Alumni Remember...

   Alumni from the 1968 basketball team

Joe Shivers '70 recently sent us word of a reunion of basketball alumni in May of 2012, including memories below which he has titled "Yellow Jacket Reverie."  The 1968 team is pictured at left (the author is No. 12) with a photo of their 2012 gathering at right (author far right). Thanks Joe for sharing your memories!

Every winter my sense of affiliation with Baldwin Wallace peaks.  Winter means basketball, and basketball is what I gave my life to at BW.  I played four years for the Yellow Jackets long before we ever became a university, and I follow the team still.  Lately, though, I have been spending more time than usual remembering and appreciating my time as a college athlete.

Before I got a phone call from him three years ago, I had not heard from Teddy Johnson in more than twenty years.  In the spring of 2009, he left a message on my answering machine saying that he was organizing a reunion of the coaches and players from the 1968 and 1969 Baldwin-Wallace College (now University) Yellow Jackets basketball teams, and he hoped I could attend.

BW was still an NCAA Division II school in the late 1960s, and we had strong, deep, competitive teams.  For three straight years we were in the hunt for a conference championship and an NCAA tournament bid;  we played schedules that included nearly as many D-I schools as D-II schools; three of my teammates were drafted by NBA teams; our opponents’ rosters were peppered (and salted) with future professional players, including hall of famers Bob Lanier and Earl Monroe; and we had a dunk line that featured nearly as many aerialists and acrobats as the University of Houston’s Phi Slamma Jamma – but we had not been together as a group since graduation.  Each subsequent year had separated me further from my life at BW:  humdrum concerns filched the hours and minutes, and I kept only a tenuous, hit-and-miss contact with my college teammates.

Bourbon Ziegler I did see occasionally.  His wife Becky is from my hometown, and whenever she and Bourbon came to visit her folks, he and I would have a chance to talk.  I had also spoken with Dick Fletcher, Senior Vice President of Baldwin Wallace, on behalf of a couple of Salem High School athletes who wanted to matriculate at BW.  Bourbon and Dick would tell me everything they knew about what guys were doing, and I would tell them what I knew.  I always left those conversations gratified, but curious to know more.

So when I got Teddy’s message, I checked my calendar.  May is a busy month for high school principals with prom and standardized testing and graduation planning, but I was in.  Once I committed to going, I thought about the teammates I hoped that Teddy would be able to convince to return.  And, no surprise, Teddy delivered:  he organized the team reunion in the same insistent way he played basketball – with all-out effort and attention to the smallest detail.  His letters, phone calls, and emails resulted in ten of us from the 1968-69 team returning to campus in mid-May for a Friday-night get together and for breakfast the following morning.

Herewith, the reunion lineup:

Ray “Muldoon” Hereford (1968) was a prodigious leaper who, in practices and in games, regularly crossed the line from saltant to volant.  ‘Doon cemented his legend in a game my freshman year when he bit on an Otterbein player’s fake jump shot, and then, noticing that his man was still on the ground, changed his flight plan, performed a mid-air split, and sailed cleanly over his opponent who was riveted to the floor in disbelief.  I inherited, proudly and humbly, Ray’s #44 uniform after his senior year. 

Jim Crumrine (1969) at 6’2” had jumped center for his high school team, but made a seamless transition to the backcourt in college.  In practices his sophomore year, Jim regularly had to check one of our two high-scoring guards – both of whom finished with more than 1,000 points for their careers – and he played them as tough as any opponent on our schedule.  Through it all, he never wilted or got rattled in the face of Coach Hugh Thompson’s scalding vituperations.

Baldwin Wallace professor Harvey Hopson (1969), whose quickness of wit and of neurological reflex measured out in nanoseconds, welcomed me to higher education by schooling me in a game of one-on-one my first day of practice.  He beat me 10-1 (I scored on a little left-handed hook shot), and afterward, sensing my dampened sense of self-worth, he taught me two new techniques for establishing inside position on an opponent who was boxing me out.  Harvey executed his signature offensive move from the high post with his back to the basket:  with his opponent riding his bumper, Harvey would dematerialize and, in the same instant, rematerialize under the hoop for a high rising layup.  Long before there were personal computers, Harvey Hopson invented the flash drive. 

Theodore “Teddy” Johnson (1969) was co-captain with Harvey, and, like Harvey and four other teammates, scored more than 1,000 points for his career.  He functioned as the heart and conscience of our teams.  His talent and wherewithal on the court could have served as the inspiration for Howard Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences.  Teddy played every position on the court, and his knowledge of the game was encyclopedic.  He was drafted by the old Cincinnati Royals (now the Sacramento Kings) after his senior season.

Steve Mack (1969) gave lie to the old sports cliché about eccentric left-handed athletes.  From his wing position, he conjured very effective, arrhythmic drives to the basket to be sure, but he was as bright, as academically accomplished, and as well-grounded as any of us.  Inasmuch as he felt that academics should have a higher priority in college life than athletics, he evinced a healthier perspective on the game than I, at least, did.  His son, Alex, was the first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns in 2009.

Bourbon “Zeke” Ziegler (1969) was one of the most coachable athletes I have ever known; furthermore, he imposed himself on every practice and every game with élan and menace.   In addition to rebounding very aggressively, he played defense as if he were enforcing a restraining order.  At pre-game meals he ordered his steak bloody rare.  In the spring of his senior year, he was invited for a tryout with the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, even though he had not played football in college.  Off the court he served as Virgil to my Dante, guiding me through college sports’ version of the Inferno and pointing out along the way the perils of road games in certain arenas, crude and inventive locker room antics, and other sorts of depravity the likes of which I had not seen in my hometown.  Zeke still orders his steak rare.

