A bit of Jack Moore's "absolutely unbelievable" 1978 state title game play.

Moore had been revered at Nebraska and in Muncie as a smooth, agile court tactician and easygoing public role model. He quickly fell in love with his adopted home state, encouraging high school teammate Jerry Shoecraft, his best friend since childhood, to enroll at Nebraska and also play for the Cornhuskers.

Shoecraft, who went on to serve on the City Council of Lincoln, said on a University of Nebraska site: "I probably would have gone to Purdue if Jack hadn't convinced me to visit Nebraska.... Everything I've ever accomplished in my life was because of him and the way he inspired me. Even now, whenever I'm down, tired, angry or staring adversity in the face, I ask myself the same question: 'What would Jack do?' "

Kevin Thompson 
at Terre Haute South

Kevin Thompson was considered the hope for an upswing at Indiana State University when the star forward signed with hometown ISU in 1980, a year after the incomparable Larry Bird graduated. Sportswriter Seth Davis described Thompson as, "a big, strapping six-foot-eight forward whose square chin, finely combed black hair and glasses made him look like Clark Kent. He was also a local celebrity, having earned all-state honors at Terre Haute South Vigo High School."

Man of Steel though he made have evoked, Thompson took an injury to a rib during the summer of '80, and when it had not healed by the start of Thompson's freshman fall semester, a deeper problem was indicated.

A doctor diagnosed him with cancer, turning Thompson's planned battle for a starting spot with the Sycamores into a battle for his life. He died in January 1982, never having played a game at Indiana State, and leaving a wife, Tammy.

"He was a courageous young man who fought a good fight," Indiana State coach Bill Hodges said.

The day after Kevin Thompson died, Hodges resigned the coach position. He had gone through a difficult post-Larry Bird losing season in 1979-80, a divorce, then the death of a promising forward, but more so a young person Hodges had befriended during recruitment efforts from just across town.

"I grew to know him so well, and it tore me apart," Hodges said.

Tony Winburn of Jeffersonville High  School was -- like Jack Moore -- 5-8 and won fans with an energetic, overachieving style of play. Also like the Muncie star, Winburn died in a plane crash in his 20s. Marion Anthony "Tony" Winburn was one of 29 people, including the entire University of Evansville basketball team, killed Dec. 13, 1977 when their propeller charter plane crashed just after takeoff on a planned trip to Tennessee for a game. The crash also killed head coach Bobby Watson and acclaimed Evansville sportscaster Marv Bates.

 

Winburn was a star on the 1972 Jeffersonville Final 4 team, which lost in double overtime to that night's state title winner. In 1973 his Jeff squad had been ranked No. 1 during the season, but was stunned in the state tourney's first round by arch rival New Albany, a team which had struggled mid-season but went on to win one of the most surprising state championships ever. They stole the title glory Jeffersonville fans believed would be theirs.

A New Albany substitute who helped turn that team's fortunes around was Steve Miller, a 6-8 sophomore forward who helped point his squad to the 1973 Final Four, but did not play there. Expense restrictions limited state tourney rosters. Miller was a starter his last two seasons at New Albany, and joined former rival Tony Winburn as a 6-9 forward on the ill-fated Evansville Purple Aces team. Miller was married four months before he died.

Terre Haute South Vigo High School's Mike Joyner, who was a senior on South's 1977 Final Four team, died in the crash that December after playing four games in his freshman season at Evansville. The Purple Aces' last game, three days before their deaths, was at Indiana State University in Mike's hometown, giving him some family time, including seeing his newborn sister Peggy for the second and final time. Mike also gave his mother Martha Joyner his Christmas gift wish list, which included sweaters and an electric blanket, she told the Terre Haute Tribune-Star in 2014.

As though Evansville fans hadn't had enough pain from the Dec. 13, 1977 crash wiping out their beloved Purple Aces team, a coincidental accident two weeks later killed the sole team member who had avoided doom by what seemed like the divine fortune to have a serious pre-season practice ankle injury that bumped him from the roster, keeping him off the plane.

