Year graduated
1964
Major accomplishments
Received the Trester Award for mental attitude; Indiana All-Star; MVP and captain as a college senior at Northwestern; Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer
Every few months, Mike Weaver, Bob Straight, and Bob Hammel—all Huntington products—meet for lunch and reminisce about their basketball careers, which earned each of them a place in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame—Weaver as a player, Straight as a coach and administrator, and Hammel as a sports writer.
“We talk about the same stuff every time we get together,” said Weaver, an Indiana All-Star in 1964, and later an MVP and captain of the Northwestern University Wildcats his senior year. “The beautiful thing about getting older is that we forget, and therefore we tend to exaggerate a little bit more. I think the world of both of them. Coach Straight, next to my dad, had more influence on my life than any other man. Of course, Bob Hammel is such a gentleman and fun to be with. And we all three absolutely love basketball.”
They usually break bread in Indianapolis, where the headquarters of the Weaver Popcorn Co. is located. Weaver is president. Straight, who won eight sectionals, four regionals, and one semistate as Vikings coach, still resides in Huntington. He is a past president of the Indiana Coaches Association, and the IHSAA Board of Control. Hammel lives in Bloomington, where he served as sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times from 1966-96.
Weaver’s love affair with basketball started early. After the Toledo, Ohio, native moved to Huntington with his family as a youngster, he finally was able to talk his conservative father into buying him a goal, and putting it on the garage. His father told him, “If you want a ball, you’re going to have to go out and earn some money to buy your own ball.”
Before he could earn enough money, Weaver met a young fellow who had a ball. He brought the ball, and the two played together in Weaver’s backyard. Weaver was finally able to purchase his own ball after saving enough money shoveling snow. In the third grade he got to go into the big gym and shoot baskets. “I can remember having trouble going to sleep that night I was so excited,” he said. “I had my own ball and I slept with it.”
Of Straight as a coach, Weaver says, “He is a most outstanding human being, most importantly. He was a great teacher and a great coach, and he brought a discipline, an understanding of the game, and a strategy that we were introduced to at a young age, which was helpful.”
Straight required the Vikings to participate in three sports. Weaver played football, basketball, and ran track, or as he puts it, “I lumbered through track. It was very good playing three sports in that it gave us a good dose of humility, because we participated in sports in which maybe we weren’t quite as strong as in basketball.”
At the end of his sixth-grade year, Weaver, who was the fastest kid and best athlete in the class, learned a personal lesson that made him a better person and teammate.
“A kid by the name of Mike Shumaker moved to Huntington,” said Weaver. “He was smaller than I was, but he was faster and a much better athlete, and I didn’t like the fact he was better than me. In the seventh grade, we went undefeated in football and basketball, and I started realizing, boy, it’s great having a guy like Mike Shumaker as my friend and teammate, because it’s more about the team and less about me.”
Another tuning point in Weaver’s life occurred when he was a freshman on the varsity basketball team. Straight would always hold a practice New Year’s morning, which was a way of making sure everybody got home at a good time New Year’s Eve.
“Our head football coach, Jerry Huntsman, was the assistant basketball coach,” said Weaver. “He and Coach Straight could be pretty animated in practices. I was expected to guard Kent Paul, a senior who was an all-state quarterback and played freshman basketball at IU. It was me, a boy, guarding Kent, a man. In that practice, Coach Straight and Huntsman cut me absolutely no slack. Coach Straight had a system that if you made mistakes you’d have to run the bleachers at the end. I was still running the bleachers after everybody else had run them, showered, got dressed, and left. I was so angry, I thought, I’m gonna quit. This is unfair. I shouldn’t have to guard Kent Paul.’ And yet, I somehow stuck it out.”
When Huntington reached the state finals Weaver’s senior year, he saw Huntsman, who later became the head football coach at Indiana State, and said to him, “Do you remember January 1, my freshman year?” Huntsman threw his head back and Weaver quickly added, “You expected me to guard Kent Paul.”
Huntsman laughed and said, “You never thought you could do it, did you?”
Weaver exclaimed, “God, I love you, Coach.”
