by Steve Beaven
In late 1962, early in his first season at Evansville, Sloan sat out practice one day nursing a sore knee when his coach sat down for a chat. “Jerry,” he said, “someday after your pro career is over, I want you to come back to Evansville to take my place.” Sloan didn’t understand. He hadn’t even played a game yet. But McCutchan was serious. He recognized the depth of Sloan’s talent and drive long before Sloan realized it for himself.
So it was no surprise that Sloan was the beating heart of McCutchan’s best teams. But he was not Mac’s only all-American.
Larry Humes was a slender forward who came to Evansville from Madison, Indiana, perched on the Ohio River, 165 miles east of the college. He was a quiet kid with prominent ears, arched eyebrows, and a deeply lined forehead. In 1962, he’d been Indiana’s Mr. Basketball—the best high school player in the state. Three years later in Evansville, he averaged nearly thirty-three points a game, maneuvering around the basket with the balletic grace of a figure skater. Walt Frazier, a guard at archrival Southern Illinois, who later won two NBA championships with the New York Knicks, once told a sportswriter that Humes was “a maestro . . . He was phenomenal, man. I couldn’t stop him. Hanging shots, off-balance, fadeaway, using the glass . . .”
Sloan’s game, on the other hand, was all bone and gristle. He was the team’s best rebounder and its top defender, equally adept at guarding players from 5'6" to 6'11". He was McCutchan’s ideal, on the court and off, with an understated disposition and a dry sense of humor.
“The only thing I regret about us being in the College Division,” McCutchan told Sports Illustrated in ’65, “is that Jerry and Larry won’t get the recognition they deserve.”
It was the perpetual lament of Aces fans. The College Division versus the University Division. Evansville knew its Aces could beat the big schools in the University Division. They’d seen it, year after year. And they were certain that Sloan could shut down Bill Bradley, the cerebral forward from Princeton, and that Humes would dominate Cazzie Russell, the high-scoring guard from Michigan. But no matter how many games they won or how many high-profile teams they beat, the Aces would never earn the same attention and respect of John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins or Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats. They settled for perfection instead.
In the final weeks of 1964, the Aces played transcendent basketball, a stretch so mysterious and magical that it seemed as if only the Boston Celtics could challenge them. Iowa fell first. Then Northwestern and Notre Dame. George Washington, Louisiana State, and Massachusetts left town wondering why they’d bothered to show up. As the new year began, the Aces rolled on, blistering regional rivals by twenty points or more. The only true threat they faced was Walt Frazier and his Southern Illinois Salukis. The Aces squeaked past SIU on January 20, 81–80. Five weeks later, Evansville prevailed a second time, 68–67. Their third meeting came on March 12, 1965, in the national championship game at Roberts Stadium. Tied at 74 when the buzzer sounded, the teams traded baskets in overtime until Evansville led 83–82 with four seconds left and Sloan at the line. He sunk the first free throw, but the second bounced around the rim for something like eternity before finally falling through the net as Sloan threw his hands toward the heavens and leaped with joy. Those were his final moments in an Evansville uniform.
The Baltimore Bullets selected Sloan in the 1965 NBA draft. The following season, he joined the Chicago Bulls, where he played for ten years and earned a reputation as a relentless defender, all arms, elbows, and knees. He didn’t back down from anyone, ever. Sloan’s best friend from childhood was David Lee, who went on to be a successful high school coach in southern Illinois. Once, while Sloan was still playing in the NBA, Lee invited him to scrimmage against his team. Sloan was a grown man, playing against high school boys. But he showed no mercy. When a kid gave him an elbow on a jump ball, Lee recalls, Sloan flattened him, dropping the boy to the floor and leaving him with a broken arm. Jerry Sloan was an NBA all-star. But growing up in rural poverty had shaped his playing style.
“He was mean,” Lee says. “That was the only way he could survive.”
