While writing a book about Larry Bird’s high school basketball days, I became fascinated by the many stories I heard about those who played high school basketball against Larry. Imagine being able to say you had played against Larry Bird. What a story to be able to tell your kids or grandkids. But then I realized that many of us who played high school basketball, even at smaller schools, sometimes went up against a player or two who went on to greatness, or at least some level of college competition.
For me, there is a difference between the most well-known and the toughest player I went up against. This point of view involves using real time perspective. Some high school basketball players, like Larry Bird, would keep growing and keep getting better. The one who grabbed the later public attention that I played against in southern Illinois in the late 1960s, Doug Collins, was much like Larry Bird in that he was injured his sophomore year and did not play. During his junior year, Collins did not start on his varsity team, nor did he average in double figures that season. But like Larry Bird, he also kept growing and getting better. He was six feet tall as a junior and 6-3 by the end of his senior year. He became one of those pure shooters, a high scoring player in his high school senior year and an Illinois high school basketball all-state member. In college, he grew to 6-6. He was the hero of the ill-fated 1972 American Olympics basketball team; a consensus first-team All-American in 1973, along with Bill Walton, David Thompson, and Jamaal Wilkes; an NBA player (#1 draft pick and 4-time NBA all-star team member); an NBA coach and commentator; and an inductee into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
And yet, he wasn’t the best opponent I played against in high school. More on that guy later.
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It was 1969, late in the regular basketball season of my senior year at Bluford High School. We were going for our twenty-first victory in a row on our home floor against Tamaroa. Toward the end of the contest, one of our guards, Rod Stover, hurled himself at a loose ball, sliding headfirst into a crowd of men who had been unable to find seats in the crowded gym and were standing at the northeast end of the floor.
Stover, his nose to the floor, looked up to see a pair of highly polished black wingtip shoes. The owner, a well-dressed man, gave Rod a hand up. Later, Coach Yates laughed and told us the man was Rich Herrin, the legendary coach from Benton High School, who had come to the game to scout our team.
We won the game, 70-49, our 21st victory, giving Coach Herrin, who believed his Benton Rangers and our Bluford Trojans team would likely clash in the second round of the regional tournament, something a coach like Herrin would worry about. He probably scouted us a few other times, seeing how quickly our team could put up the points. He later told Southern Illinoian sports editor Merle Jones about us, noting, “The thing you have to watch for when you play a small school [like Bluford] is not to let them jump out into a lead.”
By the end of the regular season, Bluford was 23-1, with the second longest win streak in the state. We had easily captured the regular season Little Egyptian Conference and tournament crowns, along with the sixteen-team Wayne City Holiday Tournament championship, this tourney touted by more than one sportswriter as the best small-school holiday tournament in southern Illinois that year. But this was back in the day of single class basketball, and small schools, in our case with just over a hundred students, typically did not do well against the bigger schools at state tournament time. Benton, for example, had 715 students. That did not mean small school players were unaware of players from bigger schools.
Like many small-town high school basketball players, I had friends who played at much bigger schools. The summer of going into my junior year I often traveled to Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and played in the open high school gym where I went up against several of the Rams players, including a childhood friend, 6-7 Steve Strickland. Steve started on a Rams team that went to the state tournament finals in our senior year. Jim Smith, who later played at Illinois State, was also in that open gym mix. Missing when I was there was Mt. Vernon’s best player, Nate Hawthorne, who would later play in the NBA. Nevertheless, several of the guys I played with in that hotter than hell gym that summer would eventually play on Division 1 college teams. I liked physical contact, and I felt I more than held my own. There were also the local courts in Mt. Vernon, Gene Howard’s court next to his house being one of the places where you could always find basketball action. And when he wasn’t hauling hay, I played on a dirt court a few times with another tall Ram, Terry Sledge.
I had once attended a Mount Vernon Rams’ sophomore basketball game in 1967 to watch Steve, and his sophomore classmates play a game against a Benton squad. During the game, one of the Benton players, a scrawny-looking kid wearing a soiled cast on his left arm, walked the sideline, hollering at the refs and the opposing players in such a loud and boisterous fashion, he grew annoying. Over the next two years, and even after that, he constantly grew in skill and size. His name was Doug Collins.
By the time the 1969 regionals had rolled around, Collins had achieved a height of six three and was like a manic, ever-moving electric eel on offense and defense. Benton’s coach, the legendary basketball strategist Rich Herrin, had created a basketball dynasty over the prior three years, but in 1969, Collins was the only really great player Benton had. Not that the other players weren’t solid. They just weren’t as talented as former Ranger stars such as Rick Yunkus, Jim Adkins, or Danny Johnson, players who led Benton to an 84-8 record in three years.