During Weaver’s freshman year, Jim Seneff moved to Huntington and became an integral part of a team that became affectionately known as the “Clean Cuts.” Weaver welcomed him with open arms.
“You look at Huntington County from the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s in terms of just a lot of things working really, really well,” said Weaver, “and it was a very magical time. We were blessed to be a part of that. Our basketball team grew every year. I fully appreciated that when I went on to college, because I got into a situation where I didn’t grow every year. What I learned is how important a teacher, a coach, or someone outside of yourself is to your growth, because Coach Straight absolutely expected, he demanded, improvement. The beauty of it was that we as teenagers thought we could be about this good, and our expectations of ourselves didn’t even approach what Coach Straight’s were.”
Weaver and Shumaker, also an Indiana All-Star in 1964, advanced to the Fort Wayne semistate all four years as Vikings. They lost to Kokomo in the afternoon in 1961 and ‘62, then beat Noblesville in the afternoon in ‘63 before losing to South Bend Central in the championship game.
“That kinda whetted our appetite,” said Weaver. In 1964, Huntington defeated Kokomo and Elkhart in the semistate to move to the state finals against Columbus, Lafayette Jeff and Evansville Rex Mundi. Weaver scored 22 points as the Vikings beat Columbus, 71-67, in the afternoon and Lafayette downed Rex Mundi, 74-61.
In the title game, won by Lafayette, 58-55, Weaver had only five points. “I’d love to play that one over,” he said. “I wouldn’t get three offensive fouls that quickly. That was a matter of not picking up on what they were doing. I didn’t play very much, which was too bad, because it’s every kid’s dream to win the state championship.”
Receiving the Trester Award “was very special,” says Weaver. “It says something about the community of Huntington, my teachers, my minister, my coach, my parents.”
Weaver dreamed of going to Indiana University. “If Bobby Knight had been at IU when I graduated and had I had an opportunity, I would have been there in a heartbeat,” he said. “I went for a weekend, and stayed with Tom and Dick VanArsdale and Jon McGlocklin. Walking around campus with Tom and Dick was pretty impressive, but I didn’t like Branch McCracken’s style of basketball. Coach Straight was very disciplined, with a heavy emphasis on defense. Branch’s style was quite the opposite. I wanted to focus on a more controlled type of game.”
Weaver chose Northwestern over Duke and Michigan, because, according to Sports Illustrated, the Wildcats had the best recruiting class in the country the year before Weaver went there; the enrollment was relatively small (6,500); and he thought the coach Larry Glass, was a “super fine guy.” Ironically, the Wildcats turned out to be more a Branch McCracken-type of team than a Bob Straight-type team, averaging over 92 points Weaver’s junior season.
Northwestern scored 108 points in a home game against Kentucky, but lost, 110-108. “I can’t tell you how many I scored, but I can tell you about the shot I missed at the end of the game,” said Weaver. “A play was set for me, and I shot from the side of the free throw line. I could hit eight of 10 consistently, but not that night.”
The Chicago Bulls of the NBA drafted Weaver in a lower round, and he believes he could have made the end of the bench for a season. “Now I wish I would have,” he said. But there was no signing bonus offered, and the pay wasn’t much for where a 6’4” forward was chosen, so Weaver opted to study for an MBA at Northwestern after serving two years in military service. He played a lot of basketball in Germany while in the Army.
Weaver’s grandfather started the Weaver Popcorn Co. in 1928, and Weaver joined the company in 1972. He worked with his late father for 30 years. The popcorn factory, which supplies about 30 percent of the popcorn consumed throughout the world, is located in Van Buren, Indiana, and has about 450 associates, the name Weaver uses for his employees. They contribute a percentage of the company’s pre-tax profits each year to the Weaver Popcorn Foundation, which goes toward scholarships.
Weaver has not met Indianapolis native Dave Letterman, but the television host contacted the company, and loves to eat a product called Explod-O-Pop. Weaver and his wife, Becky, are both married a second time. She has adopted twin sons, and he has a son and a daughter, both of whom work in the company business. The Weavers have five grandchildren.
“My wife loves to go to basketball games with me, and I still get butterflies when I go,” said Weaver. “To the day I die, I’m gonna love basketball”