We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  Dick Walters had a choice seat that night in Salt Lake City, directly across from the Indiana State bench. It had been a month since Evansville’s season ended, and Walters had cause for optimism. UE was no longer a mom-and-pop program, isolated in the southwest corner of Indiana. In its first full season in the top tier of college basketball, the Aces boasted a respectable record of 13–16 and a schedule loaded with the best teams in the country. Two schools in the Final Four—Indiana State and DePaul—had played the Aces at Roberts Stadium in the span of three days early in the season. While the DePaul game was an utter disaster, Walters saw his team’s potential in the loss to Indiana State.

  In December, Evansville fans had packed the stadium for their final look at Larry Bird in a powder-blue Indiana State uniform. The Sycamores led by a point with twenty-nine seconds remaining when Bird snatched a game-saving rebound on a missed free throw. He finished with forty points, leading Indiana State to a 74–70 victory. Although Walters complained bitterly that Bird had climbed over a UE player’s back to grab the rebound, he was proud of his young team.

  “Much as I hate to lose,” Walters said afterward, “I’ve never been prouder of a team. I think we made thirteen thousand friends, the way we played tonight.”

  After the 1978 season, Evansville’s move to Division I seemed prescient, just in time to reap the benefits of college basketball’s explosive expansion. The move had paid off handsomely. Attendance at Roberts Stadium for the 1978–79 season was nearly 112,000, surpassing 100,000 for the first time in seven years. Ticket sales grew in each of the following four seasons.

  Skeptics remained in Evansville. But soon Walters and his team would prove them wrong.

  When Walters summoned Steve Sherwood to his office after the Thanksgiving break in 1979, Sherwood feared the worst. He’d fractured an ankle during the holiday break, playing with a buddy at their high school gym. He limped into Walters’s office at Carson Center, assuming the coach was angry that he’d injured himself.

  Sherwood already felt discouraged. As freshmen classmates Leaf, Bullock, and Harris cracked the starting lineup, Sherwood barely played his freshman year. His two free throws at the end of a blowout win over Tennessee Tech were a rare bright spot. And because he was a walk-on, he and his parents had to shell out $4,800 a year for tuition and housing. Steve chipped in with money he’d saved as a kid, cleaning carpets, mowing lawns, and washing dishes. But he was running out of cash. And at home, in northern Illinois, money was tight. Sherwood grew up the fourth of five kids in rural Crystal Lake, northwest of Chicago. His mother, Anita, earned a modest living in an elected position in local government. Archie Sherwood, his dad, did carpentry for a small local construction company. When construction work slowed, the family income suffered.

  As a high school senior, Steve averaged twenty points and fifteen rebounds a game. He also made excellent grades. A couple of small colleges recruited him. But he didn’t like their engineering programs. He turned down an appointment to West Point because he didn’t want to join the military. He asked the coaches at Valparaiso University, in northwestern Indiana, whether he could play there as a walk-on. But they told him it was doubtful. Then a family friend put Sherwood in touch with a UE grad in Crystal Lake who called Walters on Sherwood’s behalf. The coach invited him for a visit, and Sherwood flew down with his mom the next day, on their own dime. He handed the coaches film from his high school games and toured the campus with the dean of the engineering school. When Sherwood returned to Walters’s office, the coach told him he saw raw potential and offered him a spot on the team with no scholarship and no guarantee he’d ever get one.

  Sherwood moved to Evansville in June and took a job with a roofing company for $6.60 an hour. He and Theren Bullock rose for work at 3:30 a.m. and spent their days hauling five-gallon buckets of tar heated to 450 degrees that would be used to seal new roofs, where the temperature soared as high as 130. The roofing job ended that summer. But Sherwood enrolled for seventeen hours of classes in the fall term, leaving him little time for anything other than basketball and sleep. Making the transition from high school to college had been more difficult than he imagined.

