by Steve Beaven
SEVENTEEN
Dying Young
KEVIN KINGSTON’S BEDROOM, AT the top of the stairs in the big house on the outskirts of Eldorado, looked much the same as it did before the crash, filled with souvenirs and trinkets that only Kevin would keep. A Gone with the Wind poster tacked to the wall over his trundle bed. A framed Bonanza poster, with the faces of his friends covering the faces of Ben Cartwright and his boys: Hoss, Little Joe, and Adam. A photo featuring Kevin and a cherubic preschool boy wearing a replica Eldorado Eagles uniform, ticket stubs from Barry Manilow, Bob Seger, and Doobie Brothers concerts, eight-track tapes he’d altered by placing his own face on the cover, a black-and-white photo of Kevin in his track uniform from junior high, after he’d won the state title in the 880-yard run, his pen-and-ink drawing of Yosemite Sam, a brochure advertising the Bobby Watson Purple Aces Basketball Camp, a ticket to a speech by President Ford, elementary school yearbooks featuring photos of Kevin as the sixth-grade class president. Don and Wanda Kingston couldn’t part with the mementoes that Kevin had collected, and so most of it remained where he’d left it the last time he’d been home. Leaving Kevin’s room untouched gave his family a measure of peace and comfort. Sometimes, Valery Kingston slept in her brother’s bed, holding his memory close while she could.
But after a year, those keepsakes seemed more and more like relics. Without Kevin, the room was lifeless. Valery’s friends felt sorry for her every time they walked past. So, Don and Wanda commenced a renovation of the upstairs that they had planned before the crash. They knocked down a wall to expand the master bedroom. They added two small leather couches to create a sitting room, where Don and Wanda could watch TV. They put shelves on the wall for hundreds of Don’s books. They kept Kevin’s trophies and photos. But they cleaned out his closet, giving clothes to his friends. One boy, several years younger than Kevin, was given a warm-up suit. When the remodel was completed, the Kingstons felt as if they’d made a fresh start. Don was named head coach of the Eldorado football team, after taking several seasons off to watch Kevin play. He also took on the role of athletic director. Wanda bought antiques at rummage sales and auctions, refinished them with Don, and then sold them at flea markets. They were resolute in remembering Kevin’s sense of humor and charisma. They didn’t miss any of Valery’s track meets, and when UE awarded Kevin a posthumous degree, the Kingstons asked their daughter to accept it on their behalf. Kevin’s parents vowed that his death would not define their family. Nor did they try to push it aside. Don and Wanda accepted that their loss was the community’s loss as well.
They grew closer to Kay Barrow, sharing a grief that friends and neighbors couldn’t fathom. Kay and Don met to review applications for an annual scholarship given to an Eldorado High School student in memory of Kevin and Mike. They appeared together on the night the Eldorado gym was renamed the Duff-Kingston Memorial Gym. Mike and Kevin would be forever linked in Eldorado, and so would the Barrow and Kingston families.
Valery could tell when her mother struggled. Wanda didn’t like to talk about the crash and couldn’t bear to imagine the terror that Kevin felt as the plane dropped from the foggy night sky. Don was different. He was something of a Renaissance man. He’d always been intellectually curious, his shelves crammed with books on the French Revolution, English history, twentieth-century philosophy, the lives of Van Gogh, Churchill, and Hemingway. He collected dictionaries and language guides to learn French, Spanish, German, and Italian. He liked crossword puzzles, Louis L’Amour Westerns, and American literature. He was also a gifted writer, the author of Sugar and Salt, a slim collection of verse and essays. Many of the poems were short and whimsical, about dogs, indignant pigs, and a rabbit skipping away into the woods. The essays were folksy odes to his childhood, his family, and growing up poor during the Depression. He encouraged readers to embrace “the sweetness of life with a grain of salt.”
Don confronted Kevin’s death with existential questions that he turned over and over in his mind. What would Kevin be doing if he were still alive? What would he have been like as the years passed? Don wasn’t a churchgoer. Valery and Kevin, on the other hand, had attended Eldorado First Baptist Church every week with family friends. When she was in sixth grade and Kevin was a high school senior, they accepted Christ as their savior and were baptized on the same day. After Kevin’s death, Don started watching Billy Graham crusades on television. He sat down with Valery to talk about her faith. What, he asked her, was it like to be baptized? But most of the questions he wrestled with after Kevin died were questions that his family and friends could not answer. These mysteries led Don down the same spiritual path his children had traveled. Like Valery and Kevin, he believed that Jesus would forgive him his sins. Don came to understand Kevin’s death with a new clarity. He knew now that he would someday join his charming, sweet-natured son in the world to come, and it gave him a peace that he’d never known before.