Freshman David Furr, 18, who during his ankle's healing was working as a statistician at home games, then after the plane crash planned to join a new Evansville squad to be rebuilt the next year from catastrophe, was driving on Dec. 27 with his 16-year-old brother near their hometown in Illinois when their vehicle was hit by another driver, killing the brothers.

As is detailed on the website bird in flight dot com, which includes stories of aviation deaths it says contain a hint of predestination, the car carrying David Furr and his brother Byron Furr was hit by a pick up truck near Newton, Ill. while David was home from the bereaved campus on holiday break. The brothers were returning from a high school basketball game in Olney, Ill.

The Furrs' deaths added one more community to the list of stricken hometowns of Purple Aces players. Thirty years after the plane crash, a story in the News and Tribune in Jeffersonville included remembrances by Tony Winburn's mother Edna Winburn of half-mast flags throughout the city of Jeffersonville and constant expressions of condolences to her.

"A lot of people around here were very hurt and concerned about Tony," Edna Winburn told the newspaper. "And people still bring it up to me now, but not as much as in the past.

"He enjoyed going to school and playing his sports," she said of her son, who would have earned a business degree from the University of Evansville in the spring of 1978. "He was just a very congenial guy, never gave me any trouble. I'll never get over wishing he was still here."

Steve Miller's widow Vicky Peay, who has since remarried, said in that 2007 story: "The people around here could not have been better," adding that their kindness after the tragedy enabled her to become skilled at helping people after painful losses. "You can take something like this and become a bitter person. Or your can use it for good and help others."

Tommy Baker, in the video excerpt below from the 1974 Final 4 at Bloomington, is described as "in trouble" until a Jeffersonville teammate maneuvers in his direction to receive a pass from the then 6-foot-tall freshman. That brief interlude from early in Baker's great career for the Jeff Red Devils ominously foretells the path his life would take.

Unfortunately, when Tommy Baker got "in trouble" later at various life stages, the system wasn't there for him, and the Indiana high school All-Star from 1977 slid down a slope through controversies, incarceration and destitution, dying of pneumonia at 51. In 1978, early in his sophomore college season at storied Indiana University, Baker was one of three players dismissed from the team by the iron-willed coach Bobby Knight reportedly over marijuana possession.

That un-glorious exit ended great hopes for IU stardom that began when -- as a Louisville newspaper sports columnist recalled it -- the high school senior Baker opened the curtains at his family's home in Claysburg, a historically black section of Jeffersonville, and gushed over seeing the legendary coach Knight getting out of his car on a recruiting visit.

There was much else that indicated Tommy Baker was a good match for Knight's program. The three-year starting guard at Jeffersonville was skilled at the motion offense, passing and pressure defense, the three legs of Knight's system which brought about an undefeated NCAA title in 1976. That was the same season that high school junior Tommy Baker led a talented Red Devil team that lost in the afternoon semis of the Final 4 by three points to that night's state champion Marion. In Baker's freshman and senior seasons, Jeffersonville also had state titles within their grasp, but suffered close tournament loses. 

After his exile from IU in late 1978, Baker had a successful two years playing at Eastern Kentucky University, but was cut in rookie camp after the NBA's San Antonio Spurs drafted him. A young man who had befriended Magic Johnson in 1977 as the two visited Germany winning the co-MVP honors on a team of U.S. high schoolers now would never take the court in the NBA his one-time peer Magic was dominating.

Back in Jeffersonville, Baker was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for selling cocaine, but critics of our nation's imprisonment-centered justice methods contend that Baker and the millions of other nonviolent offenders who have been sent to violent prisons are the real victims.

Much of Tommy Baker's problem, in one graph.

And Clark County, Ind.'s prosecutors went with the national paradigm of incarceration as the only way to respond to drug possession -- oh well, providing the offenders are not rich. Admitted past cocaine users Robin Williams, Lawrence Taylor, Steven King and presumed hard drug user George W. Bush would simply never have gotten prison, but a kid from Claysburg would. By the 2000s, Tommy Baker was an ex-con, broke and ill; he died in 2010 and was buried in a pauper cemetery in Louisville. Jeff High graduates formed a Facebook group to raise money to locate his unmarked grave and inscribe it with fitting markings noting their fondness for their schoolmate.

