Tigerland Read online

  Because Bob Hart emerged from World War II with a social conscience, he ignored those who warned him against coaching at all-black East High School.

  The ultimate goal of any good City League team is first to win the City League championship, then to progress to the state tournament, and, dream upon dream, to win a state title. East had won a coveted state championship back in the 1950–51 season, when many of the players trying out for Hart’s varsity team at East High had been entering elementary school. Hart had a reason to be confident during team tryouts: He had coached almost all of these players on his reserve teams.

  Hart ran his practices with a military-like fastidiousness. Certain drills were to be executed at particular times during practice. He kept a whistle around his neck, blowing it loudly when it was time to start another phase of practice. He had the kind of talented players who could adapt to his style, and he knew it. He settled quickly on a starting five: Mike Hammond at guard, Ed Waller at guard, Bob Calloway and Ken Fowlkes at forwards, and Avery Godfrey at center. “They knew his system,” says Assistant Coach Pennell about those players who had already played under Hart.

  There were those—like Coach Pennell—who thought the best player on the team was Bob Martin, a wiry forward entering his senior year.

  Martin’s family hailed from Reidsville, North Carolina. His father died shortly after he was born, and his mother, Jo, scrimped and saved to get the family out of the South and away from the job she loathed at the tobacco factory. When she finally had enough money and went to the train station, little Bob began crying without stop. The big locomotive, idling and hissing and belching steam, scared him something fierce. The boy refused to climb aboard. The family circled back to Reidsville. A short while later, his mom hired a friend to drive the family north to Ohio. Jo Martin got a job as a maid at a local college, St. Mary of the Springs (now Ohio Dominican University). As Bob grew up he fell in love with basketball. He starred at Champion Junior High for the great Negro coach Cy Butler. (Many in the black community believed that Butler, with his record of coaching winning teams over the years, was not considered for the head coaching job at East High School because of the color of his skin.)

  Bob Martin was excited about his first season playing under Coach Hart. He streaked up and down the hallways of East High loose and happy. His sense of humor was unmistakable. He made others laugh; he was fond of pranks. In class one day, his teacher stepped out into the hallway for several minutes. While she was away, a student tiptoed up to her seat and placed a thumb tack, upright, on it. Every student was conspiratorially eyeballing her as she returned to the room, sat down on the tack, and squealed. There was much immediate laughter. She pointed to the person she thought was the culprit: Bob Martin. Neither Martin nor any other student ever confessed, but that was his first incident of school trouble. When he flunked a test in that same class, he was no longer eligible to play the first half of the basketball season. It was a discernible loss for the team and Hart knew it. (Two years earlier, as a precocious sophomore on the varsity team, Martin had scored 32 points against North High.)

  * * *

  —

  No one was as eager for the 1962 season to get under way as Bob Hart. As the season opener neared, Hart scheduled several out-of-town scrimmages for his team. Beyond Columbus, in central and southern Ohio, sat many rural white communities, and Hart had to be smart and judicious about where he took his all-black team. This wasn’t Mississippi or Alabama. He did not feel the kids would be physically attacked. The players themselves had already talked about what they would do in the event of finding themselves in confrontations: They were not going to back down. They figured they could take care of themselves. But Hart wanted them to be able to get their meals without any hassles. He did not want them exposed to verbal insults. “One of the things I remember,” recalls the coach’s daughter, Bobbi, “is Dad calling ahead to say to a restaurant owner, ‘I have a team full of black basketball players. We want to stop for sandwiches. Is that going to be a problem?’ ”

  Sometimes as the bus was slowly rolling into the parking lot of a restaurant the coach would hop out, motioning for everyone to remain on board. These were the restaurants he had not had a chance to phone in advance. He’d amble inside to take the measure of the place. If he saw a crowd he didn’t particularly like, he’d return to the bus and march up and down the aisles taking individual orders. “I’d get off the bus and walk with Dad back inside,” adds Bobbi, “and say, ‘How come the players aren’t coming inside with us?’ ” Her father would tell her it was easier for him to get everyone’s food to go. And after waiting for their orders—burgers, hot dogs, fries, shakes, soft drinks—they’d bounce back onto the bus. The players, of course, were always fairly wise to what was going on.

