Year graduated
1948
Major accomplishments
Received Trester Award for mental attitude; Served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, from 1965 to 1999; Named a Living Legend by the Indiana Historical Society for his distinguished Congressional service; Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer
Nancy Hamilton chuckled when she learned that her husband, Lee Hamilton, had agreed to be a part of this then-and-now look at some of Indiana’s most noteworthy former high school basketball players. Mrs. Hamilton said it was kind of funny that whenever her husband is introduced at a political dinner, the emcee will not only include several of the Congressman’s most notable accomplishments in government service, but invariably will squeeze in the fact he is in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
“My wife was probably joking about the Indiana Hall of Fame,” said Hamilton. “If anybody introduces you, they’ll look over your resume and see all this, that, and the other, which doesn’t mean anything to them. They almost will invariably cite the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Indiana, of course, is famous for basketball.
“I always joke about it, because the night I was inducted they brought in Bobby Knight and Oscar Robertson. I was in distinguished company. The emcee was making a presentation to Oscar, and said that during his NBA career he scored whatever it was, 26,000 points [26,710 to be exact]. The emcee was a friend of mine, and I turned to him and said, ‘Just forget my point total, please.’”
Since leaving the House of Representatives, Hamilton has continued to score points in government service. He is the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. Hamilton also served on the 9/11 Commission.
Although he doesn’t have time to see as many basketball games as he’d like, Hamilton remains a sports fan. He said, “I’ve had a good friendship with a lot of the writers over the years, some of it relating to politics and some to sports. I’m an avid reader of the sports pages. I guess maybe a little less so than I used to be, but I still read them very carefully. I begin the day looking at the sports pages.”
Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Hamilton didn’t become interested in basketball until the family moved to Evansville when he was in eighth grade. He immediately fell in love with the sport.
“You remember the movie Hoosiers” he said. “My experience was very similar to that, only with a larger school, not a small school; but it became kind of the center of things for me.”
As a junior and senior at Evansville Central, Hamilton made a lot of sports news, along with teammate Gene Southwood, who was an Indiana All-Star in 1948.
“We had very, very good teams my last two years of high school,” said Hamilton. “In my junior year, we got put out of the tournament in the Bloomington semifinal by Clyde Lovellette and Ronnie Bland of Terre Haute Garfield [in the championship game]. In my senior year we were undefeated throughout most of the season. We got beat in the final game of the regular season in Bedford, then went to the final game of the tournament.”
Hamilton was a 6-foot-3 center, “small nowadays,” he says. The Bears rallied to beat Muncie Central, 48-40, in the afternoon, but Hamilton severely hurt his right knee toward the end of the game. “I could not finish the game,” he said. “We had a great fan, [Dr. Gilbert Hyatt], who traveled with us, and he happened to be an orthopedic physician. He took me down to the bowels of Butler Fieldhouse and looked at my knee. He knew it was a fairly serious problem. I had torn a cartilage.”
The doctor began to maneuver the knee around to get it back in place. “That’s a fairly painful process,” said Hamilton, “and when they do that they usually give you some kind of anesthetic, but they didn’t want to do that in my case. The doctor got the cartilage in place and bandaged the knee heavily and put a splint on it. He told the coach we could try it for the night game, but I don’t know how long it will last.”
Hamilton started against Lafayette Jeff, a team the Bears had beaten pretty decisively during a holiday tournament at Lafayette (65-51). After several minutes of the first quarter, Hamilton hurt the knee again. “It was clear, the doctor said, they couldn’t fix it,” he said. “I spent the rest of the game down on a training table listening to it on the radio. They were televising the game, but didn’t have it on in the locker room. And we got beat [54-42].”
Hamilton might be the only recipient of the coveted Trester Award for mental attitude to receive it in the dressing room. “The award was actually given to my father, who stepped out onto the floor to receive it,” he said. “He brought it down to the locker room.”
That must have been a bittersweet moment, to which Hamilton replied, “It was more bitter than sweet at the moment for me. We had lost the game, and quite frankly, all of us believed it was a team we could beat, because we had done it during the regular season. Gene Southwood and I were the key scorers. We worked very well together. And my injury kind of discombobulated our entire offense and defense.”
Winning the Trester Award has taken on new meaning for Hamilton. “At the time I was awarded the Trester Award I didn’t really think all that much about it,” he said. “My goal throughout high school was to win the state tournament. We had failed. I was deeply, deeply disappointed. The Trester Award was kind of a runner-up prize, I guess. I didn’t appreciate the significance of it, to be frank about it, at the time it was given to me. Over the years, given the prestige of the award in the sate, of course my attitude began to change. I recognized what a great honor it was to receive.”
Hamilton had a number of college scholarship offers. The one he considered most seriously was to Vanderbilt, where Southwood went, but Hamilton’s family favored DePauw and that’s where he enrolled on a Rector Scholarship, which paid most of his educational expenses.
“It was not an easy decision for my family, because I had a free ride at Vanderbilt, and we were not a well-to-do family,” said Hamilton. “I went to DePauw, and made a decision not to move ahead with big-time basketball. We were very good my first three years. We always played a couple of Big Ten schools and got beat by ‘em.
“At that time they had a tournament for smaller schools, and I always was disappointed DePauw University didn’t let us play in that, even though we had invitations to them. We had a very poor season my senior year. It was the only year I played that we did not do well. That was a bit of a shock to me, because I had never been on a team like that before.”
After his DePauw days, Hamilton had professional offers from teams in Fort Wayne and Oklahoma, but opted to go into law school at Indiana University in Bloomington. Any regrets about not turning pro?
“If the context were today,” he said, “I’d have gone ahead, because you earn so much money even if you sit on the bench, but that was not the case back then. In those days, the pro game was very tough. Bangui’ around on buses. It was not a very attractive life. I wasn’t that high up, and I was only offered a few thousand dollars. I don’t even remember being indecisive about it. You naturally wonder how you would have done, but you do that every time you make a decision in life.”
After a year of study in Germany, Hamilton went to Indiana University, where he earned a law degree in 1956. He practiced in Chicago and Columbus, Indiana, until finally deciding to run for Congress in 1964. “Basically I was bored practicing law,” said Hamilton.
Hamilton remains a faithful fan of Hoosier Hysteria. “You bet I am,” he exclaimed. “I promote it all the time.”