· 15 ·
Off into the World
In the spring of 1969, Eddie Ratleff was one of the most highly sought after high school athletes in America. He was an All-American in basketball and had made many baseball All-Star teams. He told professional baseball scouts that he intended to go directly to college. That did not stop the Pittsburgh Pirates from drafting him in the fifth round that year.
But Eddie Ratleff was determined to go to college, and basketball was his ticket to get there.
Ohio State, once again, proved its disdain for local black athletes. Fred Taylor, the basketball coach, had an affinity for recruiting white suburban and rural basketball stars over inner-city black stars. Other Big Ten basketball coaches outpaced him in the recruitment of black athletes. The university’s lack of interest in Ratleff, Nick Conner, and Bo-Pete Lamar—homegrown stars—infuriated Jack Gibbs. “I remember Gibbs called an assembly at the school and really lit into Ohio State for not going after Ratleff and Conner especially,” recalls Scott Guiler, the volunteer assistant basketball coach.
Before basketball season ended, Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes summoned Ratleff to meet with him. Hayes knew the disappointment and anger blacks in the community felt toward Fred Taylor. “I got close to Woody Hayes. I always saw him at banquets,” Ratleff says. “One day Hayes had someone come get me. Woody said, ‘If you come to Ohio State to play for Fred, I’ll take care of you. I’ll watch out for you.’ ” That, of course, was but a telltale sign—the football coach having to vouch for the basketball program.
Ratleff came to the conclusion that he still loved baseball, even if he was willing to turn his back on a professional contract. He began looking for a good college that had strong basketball and baseball programs. If he chose a midwestern school, the weather would not be as good for baseball. Like the other East High basketball players, he had sworn off the South because of its racial history. But he was also impressed with the rising career of Skip Young, his onetime basketball foe from Linden-McKinley High School in Columbus. In 1967, Young became the second black basketball player to receive a scholarship at Florida State University. Young had also become the first black to start a varsity basketball game; Lenny Hall, the first black recruited to the school in 1966, played in one varsity game in 1967, damaged his knee, and never played again. Young said nice things to Ratleff about Hugh Durham, his Florida State coach. The same year, 1967, Charlie Scott, another player in the Atlantic Coast Conference, became the first black player to play at the University of North Carolina. In the following two seasons, Scott led his team to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. He was considered a shoo-in for Player of the Year both seasons but never won the honor. Both years it went to a white player. Some white sportswriters simply refused to place Scott on their ballots.
With Skip Young, Ratleff figured the South was changing, so he decided, after some hard thinking, to go to Florida State. Eddie signed his scholarship offer in Columbus with both his mother and Florida State coach Hugh Durham by his side. Soon thereafter, Ratleff made his first visit to the school. He met the coaches and members of the basketball team. While there, he was invited to an off-campus party by a couple of black students. He was excited to go. “It was a nice party,” Ratleff remembers. “But then somebody on the street called the police. The police came to the house. The black student who answered the door said, ‘There are a lot of parties on this block. How come y’all are always coming to this house?’ And right then and there, I saw something I didn’t want to see. So I said to myself, ‘I’m not coming down here.’ ” Ratleff began toying with the idea of going to a smaller school. He liked what Long Beach State (much smaller than Florida State) coach Jerry Tarkanian had said to him: that he could come there and play both basketball and baseball.
Eddie Ratleff didn’t care that the Columbus media had already printed stories about him having signed with Florida State. His fears about the South had been confirmed. His mother, Barbara, wanted him to be happy. Jack Gibbs told him to follow his gut. Eddie Ratleff stunned people in Columbus when he announced he was not going to Florida State, but to Long Beach State, on the other side of the country.
Jerry Tarkanian had been at Long Beach only a year when Ratleff arrived. Tarkanian, a funny, intense, smart man, was not afraid to recruit black players. At the time, freshmen could not play varsity; they had to wait until their sophomore year, so Ratleff had to play for the freshman basketball team. In one early-season scrimmage against the varsity team, Ratleff torched the older players for 30 points. He was constantly dazzling the Long Beach coaches. “You guys know me; I’m a player’s coach,” Tarkanian said to his players one day after practice. “If you give me 100 percent on the court, I don’t have a lot of rules. But from now on, there are two rules that everyone in this program must follow. When you are on the floor with Ed Ratleff, get him the ball. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.” Ratleff averaged a whopping 39 points a game for the freshman team. After the season, he pitched on the freshman baseball team, but a hand injury the following year brought his baseball playing days to an end. In basketball, he led Long Beach State to the NCAA tournament each one of his varsity seasons. In his three-year career there, he was named Conference Player of the Year twice, and an All-American twice. Jack and Ruth Gibbs hopped a plane a couple times to go see Eddie play. When people asked Ratleff if there was any special reason he wore no. 42 on the basketball team in college, he told them there was indeed a reason: It was the number Jackie Robinson wore during his baseball career.
Ratleff was named to the 1972 Olympic basketball team. So was Bill Walton, UCLA’s All-American center. But Walton begged off, citing health reasons. Others saw it as a political statement, given Walton’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Hank Iba, who had coached the Americans to Olympic gold in 1964 and 1968, was named coach again.
