We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

Brad wasn’t alone in his despair. The first two months of the 1978–79 season were ugly. The Aces opened with five consecutive losses, winning their first game by a point at Murray State on December 11. Three players had quit by early January because they didn’t get enough playing time. Walters complained bitterly about the referees, claiming officials favored Aces’ opponents because they didn’t want to be accused by other coaches of being soft on the poor school recovering from a plane crash. He was grouchy at home with Jan and the kids and weary of scrutiny from UE fans who thought they could coach his team better than he. They booed him when the Aces played a four-corners offense and booed him some more one night when he grabbed center Barry Weston and pulled him off the court. They also sent him mail, about thirty letters a day. Some correspondents included diagrams of plays. Others sent hate mail full of vitriol for the young coach from the big city. Walters had little patience for his detractors.

  “Somebody ought to throw a bucket of water in their face and wake them up,” he said. “Their kind of support we don’t need. They can stay at home and watch Bugs Bunny.”

  Clearly, the honeymoon had ended.

  Walters also told a reporter that he got fan mail from young women who didn’t know he was married and wanted to meet him. True or not, it was a curious tidbit to share with a newspaper. Walters was a handsome guy, almost pretty, and there had always been whispers about his personal life. The whispers occasionally grew loud enough, Walters says now, that UE boosters pulled him aside and asked him to explain. “Nothing but gossip and lies,” he told them.

  Jan Walters grew up on a farm outside of their hometown of Chatsworth, Illinois. They started dating in high school, and by the time Dick was hired at Evansville, they’d been married for a decade, with three children under the age of ten. Jan was utterly devoted to Dick’s career and their family. She went to nearly every game, home and away, during his last two years at the College of DuPage. She often brought the kids with her.

  “Basketball is Dick’s life—the one thing he’s always wanted to do—and we try to be part of it,” Jan said shortly after UE hired her husband. “I’ve always told him, wherever you go, we’ll go.”

  But basketball took a toll on Walters’s family. Dick’s peripatetic work style left the five of them with little time together, especially during the season. Dick was always out recruiting, on the road with his team, or at speaking gigs. He talked often about how rarely he slept at home. When the pace slowed during the summer, Dick and Jan took the kids to the country club on Sundays, where they’d all lounge around the pool before having dinner and heading home. Dick, however, was a big celebrity in Evansville, and it wasn’t unusual for UE fans to stop and chat. Walters was gracious and polite to a fault, which sometimes complicated otherwise-ordinary outings with Jan and the kids. To give the family some privacy, he had a swimming pool built in their backyard.

  Jan had always been interested in art, ever since she was four, when she used pieces of wood from her father as her canvas. She had little time for herself in her first few years in Evansville. But as the kids got older, she resumed her interest in sketching and painting and enrolled as an undergraduate art major at UE. Her work included still-life pencil sketches and a portrait of Chad, their youngest. Dick was elated when Mark Tomasik, a young beat writer from the Evansville Press, began working on a long profile of Jan. Dick supported her passion for art and seemed genuinely proud of her sketches and paintings.

  Walters knew Jan never got the credit she deserved. While he traveled on private jets and spent nearly as much time in nice hotels as he did at home, Jan raised their kids in anonymity, taking them to school and helping with their homework.

  She was married to the basketball coach at the University of Evansville and, on some days, it was a thankless job.

  The future of the University of Evansville basketball program made its debut on a Monday night in late January 1979, when the Aces traveled north to play the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

  Brad Leaf finally emerged from the fog that had shrouded his season and soon put the idea of leaving Evansville out of his mind. As the starters struggled early in Milwaukee, Walters sent Leaf to the scorer’s table, and he responded with eight points to help turn a ten-point deficit to a one-point lead at halftime. He finished with thirteen, and the Aces left town that night with their sixth victory. Eric Harris scored sixteen, Theren Bullock grabbed eleven rebounds, and Walters finally got some sense of clarity about his lineup. Brad played even better three nights later in a victory over Tennessee Tech, dribbling through the defense and pulling up for short jumpers. He hit all four of his shots from the field and all four of his free throws for twelve points. As the season progressed, Leaf proved his value as a sub, consistently scoring in double figures.