One poster on an IU fan site, who as a Jeffersonville High student followed Tommy Baker by a few years, sadly announced Baker's death on the site in 2010, saying, "I didn't know him well, but he was a good kid and a hard worker. Well liked. Very humble young man."

John Hollinden in the
high school class of 1976

John Hollinden left his hometown of Evansville a 7-foot-4 Central High School graduate in 1976, but was really tall when he returned two years later. After struggles with growth spurts made it difficult to hit his stride in two seasons at Oral Roberts University, Hollinden came back to join the Indiana State University at Evansville team as a 7-7 center -- the nation's tallest basketball player.

Two productive seasons later, the popular and easygoing Hollinden signed to play professionally in a European league, but the night before his scheduled departure in 1981, another episode of dread familiar to Evansvillians struck. John was driving for pleasure outside the city when his car crashed, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The giant niceness for which this giant was known endured; John began working with two charities helping the poor, became a motivational speaker, and joined a choral music group.

     ____________________________________________________________________

LINK: tall inspirations in the short life of John Hollinden

    ______________________________________________________________________

Even after leg infections, then amputations of both legs in 1991, Hollinden remained a model of good spirits, his former high school coach John Wessel said.

"I went to see him in the hospital after that operation, and he had more grit and determination than the law allows," Wessel told the Evansville Courier. Nonetheless, John Hollinden died in 1992 of cardiac arrest brought on by infections. He was 34.

         ____________________________________________________________________

 

                               So many gone, so suddenly

Basketball will always be exciting to me, and the Indiana high school kids' way of playing the game -- smart, graceful and polished beyond their years -- creates an aesthetic unattainable anywhere else. Hoosier fans packing gyms to boil over with their unique brand of hysteria can convince us that it really matters who wins the game.

It shouldn't take tragic deaths to remind us of the siblings, parents, hobbies, neighborhoods, faiths and fun that matter most in the lives of youths who wear their school's uniforms only a few hours a week.

In researching these stories of lives which ended too soon, I've realized that we had great folks in ballplayers like Jack, Tony, Tommy, Steve and John. Moreover, I've learned the importance of appreciating talented, energetic and devoted people while they're still here.

Brian Arbenz grew up a classically hysterical Hoosier, and he gained even more appreciation of basketball and its players while working as an independent contractor sportswriter from 1986 to 1999, primarily covering Indiana high school games.

Unusual things you won't see anywhere else

 Welcome to the only blog post with all these sights!

The watch cat...

 

Please -- don't neglect your bowels, nor drink alcoholic liquors (they're the worst kind!)

The church that trusts you to make up your own mind!

Safe on the streets!

From my dream last night (yeah, there's an app for that)...

Don't fear, there is a large pond just out of view where ducks and geese live happily...

Coincidences between the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and -- wait for it -- James Garfield

To help retire that well worn list of JFK-Abraham Lincoln “history repeats itself” mystical eerie unexplainable similarities (like a school book warehouse being the same thing as a tobacco barn), I present:

            John F. Kennedy-James Garfield assassination similarities!

This list of unexplainable coincidences is dedicated to the reality that by turning over enough rocks and framing selected details just right, we can “prove” anything we wish to.

Here they are:

Kennedy and Garfield’s successors, Lyndon Johnson and Chester Arthur, both had 13 letters in their names.

 

Johnson got Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights bill passed by Congress, a first step in long needed progress.

Arthur got Garfield’s proposed Civil Service bill passed by Congress, a first step in long needed progress.

  

Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald pleaded for a favor (upgrading his dishonorable discharge from the Marines) by writing the Secretary of the Navy, and was angered that he got no response. He then wrote to the FBI threatening violence against high U.S. officials.