Following their grueling training camp in Colorado Springs—where the team was winnowed to its final twelve players—the team flew off to Munich, Germany, site of the Olympics. “When we got to Munich,” Ratleff recalled, “they put us up on the second floor of one of the buildings in the Olympic Village. You could come and go, and you didn’t think anything was going to happen…It wasn’t like anybody was going to come into the village and get you.”
One of the thrilling moments for Eddie Rat was to look up one day and spot Phyllis Cooley and Vivian Crisp. They were teachers at East High and had traveled all the way across the Atlantic just to see him play.
The basketball Olympians won seven straight games before the world seemed to stop. On the evening of September 5, a group of Arab terrorists, members of the Black September group, jumped a fence and entered the Olympic Village. Wearing athletic clothing, their assault rifles hidden in duffel bags, they went directly to the dorm where the Israeli athletes were staying. They shot and killed a weightlifter and wrestling coach who tried to stop them, then took nine other athletes and coaches hostage. The basketball players were in a nearby building; some heard the gunshots but thought they were hearing firecrackers. The next day a shootout took place at the airport between the terrorists and West German police. Nine Israeli athletes died in the shootout; five of the terrorists were killed. Many thought the games would be suspended, but they went on, although their luster was lost. The Olympic basketball players reached the final game, against the Soviet Union. It was no surprise, as every USA Olympic basketball team before them had won gold. In a widely disputed call by a referee, in the last seconds the ball got turned over to the Soviet team. The Soviets won, 51–50, on a last-second shot. The Americans were stunned. There were immediate cries of cheating. It was like a bad dream to the American athletes—the killings, the ending of the final game—so surreal as to be unbelievable. As a team they decided not to accept their silver medals.
In 1973 Eddie Ratleff was drafted by the NBA’s Houston Rockets. He had a fine five-year career, but it was cut short by persistent back ailments. After his pro career ended, he did some teaching and then became a successful insurance salesman. He continues to live in the Long Beach area, where he stays in shape playing golf. In 2017, he returned to Columbus, where he was inducted into the Ohio High School Hall of Fame. Bo-Pete Lamar got down to the ceremony to join him.
Nick Conner may have played in the shadow of Eddie Ratleff at East High, but he was a star in his own right, a fierce rebounder and an unselfish player. He was pursued by many colleges. Many in Columbus thought he might attend Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, because his family had roots in the state. Ohio State, having lost Ratleff, made a halfhearted attempt to woo Conner, but neither he nor his mother felt the effort was genuine.
In the early 1960s, a group of black businessmen in Columbus formed the Cavaliers Club, a men’s club where black businessmen and educators gathered. In a way, it was their answer to the white downtown Athletic Club. The Cavaliers Club was wood-paneled, carpeted, and featured a lovely bar. Its one-floor squat building was located right off East Long Street, a five-minute walk from the offices of the black newspaper, the Call and Post. Amos Lynch, the newspaper’s editor, was a proud Cavaliers Club member. The club held jazzy dances, bestowed scholarship money upon gifted minority students bound for college, commiserated about the heartache flowing across black America, and gathered there on the day King was shot. They also allowed their club to be used for important announcements. So that’s where Nick Conner revealed his college choice. Conner phoned his coach, Bob Hart; his running buddy, Eddie Rat; and Ann Ward, his favorite teacher at East High, and asked them to join him. His decision: the University of Illinois, a Big Ten rival of Ohio State. Conner took time to mention both Ohio State and Michigan State by name, wanting all in attendance to know he had spurned them.
Such was Conner’s leaping ability, that at only six foot six, he starred at the center position for Illinois, usually playing against players three and four inches taller. He played alongside Nick Weatherspoon, the great Canton-McKinley player whose team the Tigers defeated in the 1969 high school tournament.
During the 1971–72 basketball season, the Illini bested Ohio State in a game played at Illinois, 64–63. The Illinois team later came to Columbus to play Ohio State. Many Tigers were on hand to watch Conner and cheer for him that day, among them Jack Gibbs. While warming up, Conner engaged in a dunking contest with a fellow teammate. He cupped a ball in each hand, soared toward the basket, went up, and dunked both balls coming down from above the rim. There was such pandemonium in the arena that security personnel wondered if something untoward had happened. Conner seemed to be sending a vivid message to Ohio State fans, reminding them of his talent. The Buckeyes got the best of the Illini, however, 103–70. Between those two games Conner averaged 7 rebounds and 8 points. The following season Illinois beat Ohio State in Columbus, 79–68, then lost, 65–64, back on the Illinois campus. In those two games Conner amassed 29 points and 25 rebounds. The civil rights movement in the early 1970s had hardly manifested fully in college athletic departments. Even in a fairly diverse state such as Illinois, the University of Illinois had only two black players during Conner’s senior season. The next year the basketball team was all white.
Conner was drafted into the NBA by the Buffalo Braves. His lack of height undermined him at the NBA level. He bounced around the European league for a while but was plagued by knee problems. He returned to Columbus and took a factory job with General Motors. In 2005, Conner was spotted walking around Columbus using a cane. He was ill; it was lung cancer. He died that year. He was fifty-five years old.