Dick "Fletch" Fletcher (1970) was the only member of the 20-man recruiting class of 1966 beside myself who played all four years.  He was the starting point guard for 2½ seasons, and with his relentless defense and his unusual gait, Fletch wore out a pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers every three or four games, tearing right through the canvas.  The people at Converse were puzzled, but they kept replacing his shoes every couple of weeks.

Dennis “Tall-T” or “T” Talty (1970), classmate and road-game roommate, was the tallest of a group of tall guys.  He’d had a productive junior year coming off the bench, but he passed up his senior year to the detriment of our 1969-70 won-loss record (“Spoiled Fans Cringe” screamed a headline in the Cleveland Press after we lost to Youngstown State).  Like Harvey, T was possessed of a quick, sharp wit and a disarming laugh – just in case anyone ever took offense.  He is now a Philadelphia lawyer.

Coach Bill Clark took a cerebral approach to the game that contrasted with the emotional tack of his predecessor.  Coach Clark was hired after my freshman year, and he led us to back-to-back appearances in the Ohio Conference tournament finals.  In the first round of Cleveland State’s invitational tournament my senior year, we were to face Federal City College, a team coached by former Boston Celtic great Sam Jones.  In preparation for our game, Coach acted on a calculated hunch and resurrected his notes on the Boston Celtics offense taken years before at a coaching clinic that Red Auerbach had keynoted.  We spent two practices learning Auerbach's sets.  On game night, Jones’s team did run the Celtic offense, and we stopped it, resulting in a victory for the Jackets.  Chalk one up for cerebration. 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

On Friday, conversations began with the mutual exchange of forty year’s worth of biographies.  We had experienced the usual struggles and doubts and disappointments, but my teammates and I have been largely successful and happy in our professional and personal lives.  (I was jolted for a moment when I realized in a conversation with Teddy early in the evening that our own children are older now than we were when we played.)  In an animated, old-school rap session, we recalled the moments and characters that comprised our meals, games, practices, road trips, and off-season regimens.  Any sociologists looking on might have nodded as they observed the way we fell into the familiar, respective positions of our former hierarchy.  If Harvey and Teddy were royalty, I was an apprentice.  The others took their metaphorical places in between as knights or guildsmen. 

On Saturday morning, the conversation continued.  Harvey recounted the time that the coach who had recruited us all, the late Hugh Thompson, was angered by the insinuations coming from other schools in the league that he was violating an unspoken protocol by starting three African-American players.  Coach responded by starting five Black players in the next conference game. The Yellow Jackets won.  

Teddy recalled the time Harvey injured his back in a losing battle with an unmannered fire hose while filling the Berea public swimming pool late one spring.  Because of his injury Harvey was unable to bend enough even to get into a car, so his buddies drove him back to campus via Front Street, honking the horn the entire way, with Harvey clinging spread-eagle to the hood.

And so it went.  Someone would begin a story with, “Remember when . . . ?” and the rest of us would sketch in details or amend facts as necessary.  When I said, for example, that a high school contemporary, Thurman Munson, had played basketball for Canton Lincoln HS, Jim Crumrine corrected me and said that Munson played at Canton Lehman HS. 

Although they still harbor the muscle memory of what we did at Ursprung Gymnasium, our bodies are thicker now and less responsive to neural signals for sharp turns or quick moves.  Having undergone knee and hip replacements and various other procedures, my teammates and I have paid typical prices as part of the deal that athletes make in exchange for an extended period of intensified youth – what former U.S. Senator and NBA great Bill Bradley called the other side of the Faustian bargain.  But there were few regrets expressed; our re-congregation was salubrious if not quite 100% rejuvenating.

Time wound down deliciously as we talked.  Conversation was unguarded.  Laughter emerged from roots that had grown deep over the years, and by the time we finished dusting off memories, we had gotten close enough to what had actually happened forty seasons prior.  If some of us remembered imprecisely, none of us had forgotten entirely, and everyone added his own gloss.  It was truth by ensemble:  a genuine team effort.

After leafing through Teddy’s scrapbooks and posing for a group picture, we said our good-byes with everyone agreeing that forty years was too long and that we had to get together again soon.  But we returned to the demands of our individual lives knowing that, as way leads on to way, even when we do meet again, it might not be for a while. 

Whatever.  Reconnecting with my teammates was a delight of the highest order, full-up with a new set of memories.  As a bonus, Teddy and Coach have been emailing all of us from time to time with greetings, updates, and general news. 

Since the reunion I have thought about our seasons together with heightened appreciation and with new insight:  when we were playing ball – young and joyful, oblivious and completely immersed – we thought that the experience would never end.  Forty years later, it turns out we were right.

Dr. Joe Shivers (1970) is principal of Salem High School in Salem, Ohio.  Last winter he hit the winning free throw in a shooting contest against students and administrators from rival West Branch High School.

© 2012, Joseph A. Shivers

This page is devoted to memories shared by BW alumni.  Submissions of text and photos may be emailed to bwalumni@bw.edu or mailed to the Alumni House at 275 Eastland Road, Berea, OH, 44017.  Alumni staff reserve the right to edit submissions.  We look forward to hearing from you!        

 


 

© 2012 Baldwin Wallace University