by Steve Beaven
Sloan’s abrupt exit not only left his alma mater without a coach during the peak of the college recruiting season. It also left Mike Duff in limbo.
The University of Evansville secretly flew Bobby Watson into town on a Thursday night, keeping everyone guessing until he made his first appearance as the Aces’ new coach the next morning, March 11. He’d been an assistant at Oral Roberts and beat out dozens of competitors to replace Jerry Sloan.
Watson was made for Evansville. Every line of his résumé. Every word he spoke. His family. His faith. His military career. He was a commanding presence, 6'8", handsome—with the dark hair and eyes of his Italian ancestors—and he had an affable charisma that left everyone in his wake feeling like they had a new best friend. At thirty-four, he was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a devout Methodist with a wife and three daughters. He lacked Sloan’s star power, but had coached at every level of amateur basketball, in high school, junior college, and as an assistant at three Division I schools, including Wake Forest and Xavier. Watson promised Evansville fans a disciplined program, well-groomed players, and closed practices with a classroom atmosphere. The Aces would play high-intensity pressure defense and a free-flowing, fast-breaking offense. Watson was a master recruiter who made clear that UE had to upgrade its roster to compete in Division I. On his first day, he met with the UE players who would return in the fall. And then he set out to find the young men who’d soon join them at Roberts Stadium.
In those first weeks at UE, with his family still in Tulsa, Watson worked from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., attending to every detail. He hired three assistant coaches. He met with a clergyman who would provide for the team’s spiritual needs. He met with student leaders to build enthusiasm for the program. He discussed plans for joining a conference that would include Xavier, DePaul, and Valparaiso. He brainstormed new slogans for team stationery and arranged for boosters to invite players and their dates over for postgame meals. He made plans for a summer camp for boys and reviewed blueprints for the new coaches’ offices.
Much of the time, he was on the road, logging thousands of miles, by car and by plane, hopscotching between Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Dayton, Louisville, and Cincinnati. The pace was relentless. For ethical reasons, he wouldn’t recruit the nearly twenty kids he’d been pursuing for Oral Roberts. But the standards that governed big-time college recruiting had always been malleable.
“Of course,” Watson said, “if a 6'10" guy on ORU’s list called and said he wasn’t going there and would rather be in Evansville, I’d say, ‘Come ahead.’”
Mike Duff’s final decision did not come easily. Too many options. Too many people to please. A big state school with a nationally renowned program? Or a small private school with an unknown coach? Play close to home or hours away? Start immediately or ride the bench for a year? The entire process, every moment of indecision, was excruciating.
As winter turned to spring, Mike’s options narrowed. Joe B. Hall didn’t invite Mike to Kentucky for a campus visit and never offered him a scholarship. Kansas State was out because Mike didn’t want to move so far from home.
He wasn’t interested in Missouri for the same reason. But Missouri kept coming hard. It was the only way Norm Stewart knew. Stewart grew up the son of a gas station owner in rural Missouri and played his college ball at the university. By 1977, he’d been the coach at Missouri for a decade and built a program that would soon be one of the top twenty in the country. Adding Mike to his roster would send a powerful message to other coaches: Norm Stewart would pursue—and sign—the best players, anywhere. Stewart and his assistants came to Eldorado every week, for several days at a time. Mike couldn’t get away from them. And yet he couldn’t tell them no. Kay Barrow, Mike’s mom, liked Norm Stewart. She believed that Mike could thrive academically at Missouri and felt the competition would be better at a bigger school.
But Evansville was still in the running. Soon after he was hired at UE, Watson headed to Eldorado to charm Kay and John Barrow. He wanted to meet them before he introduced himself to Mike. So the three of them sat down one day in the waiting room at John’s office while Mike was at school. They hit it off immediately. Bobby wore cowboy boots, just like John. And after the monotonous parade of faceless coaches, Kay found Watson appealing. Tall and handsome, charismatic and sincere. Mike liked him, too. Evansville was an hour’s drive from Eldorado, with a small campus and a storied basketball program.