Garfield’s assassin Charles Guiteau pleaded for a favor (appointment as consul to France) by writing the White House and was angered that he got no response. He then wrote to the Secretary of the Army threatening to kill the president.

  

The assassination of Kennedy prompted a technology invented by Alexander Graham Bell to fail when Washington, D.C. phones widely went out from overuse when news of the shooting broke.

The assassination of Garfield prompted a technology invented by Alexander Graham Bell to fail when a metal detector Bell brought to the president’s doctors to locate the bullet could not find it.

 

Oswald and Guiteau both had mothers of French descent.

 

Both assassins had battered their wives. Both had trouble holding jobs down.

 

Oswald and Guiteau had moved to New York City in their youths.

Both also moved to what they thought would be utopian socialist places (Oswald the USSR; Guiteau the Oneida Biblical community in New York State). Both left disillusioned. 

Oswald and Guiteau both bought European-made guns valued at less than $20 from U.S. vendors to carry out their assassinations. Both presidents were hit by two bullets. Both were just a few feet from railroad tracks when shot.

 

  

Kennedy and Garfield both won, for their respective times, the closest popular vote victories by anyone elected president. Garfield beat Winfield Scott Hancock by 10,000 votes; Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by 100,000 votes.

 

Presidents Kennedy and Garfield opposed racial discrimination, both appointing record numbers of Blacks to federal positions.

  

Kennedy and Garfield both had two children die young. Both had two children go on to become lawyers.

 

Kennedy and Garfield fought in wars 20 years before their deaths, both being hailed as heroes in those wars.

  

The Camelot president’s grandchildren can read a comic strip about a cat called Garfield.

President Garfield’s grandchildren could read a comic strip called Prince Valiant, about a place called Camelot.

  

Kennedy’s widow went on to marry a Greek who had accumulated wealth.

Garfield’s widow went on to marry a geek who had accumulated welts -- no, actually James Garfield’s wife died before he even became president. But then Abraham Lincoln never had a secretary named Kennedy, which underscores how a little fibbing is part of this art! But all else on this list is true.

                      _______________________________________________________________________________________________________

                  Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA.

Conservatives started Cancel Culture -- it's their sin, not the left's

In 2003, as the invasion of Iraq commenced, administrators at three Albuquerque, N.M. high schools suspended or placed on paid administrative leave five teachers who had displayed antiwar posters in their classrooms, some created by students.

Officials claimed they were violating an Albuquerque Public Schools policy that requires educators to maintain a classroom atmosphere free from bias or prejudice.

One teacher resigned after the incident. Two others, employed on yearly contracts, were not hired back by their school.

Okay, all you valiant opponents of Cancel Culture, this is your cue! But where were Fox News, Patrick Buchanan or Dennis Prager when it was time to defend these teachers and condemn the stifling of debate -- and by one of those bias-free policies they are always denouncing!

That same year CBS caved in to a conservative firestorm and decided not to air its own made-for-TV movie “The Reagans,” featuring James Brolin playing the 40th president in what preview watchers described as a non-flattering light.

The network disgraced the legacy of Edward R. Murrow by punting the movie off to the cable channel Showtime.

And today’s fierce critics of Cancel Culture, or their forerunners in 2003? Surely, conservatives condemned CBS’s dropping its movie as mob rule censoring the airwaves. Nope, conservatives were that mob.

Same comfortable silence from the right in 1995 when ABC radio dropped -- let’s say it -- canceled the show “Hightower Radio,” whose feisty Texas host Jim Hightower attacked factory farming and other chemical-based industries as destroying the land and community economics.

ABC's big advertisers decided 
you won't hear this type
of information.

The multi-billion dollar Archer-Daniels-Midland, one of the key creators of those farming methods, bought myriad advertisements on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

The network openly said that unnamed advertisers felt Hightower’s criticisms were against their interests.

What, those big city eastern network people are censoring a good ole Texas man of the soil?, screamed absolutely no conservative whatsoever.

And this year, Harvard surprised everyone by passing over acclaimed intellectual Cornell West for tenure.

