by Steve Beaven
“I look those people squarely in the eye and say, ‘Listen, the university didn’t want Marv dead any more than I.’ That usually ends the conversation.”
On an overcast fall day in late October 1979, Edie stood at the lectern in front of the new memorial dedicated to victims of the crash. The plaza was built in the middle of campus on a foundation of bricks laid by students and other volunteers. A cylindrical fountain was flanked by two stone columns etched with the names of everyone on the plane who was associated with the university, plus David Furr. One column paraphrased the eulogy Wallace Graves gave at Roberts Stadium: “Out of the agony of this hour,” it said, “we will rise.” It was a solemn and fitting reminder of the city’s loss.
And here was Edie, standing against a backdrop of bare trees, looking out at two hundred expectant faces. It had been less than two years since the crash, and even after all the speeches and interviews, she knew today would be difficult. This was no Kiwanis lunch. But she had taken on a new role in Evansville. She’d emerged as the walking embodiment of her hometown’s resilience. With that new role came new responsibilities.
Edie gathered her strength and leaned toward the microphones.
ELEVEN
The New Aces
THE WAIT WAS EXCRUCIATING, each day melting ever so slowly into the next, anticipation building as the choking humidity of summer gave way to crisp fall days, until a Sunday morning in mid-October 1978 when Dick Walters threw open the doors at Carson Center.
The first day of practice: more than four hundred fans filled the bleachers for two sessions, two hours in the morning and two more at night. Joined by an NBC television crew, they’d come to get their first look at the team Walters had assembled out of spare parts. Sixteen young men, virtual strangers from Chicago, Indianapolis, North Carolina, California, and points in between. They each came for their own reasons. Brad Leaf wanted to start. Steve Sherwood liked the engineering school. Eric Harris appreciated the rigor of the academics. Theren Bullock preferred a small campus. Mostly they came to Evansville because they were a step too slow or a few inches too short for the big, name-brand schools like IU or Purdue, and figured they had a better chance to play. But as they sat before Walters on that first day of practice, with all of those Aces fans who’d skipped church to be there, not one of the new players could truly grasp the enormity of all that lay ahead. Walters had done what he could to shield them from it, to steer the conversation to the future and not the past.
“Today is a new day,” he told his players at that first practice. “We’re starting over from scratch.”
From the very beginning, Walters made clear that he didn’t want Evansville to wallow in the misery of the previous December. He opposed a moment of silence before games. A tribute to Bobby Watson and his team was relegated to the very back of the media guide. He ordered a redesign of the warm-up suits and uniforms because he didn’t want Aces fans saying, “Oh, that’s what so-and-so wore.” In a regrettable interview with a television crew, he expressed his wish that something good could come from the crash, a sentiment that didn’t go over well with the families whose sons and husbands and fathers had perished on Air Indiana Flight 216. It’s not that Walters was insensitive. He was simply in a hurry.
“I’ve done everything humanly possible to make people forget,” he said one day to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. “It’s history and you can’t change history. No one can. The only thing you can control is the future.”
Despite Walters’s missteps, Evansville embraced its new basketball team. Season ticket sales grew from three thousand to four thousand. Membership in the Tip-Off Club more than doubled to seven hundred. A new campus group called the Purple Pride Gang signed up thirteen hundred students. An exhibition against the Polish national team—the Polish national team!—drew more than seven thousand fans. On Walters’s first day on the job, the lead editorial in the Evansville Press—“Welcome, Coach Walters”—called the city and the team a true family that had celebrated and suffered together. Now, it added solemnly, Walters must carry on what Bobby Watson had started. It made clear, in so many words, that Evansville needed more than a guy with a whistle and a working knowledge of the zone press. A mere basketball coach was not enough. Evansville needed a spiritual leader, a coach who could piece the community back together, one game at a time. Walters had taken this burden on his slender shoulders, and on some days it seemed as if he might collapse under the weight.