Kevin was buried in the Wolf Creek Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery, on the gently rolling hills west of Eldorado. His grave is marked by a handsome granite stone with a small photo of Kevin at the top and the dates of his birth and death—May 8, 1956–December 13, 1977—at the bottom. Don’s love of poetry and Kevin’s hometown legacy are reflected in the four lines carved just beneath Kevin’s name, the first stanza of A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”:
THE TIME YOU WON YOUR TOWN THE RACE
WE CHAIRED YOU THROUGH THE MARKET-PLACE;
MAN AND BOY STOOD CHEERING BY,
AND HOME WE BROUGHT YOU SHOULDER-HIGH.
EIGHTEEN
The Winning Edge
IT WAS WINTER BUT the days were warm and full of promise. So warm that Paul Ford had got to thinking about fishing. But when his conversation with a reporter turned to basketball, he paused to consider Evansville’s chances in the NCAA tournament. UE was headed back to Tulsa, where the Aces would play Marquette University on March 11. Ford was a retired steelworker who lived near Roberts Stadium, and for twenty-five years he’d walked to Aces games along narrow side streets dotted with the modest homes of his neighbors. At first, he doubted the school’s move to Division I, figuring UE was too small to stand up to Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisville. But the Aces had proved him wrong, and Ford had come to believe in this team.
“I told my wife she’d better make no damn plans for Thursday night,” he said. “I’m going to be right there, watching the Aces. I think they’ll win that game.”
It was an optimism born of hope and history, and it swept over the entire city in the days before the game. The collective longing was apparent on US 41, the highway that split the town in half. The sign at the gas station said, “Go Aces Go.” The Ramada Inn declared, “Aces Are No. 1.” The sheriff’s station near the airport: “Purple Aces Beat Marquette.” Mayor Michael Vandeveer opened his State of the City address before the Downtown Kiwanis Club by saying he wished he could be in Tulsa instead. Sheriff Jim DeGroote, who had spent hours traipsing through the muck by the airport on the night of the crash, marveled at how far the basketball program and the city had come. “I wondered if we’d ever get back to the glory days of Division II,” he said. “And now, in just four years . . .”
Outside the Great Hall on the UE campus, two days before the game, an impatient crowd lined up an hour early for a rally to wish the team good luck. Fans were so overcome with school spirit that they began chanting even before they got inside. “We want [clap-clap] Marquette. We want [clap-clap] Marquette.”
When the doors opened, a crowd of one thousand poured in, filling the hall beyond capacity and leaving those who arrived late trying to squeeze in at the doorway in the back. As an NBC crew shot a feature for the nightly news, the band, the pep squad, and Ace Purple led cheers near the stage. UE students stood next to white-haired alums, who stood beside parents holding toddlers waving purple foam fingers and pom-poms. Theren Bullock emerged from the wings and led the Aces onto the stage, to a roar. Microphone in hand, he acknowledged the op
timism of his teammates and assured the crowd that it wasn’t an underdog’s naivete. The Aces would fight and scratch for every advantage, he promised. It would be a fitting finale for the four seniors.
“There is no tomorrow for myself, Brad, Eric, and Steve Sherwood,” Bullock said. “There’s no next year for us.”
Walters took center stage to chants of “Dick, Dick, Dick.” Decked out in a crimson sweater recalling the days of Arad McCutchan’s Redshirt Army, he remembered the night in December 1978 when the Aces returned to campus after beating Murray State University for UE’s first victory since the crash. The bus driver told him there was “some kind of riot” in front of Carson Center. But it wasn’t a riot, Walters said. It was a crowd of UE fans, waiting to welcome the Aces home.
When Aces assistant coach Greg Meiser traveled to Milwaukee on March 9 to scout the Marquette-Wisconsin game, it seemed like everyone on press row asked the same question: Is Dick Walters going to take the Wisconsin job?