Of all the players from the 1969 basketball team, Dwight “Bo-Pete” Lamar had the most uncertain journey to college. Eddie Rat tried to get Long Beach State to take a look at Lamar, but they were not interested. “I tried to get Western Michigan to offer him a scholarship,” says Joe Roberts, the East High alumnus and assistant coach at Western Michigan. Ohio State showed absolutely no interest. During his summer after high school, Lamar would sometimes go to the Ohio State campus to play in one of their indoor gyms. It was mostly high school kids wanting to play hoops. But sometimes, Ohio State varsity basketball players would be there as well. One afternoon Lamar found himself flying down court and facing Luke Witte, Ohio State’s seven-foot varsity center. Lamar went skyward and dunked on Witte. On that particular day, OSU Coach Fred Taylor was watching. Taylor rose from his seat and strode out to the court. “He threw us out,” Lamar recalls. The seven-footer had been embarrassed.
In 1969, all the basketball guards who came to Ohio State on scholarship were white. Many in Columbus wondered if Lamar’s so-called rebel reputation (that Afro!) from North High had somehow infected the minds of college recruiters. As Jack Gibbs knew all too well, it did not take much scurrilous gossip for a black high school athlete’s fortunes to turn in a wayward direction. Lamar sat at home waiting for a scholarship offer to come from a big-time university. He had submerged some of his explosiveness to fit in with the East High team, and he was happy about the state championship, but now he wondered if that tactic—scoring less on behalf of the team—had hurt him. He finally began telling family and friends he was going to go to Federal City College, in Washington D.C. It seemed a peculiar choice. Federal City was an open-enrollment school, meaning anyone with a high school degree could get in. The school had just opened in 1968—growing out of civil rights protests—and had suffered financial woes from its beginning. It also lacked a home gymnasium for its basketball team. A player of Lamar’s caliber deserved better opportunities than what Federal City College could offer. The school had absolutely no athletic history.
When Beryl Shipley, the coach of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, had come into Columbus to visit Eddie Ratleff and watch him play, he found himself also paying attention to Dwight Lamar on the court. He liked the way Lamar shot and the confidence with which he carried himself on the court. So when Shipley found out Lamar was thinking about going to unheard-of Federal City, he called Jack Gibbs and asked if it was true. Gibbs told him yes, and he also told him Lamar deserved a better scholarship offer. He vouched for Lamar’s character and praised him to the skies. Gibbs had persuaded Lamar to come to East for his senior year of high school, so he had a special concern about the direction his former student’s future might take. Shipley decided to offer Lamar a scholarship, figuring he just might become a nice role player on his team. Lamar thought long and hard about the offer. He was petrified of going into the Deep South.
Southwestern Louisiana had been notable for being the first university in the South to welcome black students—a small number of them—following the 1954 Brown desegregation ruling. The first black basketball player arrived there in 1966. It made national news. By 1969, the flagship university in Louisiana, Louisiana State University, had still not integrated its all-white basketball team.
AN INTERLUDE
Down in Dixie
Beryl Shipley grew up in rural Mississippi. He knew and heard of that world of Negro maids and Negro sharecroppers. He knew of red-eyed former slaves sitting in town squares, old men and women, swollen ankles and arthritic limbs, the life drained from them. He knew of married white men who carried on affairs with Negro women. He knew that Mississippi’s William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren were fascinating figures and writers. And like most who were living in Louisiana in the latter part of the 1950s, as he was then, he knew the name Mack Charles Parker.
On February 23, 1959, June Walters, white, married, and pregnant, was sitting in a Dodge sedan just off U.S. Route 11, a few miles outside of Lumberton, Mississippi. The car had broken down. Her four-year-old daughter was with her. Jimmy, her husband, had gone to get help. Mack Charles Parker, a black man recently out of the army, was in the area, coming from a Negro juke joint not far away. He was in a car with four black friends. They had consumed some moonshine. They came across Walters and left after she informed them her husband was returning. A day later, Walters claimed Parker, having sent his companions onward, had circled back, kidnapped her and her daughter, taken them to a nearby creek, and raped her. Walters picked Parker out of a lineup. Parker vehemently denied the charge. Walters said Parker had a gun. A gun linked to Parker was never found. Parker was jailed a day after the charge. On April 13, he was indicted on charges of rape and kidnapping. On April 25, hooded men broke in to the Mississippi jail where Parker was being held, beat him, and dragged him out, bleeding badly, to a waiting car. The men raced across the state line into Louisiana. Just inside the state, they stopped the car, pulled Parker out, stood him up, and fired bullets into his chest at point-blank range. They then threw him into the Pearl River. Word of the jailhouse abduction hit the newswires. Martin Luther King Jr. notified the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, sent upwards of sixty agents into Mississippi to investigate. Parker’s swollen body was pulled from the river on May 4. The FBI agents, in what was widely believed to be a serious and thorough investigation, got confessions from three of the Parker murderers. The agents also identified the other members of the kidnapping-lynching party. The FBI wrote an extensive report and turned it over to the Mississippi prosecutor, expecting indictments. But the prosecutor refused to hand down any indictments. Brave FBI agents then volunteered to testify before the state grand jury themselves. The prosecutor quashed that plan. A federal grand jury also refused to indict the men identified in the Parker killing. To this day, the murder of Mack Charles Parker remains unsolved and the perpetrators unpunished.