The college offered West, a longtime attacker of colonialism and supporter of the Palestinian cause, a pay raise absent of tenure. That’s a move so contradictory that outside pressure from pro-Israel absolutists and power elites dependent on colonialist exploitation likely prompted it.

West said that’s what happened, though Harvard denies it.

Well, that concludes our Conservatives’ Hypocrisy by Silence Tour, though there are many more examples, such as, JUST IN:

_________________________________________________

LINK to: Angela Davis says Butler cancelled her appearance

     __________________________________________________________________

Yeah, there are also left-driven episodes, but overwhelmingly they aren’t equivalents, because they’re not about intimidating critics of war or factory farming.

Consider the case of Don Imus, whom CBS radio let go for referring to black members of Rutgers’ woman’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

And longtime CBS sports broadcaster and odds maker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was dropped in 1988 after he made rambling, asinine comments about black athletes owing their talents largely to slavery’s breeding practices. Snyder also said blacks breaking into the coaching profession should be seen by white coaches as a threat to their opportunities.

Was there a better way
to respond than firing Snyder?

Ed Hotaling, an African-American reporter/producer for a Washington, D.C. TV station who recorded and broadcast the remarks, said CBS should not have fired Snyder. Instead, Hotaling said the incident should have cued the network to explore racism straightforwardly.

“I think you have to think a little more broadly than firing a sports commentator for expressing stupid comments about civil rights,” he said. “You should start covering the story and let him learn something.”

Hotaling suggested letting Snyder discuss his remarks and the wider issue of civil rights with black and white athletes on CBS’ football coverage.

“His views would be expressed a little more adequately, I think,” Hotaling said. “They’d have the thing resolved in a positive way instead of a negative way.”

Today's retributive discourse, the wider problem than just Cancel Culture.

Hotaling has the right idea overall. Though as someone who remembers Snyder’s insipid pseudo-history lessons in that 1988 broadcast, I have my doubts that a person so evidently entitled and isolated as Snyder would be open to learning.

And there is also the matter of Jimmy The Greek’s words revealing an incompetence to be a national sports commentator and forecaster (would we want a TV weather forecaster using crickets and supplicating the god Thor?)

Still, what Hotaling suggested in ‘88 is very relevant to today’s controversies. A speaker or tweeter who makes a short comment should be given more time to explain it, but more importantly should be compelled to, in Snyder’s case, talk repeatedly with great black athletes. He could hear them describe the ways in which their success came not from some ghoulish echo from slave breeding, but from their own hard work and sacrifice.

Responding to bigotry should involve face-to-face discussions and persistent attempts to show the offender what they are missing, not instantaneous sanitizing of discourse that may make us feel better, but leaves the hate unaddressed.

 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

That championship season reframed -- today I see the people, not the uniforms

Glove inventor Andre McCarter (45), teacher 
Dave Meyers (34) and house rehab person Richard
Washington (31) do in my Wildcats for the 1975
national title, but I like these guys today.

Picture a man in Oregon who, in tandem with his wife, rehabs houses for a living, with the couple doing the work themselves of tearing the floorboards and hammering the nails.

Then there’s a person near San Diego who teaches elementary school.

Now think of another person, this one in Indiana, who worked for a steel company and coached youth sports in his city, sometimes driving kids home from practice and driving the team bus to and from games.

And yet another, a man from Philadelphia, works part time as an inventor and comes up with a certain type of glove to improve athletes' dexterity.

These folks sometimes pause from their daily lives of civic and business devotions to recall their college years, when they used to get together and play some basketball.

And the former Indiana farm kid who grew up to coach them was paid a modest salary for job tasks that for a while included waxing a gymnasium floor.

Sounds like a group who only dreamed of the big time, but missed out on lives of fame and glory.

Well, in fact you’ve just read a description of the people who in 1975 won their school, UCLA, the NCAA basketball title -- the last of coaching legend John Wooden’s 10 basketball championships at UCLA.