  Now he was nearly halfway through his sophomore year, hobbling around on a broken ankle and worried about money. Sherwood got a $1,200 annual grant through the engineering school. But it wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. He considered borrowing money or playing for Indiana State University–Evansville, which fielded a Division II team. But Sherwood loved UE and its engineering school. He had also embraced an unlikely and high-profile role at the end of the Aces bench, as an animated, fist-pumping reserve, the first to greet his teammates on the sidelines during a time-out. Fans roared their approval on the rare occasions when he entered a game. The newspapers wrote feature stories and ran photo essays about him. Sherwood had found a home at the University of Evansville, and he didn’t want to leave.

  In the coach’s office, Sherwood took a seat facing Walters, bracing himself for the coach’s wrath. But, to his surprise, Walters wasn’t angry about his ankle. In fact, he told Sherwood how much the coaches appreciated his hard work and admired the improvement he’d made since coming to Evansville.

  Then Walters gave the walk-on a scholarship, erasing all doubts about Sherwood’s future with the Purple Aces.

  Late in the second overtime of a mid-December game against the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, Theren Bullock raced from beneath the basket in three giant strides, stopped at the free-throw line, and called for a pass. Eric Harris put up a shot instead, and Bullock drifted backward toward the baseline, watching the play unfold in front of him, following the ball with his eyes, moving into position. He gathered himself, leaped high with his right arm extended, and tapped the errant shot off the backboard. As it slipped through the net, a defender bumped him from behind and Bullock headed to the free-throw line. He calmly sank the shot, giving Evansville a four-point lead. As the buzzer sounded a few moments later, the Aces walked off the floor with a 79–75 victory in the University of Louisville’s annual holiday tournament. North Carolina–Charlotte had been to the Final Four in 1977. Louisville would win the national championship just four months later. Before a crowd of fifteen thousand, Evansville’s victory felt like an NCAA tournament game.

  “This is where we belong,” Walters said afterward, expressing his fondest hope as indisputable truth. In reality, Louisville had invited three weaker teams to serve as cannon fodder, guaranteeing two sellouts and two easy wins. Schools from across the country, including the University of Evansville, operated their holiday tournaments the same way. But if Walters believed UE belonged among the greatest teams in the land, why quibble over the details? Even the skeptics agreed that the Aces were on the rise.

  The victory over UNC–Charlotte marked the Aces’ fifth win in six games to start the 1979–80 season. Two weeks later, at the end of December, Evansville’s record stood at 9–2. Local TV stations had signed on to carry eight to ten games that season. And in January, UE began play in the Midwestern City Conference, a new league that included Butler, Xavier, Loyola of Chicago, Oral Roberts, and Oklahoma City. Playing in the MCC provided UE with new opportunities for money, media attention, and postseason play. The MCC included three big-city markets—Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati—and the potential for regional and national television deals. The first conference tournament was scheduled for Roberts Stadium at the end of the 1979–80 season, a financial boon for UE, which still relied on basketball to fund the entire athletic department. Perhaps most important, the MCC champion would eventually receive an automatic bid each year to the NCAA tournament. Walters, as ambitious and media savvy as any coach, had pushed hard for the creation of the conference.

  But he always wanted more. More TV coverage. A nicer locker room. Better housing for the basketball players. His ambitions reflected his philosophy that style and substance need not conflict. Excellence need not be limited to the playing floor. His basketball pro
gram would be every bit as impressive as his suits. Building a top-tier program required amenities that UE lacked.

  Walters lobbied for every upgrade imaginable. He commissioned redecorated locker rooms at Roberts Stadium, with plush purple carpeting, a new stereo system, and full-length mirrors surrounded by lights. Players relaxed on new recliners and drank Pepsi provided by the local distributor. UE purchased a purple van to ferry recruits to and from the airport. An advertising firm donated eight billboards that said “Welcome to Evansville, Where Basketball Is King.” Five championship banners were hoisted to the rafters at Roberts Stadium. UE played in Florida and Hawaii, trips meant to entice recruits and boosters alike. The Aces stayed at nicer hotels on the road.

