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Coach Ballard's Blog #5

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Two Star Poster
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Aug 13, 2002
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The Rebels….


My parents drove me down to Baytown, Texas, to start my career at Lee College. Our goodbyes were painful, because I had lived at home my whole life and was pretty attached to it and them. But, this is how life is and it was time for the next step. What made it a bit more frightening was that I knew nothing about Baytown or it’s inhabitants, nothing about the college, nothing about the living arrangements, nothing about my teammates, nothing about the league, nothing about the level of play, and most of all, nothing about the coaches. Other than that, I was ready to go.


Let’s start with Baytown. It is right at the tip of Galveston Bay, but is not a resort town on the beach by any stretch. It lies next to the Houston Ship Channel, which was reputedly one of the most polluted waterways in the world. Nearby were several chemical plants and a huge refinery run by Exxon. The air constantly smelled like industry- in other words, it stunk. It was extremely humid and the combination of the smell and the high humidity was not intoxicating in a good sense. Baytown was not a rich area- those were closer to Houston- and most of the inhabitants were blue collar industrial workers. There was a definite line between the white part of town and the black part of town in those days. The line was classic- railroad tracks. I would find out that walking on the railroad tracks, which were not far from the college, with my black teammates was not seen as a good thing on either side.


The college was a quaint series of red brick buildings just off the main street. There was a gym that was quite old and stuffy. Basketball was a winter sport right? So they never bothered to put in any kind of cooling system, because people don’t play basketball year round, do they? There were no dormitories, so the basketball team- almost the entire basketball team- was put into a house just across the street from the campus. It was a five bedroom, dilapidated Texas style house with a big front porch. The beds were all single, with a few bunk beds, because we started out with ten guys in there. There was a large living room with a chair and a couch, and an old TV with rabbit ears, as cable TV had not been invented. The address was 311 South Whiting, so the place must have had some memories or I could never be expected to remember that. Meals were bought on your own and paid for with a monthly allowance that each player was given. I didn’t have any idea, nor ever asked how that fit in with NJCAA rules.


I never had any prior contact with any of my teammates before being dropped off by my parents. The ten guys in the house were from New York, Louisiana, some other Texas towns, and me. We just grabbed rooms and beds as we could, no one really said anything about that. This was the sixties, so basically the black guys grouped together as did the white guys. There was never really any discussion about it, it’s just the way it was. The first couple of days, we just kind of hung around since school hadn’t started and kind of listened to the stories being told by the three returners amongst us. The third evening, most of us filtered into one of the bigger bedrooms and began talking about where we were from and just anything else that came to mind. Just teammates sort of trying to bond, right? One of the Louisiana kids was a pretty big guy- about 6’9”- and he really had been very quiet the whole three days. Guys started pushing him to speak up a little and tell us about himself. It sounded pretty normal at first, then he said that he had been fascinated by death and that he wondered what is was like to die. I, and the others began to feel a bit uncomfortable at this point. He went on- he said he was standing outside of a laundromat in Louisiana and he saw a woman inside by herself. So he shot her. That is where our meeting fell apart. He couldn’t be serious right? The next morning, he was gone, and a few days later some detectives showed up at the house, showed us his picture, and asked if we knew him. We said we did, said he told us that story but that it sounded so crazy that no one believed him. They asked us if we had reported this to the coaches? We said no, because no one believed him. It couldn’t possibly be true, could it? It was. I don’t know where he went or whatever happened to him. I can’t even remember his name. So, then we dropped to nine in the house. Welcome to Junior college.


The league was the Texas Junior College Athletic Association and it had some national powerhouses, as it still does today. Right down the street from Lee College was San Jacinto College, who would be the eventual national champions my freshman year. They had two guys who would end up in the NBA- Jeff Halliburton who would go on to Drake University, and Bob Nash, who would go on to the University of Hawaii. Most of the teams were loaded with players from across the nation. This was a level that was instantly much higher than what I had seen in high school, and it was not going to be easy.


Our head coach was John MacCormick and I fully, and naively, expected him to be a step up from my great high school coach. He most definitely was not. He was an ex-Marine drill instructor, who was very impersonal and didn’t teach basketball. He taught physical training. I don’t know about the other guys, but I was thankful that I had gone through all those things at East High, because Coach MacCormick put us through hell the first two weeks. All we did each day was run a quarter mile in the gym (eight laps), full speed, then immediately go to a station where we did rebounding, shooting, push ups, sit ups, dribbling drills, etc. After each station, we hustled to the starting point for another quarter mile. The running was timed, of course, and if we didn’t make it- well, I’m sure you know what happened. Run it again. We were supposed to do that eight times, but always missed a time or two, so it was always around ten quarter miles. Every day for two weeks, that’s all we did. Nobody in the house quit, but a couple of local guys quit within a few days. We ended up with only one local guy on the team- Lavoy Darden, who became a close friend of mine. We would drag ourselves over to the gym each day and dread the start of the routine. Within two days, absolutely every part of my body ached. Some guys actually cried before we started because we were all in pain. Nobody stretched- we just laid on the floor until Coach MacCormick came in. There was no warm up, but before you think how absurd that was, remember there was no cooling system in the gym except for a big box fan over in one corner that blew hot, humid air. You were sweating as soon as you walked in the gym. The coaches (we had no trainer) made salt pills available to us. There was no drinking fountain in the gym, which was the first time of many over my lifetime that I wondered who actually designs these junior college gyms? Even today I wonder that as I go around Arizona. Our gym at MCC has one bathroom in the lobby that has one urinal and one stall. I mean, what did the designers envision would be going on in a gymnasium at a college?


After two weeks of boot camp, ten of us Marines were ready to actually attempt to play basketball. It became apparent immediately that basketball strategy and tactics was not a strong point of Coach MacCormick’s. His assistant, Mike Hefley had coached a state championship team at Sour Lake, Texas, but he didn’t seem to be able to contribute much. Neither coach was really approachable to talk to, so most of the things that went on in and around the house on Whiting Street went unreported. We just kind of handled them ourselves. For example, Baytown had a stereotypical for the period police force. They knew who we were and we got to know them. There was a kind of mini-mart close to our house where we would walk to and buy food for the house sometimes. One night, one of our black players, Lafayette Spivey, was walking back from that store and was stopped by Officer Parker, who we knew. He asked Lafayette what he was doing, even though that was fairly obvious. He put Lafayette in his car and drove him to the house. He brought him to the front door and asked a group of us, black and white, who were sitting in the living room watching TV if we knew Spivey. We all thought it would be spontaneously funny to say no, we didn’t know him. Despite his loud protests and our laughter, Officer Parker put Spivey back in the car and hustled him off to jail. He was booked on “suspicion”, which was a Southern way of controlling everyone. We ended up having to shell out $50 to “bail” him out- money which probably never saw the light of day in the justice system, and all learned a hard lesson about joking around in the South. Of course, no one ever told the coaches. That’s the way we lived.


Next up…playing ball…
 
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