Beryl Shipley had been in Lafayette, at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, for two years when the Parker killing occurred. It was the talk of Louisiana. Shipley had been raised in that stark and corrupt world where blacks were terrorized and faced a cruel and indifferent justice system. The South’s political heroes were men like George Wallace of Alabama, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Leander Henry Perez of Louisiana. “Bad ones are niggers and good ones are darkies,” Perez once said about the black populace of his state. Perez was a lawyer, a liar, a bully, a bigot, and a political intimidator. In 1965, less than 5 percent of the blacks who lived in Perez’s Louisiana parish were registered to vote. He routinely sent goons to intimidate would-be black voters.
It was into this racial history and political brew that Bo-Pete Lamar traveled in 1969 to play basketball for the Ragin’ Cajuns of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Before leaving home, he promised his mother, Lucy—who remained frightened of the South—that he would not travel alone after dark if he could help it. Lamar remembers the first evening in his dormitory, settling in, then going to watch TV in a common area. “I was watching TV. And on the channel, they started playing ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie.’ I said to myself, ‘What the hell?’ ”
He was definitely in Dixie.
It may have had “University” affixed to its name, but the school played in the small college division. As soon as basketball practice got under way, it took Shipley and his coaches little time to realize that Bo-Pete Lamar had come south to make his mark. He stunned onlookers with his offensive prowess, tossing in jump shots from all over the court. He made Houdini-like passes. Shipley couldn’t wait for the season to start. He asked his coaches and himself: How did the Ohio colleges not see this kid’s talent? Lamar averaged 22 points a game in his freshman year; in the small college division, freshman could play varsity. He was a shoo-in and won Freshman of the Year in the league conference.
By the middle of his sophomore season, Lamar—his Afro now grown to epic proportions—was all the rage for the Ragin’ Cajuns: He was leading the entire nation in small college basketball scoring, averaging 36 points a game. With no Eddie Rat around, the reins had come off the small stallion. He was unanimously voted first team All-Conference selection. In his sophomore season, on February 25, 1971, Lamar eviscerated a school record, scoring 62 points against Northeast Louisiana. In Lamar’s junior year, the school moved into Division 1. They would be playing bigger schools, against bigger and better basketball players. Lamar didn’t care: He scored at a 30-plus clip in the early part of the season. They were the Ragin’ Cajuns of Southwestern Louisiana, and Shipley kept telling the kid nobody wanted out of high school to just keep shooting the daggone ball, which he jubilantly did.
Bo-Pete Lamar of Southwestern Louisiana and Eddie Ratleff of Long Beach State. The former East High teammates were both named UPI first team All-Americans in 1973.
Fans couldn’t wait for that year’s Bayou Classic tournament, which was going to be hosted by the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The teams that were invited included Texas El Paso, Pan American, and Long Beach State, which featured Eddie Ratleff. Jack Gibbs had journeyed from Columbus and was in the stands, along with Lee Williams, East High’s track coach. The games shook out in a dream fashion, with Southwestern Louisiana pitted against Long Beach State in the final. Ratleff’s team was blisteringly hot, shooting 68 percent, and led at the half, 41–36. Lamar had a frigid first half, making only six of eighteen shots. The game seesawed in the second half, but Lamar stepped up. He had poured in 22 points by the time the Ragin’ Cajuns pulled the game out, 90–83. Eddie Rat had 26 points and 8 rebounds. Bo-Pete Lamar and Eddie Rat were named Co-MVP’s for the tournament. They stood at midcourt, their cool Afros abloom, to accept their awards. The moment was magical for Jack Gibbs, like something that had been beautifully scripted. He joined his fellow Tigers for an after-game celebration.
That same year, Lamar led all major colleges in scoring with a 36.3 per game average. He was the first player in history to lead the nation in small college scoring one year, then to lead the nation in major college scoring the next. It was an astonishing feat. On the hardwood courts of college basketball, Bo-Pete Lamar was unstoppable. The Cajun fans loved his flamboyant game. Sometimes on campus he was seen sporting a purple leather jacket. Before home games the crowd chanted “Dwight Lamar Superstar,” as the band played “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Dixie grew on him. But he still wouldn’t drive around the Cajun countryside at night alone. In his senior year, Lamar finished sixth in the nation in scoring, and he led the team, once again, to the NCAA tournament, where they lost in the second round to Kansas State, 66–63. That year, Bo-Pete Lamar made the UPI first team All-American squad. The other members were Bill Walton of UCLA, David Thompson of North Carolina State, Doug Collins of Illinois State, and Eddie Ratleff of Long Beach State. Ratleff and Lamar thus became the first two players in NCAA Division 1 college history to have played on the same undefeated high school team and gone on to become first team All-Americans in the same year.