  But in Evansville, the Aces lived at Franklin House, a ratty old three-story brick building owned by the university and located across the street from campus. Three players shared each of the five two-bedroom apartments, which included a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. With peeling paint and fading carpets, it looked like typical student housing. Walters wanted to replace it with something more . . . comfortable. He envisioned a new house near campus with a whirlpool, a steam room, a film room, and study space, all swathed in plush purple carpet. The front lawn would feature an Ace Purple statue spouting water. He also called for a new court at Roberts Stadium, because the old one had too many dead spots. “Get rid of the wooden bleachers,” he suggested, “and add more padded seats.” Kentucky’s Rupp Arena, he pointed out, had twice as many seats as Roberts Stadium.

  “Sometimes I’m impatient,” he said one day, outlining his plans for conquering college basketball. “We’ve come a long way in the rebuilding process. But to me it seems like we’re moving at a snail’s pace. I want to run with this thing.”

  One luxury that Walters couldn’t provide his players was chartered air travel, which made for longer road trips. The Aces now flew commercial, which meant they left Evansville the night before the game and returned the day after. It wasn’t convenient, but it was nonnegotiable.

  Still, Walters wanted to rebuild Evansville’s program every bit as much as the most rabid Aces booster. He wanted to give UE fans what they so desperately wanted: a basketball team to restore their civic pride. So Walters asked the university for everything and then some. He certainly held up his end of the bargain. The Aces finished 18–10 in 1980. With Evansville’s weak schedule, its respectable record wasn’t nearly enough to qualify for the NCAA tournament, or even the National Invitation Tournament. But UE’s momentum was palpable and Walters had begun competing with Top 20 schools for top recruits. He was obsessed with Kenny Perry, a long, lean southern Indiana boy with a smooth jumper. He battled Missouri’s Norm Stewart—just like Bobby Watson!—for the services of Richie Johnson, a point guard in a power forward’s body. He also snagged a slender, multilingual 7'1" center from Istanbul named Emir Turam.

  But in stark contrast to Arad McCutchan, Walters’s ambition wasn’t limited to the University of Evansville. Mac had waved off other schools that came to him with more money and a bigger recruiting budget. He wasn’t going anywhere. Aces fans appreciated his hometown loyalty and rewarded him with utter devotion. Mac was one of us. Even Bobby Watson, the outsider, expressed his devotion to Evansville. In his very first press conference, Watson promised that he’d stay at UE “as long as you’ll have me.” That evening, the Evansville Press splashed Watson’s quote across six columns at the top of its sports page. Evansville wanted a coach who was absolutely, unquestionably committed to the city and its basketball team. In the eyes of the Aces faithful, UE was not a stepping-stone. It was a destination.

  Walters, however, liked to keep a fresh résumé on hand at the end of the season, when big schools snapped up promising young coaches from their smaller rivals. But instead of networking quietly behind the scenes, he negotiated in public, happily sharing the latest opportunity with any reporter who cared to listen. He couldn’t keep his ambition to himself. This did little to endear him to UE fans.

  In April 1979, not long after he’d finished his first season at UE, Walters told Evansville sportswriters that Oklahoma State University had pursued him aggressively. Oklahoma State flew Walters and his wife down for the weekend, wined and dined them, and then offered a contract worth $38,000, with $12,000 from television appearances, about double what he made in Evansville. If it had been a mere $7,000 or $8,000 more, Walters said, he wouldn’t even have considered it. But double his salary? Well, he felt he owed it to his family to at least listen to such a generous offer. Sometimes, Walters said, he heard about coaches making $15,000 more than he did, and it made him wonder about his own value on the open market. But, he added quickly, money isn’t everything. So he turned down the offer from Oklahoma State to stay at UE.

  “Evansville is just going to have to put up with me for a few more years,” he said, “and yell and scream whenever I make substitutions or run a four-corners offense.”

  A year later, he assured UE fans that he wouldn’t apply for the vacant job at Purdue.

  “I’m very happy here,” he said. “I’m not looking to leave Evansville.”

  Walters’s style—brash and bratty—rankled some of UE’s old-school fans. From early on, they pegged him as a big-city coach who drove expensive cars and wore flashy clothes, an outsider who was the hero of every story he told, eager to exploit Evansville for his own gain.