  Bullock built his reputation on defense. At 6'6" and 170 pounds, he was long, sinewy, and tireless, with a pterodactyl’s wingspan and an intensity that recalled Jerry Sloan in his prime. Bullock grew up in Blue Island, a town of twenty-two thousand about fifteen miles south of downtown Chicago. He learned his work ethic from his father, a construction worker, and earned his nickname—Snow—because he reminded childhood friends of NFL wide receiver Jack Snow. His was the house where every kid on the block gravitated, where he played basketball with his friends for hours in the backyard, pausing only for injuries and his mother’s iced tea. Theren gave up football after breaking his shoulder as a high school freshman—“My grandmother made me promise I would quit”—and grew into a star on the basketball team. He was an amiable and outgoing kid, a B-plus student who averaged twenty-one points and fourteen rebounds as a senior at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School. He turned down a chance to play Big Ten ball at Northwestern, in Chicago’s northern suburbs, because he wanted to get away from home and found UE’s small campus friendly and inviting. Bullock played regularly almost from the beginning of the season. But he struggled at times. He was no longer the best athlete on the floor. The days when he could get any shot he wanted under the basket had faded into memory, as had the smaller, slower opponents who couldn’t stop his ballhandling.

  Of all of the freshmen, Eric Harris was the first to earn consistent playing time. He arrived in Evansville shortly after graduating from high school in tiny Washington, North Carolina, and immediately enrolled in summer classes: physics, math, and chemistry. He’d decided on a career in medicine after knee surgery in high school. He liked the doctor and he liked science and mathematics and envisioned his future as a physician. So, in addition to summer school at UE, Harris took a job as a courier at Welborn Hospital, delivering lab reports and X-rays.

  “The lab reports list a variety of diseases and I can ask the nurses what they mean,” he told the Evansville Courier that summer. “Going into different units gives me something of an overall picture of the hospital.”

  Late in the season, as Leaf, Harris, and Bullock settled in, the bitterness of the previous months diminished with each Aces victory. UE’s improvement coincided with the reemergence of Scott Kelley, another refugee from Iowa. Kelley was 6'8" and slow, a frequent target of criticism from Walters. But once Walters stopped yelling at him, Kelley relaxed and led the Aces in scoring in the three games prior to a Valentine’s Day matchup against Butler University in Indianapolis. UE had won five of its last seven, a promising streak that eased the anxiety among Evansville fans. Butler was just 9–13. But this was an important game for the Aces, on the road against a longtime rival that had beaten UE the month before at Roberts Stadium. Butler, like Evansville, was a small private school with a sacred hoops history. The Bulldogs played on holy ground at Hinkle Fieldhouse, a fifty-year-old campus gym that hosted the state high school basketball championships for many years and later served as the setting for the climactic scenes in the movie Hoosiers.

  UE led by twelve at halftime. But the Bulldogs surged back, tying the game at seventy-six with a minute to play. On their final possession, the Aces went into a stall, whipping the ball around the pe
rimeter, looking for a final basket that would leave Butler with little time to forge another tie. As Eric Harris dribbled from the top of the key toward the basket, he made a smart bounce pass to Kelley, who dribbled once and took two long steps to the hoop along the left baseline.

  Mike Blake handled the play-by-play for the television broadcast, his ragged baritone reflecting the gravity of the moment. “Sixteen seconds . . . We’re down to the nitty-gritty . . . Scott Kelley on the drive . . . And he’s got it! Eight seconds. Six seconds . . . The game is over! Evansville has won the ball game!”

  The Aces rushed the floor in a mob, hugging and slapping backs and palms. Walters raised his arms in triumph, walking toward the locker room, as if he had shrugged deadweight from his shoulders. Two weeks later, UE wrapped up its first full season in Division I at 13–16. It wasn’t the .500 record Walters had predicted. But after losing its first five games, his resilient team of castoffs and transfers had recovered to give Aces fans hope for the future.