Drafted by the Detroit Pistons, Lamar instead chose to play in the American Basketball Association (as did fellow All-American David Thompson) and, in 1973, signed with the San Diego Conquistadors. First things first: He took care of his mother, Lucy. She never had to scrub another bathtub, save her own. He couldn’t make the migraines go away, though she did get better medical attention. The ABA was an enigmatic league with outsized personalities. The league’s game ball was red, white, and blue; the Conquistadors’ coach was Wilt Chamberlain; and the team’s organization was a mess. The team owner had signed Chamberlain as player-coach, but a court battle with Chamberlain’s former NBA team, the Lakers, allowed him only to coach. Lamar had a stellar rookie season, averaging 20 points per game. On January 13, 1974, Lamar set the team scoring record, pouring in 50 points against the Indiana Pacers. He played two more years in the ABA, then went to the Los Angeles Lakers. His first season there he suffered a host of injuries, most severely a dislocated bone in his hand. The Lakers let him go after one season, and his basketball career ended.
He returned to Lafayette, became a sales distributor for a beer company, married, and had two daughters. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August of 2005, the aftermath affected businesses all across the state. The economic suffering drove Lamar to move back to Columbus. Michael Coleman, the city’s first black mayor, helped him get a job in recreation. Coleman thought that players who had gone off and had success in the professional ranks and then returned to the city should have an opportunity to work with inner-city kids.
In 1973, the year Lamar finished college, the NCAA suspended the basketball program at his former college (now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) for two years, citing a slew of NCAA violations when he was there. It remains a painful subject for him, and he says he had no idea how the program was run administratively during his career there. There were supporters of Beryl Shipley who believed it was all about revenge by other white southern coaches who resented Shipley for defeating them with his black players. Shipley’s team was penalized for doing things those coaches had been doing with white players for years, Shipley’s supporters howled.
In 2016, Bo-Pete Lamar retired from working for the recreation department in his hometown.
Roy Hickman and Larry Walker, the other two starters on the 1969 basketball team, ventured out west, like Eddie Rat, getting scholarships to play basketball at Citrus Junior College. They both had fine careers. Hickman returned to Columbus after two years. “I met a woman, got married.” He began rehabbing houses. He’d show up at a Tiger reunion, then he’d go five or so years before attending another one. He still has a bull-like physique, though he has a noticeable limp: the knees sometimes get to throbbing. Walker finished his education at Central State University in Ohio. He didn’t play basketball, but he caught the coaching bug. He wound up coaching the boys basketball team at his alma mater, East High, and in 1979 he led the team to a state championship, the first championship since the 1969 Tigers won it all. He now resides in Indianapolis.
Robert Wright, a role player who came off the bench on that 1969 team, went to a business college and still works as a consultant. His business takes him around the world. Sometimes in his travels he’ll run into someone who knows someone who went to East High. Then the memories start to swirl. Kevin Smith got a scholarship to George Washington University. Knee problems curtailed his basketball career. He came back to Columbus and finished his degree requirements at Ohio Dominican University. He currently works as a car salesman in the city.
When Bob Hart stepped down from coaching East High in 1971, the school hired Tom Fullove. (He was the school’s first black head basketball coach.) Hart became the athletic director at Walnut Ridge High School up until his retirement. He married Millie Cooper, who had been a longtime neighbor. During horse racing seasons, he’d ride out to Scioto Downs Racetrack, where he continued to work in the evenings as he did in many previous years. Whenever a Tiger alumnus appeared at his ticket window and recognized him, they’d start a conversation about his teams. It made him feel good to be remembered. Some of the ticket holders in line would get to grumbling because they wanted to place their bets. One day he arrived home and told Millie he wanted to return to the battlefields of World War II. It caught her off guard, but she was game. He dipped into his savings, got two plane tickets, and off they flew. As they walked the battlefields where he had fought, Millie could tell how meaningful it was to him to be there. He stared quietly out over the terrain and summoned names of the dead. He was an old soldier tasting the salt air and remembering the bloody cost of freedom.
It began to upset Bob Hart that no one called him for induction into the Ohio High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame. Coaches with less stellar records than his were being inducted. He’d been voted Ohio Class AA coach of the year three times. And that was the top high school division in the state. What more did it take? He’d heard what was said behind his back: That those teams he coached on the segregated East Side were just naturally gifted; that it didn’t take a genius to coach them. The more astute coaches knew otherwise. “He kept saying to me,” recalls Paul Pennell, “ ‘I don’t want to go in posthumously.’ ” But Bob Hart died in Venice, Florida, in 2005, and his Ohio Hall of Fame induction didn’t come until two years later, in 2007. Even with the Hall of Fame honor, Hart’s daughters have never thought their father was properly appreciated, especially for his progressive racial outlook. “I can remember,” says Sherri, “me and Dad sitting at the counter of the Novelty Food Bar. We’d be the only white people in there.”
There was little doubt that Garnett Davis would be drafted by a professional baseball team. The scouts had been eyeing him since his junior year of high school. He had also become something of a local legend playing American Legion summer ball. He had made first team All-State in Ohio as a catcher and was named to several All-Star teams. So it was a joyful event for Davis and his family when he was drafted in the third round, in June of 1969, and signed by the New York Mets, the team that was racing to a World Series championship that year. Lloyd Gearhart was the Ohio scout who had pushed for Davis. In the 1940s, Gearhart had played in the minor leagues for the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association. Blacks knew to steer clear of the all-white Crackers and their ballpark. After his playing days were over, Gearhart did some scouting around Ohio and Kentucky for the Mets, and Davis caught his attention.