Their lives of rehabing homes, teaching sixth graders and so forth were what they were doing 20 and 30 years after that night in March 1975, when Richard Washington, Dave Meyers, Pete Trgovich, and Andre McCarter led the UCLA Bruins to John Wooden’s 10^th title.

They allowed Wooden to cap off his dynasty in storybook fashion, beating favored Kentucky 92-85 in the title game in San Diego, ending Wooden’s 27-year tenure at UCLA.

During that stint, the Martinsville, Ind. native and former Purdue hoops star won those 10 national titles while maintaining a player graduation rate of 65 percent (comparable to the student body rate of around 75 percent). For all this, he earned a top salary of $40,000, and that includes all money from endorsements.

Late in his career Wooden also brought in about that much yearly in outside income from speaking engagements and basketball camps, but with that added in, his $80,000 figure was about one percent of what today’s highest paid coach makes.

Kentucky’s John Calipari, who is paid -- wait for it -- $8.1 million, has a player graduation rate of 28 percent (the UK student body rate is 66 percent).

Wooden emphasized to his players passing, footwork and body position, not the glamorous high scoring or fancy one-on-one moves many other coaches favored in the ‘70s to enhance their recruiting in an era of expanding TV coverage of college basketball games.

In fairness to Calipari, he also emphasizes those game fundamentals, but compared to Wooden’s strong emphasis on getting a genuine education, the Kentucky multi-millionaire coach’s program has that 28 percent graduation rate. Among Calipari’s top talent, it’s close to 0, because almost all of his Kentucky stars stay in school just one season, then go pro.

Almost all of Wooden’s greats played four seasons.

The best players leaving after their freshman year, a method called "one-and-done," is widespread in this era; UCLA itself has just a 20 percent player graduation rate today.

Whereas Washington and Meyers were the biggest contributors to the title win in ‘75, another player, Marques Johnson, did go on to great National Basketball Association stardom. But in 1975 Johnson was coming off a bout with hepatitis the previous summer and didn’t go on to become a star at UCLA until about a year after Wooden’s 1975 retirement.

He had a superb NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks, the team for which Dave Meyers also played a few years before deciding to change careers and earn a teaching certificate.

Meyers didn’t teach gym or do photo-ops in classrooms as a sports celebrity, mind you -- he genuinely taught elementary school for 30 years in Southern California. And Marques Johnson was a devoted family person; wealth and national acclaim did not distract either of these two Bruin products from the obligations and rewards of doing the essential duties of the lives all of us live.

Same for Richard Washington, whose career change came when he realized his pleasant temperament (Coach Wooden had described him as a “passive, easygoing, lovely person.”) just wasn’t ideal for the Type-A pro basketball world after Kansas City Kings teammates politely but firmly told him he needed to push himself harder.

Dave Meyers, after three decades teaching elementary school children, died from cancer in 2015 at age 62. After his death, former teammate Marques Johnson recalled Meyers as “a gentle, compassionate guy."

Sibling Ann Meyers Drysdale recalled that Dave’s decision to leave pro basketball in 1980 after six seasons, though partly because of a back injury, also was because her brother “wanted to be with his family and watch his children grow up.”

Even many of the more basketball-centered John Wooden products have lived notably full lives; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, also is a fine writer and commentator. He worked as a newspaper contributing reporter while a teenager in New York City.

Bill Walton attended law school after his basketball days and has long promoted environmentalism and his vegetarian diet. Both former UCLA centers were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War.

Still, the UCLA Bruin world wasn’t flawless; an L.A. Times investigation in the 1980s revealed that a wealthy UCLA booster named Sam Gilbert was co-signing for loans for some of Wooden’s players, in violation of NCAA rules.

Though the gifting was not used to recruit players, and a shocked Wooden ordered his team to have no contact with Gilbert when he found out, the co-signing continued and Wooden largely looked the other way, the coach acknowledged in interviews late in his life.

From raising title banners to raising his family,
the gentle Dave Meyers, 1953-2015.