As Evansville fans celebrated UE’s march into the postseason, Walters’s relentless ambition provided an unwelcome distraction during an otherwise-giddy week of anticipation. Newspapers in Chicago and Evansville reported Walters was already “signed, sealed, and delivered” as the next coach at Wisconsin. Badgers coach Bill Cofield had resigned the previous week in the midst of a 6–21 season, and the consensus suggested that Walters would soon replace him. In an unfortunate accident of timing, Marquette hosted Wisconsin just forty-eight hours before facing the Aces. Walters wanted to scout the Warriors himself, but opted to skip the inevitable media circus and sent Meiser instead.
Walters was indeed a hot prospect. At just thirty-four years old, he had resurrected a venerable program, winning seventy-three games in four seasons. The media had just voted him Midwestern City Conference Coach of the Year. As network television crews chronicled the Aces’ rise, Walters had cultivated a national profile. He was handsome and telegenic, a rising star at the dawn of the TV sports boom, perfect for big schools in rebuilding mode. Arizona, for example, had contacted UE for permission to speak with him. Walters wasn’t interested. He also batted down a rumor that he would coach at Stanford.
But the Wisconsin job would be different. The Big Ten was big-time. Walters could remain in the Midwest, where he maintained a Rolodex full of contacts, and he could recruit heavily in Chicago, his old stomping grounds. With a handful of junior college kids and freshman recruits overlooked by the likes of Indiana, Kentucky, and Notre Dame, he could transform the program in a year or two. Taking the Wisconsin job would be a big step up.
“The Big Ten can give Walters what he wants most in life: publicity,” Dave Johnson wrote in the Evansville Press. “Publicity—with money a close second—is what turns Dick Walters on.”
Walters acknowledged that he had interviewed for the position seven years before, when Cofield was hired. And he admitted that he was a good friend of Elroy Hirsch’s, Wisconsin’s athletic director. But he adamantly denied that he was interested in coaching the Badgers.
“I swear to God,” he said. “I don’t even know how much the Wisconsin job pays. I’ve never even been to the campus.”
It was a dubious claim. The Wisconsin rumor lingered for weeks, and there was more to it than Walters would admit. But the chatter about another big school pursuing Walters merely reinforced what Aces fans had learned about him in the past four years: he was an excellent young coach with a very bright future, and there was no guarantee that he would stay at UE. Now, after coming so far, Evansville didn’t want to lose its coach, no matter his ego or eccentricities. Walters’s swaggering arrogance and big-city ambition were not impediments to UE’s resurgence. They were its foundation. The very qualities that turned off so many fans were what enabled Walters to resurrect a broken basketball program. And in raising up that broken basketball program, Walters had lifted the rest of the city, too.
Aces fans lobbied on his behalf.
“I think Dick Walters deserves a raise and if that is what it takes to keep him in Evansville, then fine,” wrote Mr. Robert E. Zoss in a letter to the Evansville Courier. “Either pay him what he’s worth or lose him!”
On the afternoon before his team faced Marquette, Walters took a seat in the hotel restaurant for a late lunch of iced tea and cream of broccoli soup. He seemed . . . relaxed, draping an arm across the back of the red booth, as if awaiting an exhibition game against the Polish national team and not the most important game of his career.
“I really feel no pressure at all,” he said. “I’m as loose as can be.”
His players felt the same way, he added. Confident, prepared, eager. The Warriors did not intimidate them.
Marquette was a fitting matchup for UE, a small, private school with church ties in a faltering rust belt town. Like Evansville, Milwaukee had been battered by a shrinking manufacturing base and haunted by the loss of industries that once defined the city. And, like UE, Marquette had its own championship history. As Bobby Watson zipped through the Midwest to restock the Aces roster, the Warriors won the NCAA title in 1977 under the leadership of charismatic coach Al McGuire, a feisty, wisecracking New Yorker well known to Aces fans. In 1959, McGuire led tiny Belmont Abbey into Roberts Stadium and promised UE fans that if Arad McCutchan’s boys beat his team the following year, he would buy ice-cream cones for everyone. Belmont Abbey did indeed lose on its return trip to Evansville, leaving McGuire with nothing to offer the crowd of twelve thousand. A local dairy owner saved the day by passing out thousands of ice-cream bars on McGuire’s behalf.