  And in Leaf, Bullock, and Harris, Walters had discovered the foundation of Evansville’s resurgent basketball program.

  TWELVE

  Out of the Agony

  IN THE WEEKS BEFORE Jeff Bohnert died aboard Air Indiana Flight 216, his younger brother Craig decided to give up on a career in veterinary medicine and transfer from Purdue to the University of Evansville. He planned to move back in with his family during the holidays and stop by the athletic department to talk with Bob Hudson about joining Jeff as a student manager. But Bob Hudson was gone now and so was Jeff. Craig needed his family more than ever. And they needed him.

  In the spring of 1978, the Bohnerts met their firstborn son’s death with silence. Jeff was the oldest of four, the one Don called “our first miracle” because doctors had told Dolores Bohnert she’d never have children. The void Jeff left was obvious but unspoken. Dolores, known by nearly everyone as Dee, did her best to maintain a sense of normalcy and order for Don and their three sons, sticking to routine, moving forward every day. In an era when mothers stayed home to care for their children, Dee continued working at the phone company. She made sure the boys did their chores, that they kept the house clean, that Craig cleared the table every night after dinner, a responsibility he had once shared with Jeff. When Don decided to build an addition at the back of the house, Craig resumed his role as his father’s helper, hanging drywall and sanding rough edges from the lumber, just like he and Jeff used to do. But resuming their old life provided little comfort, especially for Don.

  Don was forty-seven when Jeff died, a salesman for a sanitation company who had lived most of his life in Jasper, a small town about an hour northeast of Evansville. He was an affable guy, a talker with a knack for putting even strangers at ease. He’d been doing the news on the radio in Jasper when he got a job as a reporter and weekend anchor at an Evansville TV station. In 1965, he moved the family to the east side of Evansville and joined the Holy Rosary Catholic Church. Don was a US Navy man with high blood pressure who enjoyed a drink now and then and kept his feelings to himself. He also kept his sons in line. If Dee ran the house, Don was the disciplinarian. The weekend after the crash, one of Jeff’s best friends brought Craig and his brother Scott to a fraternity party at UE, hoping to provide them a brief respite from the misery of the past several days. But when Don found out, he called the fraternity, ordered his boys home, grounded them both, and dressed them down. He was angry and disgusted: How could they go to a fraternity party just days after Jeff had been buried?

  Don was a devout Catholic with a black-and-white sense of right and wrong. He felt, from the very first days after the crash, that the University of Evansville wasn’t being honest with the families of the victims. He was among the parents who hired an attorney to find out how the university spent the contributions that flowed in after the crash. Don suspected the money was going straight into UE’s general fund. He was also angry about the memorial. He couldn’t understand why the university included a globe-like fountain instead of the eternal flame the families had requested. He was angry that the plaza had been built in the middle of campus, behind the dining center, instead of near Carson Center. It seemed to him that the university had used the memorial to beautify an unattractive part of campus rather than constructing it on a spot associated with UE basketball.

  Craig shared his father’s bitterness, even as he took a job in the athletic department. He started that spring, working with the track team, and then took over Jeff’s old job with the basketball team the following fall. He worked part-time in the sports information office and hauled uniforms and equipment back and forth to Roberts Stadium. He also occasionally traveled with the team to road games. Craig felt deeply invested in the program, as if he was carrying on Jeff’s legacy.

  On game days, Craig climbed up to the press box with the 16 mm camera that Jeff had used and shot game film. It was a nerve-racking assignment. Operating the camera was complex, and he wanted to make sure that Walters and his coaches got the high-quality film they needed. In early December 1978, UE hit the road for a game at Pittsburgh. The first half went smoothly for Craig. He remembered to shoot the game from a wide angle, so the coaches could get a complete view of the action. Once the second half began, however, something happened and the film unspooled, coiling around Craig’s ankles. The Aces played a terrible second half and lost by nineteen, their fourth loss to start Walters’s first season. Back in Evansville, Craig took the film to be developed and found that he hadn’t captured a single minute of play after halftime—when he had opened the camera to reinsert the film, he had exposed the portion he’d already shot. Walters was furious. Decades later, Craig easily recalls the humiliation he felt at the next practice as Walters criticized the quality of the film in front of the whole team.