Nonetheless, we can long for some lost priorities when contrasting the community minded lives of people like Meyers, Washington and other 1975 Bruins with most of the great NBA stars who won college championships in the years following Wooden’s retirement.

For instance Irving “Magic” Johnson of Michigan State and Michael Jordan of North Carolina have sports-centered identities wrapped in layers of massive PR machines. Neither graduated from college. The egotistical and sometimes brusque Jordan had more say over his Chicago Bulls team’s offense than his coach, and Magic Johnson actually ordered his Los Angeles Lakers team to replace its head coach over the young star’s differences with him.

And the 60-second TV ads Magic did for a fast food chain and Jordan did for Chevy cars earned them more money than Richard Washington or Dave Meyers made in a year of rehabing houses and teaching elementary students.

But for the vast majority of NBA players, having a real world job skill like those of Washington or Meyers would be more valuable than perfecting every great basketball move. Consider that Sports Illustrated reported in 2009 that 60 percent of former NBA players were broke within five years of leaving that supposedly paved-with-gold league. The magazine said the number for former National Football League players was 78 percent.

Those percentages mean John Wooden's $40,000 salary and his stressing of education and life skills more than basketball have never looked better. And "one-and-done" has never looked more dangerously exploitive.

In 1975 I scowled as I watched UCLA win Wooden’s 10^th title by beating Louisville and Kentucky, two of my three favorite teams. This was just after my other favorite, unbeaten Indiana, lost its top scorer to an injury, knocking the Hoosiers out of what looked like a sure title.

My adolescent anguish didn’t last too long; Indiana, Kentucky and Louisville won three of the next five college championships.

Although those titles were redemption, I have since placed more importance on the good character of our champion teams’ stars, such as Louisville’s Darrell Griffith and Scooter McCray, who following their playing years started restaurants and alcohol-free youth recreation centers in our city.

Whereas their Louisville college uniforms and UCLA’s bore opposing school names, I now see that the people who were wearing both are teammates in the contest between good citizenship and “I’ve got mine, you get yours” selfishness. And that is a game in which this nation badly needs a come-from-behind win.

So Richard, Dave, Pete, Andre, Marques -- as much as I could not have imagined 45 years ago that I’d ever feel this way about any Bruin -- I’m now a fan of each of you.

                                                    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brian Arbenz has been a news and sports reporter in Indiana and Kentucky, states whose college basketball success can cloud people's judgment.

Why we should discontinue use of the term "hate group."

You know the Nazis and the KKK are hate groups. There’s no need for some organization to tell you.

And we can all agree that the Camp Fire Girls and neighborhood stamp collectors club are not.

But for the remaining 98 percent of the spectrum of organizations out there, it is usually a matter of opinion as to who is and isn’t a hate group. And the criteria are so subjective that labeling a group as such usually has no value; i.e. one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

But wait -- some groups, like the Aryan Nations, are natural perfect fits for the designation “hate group.” That’s an empirical finding.

Yet, when we place that label on even the most indisputably deserving, we are certain to start sliding from the high ground down the slippery slope of “what about” equations run amok.

"What about Stalin and Pol Pot?" conservatives are fond of asking. How can Marxist-Leninist parties not be designated hate groups if the Hitlerian genocidists are? Well, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supported Pol Pot, so there go the Democrats and Republicans as well.

By unleashing such absolute standards, we could become paralyzed by a realization that every group is a hate group. I mean the Camp Fire Girls and stamp collectors drove to events with oil made more available by the U.S. and U.K forcing a dictatorship on Iran in 1953. The hate implicating process could never end. 

An important distinction in this issue: the designation of a “hate crime” is a different matter than a hate group. Presuming hate crimes laws apply equally to all people and don’t infringe on free speech or peaceable assembly (which the Supreme Court has ruled must be the case), legally defining a criminal act a hate crime is proper, and helpful to achieving justice.

But either the state or private organizations designating groups “hate groups?” In the U.S., the state has no such power, because of the longtime doctrine of free association.

Non-governmental social justice organizations do have the right to express the opinion that a group is a hate group. But to see why doing so is fraught with hazards, check the history of that term.