Garnett Davis received a $15,000 signing bonus. To a poor kid on the East Side of Columbus, it was a princely sum. He was very proud that he was now able to help out his hardworking mother.
The Mets assigned him to one of their AA minor league teams and he reported to Marion, Virginia. Garnett had little understanding of how difficult it was to ascend the ladder in professional baseball. Less than 10 percent of drafted players actually make it to the big leagues. Garnett, unwittingly, added to his long odds. The team had another player slated to start at the catcher position on their Virginia minor league team, and they told Garnett he’d be playing third base. “They didn’t want to waste his speed as a catcher,” Paul Pennell says of the Mets. But the switch confused and upset Garnett. He kept telling anyone in the organization who would listen that he was a catcher. But professional baseball coaches aren’t in the business of bending to bruised egos; there are simply too many players in any organization who are willing to do whatever is asked of them. He had a decent enough rookie campaign, and the following season, Garnett Davis made the twenty-seven-man Mets roster for the Florida Instructional League. The team played in Pompano Beach, Florida. It didn’t take long for his complaints to start up again. He wanted to catch. But there was already a catcher in Pompano Beach, and the Mets liked him. In the eyes of Mets officials, Garnett became a malcontent. The next season, he made the self-defeating move of asking the Mets organization for his unconditional release, imagining such a request might force the team to yield to his demands. But on April 5, 1972, Garnett received a Certified Letter in the mail. At the top of the letter from the Mets, in bold print, was written: OFFICIAL NOTICE OF DISPOSITION OF PLAYER’S CONTRACT AND SERVICES—National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues.
In the middle of the letter there were four words, surrounded by a lot of white space, as if to starkly emphasize the point the team wished to make: “You are released unconditionally.”
Garnett couldn’t help but be surprised by the suddenness of the Mets’ reaction. But he had, in effect, cut himself out of the organization. Pennell, his high school coach, was bewildered that Garnett had demanded his release after a little more than two years. “There are ten- and twelve-year minor league players,” Pennell says, pointing out that players who stay in the league for their entire careers can still make a good living.
There were discussions between Garnett and the Cincinnati Reds about getting into their minor league system, but the talks went nowhere. He was adrift. Garnett attended some baseball games back in Columbus; people listened to his long spiel about what had happened. He began saying that he had been “blackballed” by the Mets, a term connoting underhanded banishment. He began losing sleep. All his life, he had played baseball. In 1975, he enrolled at Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio, and majored in recreation. One day, on campus, in his dorm room, he began wondering if he had been too impatient, if he had foolishly tossed away the dream he had possessed since junior high school. So he swallowed his pride and wrote to Joe McDonald, the Mets general manager. It was a one-page typed letter. At the outset, he explained how much he missed baseball. But then the letter quickly took on an accusatory tone, saying that the Mets had misused him by putting him at third base. He also said he had not received “proper compensation” for having been a third-round draft choice, and he wondered if his race had anything to do with his treatment. The letter finally swooped back around by its conclusion with a plea. “May I have a second chance,” he asked the Mets general manager. “I am ready to play baseball the way you want it played. I want to be a pro. I want to supplement my baseball dreams with reality.”
Joe McDonald might have thought of tossing such a letter away. But he had grace, even empathy, and wrote back. His letter, dated May 23, 1975, reached Garnett in Wilberforce. It started out with McDonald warmly and personally recalling Garnett as a Mets draft choice. But it quickly veered back to answering Garnett’s charges against the Mets. “The New York Mets gave you every opportunity to show your ability, but, unfortunately, the potential which we initially saw in you as a player never fully developed,” McDonald wrote. “We certainly did not resent the fact that we were wrong or you did not succeed. We fully understand when we sign a player he only has one chance in ten of making it to the Major Leagues. It is a long and difficult road.” McDonald went on, intent, in a very down-to-earth manner, to defend the character of the Mets. “Garnett, you know as well as I how we worked with you and tried to get you to the Major Leagues. Neither the color of one’s skin nor the bonus he receives for signing have any bearing on the outcome. It is strange that four other players who made it to the majors were mentioned….namely John Milner, Dave Schneck, George Theodore and Bob Apodaca. If we were to combine their aggregate bonuses, they would not approach the amount you received for signing.” A young man sitting in a dormitory room in Wilberforce, Ohio, reading such a letter, might certainly have reeled from the directness of it, but he would also have had to appreciate the respect and reasoned tone it conveyed. “Regardless,” McDonald concluded, “we just have to concentrate on signing younger players in the hopes we come up with a Major Leaguer. I hope you can understand and we wish you nothing but the best in the future.” Garnett Davis never heard from the Mets again.
Davis got his college degree in 1977 from Central State University, then took a job with the American Electric Power company in Columbus. He worked there for seventeen years, mostly answering emergency calls about downed power lines. Most weekends he found a baseball game to play in. He continues to live in Columbus and has started a small baseball training camp for kids. It’s a modest endeavor; he does all the printing for the brochures himself. On a recent visit to his home, I spotted a brand-new baseball sitting idly on the dining room table. At sixty-seven years old, he still looks fit enough to belt a couple balls into the bleachers.