By his own count, in those first six months, Walters lost seventeen pounds—down to 146—and got by on some nights with only a few hours of sleep. He lived like a transient, staying by himself at a booster’s experimental solar house next to a country club in a swanky north-side neighborhood, with a half dozen bedrooms and no furniture. Which was fine, because Walters was on the road, three or four cities in a day, hitting the department stores for new underwear because there was no time to do laundry. He gave more than a hundred speeches and rarely ate dinner at home, even after his family moved down from Chicago.
Walters and his assistants had built the roster out of electrical tape and baling wire. They brought in a group of unheralded freshmen with long-term potential and two kids from the College of DuPage. He also poached five veterans from Kansas, Arkansas, and Iowa, making a few enemies in the process.
Iowa coach Lute Olson released two little-used subs from their scholarships so they could transfer to Evansville. But his generosity was limited. He wouldn’t let go of Larry Olsthoorn.
Olsthoorn was a 6'10" center who’d started for Iowa throughout most of the 1977–78 season. He seemed like a perfect fit for the Hawkeyes, a big blond kid from Pella and a high school all-American who’d played particularly well when Iowa faced Big Ten rivals like Minnesota and Purdue. But he was also hulking and slow and handled the ball at times like he was wearing concrete gloves. When Olson banished him to the bench late in his sophomore season, Olsthoorn decided to follow his two teammates from Iowa City to Evansville. Walters desperately wanted a big kid like Olsthoorn, someone who could rebound, clog the lane on defense, and drop in a few short jumpers when the opportunity arose. But when Olsthoorn called UE to say he wanted to transfer, Walters told him to request a release from Iowa so Aces coaches could meet with him. That’s when Olson got testy. Taking two reserves was one thing. But swiping a potential starter? No way. Olson was angry. And adamant, telling Olsthoorn, in no uncertain terms, to reconsider. Iowa athletic director Bump Elliott then offered a friendly reminder to Jim Byers, his counterpart at Evansville. “I only called to remind him that a school can’t visit with our players unless we give permission,” Elliott said. “I didn’t threaten anything.”
Still, he left the impression that Iowa might file a complaint with the NCAA, accusing UE of recruiting violations. So Olsthoorn—and Walters—had to wait. Two weeks passed before Olson relented, publicly questioning Olsthoorn’s fortitude as he kicked him out the door.
When Olsthoorn moved to Evansville, Walters rejoiced, calling his new center “potentially the best pivotman ever to play for the University of Evansville.”
It was classic Walters, a shameless mix of optimism and overstatement, and Aces fans wanted to believe every syllable.
On November 29, Ray Meyer brought his DePaul Blue Demons to Roberts Stadium for the home opener. Meyer was an aging huckster with a cauliflower face and a gray brush cut, the winner of 571 games in thirty-six years, and a reliable dispenser of bluster and charm. The Blue Demons had finished the previous season 27–3, and their visit made for a high-profile coming-out party for Evansville’s new basketball program. The Aces lost their first game on the road to Southern Illinois by twelve. But for UE fans, that loss was like a dress rehearsal, a chance for this new collection of strangers to shake off their nerves before a proper introduction at Roberts Stadium.
The national media converged on Evansville, with more than sixty writers, broadcasters, and camera crews filling the press box and camped out courtside. But there was
only one true superstar among the dozens of journalists who’d come to the stadium on that Wednesday night.
Frank Deford returned to Evansville thirteen years after he had chronicled Arad McCutchan, Larry Humes, Jerry Sloan, and their undefeated national championship season for Sports Illustrated back in 1965.
In the years since, Deford had established himself as one of the greatest magazine writers in the country. He didn’t hang around ballparks and arenas, interviewing half-naked athletes about their batting streaks or free throws. Instead, he spent weeks and weeks with his subjects, probing their fragile psyches, searching for the soft spots, conducting dozens of interviews with family and friends. He wrote sweeping, highly stylized stories, some nearly ten thousand words long, and the writing was ambitious, almost grandiose. Three months before he came back to Evansville, Deford opened a seven-thousand-word profile of tennis star Jimmy Connors with a quote from Freud followed by a reference to “Alexander astride Bucephalus astride the globe.”