  * * *

  —

  Coach Hart’s wife, Jane, was a stay-at-home mom. Her three daughters kept her quite busy. The coach was often absent with coaching duties. The challenge of raising her daughters without her husband was not the only thing that bothered Jane. She also began to chafe under his exacting household regimen. There was a ten-year age difference. “Mom was this little farm girl,” says Bobbi. Jane was only in her late twenties; she wanted to get out of the house more often and have fun with friends her own age. The daughters could see their parents’ marriage coming undone. Not long after, Bob Hart filed for divorce. Afterward, he went to family court and eventually won custody of his three daughters. He approached this new dimension of fatherhood the same way he approached everything else, with a clear focus and a particular fastidiousness. He took the girls grocery shopping. He bought cookbooks, though he never morphed into anyone’s idea of a chef.

  He’d load his three young daughters onto the team bus with the team. Lynne, the youngest, became the team mascot, her blond hair flowing, her cheeks glowing. “I remember people telling Dad, ‘How can you let your daughter be on that big black boy’s shoulder?’ ” Lynne’s sister Bobbi would recall. Bob Hart would shake his head, sometimes let that little smile cross his wide face, and keep walking. The smile was just another weapon; Hart and his Tigers were on their way to whip the local boys. Bobbi felt mighty proud of her father at such moments.

  They opened the season on November 29 against Chillicothe and beat them easily, 81–54. The next seven games were all victories. On a chilly Friday night they traveled to Cuyahoga Falls to play a team that had beat the Tigers a year earlier by 9 points. Three thousand fans squeezed into the gym to see the game. This time Bob Hart’s Tigers had their revenge, winning by 9 points. Commentators were starting to refer to the team as quick, freewheeling, domineering. They whipped Columbus North, 68–44. Bob Hart took the victories in stride, careful not to show too much emotion. But secretly he mused about how good his team might become upon the return of Bob Martin, arguably the team’s best player.

  The Tigers traveled to Dayton for a game against Chaminade High—like East High also undefeated. Hart had warned his team about Chaminade. The school was competitive and had always fielded tough teams. East scurried to an 11-point lead during the first half. In the second half the score tightened considerably. East popped into the lead with thirty seconds to go, 49–48. Chaminade let the clock run down to fifteen seconds before Bob Hafer launched an eighteen-foot jump shot that went in. It was the Tigers’ first loss of the season. Bob Martin watched the game from the stands. “If I’d been playing,” he mused years later, “we would have blown them out.”

  East regrouped against archrival Linden-McKinley, beating them 59–42, and the Tigers found themselves ranked No. 4 in the state. In their matchup against local Central High, both teams found themselves with 5–0 league records. More than a thousand people had to be turned away at the door on game night. Even so, safety codes were violated as the school allowed eleven hundred fans through the doors. East dismantled Central, 75–54, leaving little doubt who was the best team in the city.


  Heading deeper into the season, Hart’s team got a holiday gift: Bob Martin was ruled eligible to return to play. There was already an established chemistry with the starting five, but Hart knew he would have to find time for Martin, so he decided to use him as the sixth man, the first player off the bench. (Martin had been dutiful about remaining in shape during his period of ineligibility. He had joined an amateur basketball team and traveled around the state playing games on weekends.)

  East ripped off a string of victories to take the City League title. All five starters—Godfrey, Fowlkes, Calloway, Hammond, and Waller—made first team All-City, a feat the school promoted as unprecedented. Coach Hart was named UPI High School Coach of the Year.

  East met Big Walnut at the beginning of the district tournament and cruised, 73–42. They then took apart Newark, 56–35, a notable win as Newark had been Central District champions the year before. East High players may not have been allowed into some of the restaurants in Upper Arlington, a white suburb of Columbus, but they set their own rules on the basketball court and ousted the suburban school 70–64 in tournament play. They next faced Watterson, where they notched their twentieth win, 63–52. Many were now wondering: Could Bob Hart’s Tigers actually reach the state final game? To keep their streak going, they had to get by City League stalwart West High, which they did by shooting 47 percent from the floor. Their defense held West to 27.9 percent shooting, and the final score was 54–42. Lynne Hart, the youngest Hart daughter, was hoisted up on the shoulders of the players, outfitted in a black sweater with a large “E” in the center.