Sloan’s return as head coach was a coup for the University of Evansville, a private school eager to shed its reputation as a parochial institution that drew most of its students from surrounding towns. Since 1967, the university had changed its name from Evansville College, created a satellite campus in England, and expanded its academic offerings, all under the leadership of an enterprising president named Wallace Graves. And in 1977, the coming season, the basketball program would ascend to the top rung of the college game, leaving behind many of the small regional schools on its schedule to play the best teams in the country.
But for all of Jerry Sloan’s legendary grit and fortitude, he was prone to near-crippling bouts of uncertainty at pivotal moments in his life. Doubt drove him from the University of Illinois, and it plagued him again in the weeks before he took the Evansville job. He was torn between big-city ambition and hometown loyalty, between Chicago and Evansville, the Bulls and the Aces. Evansville offered him a four-year contract at $40,000 per year. It was his alma mater, practically home, and Coach McCutchan had given him so much. In Chicago, however, he could easily slip into an assistant’s role with the Bulls, putting in his time before ascending to head coach, earning far more money in the process. Sloan weighed his options in public.
“I don’t want to sound hard to negotiate with,” he said. “I’ll try to be fair and across the board with both sides.”
Ultimately, his loyalty to McCutchan and his alma mater won out. His introductory press conference at the swanky downtown hotel was packed, so crowded that one sportswriter compared it to the media scrum that had welcomed Evel Knievel to town a few years before. Sloan gave a polished performance. He was no miracle worker, he said, and if he didn’t get the job done, he expected to be fired. He wanted players who were big, quick, and intense. He promised that he’d recruit “fair and square. Hopefully, there are still some kids out there who think the same way.”
Then he headed to Eldorado to reacquaint himself with Mike Duff.
TWO
Spiral
HOW FITTING THAT WHEN Jerry Sloan came to Evansville in 1962, he spent his first weeks on the factory floor at a Whirlpool plant. The kid and the company were a perfect match, their brief partnership evoking the city’s romantic ideals of hard work and humility. But as Evansville sports fans reveled in Sloan’s return, sputtering contract negotiations between the Whirlpool Corporation and Local 808 of the International Union of Electrical Workers threatened once again to fracture the city’s economy. On February 17, 1977, some four thousand members of Local 808 squeezed through the turnstiles at Roberts Stadium, not to watch basketball but to consider Whirlpool’s latest contract offer. It was a high-stakes vote for both sides. Negotiations between the two had been grim business for nearly a decade, punctuated by two harrowing strikes that reinforced Evansville’s reputation as a “bad labor town,” steeped in union-management hostility. Charles Johnson, the powerful and blunt-talking president of Local 808, told his coworkers before the vote that he couldn’t recommend the contract because the pension and vacation proposals fell short of the union’s demands.
“It’s up to you,” Johnson said, “to make the final decision.”
The tension at the stadium that day and the deteriorating relationship between the company and its workers belied Whirlpool’s role in rescuing Evansville’s economy two decades before, when the city needed it most.
After a massive manufacturing boom during World War II, the Evansville economy crashed in the 1950s. Local plants that had supplied the home-building boom after the war, when the city proudly proclaimed itself the “Refrigerator Capital of the World,” no longer had a market for their goods. Ten major employers moved or closed between 1950 and 1957. Chrysler packed up and headed to St. Louis. The Servel Refrigeration Company shuttered its factory. The International Harvester plant out by the airport also shut down. Unemployment topped
13 percent, and the federal government added Evansville to a list of “distressed areas” eligible for loans and grants to attract new employers, a dubious distinction that sullied the city’s image of itself as a muscular manufacturing hub. In a panic, local leaders hired a consulting firm to assess the potential for luring industry. The firm’s glum appraisal haunted the city for years to come: “Evansville is racked by pessimism, gloom, inability to work in a unified fashion; one group stymies another simply because of personal differences between members. The city as a whole is unable to accomplish anything.”
