Year graduated
1966
Major accomplishments
Lebanon’s all-time leading scorer with 2,595 points for four seasons, and fourth on the state’s all-time list; First high school athlete in a team sport to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a senior; Mr. Basketball; Named one of Indiana’s all-time 50 best players in 1999; Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer
In the summer of 1965, just eight months before Sports Illustrated chose him to be the first high-schooler in a team sport to appear on the cover, Lebanon’s Rick Mount decided to test his skill at a basketball shoot being held at a Fourth of July fair in the city park. He had already earned the nickname “The Rocket” because his right-handed release resembled the launching of a deadly missile.
“When you went over there in your regular clothes you weren’t warmed up,” said the three-time All-American at Purdue and five-year pro in the ABA. “The balls were inflated pretty tight. So I got my basketball stuff on and warmed up at the outdoor court, then went over to the basketball shoot. I just wanted to see what I could do warmed up.”
Mount not only was warmed up, he was red hot. “I had the guy running it for 25 Teddy Bears,” he chuckled. “I shut him down that night. People were giving me money to win a Teddy Bear for their kids. Once I got done, the man said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Rick Mount.’ He said, I knew you were Rick Mount. I should have sat you down right at first.’ The guy said, ‘Tomorrow I’ve got to go to the bank and get some money, so I get some more Teddy Bears.5 He wanted to know if I wanted to go on the carnival circuit with him and shoot for money.
“About three years ago a mother brought her kid to one of my shooting camps and she said, ‘I’m one of those kids you won a Teddy Bear for.’”
Rick declined the invitation to go on the carnival circuit for obvious reasons.
Mount has been teaching kids how to shoot the last 17 years at his nine Rick Mount Shooting School camps—two in Illinois, one in Ohio, and six in Indiana: two in Indianapolis and four in Fort Wayne. The 800 to 1,000 kids who attend the camps each summer are able to shoot rapidly because of a Shoot-A-Way device attached to the goal. The way it works is that a ball falls into the net after a camper shoots it, and goes down to a hopper, which throws the ball back to the camper.
Rick has a Shoot-A-Way device, called “The Gun,” at his home. Mount has been the Indiana rep for the device for 18 years. It takes about two minutes to set up and then Rick fires away. Is he shooting as well as ever?
“When I was younger I got up pretty high on my shot.” he said. “Now I can get up pretty good on my shot, but I’m 59 years old. I can make 96 out of 100. That’s three-pointers, not free throws. I can hit 100 out of 100 free throws.”
In addition to that, Mount averages between 400 and 500 jump shots a day on the goal in the driveway of his modest home in north Lebanon. “People say, ‘Mount, you’re crazy, what are you trying to do, bring back your career?’ I say, ‘Why do you go out and run on a street? Why do you ride a stationary bike?’ I don’t like to do either of those things. I can still shoot jump shots. And it keeps me in shape.”
Mount takes pride in being a self-taught jump shooter. He credits his late father, Paul (Pete) Mount, with two major assists in his development (the Mounts are one of the few families to produce three Indiana All-Stars: Pete in 1944, Rick in 1966 and Rich, Rick’s son, in 1989—all three started four years for Lebanon, and both Pete and Rick are in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame).
“Nobody ever taught me how to shoot,” said Mount. “It fell into place. I think it was because my dad didn’t start me out with a 10-foot basket and a big ball, where I had to shove it up there. I used a tennis ball on a lower basket.”
When Mount was five, Pete cut the bottom out of a Planters Peanuts can and nailed it to the back porch. He started to hit the can with a tennis ball, but he didn’t think the can looked like a basket, so he got a coat hanger and straightened it out. He made it about as big around as the Planters can, took two rolls of athletic tape and wrapped it around the hanger to a size about as thick as his thumb so it would be sturdy. He cut up a fishing net to complete the basket.
When the family moved a second time, Rick put his homemade basket in the garage and he would go to the corner, jump up and shoot his tennis ball over the rafters. “That got me to lifting the ball and jumping good when I was young,” he said. “I never picked up any bad habits. When I got a little older my dad put up an eight-foot basket outside, and I shot a volleyball at it. I didn’t shoot at a 10-foot basket with a regulation ball until I was in the fourth grade.”