On Thursday, April 14, Watson made another trip to Eldorado. Mike told him he hadn’t made a decision, but promised he would drive to Evansville the following Monday for a campus visit.
Then, at 2:00 p.m., Norm Stewart and two assistants showed up at Eldorado High School. Mike told them he wasn’t ready to make a commitment, and the coaches assured him they were only visiting. They knew the competition was fierce, and they wanted Mike to understand that, after investing so much time and energy, they had come to protect their interests.
Mike had a track meet that day at another school, and when it ended, one of the Missouri coaches gave him a ride home. When they arrived, Stewart awaited them inside, prepared to make a final pitch. He wanted Mike’s signature on a National Letter of Intent, securing his commitment once and for all. The discussion that followed dragged on for hours.
At first, Mike agreed to come to Missouri, then and there. But later he changed his mind and called Bob Brown, who came over to talk with him one-on-one. Brown bolstered his resolve, prompting Mike to tell Stewart again that he didn’t want to sign with Missouri. He’d visited the university and knew he’d never be happy there. The campus was huge. And the drive to Columbia was four hours, too far from his family and his girlfriend.
But Stewart persisted. “You told me you would sign,” he said. “So let’s get it over with.”
Exhausted from the pressure, Mike finally signed away his college career at 8:30 p.m. Even then, pen in hand, he knew it was a mistake. Stewart and his assistants left, victorious at last.
But Mike was devastated, wondering what he’d done. He couldn’t sleep that night. At 2:00 a.m., he awakened Kay and told her he would be unhappy at Missouri. She told him it was only natural that he would have second thoughts after making such a big decision and assured him that everything would be fine. But it wasn’t fine, not the next morning nor in the days that followed. Mike felt certain that Missouri was wrong for him. Finally, he mustered the courage to call Stewart to renege on their agreement. Stewart wasn’t having it. He promised Mike that once he moved to Columbia, he’d realize that he had made the right choice. He called Mike back three or four times that day, frantic at the thought of losing his top recruit. But Mike finally stood his ground. Missouri was out. Now he had to decide, all over again, where he’d go to college.
The next day, he met with Bob Brown to discuss his options. Stewart insisted that the letter of intent was binding, which meant that Mike couldn’t go to another Division I school unless he sat out a year. If he wanted to play immediately, he’d have to settle for junior college or a Division II school. But the competition would be so weak, Mike worried that his skills would deteriorate.
When Watson learned that Mike was wavering in his commitment to Missouri, he let it be known that he was still interested in bringing him to Evansville. Watson returned to Eldorado on May 2, but swore that it had nothing to do with Mike.
“Bob Brown and I are working together on a basketball camp and we have some other business interests,” Watson told a reporter, without elaborating. “The purpose of my visit was strictly to see Bob Brown.”
Because, of course, Watson would never actively recruit a player who had signed a letter of intent with another school, right? But, if Brown suggested to Mike that he should call Watson, Bobby would most certainly take the call, wouldn’t he? So that’s what Mike did. Then, on May 3, he drove to Evansville.
Watson, meanwhile, adopted a particularly creative interpretation of the widely held tenets of the letter of intent. He claimed the documen
t that Mike signed wasn’t binding. It was merely a “gentlemen’s agreement” honored by Division I schools, but not an NCAA rule. Technically, he added, UE remained a Division II school until the fall, and thus didn’t honor letters of intent. Bob Hudson, the assistant athletic director, even called the NCAA to get an unofficial ruling on the matter. Then he wrote an official-looking document in his best legalese.
To Whom It May Concern:
This will confirm the conversation with Mr. Warren Brown by phone Wednesday, May 4, at 9:15 a.m., concerning the National Letter of Intent. Mr. Brown stated that the NCAA is not connected in any way with the National Letter of Intent, and the signing of same by any student would not affect the eligibility of any student athlete.
Later that day, Mike officially signed a scholarship agreement with UE. Stormin’ Norman Stewart was furious but uncharacteristically subdued, offering a “no comment” through gritted teeth when a reporter asked about Mike.