  “Just because I wear three-piece pin-striped suits, everybody thinks I’m a big-city person,” Walters complained a few weeks before his first game at Roberts Stadium. “And because I coached in suburban Chicago, they associate me with that area . . . I doubt there’s anybody in Evansville more country than I am.”

  In fact, Chatsworth, Illinois, was a farm town of thirteen hundred about ninety miles southwest of Chicago. Chatsworth was a slice of small-town Americana on the Illinois prairie. In Chatsworth, Barry Goldwater beat LBJ, and young men raised families on a single income from the clay tile factory or the screen door manufacturer. When Walters was a boy, Main Street was a busy shopping district and the railroad cut through the center of town. There was a movie theater but no public pool. There was a lovers’ lane southeast of town. But when it rained, the road got too muddy and nobody parked. The kids didn’t smoke marijuana, and the boys who drank beer kept it to themselves. For fun, Dick and his friends rode their scooters on old country roads all summer long. Many of Walters’s classmates lived on nearby farms. But Dick was from Chatsworth proper, the son of Gladys and Albert Walters.

  Gladys and Albert had grown up in the Depression and, as Walters tells it, endured their share of hard times before he was born. At one point, to make ends meet, they washed eighteen-wheel semitrucks for a quarter each in the middle of bitter Illinois winters. Albert fumbled around as a young man, starting a TV repair shop and then an auto repair shop next door. His family’s fortunes rose in the mid-1950s when Albert bought a local car dealership. By Chatsworth standards, the Walters family was well-off, and Dick’s parents indulged their son well into his adulthood. Their daughter, Pat, Dick’s only sibling, moved out when he was a boy, and Dick grew up basking in his parents’ attention like an only child. Albert put up a basketball goal above the garage on the side of their house and installed four three-hundred-watt lights so Dick could play at night. He spent hours and hours under those lights, even in the winter, wearing warm gloves on frigid evenings.

  Dick ran track and played football at Chatsworth High School. But basketball was his obsession. He played for four years and earned letters as a junior and senior. In the 1964–65 season, Dick played guard and wore number 40. He handled the ball well and scored consistently from fifteen feet. He wasn’t the fastest Bluebird. He was smart, though, and played solid defense because he anticipated each pass and shot like a grand-master chess player. Even as a teen, he showed flashes of the intensity that would carry him to Evansville, politely challenging the referees on questionable calls.

  In the senior class prophecy in the
back of the 1965 Chatsworth yearbook, Walters’s classmates predicted that Howard Diller would be the mayor, Darla Dehm would be an attorney, and Warren Shafer would fly airplanes. For Dick Walters, the class prophecy wasn’t too far off the mark: his school friends pegged him as the coach of a fictional basketball team called the Arabian Nights.

  Kenny Perry was a southern Indiana kid, nearly seven feet tall and painfully shy. It seemed on some days that every coach in the country wanted a piece of him, and they wore out the roads leading to Rockport, making their pitch, hoping for the best. UCLA was especially aggressive. With John Wooden retired, the program was no longer the dominant force in college basketball. Still, the Bruins were one of the top teams in the country and UCLA coach Larry Brown wanted Kenny Perry. So he invited Perry for an official visit to the UCLA campus in October 1979, and the kid from Rockport returned with starstruck tales of his encounters—real or imagined—with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and one of Charlie’s Angels.

  Dick Walters couldn’t muster the same star power. But he wanted Kenny Perry more than Larry Brown.

  He wanted Perry more than any kid he’d ever recruited. Walters believed Perry would transform his basketball program, attracting a long line of blue-chip recruits. So he adopted a strategy that coaches from far-flung schools couldn’t match. He lavished Perry with personal attention, making the thirty-five-minute drive to South Spencer High School dozens of times. He presented Perry with a petition signed by UE students, urging him to play for the Aces. Busloads of Tip-Off Club members crowded the bleachers for South Spencer games. Walters invited Perry to his home, where they shared a bowl of popcorn and talked about the future.