The silver ring Pete Mount received when Lebanon finished runner-up to Fort Wayne Central in the 1943 state tournament was instrumental in instilling a fiery competitiveness in Mount at age seven. Pete found his son wearing the ring twice during the summer and got into his face both times.
“I never talked back to my dad, because he’d pound me with that ping pong paddle he had,” said Mount. “He broke one on me one time. I said, ‘Here, take your silver ring. I’m gonna get the gold ring. I’m gonna win the state championship and outdo you.’ At that point I was driven.”
In Mount’s freshman year at Lebanon, under coach Jim Rosenstihl, he averaged 20.5 points a game. The average climbed to 23.5 as a sophomore, to 33.1 as a junior, and finally to 33.2 as a senior. He ranks fourth on the state high school career-scoring list with 2,595 points. When the Tigers lost to East Chicago Washington, 59-58, in the championship game of the West Lafayette semistate in 1966, Mount’s dream of winning a gold ring ended.
“Starting the fourth quarter, I always got cramps, in the sectional, regional and semistate,” said Mount. “When I got those cramps in the semistate, I had just hit a basket and we were up 15 points. I never put up another shot.”
Going to Purdue, after turning down Miami of Florida, meant that Mount could remain true to himself. “I could come home when I wanted to, because Lebanon is only 45 minutes away, and I was far enough away that I felt like I was on my own,” he said.
“I had a really great college career. I did some things that put Purdue on the map,” said Mount who holds the men’s career scoring record with 2,323 points for a 32.3 average, in addition to the men’s single-game record of 61. “If you had told me we were going to the final game of the NCAA tournament my junior year the way our chemistry was, I’d have said forget it.”
Fortunately, the team spent about two weeks during the holidays together at the Sun Devil Classic and Rainbow Classic. By the time the Big Ten season began, the players started caring for each other. The Boilermakers lost only one conference game, at Ohio State, by three points. In the championship game, Purdue played without center Chuck Bavis, who had suffered a shoulder injury in the Mideast regional. Mount shot horribly in the first half, but recovered well in the second-half; however, it was too late and the Bruins won, 92-72.
“Purdue had Rick Mount, a great player,” said UCLA coach John Wooden, himself a former Boilermaker player. “And I had Kenny Heitz, a 6-3 guard, play him. Kenny did a tremendous job of controlling Mount until we had the game well in hand.”
Mount hit his first two shots, then missed 14 in a row to be 2-for-16 at the half. He was 10-for-20 the second half, finishing 12-for-36 for the game, scoring 33 points. “Johnny Wooden would like to think that his decision to put Kenny Heitz on me [was a major reason that I shot so poorly the first half),” said Mount. “But that wasn’t it. I don’t know what really happened in the championship game, the energy and the focus, just boom, from a period of about six minutes gone in the first half for maybe 12 minutes I had nothing going. After the half I come out and everything’s back.”
Of his five ABA seasons—two with Indiana, which drafted him No. 1 in 1970; a year and a half with Kentucky; a half-year with Utah; and a year with Memphis—Mount says, “People keep saying I had a bad pro career, but I didn’t have that bad a pro career. When I got to play a lot of minutes, I had some pretty good numbers. I really take pride in being in three ABA championship finals.” These championships took place in 1972 when the Pacers won their second of three titles, 1973 when Kentucky was runner-up to Indiana, and in 1974 when Utah was runner-up to the New York Nets.
“In the last game I ever played at Market Square Arena against the Pacers, I was with Memphis. I had 29 points and we beat ‘em.” The legend smiled while saying that.
When asked if he still loves the game, Mount responded like the picture-perfect shooter he’s always been. “I watch basketball being played today and I’m glad I played in the era I did, because they let shooters shoot then. Now it’s kinda slowing it up, passing it eight or 10 times. When we played it was get it up and down, maybe pass not over three times and fire it up. That was a good era for guys that like to score. Now I look at it and I don’t think it looks as fun. It’s still fun for me to go out and shoot 400 or 500 times a day.
“They took a poll [done by Scripps Howard News Service] two years ago of 30 coaches all over the United States, and I was named the greatest outside shooter that ever lived. Take it or leave it. But I was pretty good. You saw me. Maybe they’re talking about me because I’m getting old and they call me a legend now.”