Rather than crowing about Duff’s change of heart, Watson professed wonder at such a fortuitous turn of events, as if the hand of fate had gently guided Mike to Evansville.
“It is just one of those unbelievable things that just happen,” he said. “Why it happens, I don’t know.”
For Watson, Mike’s commitment was his first victory at UE, an emphatic endorsement of his fledgling basketball program. The best coaches in the country wanted Mike Duff, and he chose Evansville.
It seemed, at the time, like a small but encouraging sign of a hard-luck town’s changing fortune.
THREE
Down South
EVEN WITH ITS TEEMING factories, its slums, whorehouses, and gambling dens, its bustling banks and shops, Evansville, Indiana, has always seemed more rural than urban, more like a town than a city, more a part of Kentucky than Indiana. Evansville had much in common with the great urban manufacturing centers of the Midwest—Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland—big cities where cars, bombs, and refrigerators rolled off assembly lines by the millions. But its pace, its geography, and its approach to race relations often left Evansville out of step with its northern neighbors.
The novelist Theodore Dreiser spent four years in Evansville as a youth and wrote about the city in A Hoosier Holiday after returning to town as an adult in 1915.
Evansville is a Southern city, in spite of the fact that it is [in] Indiana, and has all the characteristic marks of a Southern city—a hot, drowsy, almost enervating summer, an early spring, a mild winter, a long, agreeable autumn. Snow falls but rarely and does not endure long. Darkies abound, whole sections of them, and work on the levee, the railroad, and at scores of tasks given over to whites in the North. . . . It is as though the extreme South had reached up and just touched this projecting section of Indiana.
The Ohio River was central to life in Evansville, to jobs and politics, to war and peace and race relations, gambling and prostitution, and the economy. Early in the nineteenth century, white settlers built Evansville on the shores of the river in the southwest corner of Indiana. Native Americans had thrived on the deeply forested land for hundreds of years. But in 1805, the US government pulled off an old-fashioned land grab, taking vast swaths with sweetheart treaties and then selling its new property on the open market for two bucks an acre. Hugh McGary Jr., the enterprising son of an Indian fighter, took a liking to the lush green hills as he traveled back and forth across the river to pass the time with a lady friend in Kentucky. But more important than natural beauty was his hunch that he could make, literally, boatloads of money. Hugh Jr. envisioned a port along a rising little spit of land that looked unlikely to flood. So, in 1812, he bought 441 acres. Two years later, he donated one hundred acres for a county seat and named the new community after Colonel Robert M. Evans, a well-known local pol and friend of Hugh Sr.’s. McGary’s bet on the Evansville riverfront paid off. At midcentury, locals built a wharf along the river, and soon steamboats loaded with raw materials added Evansville to their routes. The mills and factories built on the riverfront would dominate the city’s economy for more than a century. Furniture shops, lumber mills, foundries, and all manner of factories paid decent wages, about ten dollars a week for sixty hours of work. The Scotch Irish and Brits who’d first settled Evansville were soon outnumbered by Germans escaping political strife at home.
Indiana troops fought for the Union during the Civil War. But Evansville couldn’t escape its Southern roots or the slave trade. Racial unrest would define the city and its politics for decades.
Evansville served as a link in the Underground Railroad, as black men, women, and their children were smuggled across the Ohio River at night and given shelter in the homes of black families willing to risk their lives. Escaped slaves continued north up to Terre Haute or Lafayette, often on their way to Canada. These were dangerous missions—for the escaping families and for the people ferrying them north. Even freed slaves who had the documents to prove their status weren’t safe. Slave catchers traveled from the South and patrolled the riverfront, looking for a lucrative payday, their work sometimes aided by the sheriff. Still, in the years to come, thousands of former slaves settled in Evansville. From before the war to 1890, the black population exploded from about 130 to more than 5,500.