Collins’ lack of a supporting cast caused one sportswriter to label Doug “the Lone Ranger.” But while the Benton Rangers’ record was not quite as good as past seasons, his scoring numbers and defensive plays were dazzling. By mid-season of his and my senior year Collins was vying for the top scoring position in the top-flight southern Illinois South Seven Conference, made up of teams such as Mt. Vernon, Carbondale, Centralia, Marion, Herrin, Harrisburg, and West Frankfort. Collins’ main rival for top scoring honors that year was Carbondale’s great Les Taylor, a player whom I watched almost single-handedly beat an exceptional Mt. Vernon team twice in that regular season. Taylor had the greatest vertical jump I had ever seen and would later star at Murray State University. Doug Collins, meanwhile, had grown to be a pure shooter and a demon on defense, moving all over the court like an angry pinball.
By regional tournament time at West Frankfort, the site my Bluford team would play, Benton, despite a poorer than usual record, had completed as tough a schedule as could be had in southern Illinois and had a wave of tradition at its back. Bluford, meanwhile, came into the tourney at 23-1. Interestingly, one poll ranking of southern Illinois teams had us just behind Benton. As always, the sportswriter gurus made their regional play predictions.
Amazing to me, Jack Taylor, at Illinois Prep Sports Special, picked Bluford to win the West Frankfort regional. Pete Swanson, at the Evansville Courier, wrote a long feature article about all the teams in the West Frankfort regional, assessing each one but not choosing a potential winner. Of Bluford, he noted the following:
The sleeper is Bluford, which has designs of becoming the modern-day Cobden [A 1964 small-school state runner up]. A smooth-functioning unit that plays tough defense, the Trojans have an under-the-basket defensive standout in 6-3 Randy Mills. They have a couple of 20-point scorers in 5-10 Ed Donoho and 6-1 Ed Case, both juniors. Bob Osborn and Jack Michels do workmanlike jobs.
We won our first game in the regional, bombing Tamaroa 86-67. We would now play the Benton Rangers who had easily dispatched their first regional opponent.
The next day, the greatest southern Illinois sports barb of them all, Merle Jones, assessed Bluford’s chances against Benton in a surprisingly gentle way, at least at the beginning of his article on the matter.
The Goliaths are beating the Little Davids with monotonous regularity in the Southern Illinois regionals so far this week. Tonight, little Bluford challenges Benton at West Frankfort. Bluford might have been the only undefeated team in the state except for some bad luck. Bluford may have been a little overconfident in its season opener with Enfield and lost. Nobody has beaten Bluford on the basketball court since. So tonight, it is Benton against upset-minded Bluford and West Frankfort against Du Quoin in the semi-finals. Only those fans who have lived in Bluford many years think it will be anybody other than Benton against West Frankfort in the finals Friday.
I had never seen our team or the coach as quiet as they were as we waited in the locker room for the Benton game. When we came out onto the floor, we received loud applause and cheering from every section but where the Benton fans sat.
Bluford took a 3-2 lead, but then Benton reeled off sixteen straight points. We were behind 47-27 at halftime.
Late in the third quarter, the Bluford Trojans started playing with their old methodic rhythm. The two Eds got hot, Bob Ed Osborn made a few great passes, and I started knocking around the Rangers under the basket. Suddenly the chanting began, throughout the gym—save the Benton section— “Trojans, Trojans.” Meanwhile, Benton continued to use a platoon-style rotation, always having players with fresh legs in the game. We were not deep enough to do that, but the boisterous encouragement from the fans, a sense of the game turning, gave renewed strength to the Bluford players’ efforts. Dunking had been made illegal during this time in high school basketball. I was never a great leaper anyway, but on one play, I caught the ball as it was just coming off the top of the rim, jamming it back in for a basket. No whistle blew.
Such was the power that comes with an adrenaline rush.
We drew within six points with 4:30 to play and had possession of the ball. The crowd was really into the game, urging us on. Reliable Ed Donoho took the ball to the basket but missed. Bluford fans screamed for a foul but to no avail. Doug Collins hit a long quick basket for Benton, and we missed a shot the next time down, fouling a Benton player when they got back possession of the ball. Roger Adkins made both free throws. Collins scored again, his basket followed by two more free throws by a Benton player, leaving the score 69-55 in Benton’s favor. Bluford had to foul the rest of the game to try to get the ball back, and we lost the game. After the contest Merle Jones pointed out how “the Rangers almost got too confident” as Bluford came back. But it was a loss any way you looked at it. Our 25-2 record, however, still stands as the school’s best winning percentage for a boys’ basketball team fifty-six years later.