Ray Scott, who periodically took over the catcher position when Coach Pennell moved players around, enrolled at the Columbus College of Art and Design after high school. It’s a well-regarded school and a pricey one. He lasted less than a year because of money woes. He then joined the Air Force. The Vietnam War was still going on, and he got orders to go. Then someone in the Air Force was smart enough to realize he already had two brothers, Ken and Jesse, who were Marines serving in Vietnam, and the Air Force determined maybe that was enough sacrifice for the Scott family. His Vietnam orders were rescinded at the last minute, although he spent a career in the Air Force. Afterward, he returned to Columbus. He now works for the city’s bus company on a specialized route, picking up and taking seniors where they need to go. Ray Scott’s wife, Cynthia, is the daughter of the late Hiram Tanner, the onetime sports editor of the Call and Post.
As gifted and fearless as Norris Smith was on the Tiger mound, he could not garner the attention of professional baseball scouts. But that didn’t much matter to him, because Capital University in Columbus offered him a scholarship. In his freshman year, he pitched a no-hitter. He retired as a Columbus schoolteacher.
In the mid-1990s, Roger Neighbors, the Tiger shortstop that victorious year of 1969, was walking across East Broad Street—near East High School—and by the time he saw the bus, it was too late. The impact left him severely injured, forcing him to go on disability. Every now and then Coach Pennell would go pick him up and they’d go out to Jet Stadium to watch the Columbus Clippers minor league team play. His health deteriorated. When he died in 2000, his friends later told stories at his funeral of what a great high school shortstop he had been.
In high school, it was hard not to envy Robert Kuthrell, the right fielder, just a little: He could make it home to dinner before every other Tiger after baseball practice. His family lived in a white house on a hill above Harley Field; he could get there in less than seven minutes. Sometimes he’d race up the hill, reach his porch, and turn around and wave at the players going by. He played baseball at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. He later moved to Illinois, where he worked for many years. When his father, William, died on March 28, 2005, Robert returned to Columbus for the funeral. While in Columbus, on April 2, Robert himself suffered a heart attack and died. He was fifty-three years old. His mortified family had to hold a double funeral.
Erkie Byrd, the star pitcher on the 1967–68 East High baseball team, who had gone off to Vietnam right after high school (actually completing two tours), made it back home. The old-timers in the neighborhood who would see him out and about after his military service told him he was as good as Eddie Rat on the mound. He would just chuckle. He worked in Columbus seventeen years for the Ohio Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation, helping veterans with their paperwork about Agent Orange, the chemical spray that was used to defoliate the forests in Vietnam but that entered the respiratory system of American soldiers with devastating effects. Byrd died in 2008 at age fifty-seven. He had been suffering for years from his own exposure to Agent Orange.
Coach Pennell, in later years, always took time, when someone asked about that 1969 baseball team, to mention the juniors on the squad. “When we came down the stretch,” he says, “those juniors were really important. They stepped up.” Those juniors were Phil Mackey, Robert Kuthrell, Richard Twitty, Leroy Crozier, Larry Mann, Tony Brown, and Kenny Mizelle. They all returned for their senior season.
When he was a high school senior, Kenny Mizelle dreamed of going to California to play college baseball. “I thought I could play for UCLA.” The ghost, his father, was out in California, supposedly dead, only not really. Instead of going to the West Coast, Mizelle remained in Columbus and went to Ohio Dominican College, now Ohio Dominican University. He played point guard on the basketball team and set some school assist records. After college, he married Cynthia Chapman, his sweetheart from East High, went to work in banking, had a son, later divorced, and became a fairly popular deejay in the city. He’s retired now and living in a suburb of Columbus.
Ernie Locke, the lone sophomore on the baseball team that year, abruptly left baseball behind in his junior and senior years of high school. His decision surprised and disappointed Coach Pennell. A seemingly promising career simply ended. “My girlfriend didn’t want me to play,” Locke says. “And, well, so I didn’t.” She was his first serious girlfriend. He continued to work at the grocery store on Mount Vernon Avenue. After high school, he enrolled at Ohio State. Walking around campus his freshman year, the fall weather sweet, the World Series on television, a thought came to him: He wondered if the Ohio State baseball coach might be interested in a onetime pitcher who had played for the East High School state championship baseball team three years earlier. No, he was not. He worked some blue-collar jobs but decided he wanted more for himself. He got admitted to the police academy and became a police officer. In thirteen years on the force, he never fired his weapon and was grateful for that. But the job wore him down. “I once got a call to the West Side of town. A home had been burglarized. The white lady standing at the door wouldn’t let me come in and investigate. She said, ‘You’re not coming inside my house. I want a white officer.’ ” He left the force after thirteen years. When he thinks of the baseball championship, he often thinks of the day the entire team was standing tall together in front of the school during the celebration. “Standing up there with the team,” he says, “was so inspiring to me. I think that’s the reason I never got in trouble as a teen.” Ernie is also retired now.