But even as the black community grew—opening businesses, churches, and schools—its tenuous relationship with its white neighbors was defined by intimidation and mob violence. Historian Darrel E. Bigham has pieced together the escalation of slow-simmering racial tension in 1903, when blacks and whites fought over property rights, and black men were accused of assaulting a white woman and trying to kill a police officer. Then, on the afternoon of July 3, a tavern dispute ended in a shoot-out between a white police officer and an African American man named Robert Lee. The officer died the following day—the Fourth of July—and that evening hundreds of angry whites crowded outside the jail, eager to get their hands on Lee. The prisoner remained locked away. But the next night, the city erupted in violence. About a thousand people returned to the jail, and white men descended on black neighborhoods. With his city in chaos, Evansville’s mayor closed all the taverns and ordered his constituents to remain inside. On July 6, the governor sent one hundred troops to restore the peace. But when the soldiers faced off against another angry mob at the courthouse, someone among the protesters fired a shot. The troops responded by firing into the crowd. By the time the shooting stopped, twelve were dead and thirty wounded. Fearing ongoing attacks on their neighborhood, Evansville’s black community was consumed by panic. Many fled the city on foot along the railroad tracks leading out of town. Order was restored only after the governor sent in another three hundred troops. But the damage had been done. Black families left town for good. Plans for an African American newspaper were scrapped. Evansville grew to nearly seventy thousand people by 1910, but the black community only got smaller. In the 1920s, white supremacy had rooted so deep in the workings of the city that the men who ran for office often sought and received endorsements from the recently revived Ku Klux Klan. Or they simply joined, aligning themselves with a cresting wave of fervent white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and opposition to the Catholic Church.
The Klan was a powerful player in city politics in the 1920s, thanks to D. C. Stephenson, an ambitious, baby-faced political operative of mysterious origins who arrived in Evansville after World War I, working for a coal company and glad-handing the local power brokers. His formal education was limited. But Stephenson possessed a certain charisma that attracted returning veterans and aspiring statesmen. Stephenson lost a bid for Congress in 1920 as an anti-Prohibition Democrat. So he joined the Republican party, opened an office downtown, and adopted the title of Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana. With Evansville as his base, Stephenson built one of the most powerful Klan operations in the country. At its peak, Klan membership included more than 30 percent of the white men in Indiana. About four thousand men claimed membership in Evansville, marching in parades and burning crosses. Stephenson soon gre
w wealthy from his cut of membership fees and the sales of white robes and hoods. He forged alliances with politicians of both parties, in Evansville and throughout the state. In 1924, the Klan helped governor-elect Ed Jackson, a host of state legislators, and most of the Indiana congressional delegation. The following year, the Klan sent Evansville Republican Herbert Males to the mayor’s office. The Klan’s support was no surprise. Males was one of its own.
Far from the back rooms and saloons where Evansville’s politics were hashed out, the city’s elites boasted opulent Victorian homes in sunny riverfront neighborhoods and steered local social and cultural institutions. But even as Evansville grew in the early 1900s, it remained an insulated outpost 180 miles south of the state capital in Indianapolis and 170 miles east of St. Louis, the nearest big city. Evansville lacked many of the cultural amenities enjoyed by its neighbors in Terre Haute and Carbondale, where big state universities played a leading role. In Evansville, the closest four-year colleges were more than one hundred miles away. Wealthy families were happy to send their sons and daughters out of town for a university education. But the absence of a college contributed to Evansville’s reputation as an unsophisticated industrial town. For the wealthy and the civic-minded, this simply would not do. Evansville wanted a college, an institution of higher learning that might smooth the city’s raw edges. So, in 1917, it bought one.
Civic leaders proposed relocating Moores Hill College, a financially struggling little Methodist school two hundred miles east of Evansville. But they needed money. So, on April 15, 1917, the city launched a fund-raising campaign with a goal of $500,000 and asked the Methodist Church to match it. The chamber of commerce took out a newspaper ad outlining all the benefits a college would bring to Evansville, including higher property values, trained leadership for local industry, and “an elevation of intellectual and moral standards.”