Benton went on to win the West Frankfort regional that year, before losing to a powerful Mt. Vernon Rams squad in the finals of the sectional play. The Rams would eventually represent southern Illinois in the state tourney. Collins, meanwhile, was destined for Illinois State. At Illinois State, Collins grew three more inches and evolved into an amazing scoring machine. He ended up the number one draft pick in the NBA in 1974. Yet, in his high school days, he was not the best player I went up against.
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Bluford High School basketball had been in a downward trajectory for a few years when I started school there as a freshman. The varsity won only five games that year while the junior varsity team I started on won all but three of its games. Fans took hope in the fact we were the school’s future. My sophomore year was a surprise. We had a new coach, and he started me on the varsity team with four seniors. We only won a single game in the regular season and our first game in district play, Bluford’s worst season ever, but I had a blast. There was little pressure, and I performed well that year, even being the leading scorer in four games.
The next season, my junior year, we had another new coach, Roger Yates, a former Mt. Vernon basketball star, and some great junior and sophomore players. It was a magical season. We won our first ten games in a row, the Little Egyptian Conference title, and claimed the district tournament, advancing to the regional level. Meanwhile, a larger and storied basketball team in southern Illinois was having a tremendous year as well.
Benton in the 1967-1968 season was having their final great run of a three-season triumph. The Rangers, under coaching genius Rich Herrin, had gained two straight undefeated regular season campaigns before ‘67-68’ and were the talk of the state. The main player on that last great Ranger squad run was a kid named Danny Johnson, the best player I would ever go up against in high school play. Great basketball players tend to have two different styles of playing. Some move so smoothly, you are hardly aware of their speed or effort. Others play like they are possessed, always moving, looking for angles. Danny Johnson was the latter type. He could take over the rhythm of a game, bent it to his own will.
Johnson went on amazing scoring tears before there was a three-point line, scoring over forty points in one game. He was chosen as the most valuable player at the prestigious Centralia Holiday Tournament. His 39 point and 37-point rampages against conference leader Mt. Vernon led Benton to close victories over the Rams in the regular season. One major sportswriter called Johnson “a 6-1 fireball” and “the most complete basketball player in southern Illinois this year.” I can certainly add to that: God help you if he was guarding you.
In the ‘67-68’ regular season we captured the district tournament for the first time in over a decade. Yet, few experts gave Bluford much of a chance against our first opponent in the regional, Sesser. The Red Devils were winners of two holiday tournaments and the Black Diamond Conference. The school was twice as large as Bluford and they had the tougher sport calendar, a schedule peppered with several bigger schools. The gym for our regional was in West Frankfort, one of the finest gymnasiums in southern Illinois, a gym that had witnessed some of the greatest high school basketball games ever played in the state. We got to the gym early, and as we walked across the polished floor, toting our things down to the locker room area, Coach Yates pointed to where he had sat under one of the goals to watch the unforgettable Cobden/Pinckneyville Super-Sectional game in 1964.
When we came back out on the gym floor for warm-ups, we could see the Bluford fans, a not-very-large-looking group in the vastness of the stands. I was unable to spot my dad among the crowd, but I could feel his presence. John Rackaway headlined his next day’s report of our game in the Mt. Vernon Register News with all caps and an exclamation mark: “BLUFORD DEFEATS SESSER!” But it was the king of the southern Illinois sportswriters, Merle Jones of Carbondale’s Southern Illinoisan, who wrote up the best piece in a special Sport Talk column. “Bluford played with much more poise and skill than a lot of big school teams I have seen this year. Benton, Bluford’s opponent Thursday, has great outside shooting and enough height to beat the Trojans on the boards. The little Trojans, however, may make it a more interesting game than had been indicated before they played Tuesday.”
Merle Jones must have felt like a fool the next day. Benton was 21-5, close to our 21-6 record but the game was a rout. Danny Johnson seemed to be on a mission to destroy us. I know he stole the ball from me and the other Bluford players several times. Jones wrote the next day, “The little Bluford team which looked so good against Sesser Tuesday was no match for the Rangers, led by ball-hawking Danny Johnson. The Rangers pressed the Trojans into 20 floor mistakes and made repeated steals.” Mt. Vernon, who had lost twice to Benton in the regular season, beat the Rangers 72-70 in the first game of sectional play. Danny had 34 points while a friend of mine, Terry Sledge, was the high scorer for the Rams. Mostly forgotten today, Johnson would go on to play college basketball at Western Kentucky University.
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The baby boomer generation is fading away, and with that fading goes the memories of the small-town basketball culture many of us played in during that golden age of high school basketball. Most of the memories are sweet, but I can still feel the pain and embarrassment today when I think about that regional game in 1968, how a great but forgotten player named Danny Johnson took my team to the woodshed. Yet, it was an honor to have played against Danny and his great Benton team. So, who was the best player you went up against in your high school basketball days? Was it me?