McGuire retired from coaching after Marquette won the championship, replaced by longtime Warriors assistant Hank Raymonds. But McGuire’s legend lingered, and Marquette fans still considered their team a national power. In 1982, heading into the NCAA tournament, Marquette had won twenty-one and lost eight with a schedule far more difficult than Evansville’s, including games against Iowa, Minnesota, Stanford, Arizona State, and Notre Dame. Marquette was led by a big and speedy guard combo that more than compensated for the Warriors’ lumbering and erratic front line. Senior Michael Wilson and sophomore Glenn “Doc” Rivers were both 6'4" and led Marquette in scoring, blocked shots, steals, and assists. Wilson was a pure shooter, and Rivers was a dominant defender and leaper who could drive the lane and score, destined for a long career in the NBA, as a player and a coach. Dean Marquardt, a 6'9" center and Marquette’s leading rebounder, anchored the front line.
Overall, the Warriors were bigger than the Aces, and their guards were more athletic than Eric Harris and Brad Leaf. But the Aces boasted one of the stingiest defenses in the country, relying mostly on a 1-3-1 zone that featured Harris up front, at the top of the key, harassing opposing guards. Richie Johnson joined Turam and Leaf playing in the middle, and Bullock patrolled the baseline beneath the basket. The 1-3-1 limited the mobility of rival guards who preferred to drive the lane or pass to big men looking for easy shots inside. It forced teams like Loyola and Marquette, with slashing guards, to shoot from long range. It worked especially well for UE because Johnson and Turam were so big and agile that it was difficult to pass over them. It helped that Bullock was long and relentless on the baseline, moving from one corner to the other with a suffocating intensity. Because man-to-man defense was more prevalent around the country, other teams struggled against UE’s zone, shooting less than 50 percent against the Aces. Raymonds believed that Evansville’s zone was the best in the country.
Walters saw no reason to change the Aces’ game plan as he prepared for the Warriors. His team was 23–5 and ranked twentieth in the country by Sports Illustrated. Better to stick with what got them this far. His primary goals were controlling the tempo and preventing Rivers from waltzing through the lane as he pleased.
No one gave much thought to stopping Dean Marquardt.
Brad Leaf woke up on game day dead set on fulfilling two lofty ambitions against Marquette. He’d come to Tulsa to prove himself to the rest of the world, to show NBA scouts he belonged am
ong the best in the country. Perhaps more important, he wanted to leave Evansville fans with a lasting memory to assuage the wounds that lingered from December 13, 1977.
Leaf had enjoyed a good run in Evansville. Since that bitterly cold night in Milwaukee during his freshman year, when he regained his confidence and set aside thoughts of transferring, Leaf had carved a reputation as one of the better shooting guards in the country. As a senior, he averaged more than seventeen points and four rebounds. At 6'5", he was still a step or two slow. But he was big and strong enough to muscle his way to the rim and shot consistently from eighteen feet. He was also money from the free-throw line. The day before the Marquette game, Leaf was named honorable mention all-American by the Associated Press.
But those accomplishments were achieved over a period of weeks and months and years, a slow accretion of free throws and jumpers and layups. They spoke to his tenacity, the hours he spent in the gym, the effort he invested in fine-tuning his shot, perfecting his form. Brad regarded the Marquette matchup as a predraft tryout for the NBA, a chance to showcase his skills in a high-profile, high-stakes environment. Never had he enjoyed such visibility, playing on network television on the first night of the NCAA tournament. An explosive performance would give him a nice bump as pro teams considered their options among college shooting guards.
Brad also felt a powerful obligation to Evansville. He knew little about the city or the university before he committed to play for Walters. He wasn’t familiar with Arad McCutchan’s legacy, and the crash at first seemed an abstraction to him, something that happened in another place, at another time. All Brad wanted when he arrived on campus was directions to the gym. But once he earned playing time and returned for his sophomore year, the depth of Evansville’s loss slowly dawned on him, as if blinders had been removed and he could clearly see what the city had endured. He felt a palpable sense of sadness on campus. He heard fans comparing his team to Bobby Watson’s Aces and began to understand the impact of the crash from the people who’d lived through it. His girlfriend, Karen Leach, was an intramural jock, a member of the Chi Omega sorority, and a UE cheerleader who’d grown up in Evansville fully immersed in Aces basketball. Her parents, Jerry and Roma Leach, had met when they were both students at Evansville College. Jerry later served on the alumni board at UE, Roma taught nursing there, and each year they bought season tickets for basketball. The Leaches had a pool at their house on Evansville’s north side and often invited Brad and his teammates over for a swim or a cookout. The closer Brad grew to Karen and her family, the better he understood what Aces basketball meant to the city.