“Evansville symbolizes college basketball,” Deford said that night. “This may sound like a terrible thing to say because any plane crash is a tragedy. But Evansville’s comeback has a little more meaning than if it had been any other team.”
Deford spent many hours with the Aces and their coach, sizing up Walters as the antithesis of his predecessors at UE. Walters was a generation behind McCutchan, and several years younger than Sloan and Watson. He fit squarely within a wave of emerging young coaches who were media savvy, dressed for success, and eager to jump from one school to the next, with a detour or three in the NBA, all in search of a better job, a bigger challenge, and more money. As Bob Knight and Joe B. Hall enjoyed the best years of their careers, little-known young coaches like Walters, Rick Pitino, and Jim Valvano waited in the wings.
“College basketball coaches tend to be brash front men—vain, often foppish,” Deford wrote. “And no one is more stylish than Walters: contained, slick, earnest, handsome, and absolutely sure of what he wants . . . He knows himself. Every hair is in place, every color coordinated, everything about him is impeccable—except for one. His nails are bitten to the quick.”
It had been difficult, Walters told Deford, to establish a unique identity for himself and his team in Evansville. The history of the program, memories of the crash, and the presence of two sainted coaches before him made rebuilding even more difficult than it appeared.
“On the one hand,” the young coach said, “there’s the legend of Coach McCutchan and his five titles. On the other, there’s the memory of Coach Watson and the thoughts of what he might have done. That’s been almost a JFK kind of thing.”
Four hours before the game, Walters and his team gathered in the basement of the Harper Dining Center for a pregame meal of roast beef and baked potatoes. Afterward, he reviewed the DePaul scouting report with his players, the defensive assignments, how to stop the spectacular freshman forward Mark Aguirre. He skipped an inspirational speech in favor of a more subtle approach. He was eager to take his seat on the UE bench that night, excited about their shared future. But he envied his players.
“I’d rather be you,” he told them. “I’d rather be playing tonight.”
His ballhandling would have helped. The Aces turned the ball over thirty-two times, wilting in the face of DePaul’s ferocious full-court press. UE didn’t score until two minutes and twenty seconds had elapsed. The Blue Demons led 47–28 at halftime. When the Aces cut the lead to eleven midway through the second half, 9,500 UE fans erupted, hopeful, if only briefly. But Ray Meyer’s team was merely toying with the Aces. The final score wasn’t pretty: DePaul 74, UE 55.
While Walters was disgusted—“This was the worst I’ve ever had a team play”—Deford took a more dispassionate view. After all, it was only one game, one step on the long road back to relevance.
“The fans did not appear to be all that dismayed,” he wrote. “Evansville has very knowledgeable fans . . . It’s a basketball town, in the basketball season.”
Jerry Leaf grew up amid the rolling hills and limestone quarries of southern Indiana. At 6'1", he played high school ball in the early 1950s for the Bedford Stonecutters, one hundred miles northeast of Evansville. But Jerry married young and took a job to support his family, leaving behind his hopes for a high-scoring college career. Jerry and Jackie Leaf had two sons, five years apart. Greg was the oldest. But it was Brad who shared Jerry’s intensity for the game. And it was through Brad that Jerry channeled all of the ambition he’d once harbored for himself. In the early 1970s, when Brad was in junior high, Jerry told him to give up baseball so he could concentrate on basketball. By then, the Leafs lived on the north side of Indianapolis and Jerry drove a forklift on the overnight shift at a Ford plant. Each day during the summer, while Jerry slept, Brad hopped on his bike and rode three miles to North Central High School, where he worked on his shot and played pickup games from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., pausing only for a lunch break at the burger joint around the corner. Then, after Jerry woke up and the family had dinner, Brad followed his dad out to the driveway for another ninety minutes of practice. Jerry instructed Brad to shoot from several spots on the court—say, fifty shots from the right baseline, fifty from the left baseline, fifty free throws. Jerry tracked every shot, keeping detailed written records of each session. For conditioning, he ordered Brad to skip rope and mapped out a four-mile route that Brad ran through the neighborhood. And when the high school kids gathered on the outdoor court at the elementary school across the street, Jerry made sure his boy got to play, even though Brad was only thirteen. He kept an eye on the games from a lawn chair on the Leafs’ front porch. Brad did as he was told, without complaint. He loved Jerry as much as he loved basketball.