  Later in the week a nine a.m. pep rally was held at the school before the team departed for the Class AA regional tournament, where they would be pitted against Portsmouth. Portsmouth was dispatched in quick fashion, 71–52. Next up was a stiffer opponent, Canton McKinley, a team that always managed to make noise come tournament time. East would be playing inside always noisy Canton’s Memorial Field House.

  McKinley took a lead at halftime, 25–21. At the end of three quarters they were leading by 5 points. Hart glowered at his players, biting into the orange towel he always held in his hands. (East’s school colors were orange and black.) Since his return to the East High team, Bob Martin had not had any explosive games. He was sent in as the first player coming off the bench, often to slow the opposition’s highest scorer. But against McKinley, Martin shone: He gave East the lead by hitting a jump shot with 2:03 left, making the score 49–48. East then quickly found themselves down by one, 50–49. Martin then hit one of two free throws to send the game into overtime. The first overtime ended with the score tied, 54–54. McKinley couldn’t contain East’s Ed Waller, who scored 10 points during the two overtimes, leading East to a scintillating 60–58 victory. Waller had to share the spotlight for the victory with Bob Martin. It was to Martin that the press gave much of the credit for the victory. “He is the best sixth man around and could play for anybody,” Coach Hart conceded afterward about Martin.

  The victory put East High in the state tourney finals, where three other teams—Urbana, Marion Harding, and Cleveland East Tech (which, at 24–0 was the only undefeated team)—would be vying for the state title. East drew Cleveland East Tech as an opponent. The city of Columbus hadn’t had a team in the state finals since 1958. Excitement throughout the state capital was high.

  Bob Hart put his players through their last practice at East High on Thursday, the day before their tournament game. “You have devoted a lot of time to basketball here and you have worked hard,” he told his gathered players. He was the kind of coach who commanded rapt attention. But he offered levity: “Now let’s see you make one last layup.” The players chuckled, loped off, and each flipped in a layup. “I would say we’ll be ready,” the coach allowed.

  Tiger fans could be forgiven if they were more than a little worried about East Tech: This would be Tech’s sixth straight jaunt to the state finals, an unprecedented feat. With that kind of record going into the finals, and after four years as head coach, Tech’s head coach, Joe Howell, was a wily steward of his team. (Howell was the only black head coach in the state finals.)

  When East Tech raced to a 6–0 lead, East’s Bob Hart called a time-out. He glared at his players, told them to calm down, and quickly decided to draw up some defensive adjustments. They listened intently. Back on the court they dropped in 11 points. For the remainder of the first half and during the second half, Bob Hart’s Tigers dismissed the East Tech pedigree: They outshot Tech 49 percent to 35 percent; they outrebounded them 36 to 22; and they outscored them. The final showing was 58–44. The rookie varsity coach was taking his team to the state championship game. They would be matched against the gritty Marion Harding team, which had whipped Urbana High 64–50 in the other semi-final contest.

  Marion Harding had to sense trouble when East High took off with a 9–0 lead at Ohio State’s St. John Arena in the state championship contest. Inside the third quarter, East High’s tall trio of Godfrey, Fowlkes, and Waller intimidated the Marion Harding players so much that they managed only a single field goal. Figuring their best chance to win was to slow the game down, Marion Harding crept up the court, had the ball for long spells, all of which ignited the always fast-breaking Tigers to quicken the pace more than usual whenever they had the ball. At the end of three quarters the score was East 31, Marion Harding 19. And when the final horn of the low-scoring game sounded, East had outscored Harding 41–32 to claim the state trophy. Tiger fans swarmed the court. Hart’s players lifted the getting-chubby coach skyward. Jimmy Hart, beaming, bounced from the stands toward his son and the team members. Then he found himself cackling with newsmen, saying his son had been crazy about basketball since he was a tot.

  The day after the championship victory there was a parade to the statehouse—the caravan leaving from the school on East Broad Street, then making its way to High Street downtown. More than twenty-five hundred people showed up, among them Governor Jim Rhodes and Mayor W. Ralston Westlake.