Paul Pennell eventually left East High and became a coach at Briggs High, also in Columbus. In 1991, he took Briggs to the final four of the state basketball tournament. They didn’t win, but it was a proud moment. He has amassed a shelf full of honors and awards for his coaching and community service. He and Sharon get out to all the East High reunions. At the reunions, they don’t even have to ask; he insists on singing the Tiger fight song. And there he stands, white man, crew cut, contorting himself:
I went down to the river
Oh yeah
And I started to drown
Oh yeah
I started thinking about them Tigers
Oh yeah
And I came back around
They crack up. They’re crazy about him. Every now and then, Sharon Pennell—lifelong teacher and community volunteer—will be in the kitchen in the early morning, brewing coffee. There’s a knock at the back door. Garnett Davis. “We’ll just sit and talk,” she says. At one of the 1969 baseball banquets, Garnett had singled Sharon Pennell out, telling the audience that at the away games that final baseball season, she often was the only Tiger supporter in the visitors’ section. She got tears in her eyes.
Throughout much of 2017, Sharon was in and out of the hospital with kidney problems and other ailments. Sometimes, back at home, in her special hospital bed, Paul would hear her cackling on the phone. It was Eddie Rat, calling from the West Coast. Sharon died on September 3, 2017.
In 1971, Jack Gibbs announced he was leaving East High. He wanted to try something new after having been in the Columbus school system for twenty-seven years. There was a dinner and testimonial for him at East High. He was given many gifts, and the school auditorium was renamed in his honor. Hampton Kelley, a singer and East High graduate, flew in from South Carolina just to sing “If I Can Help Somebody.”
Gibbs subsequently got a lot of speaking invitations. He liked to tell audiences that the 1968–69 school year at East High was quite special to him because of its unforgettable twin championships, yes, but also that it was the first full class to graduate following the King assassination—and that year the school had the highest number of graduates go on to two- or four-year colleges in the school’s history. “At least 30 percent that year went on to some kind of college,” says Roger Dumaree, the vice principal at the time.
One day not long after he had left East High, Jack Gibbs was riding downtown, going to a meeting. Phillip Pool, a young white teacher Gibbs had hired at East High in the fall of 1968, was in the car with him. Gibbs wanted to discuss future business opportunities but also wanted Pool to catch him up on what was going on at East High. Through the car window, Gibbs spotted a haggard and disheveled figure pushing a grocery cart. It wasn’t his first time seeing this man downtown. Pool half glanced at the man as the car slowly kept rolling. “Jack turned to me,” Pool recalls, “and said, ‘Phil, did you see that man pushing that cart?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ Jack said, ‘That’s my father.’ I didn’t know how to respond. It was one of the most shattering things that ever happened to me.”
Clarence Gibbs, Jack Gibbs’s father, was staying at the Faith Mission, a homeless shelter in downtown Columbus. Every year the Gibbs family had a family reunion in Harlan, Kentucky. And every year Clarence Gibbs showed up—in suit and tie. He always looked more like a tired businessman in a tired-looking suit than a homeless figure. Jack Gibbs was amazed at how his father always pulled himself together for these reunions. Clarence told whoppers about how well he was doing in Columbus. The truth was, no matter how much his son tried to help his father, he couldn’t keep Clarence away from the bottle. Jack Gibbs continued to spot his father in downtown Columbus, pushing the grocery cart, shambling about like some Stagolee figure.
Jack Gibbs took a steady job directing a program called Educational Resources, under the umbrella of the Model Cities program, a nationwide antipoverty program. From a tiny office on Bryden Road, not far from East High, he helped college-bound minority kids get scholarship money. They were overwhelmingly first-generation college students. He still worked long hours. Ruth kept on him about his weight, and his blood pressure medication. He nodded and basically ignored her. Every year he went back to Harlan, Kentucky, to put flowers on the grave of his little sister. Sometimes, looking around Harlan, he couldn’t believe how far he had come, both from the town and in life. Everyone in Harlan was proud of him.
One day, Jack Gibbs decided Columbus should have a career center for high school students, something that would incorporate the arts and vocational learning. It would be akin to New York City’s High School for the Performing Arts, but even more ambitious than that because it would offer many innovative challenges; he envisioned more than a dozen one- and two-year intensive programs. Gibbs poured every brilliant idea he ever had about education into this concept. The school opened in 1976 and was labeled a magnet school. It’s now known as the Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center, and it has a national reputation.
On June 22, 1982, Ruth Gibbs was rushing about because she had to get out the door for church. Jack wasn’t going; he wanted to catch up on some reading. “I said, ‘Honey, give me some money to put in the church basket,’ ” she recalls. He did and off she went. She came home to get his supper going, then went right back out to get to Bible study. That evening, when she arrived back home, Jack Gibbs was in a coma; he’d had a massive stroke, from which he would never recover. He’d always found it hard to stick to the routine of taking his prescribed medication. His death, at age fifty-one, shocked the community.
In the 2016–17 NCAA college basketball season, those who rapaciously followed the sport heard the name Jack Gibbs quite a bit. He was one of the highest-scoring guards in the nation for the Davidson College basketball team. He is the namesake and grandson of Jack Gibbs.