By the fall of 1976, Brad was a high school junior, 6'3" and skinny as a pole, a decent leaper with a decent shot and a knack for anticipating the trajectory of each ball as it bounced off the rim. He’d also learned how to get open shots against bigger and faster players, twisting, fading, leaning in, or stepping out to create just enough space to flick the ball toward the hoop. But he needed playing time if he wanted to attract the attention of Division I coaches, and he wasn’t getting it at North Central High School. So Jerry and Jackie Leaf made a bold decision: the family would move to an apartment in a neighboring district so Brad could enroll at a new high school with a lousy basketball team.
On the day that Brad walked into the coach’s office at Lawrence North High School, Jack Keefer thought, What the hell? Why not? He didn’t care that it was the middle of the season. The school had opened its doors only a few months before and that first year there were no seniors, forcing Keefer to assemble a team from a small group of athletes with little or no varsity experience. Adding Brad might not help. But it couldn’t hurt. The young coach realized soon enough that the skinny kid with the goofy smile and a halo of curly black hair had been an unexpected midseason gift. He didn’t start at first. But a few weeks after Brad transferred, Keefer waved him to the scorer’s table early in a game against a suburban rival and Brad scored twenty points. The next week he dropped in nineteen and then twenty-three. Keefer’s team won six of its final ten games, and Brad was among the leading scorers in Marion County. The following season, the Lawrence North Wildcats finished 22–2 and Brad averaged twenty-five points a game. Coaches from low-level Division I schools started sniffing around. Texas Christian and Nebraska were especially aggressive, and Brad visited both. Evansville didn’t get interested until late in the season. But once Aces assistant Gary Marriott saw Brad’s gorgeous shot, he was convinced.
Holy shit, Marriott thought, this guy can play.
Brad didn’t know much about Evansville’s basketball tradition or the crash. But it didn’t matter. He eagerly accepted UE’s scholarship offer. It was too good to pass up. He could play immediately, maybe even start. And it was close enough that Jackie and Jerry could see every home game.
Before Leaf moved to Evansville in June, he assumed his new teammates w
ould include a half dozen or so quality Division I players. But he realized soon enough that Walters and his coaches had put together a big and experienced team. Guys from big-time basketball schools. Two centers who stood 6'10" and two burly forwards who were 6'8". Leaf would compete for playing time against five guards and learned during the pickup games that summer inside the sweltering confines of Carson Center that several of his new teammates were quicker and more agile than he. So, when he returned to Indianapolis later in the summer, Leaf created his own boot camp to prepare for the challenges that awaited him back in Evansville. He worked out for three hours in the morning, starting at 10:00 a.m., honing his shot and jumping rope to improve his foot speed. He worked out again for three hours each night and played on a summer league team. Brad brought the same work ethic back to Evansville. His first day on campus, he wasted no time before getting into the gym.
He played well in preseason practices and scored thirty-four points in the final intrasquad scrimmage. But when the regular season began, Brad seemed to vanish, playing in only five of the first sixteen games for a total of twenty-six minutes. Walters believed he wasn’t quick enough to play point guard or tall enough to be an effective shooting guard. Plus, he was a plodding defender on a team defined by its defense. For Leaf, it was a demoralizing start to a season that had once held so much promise. As December turned to January, he thought about quitting. The Leafs racked up triple-digit phone bills to soothe his disappointment. Jerry called Brad nearly every day, encouraging him to stick it out. Jack Keefer assured him that his moment would come.