The Southern Poverty Law Center leader Morris Dees largely popularized the concept of the “hate group.” Critics, including writers for The Nation, The New Yorker magazine, and James Madison University researcher Mark Purington, have asserted that Dees has actually neglected social justice causes by focusing the SPLC ‘s efforts on glamorized lawsuits against klansmen, in order to raise millions.

Purington’s JMU thesis said Dees raised $9 million for his Montgomery, Ala. based SPLC via impassioned, shockingly illustrated fundraiser letters about his winning a civil judgment against klan members in the 1980s. Yet that courtroom victory resulted in just a $52,000 payout to the mother of Michael Donald, who was murdered by the klansmen.

Purington acknowledged that Dees had told her in advance that the killers’ destitution meant she would never get more than a pittance of the multi-million dollar award sought. And in fact, $52,000 of the actual $7 million jury award was all Beulah Mae Donald got. Meanwhile the SPLC shared with her not one penny of its $9 million fundraising haul over her case.

Anti-racist activists within and outside the SPLC have blasted Dees for focusing so narrowly on such high profile cases, instead of the overall racial justice struggles the organization so deftly had waged in the 1970s.

Ken Silverstein, writing in Harper’s magazine, said the SPLC legal staff quit the organization in 1986 to protest Dees’ single minded pursuit of the Klan, which they believed was a minor threat compared to the daily injustices facing poor Americans.

Along with shifting toward cases that make for heroic sounding fund raising letters, Purington in his JMU paper and former SPLC staffer Bob Moser in The New Yorker magazine have written that the SPLC’s yearly release of its list of “hate groups” in the U.S. also is geared to boost fundraising.

And that list has been extended too widely to include groups that don’t lynch, bomb or openly espouse racism.

The SPLC’s web site says: “We define a hate group as an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

But Moser, a former staffer under Dees at the SPLC, wrote in his New Yorker piece: “As critics have long pointed out… the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the SPLC’s ‘attacks.’ ”

                    Seth Andrews examines the related problem of the "extremist" list.

Even though just one organization, directed so centrally by Dees and a very few other people, calls organizations like the Family Research Council hate groups, the bulk of the U.S. left is widely thought of as having labeled them as such.

And the Family Research Council is a group that hates. But opposing its agenda requires examining exactly what is wrong with it, piece by piece. And exposing how the elite corporations' political agenda of exploiting the labor of women and minorities is really what maintains the "religious" right. 

Stamping a group with an arbitrary label doesn't inspire us to do these involved tasks. But a gunman said the SPLC’s including the Family Research Council on its hate group list inspired him to enter the FRC’s headquarters in 2012, injuring one person and threatening to kill more. That attack made it seem the whole progressive population was saddled with an unsought image of stoking terrorism.

Dees and other SPLC staffers publicly denied that their issuing the hate group list had the effect of encouraging the attack, adding that the Family Research Council's false and denigrating statements about homosexual people, not the group's opposition to same-sex marriage, is what got it on the list. But such carefully put nuanced points need to lead a justice organization's report, not follow a violent misinterpretation of it.

And that messy episode, combined with mounting accusations first written about in the daily newspaper the Montgomery Advertiser that Dees himself had practiced racial discrimination within the SPLC’s ranks pointed to his days as director being numbered.

Dees was fired by the SPLC in 2019. Moser and other critics said his dismissal alone won’t end the toxic culture of discrimination and elitism within the SPLC.

Much more must be done to fix the mess in its Montgomery HQ.

Too many media sources automatically turn to the SPLC’s yearly list of hate groups as the measure of whether the far right is growing and how fast -- not grasping that the annual list long ago became a self-serving cash-raising trick.

Moser wrote in The New Yorker that since it dumped Dees the SPLC has made small steps to widen its scope, a glimmer of hope that the organization will return to its purpose of fighting injustice. Progressives dropping use of the hazardously open ended term “hate group” would help. 

Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, is a writer, researcher and a resister of fascism.