  A short while later a telegram landed on Hart’s desk: ON BEHALF OF THE FIRST COLUMBUS EAST HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL TEAM TO THE FINE OHIO STATE CHAMPIONS OF EAST HIGH SCHOOL HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS—J Elwood Bulen 1899 class of East High School Basketball Team.

  For Bob Hart, it was more than a state championship victory. He knew what was out there on the streets. Basketball, for the black kid, was something deeper than the game itself. It was a powerful step toward the road of freedom.

  Jimmy and Mirza were so jubilant about the team’s championship that they decided, in the days following the parade, to take the team out to dinner for a more intimate celebration. There was a nice dining spot the couple liked, Reeb’s Restaurant, and Jimmy and Mirza decided that’s where they’d all go. Jimmy phoned Freddie West, the restaurant manager, and asked to reserve the party room, a lovely and semi-private room in the back of the restaurant. West told him the room was available. Jimmy told the manager that he would be bringing the East High School basketball players. “I’m sorry, we can’t do it,” the manager said. He started up about the black boys, that their presence would be disruptive. The conversation became heated before ending abruptly. Jimmy was livid, and so was Mirza when he told her. Their friendship with the restaurant owners was damaged from that day onward. “It crushed my grandmother,” recalls Bobbi, Bob Hart’s daughter.

  Jimmy Hart finally found an accommodating restaurant for his son’s basketball team. They all went to Miller’s Restaurant on Johnstown Road on the outskirts of town. Everyone had a fine time.

  * * *

  —

  The East Side of Columbus could have been a stand-in for small-town black America. It was an urban setting, true enough, but was knitted by neighborhoods. Southern accents were not uncommon to hear. Neighbors celebrated community achievements. Cultural highlights came by way of movie openings and concerts. Those events were buffeted by accomplishments in the local sport
s scene. Most, however, simply saw sports and culture and politics blending together.

  In the same winter week of 1963 that Bob Hart’s Tigers were wending their way toward the end of the basketball season and on to the tournament, To Kill a Mockingbird, a movie based on the popular Harper Lee novel of the same name, opened in downtown Columbus at the Ohio Theater. For years Barbee Durham and Rev. Phale Hale, two local NAACP members, had lodged complaints about local theaters and their inhospitality toward blacks. There was no physical abuse of blacks who tried to see To Kill a Mockingbird at the Ohio Theater, but there was a feeling among blacks that they’d rather go to the theaters that catered to them on the East Side of town, which were the Pythian and Cameo theaters, the same theaters that the East High students frequented. The movie, which stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, William Windom, and Brock Peters, among others, tells the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer who defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. The horrors of racial injustice in the movie are seen mostly through the eyes of the young Finch children, Scout and Jem, which layers the movie with a quiet—albeit still quite menacing—texture. The movie was widely hailed and went on to Oscar glory. “At the outset,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review of the film in the New York Times, “it plops us down serenely in the comfort of a grubby Southern town at the time of the Great Depression, before ‘desegregation’ was even a word.”

  In 1963, in Bob Hart’s glory year at East High, “desegregation” was not yet a word in Columbus, Ohio, either.

  The spiritual center for the East High athletes was inside Rev. Phale Hale’s Union Grove Baptist Church, which sat mere blocks from the school. It is where the basketball team would go to hear church praise—along with the sermon of course—heaped upon them following their big victories. Reverend Hale was a pillar of the community, a potent voice against discrimination around town. The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Hale had, as a young boy, turned to hoboing to get out of desperate straits in Mississippi. He was industrious and wound up gaining admission to Morehouse College. As a Morehouse graduate, he acquired an instant pedigree. (“You can tell a Morehouse man—but you can’t tell them anything,” went the quip.) Both Hale and his wife, Cleo, had known the family of Martin Luther King Jr. for years; Cleo and young Martin had been playmates in Atlanta. Reverend Hale brought King to Columbus in 1958 and chaperoned the young minister around town, the two of them bowing before the church ladies and cackling softly in the moonlight when discussing the less arduous facets of black life.