  “I felt about two inches tall,” Craig says. “It wasn’t just one comment. It was several.”

  Craig also felt that Walters wanted to have it both ways when he talked about the crash. He preached over and over about the need to focus on the future, yet talked about the difficulty of rebuilding from scratch when the Aces played poorly at the start of that first season.

  In early 1979, Walters got wind of Craig’s discontent and called him into his office one day before practice. He could tell the young man before him was angry. He wanted to hear him out and ease the tension. Craig agreed that it was important to look forward, to try to move on from the crash. He was also struggling with dual roles, at home and on campus, navigating his family’s grief while taking over Jeff’s old job. Expressing his frustration to Walters helped. It was a brief conversation, maybe ten minutes, and Craig walked away impressed that the coach took time to make peace with a lowly student manager.

  But Craig couldn’t make peace at home and Don couldn’t shake his anger. It ate at him, even as other parents had begun coming to terms with their losses. Don could no longer watch basketball, in person or on TV—high school, college, or pro. He stopped taking his blood pressure medication, complaining that it slowed him down. He also started drinking more. While Dee forged ahead, holding her family close and relying on her Christian faith, Don seemed to fade. His health deteriorated. In January 1981, he was rushed to the hospital after suffering a stroke. Craig and his family took turns keeping vigil in his room as Don slipped into a coma. He died on February 7, at the age of fifty, having never recovered from the crash of Air Indiana Flight 216, and having never forgiven the University of Evansville.

  THIRTEEN

  Young Man in a Hurry

  AS CHAOS ENGULFED THE court in Salt Lake City, Larry Bird retreated to the bench and buried his face in a white towel, surrendering to the inevitable. His college basketball career was over. Photographers swarmed the sideline. Grim-faced coaches and trainers milled around, waiting to accept the runner-up trophy. A few steps away, Earvin “Magic” Johnson draped an arm around Michigan State’s Judd Heathcoate, his rumpled and diminutive coach, and told a national television audience that reports of his depar
ture for the NBA were nothing more than “rumors.”

  Bird didn’t move, until a teammate stood over him. “C’mon, man, let’s get that trophy,” said forward Brad Miley. “Thirty-three and one. A hell of a year.”

  Michigan State beat Indiana State for the NCAA championship on March 26, 1979, and it was clear already that these two young men—Bird and Magic—had outgrown college basketball. This game was a transformative moment, every bit as important for American sports as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates were for politics. The Bird-Magic rivalry would alter basketball at every level, from high schools to the Olympics. It transformed sports broadcasting, turned college hoops into a billion-dollar entertainment juggernaut, and resuscitated the NBA. That night, nearly a quarter of all television sets in America were tuned in to NBC’s coverage from Salt Lake City, still the highest rating for any basketball game, college or pro, in history.

  American sports fans clearly wanted more basketball. The following season, they would get it. On September 7, 1979, as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird prepared for their rookie seasons in the NBA, a cable-TV start-up in Connecticut broadcast its first episode of SportsCenter. In the early days, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network relied on slo-pitch softball and Australian Rules football to fill the airtime. But that December, ESPN broadcast its first college basketball game—a DePaul victory over Wisconsin—with a verbose ex-coach named Dick Vitale providing commentary. The network carried twenty-three games during the 1980 NCAA tournament, and suddenly college basketball fans could count on more than a single Game of the Week to satisfy their cravings. In the coming years, the NCAA would expand its tournament from forty teams to sixty-four. The broadcast rights to televise those games would grow from $5.2 million in 1979 to $48 million three years later and $96 million in ’85. Basketball would soon succeed baseball as the national pastime, changing the economics of college sports and giving small schools like the University of Evansville unprecedented opportunity. UE could play on national television. UE could play in the NCAA tournament. UE could restore Evansville’s proud reputation as ground zero for small-college basketball.