In the midst of this slump, Whirlpool swooped in to rescue the city. The home appliance maker, based in Michigan, bought the International Harvester, Servel, and Seeger-Sunbeam factories in the late 1950s. As Whirlpool broadened its product line to include air conditioners and dehumidifiers, it expanded its footprint in Evansville and added thousands of well-paying jobs. Evansville was removed from the distressed cities list in 1963, and a second report from the relocation consultant praised the city’s progress. Whirlpool was especially good to Evansville College. Its executives served on the board of trustees, and each year the company hired graduates of the college’s engineering and business programs. Whirlpool, like Arad McCutchan’s basketball teams, was a cornerstone of the city’s identity. It was also the foundation of Evansville’s economy. The company’s impact and influence extended well beyond its own factories. Local Whirlpool suppliers—at plastics factories, fabrication plants, even advertising firms—employed thousands. Retailers relied on Whirlpool workers and so did local charities. Jobs at Whirlpool were coveted for their generous pay and benefits. Husbands and wives worked opposite shifts so they could raise families. Fathers got jobs for their sons. One generation after another relied on the company to provide a middle-class life.
Donnie Latham grew up on Evansville’s west side and got hired on as a machinist at Whirlpool in 1966, a few years out of high school. Donnie’s dad had worked at Servel, and his younger brothers, Billy Ray and Larry, eventually got on at Whirlpool, too. Donnie started out at $2.50 an hour, making the doors for side-by-side refrigerators, working second or third shift because he had no seniority. But he took on overtime and got a few promotions. He bought new cars and a house and raised three kids on a Whirlpool paycheck. The work was challenging and meaningful, rooted deeply in the well-being of his extended family. He was an officer in the union and retired in 2009, after forty-three years.
“I liked it there,” he says. “It was good money. When I retired I think I was making $50,000.”
But every three years, contract negotiations at Whirlpool brought a collective, low-grade anxiety to Evansville. There had been brief strikes and lockouts in the 1950s and ’60s. It wasn’t until the early ’70s that the tenor of the disagreements between the union and the company turned particularly nasty.
A strike that began in October 1970 lasted for 110 days. After the strike came to an end, Whirlpool ramped up production and in 1973 sales of room air conditioners exceeded five million. This was Whirlpool’s peak in Evansville, with nearly ten thousand people working at three plants. But it wouldn’t last. A four-month strike in 1974 was the start of a slow downward spiral. After members of Local 808 went on strike that February, Whirlpool shifted production and jobs to its plants in Arkansas and Ohio. Crescent Plastics and Ball Plastics, two major Whirlpool suppliers, laid off nearly 150 workers. As the strike wore on, community leaders pleaded with the two sides to find common ground. Federal mediators were summoned. Bishop Francis R. Shea of the Catholic Diocese of Evansville sent a letter to both sides, asking them to “make some gesture of genuine goodwill.” Finally, on June 19, Local 808 approved a contract after 122 days on strike. The new deal provided a raise, but for fifteen cents less per hour than the company’s original proposal.
Three years later, when members of Local 808 returned to Roberts Stadium for another contract vote, bitter memories of the ’74 strike lingered. Whirlpool had warned union leaders that if the local rejected its final contract offer, the company would lock the factory doors. The union had already compiled picket line schedules, and the county welfare board was preparing for a flood of food stamp requests.
The vote, however, wasn’t even close. After the union approved the new contract by a three-to-one margin, workers cheered and hugged as they streamed into the parking lot. In the optimistic days after the vote, the company suggested that it would add jobs and boost air-conditioner production in Evansville. Instead, when the market for gas refrigerators collapsed, the company closed one of its three plants in town. Its payroll in Evansville had fallen by more than half since ’73. Three weeks after the union signed the new contract, Whirlpool laid off 375 workers. More layoffs followed that summer. Bills were put off and mortgages went unpaid.
If Whirlpool was one indicator of Evansville’s well-being, the company’s decline suggested 1977 would be a bleak year for the city. And yet our mood was lightened, our hopes lifted up, by our basketball team and its new coach. Jerry Sloan passed up the NBA for Evansville. His return was an indisputable validation of our worth at an otherwise-uncertain moment in the city’s history. As the world economy slowly passed us by, we still had basketball; we still had the Purple Aces.
In the days after he accepted the job in Evansville, Sloan seemed committed to building the program in his own image. He talked to his old teammate Larry Humes about joining him as an assistant coach. He offered another assistant job to David Lee, his childhood friend. On February 5, a Saturday, Sloan traveled to Eldorado to see Duff score thirty-two points against McLeansboro, his alma mater.
Even with Sloan in the stands, Eldorado coach Bob Brown made clear to reporters that Evansville had plenty of competition for Mike. Sloan’s pedigree guaranteed nothing.
“I’m sure Mike is interested in Evansville,” Brown said. “But a lot of good people are hustling Mike very hard. He’s a long way from a decision.”
Still, Sloan enjoyed a history with Mike that none of the other coaches could match. Everybody in Eldorado knew Jerry. His farm in McLeansboro was only a half-hour drive away. Kay’s new husband, Dr. John Barrow, was an orthopedic surgeon who had operated on one of Jerry’s brothers. And Sloan, perhaps more than anyone, commanded Mike’s respect. His first workout with Sloan, at the summer camp at St. Henry’s Seminary, seemed in retrospect like a tryout. Sloan would be Mike’s mentor, one southern Illinois boy preparing another for the NBA. Mike would be Sloan’s first and most important addition to the UE basketball program, a national recruit who would set off a chain reaction that would bring more talent, more media coverage, and a long-awaited resurgence at the University of Evansville.
Two days after visiting Eldorado, Sloan brought Lee to Evansville, where they met with UE administrators and stopped by practice at Carson Center to chat with McCutchan. But Lee noticed a change in Sloan’s mood that day. He seemed discouraged. After seeing all of the other college coaches recruiting Mike Duff, Sloan felt that familiar churning in his stomach. It was the same way he felt as a homesick freshman at the University of Illinois, convinced he’d made a huge mistake.
On February 9, six days after the celebratory press conference, Jerry Sloan called Thornton Patberg, the UE vice president who oversaw athletics. Sloan told Patberg that he was headed to Evansville with his wife, Bobbye, and needed to meet with UE president Wallace Graves. Patberg immediately sensed the gravity of the meeting, but Graves dismissed his concerns as if picking a stray thread from his suit. Perhaps, he told himself, Jerry and Bobbye want to talk about buying a house or some such thing. After all, it was a big move with myriad details and a short timeline.
But when Jerry and Bobbye arrived at Graves’s office that afternoon, the new head coach didn’t want to talk about real estate. He wanted to quit. It just didn’t seem right. He told Graves about that awful feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t offer any details and didn’t make any excuses. But he’d made up his mind. He’d come to resign. Graves was incre
dulous. He’d courted Jerry for years, meeting him for dinner in Chicago, building a relationship, waiting for the day that Sloan returned. And now, less than a week after giving him the job, he wanted to quit? Graves urged Sloan to think it over.
But Sloan wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t do it.
News of Sloan’s departure struck the city like a thunderbolt. What the hell just happened?
“I think I’ll just get drunk,” one Aces fan told a sportswriter. Another said the news “actually made me sick.” In a column headlined “Black Night in Evansville,” Courier sports editor Bill Fluty acknowledged the suffering of UE fans who had long considered Sloan as “the messiah.” Fluty wrote with great solemnity that he wouldn’t blame Sloan for reneging on his deal with the University of Evansville.
“But the news kicked a world of Aces fans in the gut. That’s always the way it is when a dream ends.”
In the days after the news broke, Sloan gave one interview after another, offered vague excuses, and apologized to anyone who asked. But he never fully explained his departure. Was it money? Was it his family? Did Bobbye want to stay in Chicago? Did the Bulls make him an offer he couldn’t refuse?
“I made a mistake,” Sloan said in one interview. “Some personal problems came up—some problems I hadn’t anticipated.”
Graves believed Sloan got cold feet when he realized the competition he faced in his pursuit of Mike Duff. Sloan didn’t relish recruiting. Smooth as gravel, it was hard to imagine him glad-handing teenage boys and their parents. So he stayed in Chicago and took the assistant’s job with the Bulls instead, forever leaving Evansville wondering why.
