The Write Coach Blog

(This is a chapter from my non-fiction book, JOCK: The Quickest Thinking Coach in America, 2025

Fall of 1968

Irvine Stewart says he didn’t know what to expect that morning, Aug. 28, 1968 — the day the Democratic Presidential Convention was about the tear apart Chicago and the nation and four days after he turned 15 years old.  Anxious about the road ahead, he boarded the yellow school bus near his home on West Sixth Street in Lexington. Ky.  That bus and  others carried Stewart, his best friend, D.K. Garth, and dozens of  black students miles away from their downtown neighborhoods to a high school in the  suburbs, a school where only a couple of years earlier the students waved Confederate flags at athletic events.

Stewart didn’t fully grasp then why he couldn’t attend Paul Dunbar High School, which was only a block from his house.  Ever since he was young enough to pick up a basketball, he imagined himself wearing a green-and-white Bearcat uniform.  Dunbar basketball was the pride of Lexington’s black community. Home games had the fervor of a gospel service.  The band played.  The cheerleaders swayed.  And all the people said “Amen” to their high priest of basketball, the head coach, Dr. S.T. Roach.

The icons of the team’s 512 victories under Roach filled the school’s trophy case — two state black school championships, six 11^th Region championships in the 11 years Dunbar was allowed to compete against white teams and  two state tournament runner-up trophies, from 1961 and 1963. Stewart knew all the players from those teams from pickup games at Douglass Park and the Charles Young rec center.  This should have been his time to be a part of all that tradition, to add another trophy to that shelf.  And now the high school, and all that it meant to him and every other kid in the neighborhood, was gone.

In 1966, Lexington school officials, fearing forced integration, took a pre-emptive step, announcing they would close Dunbar High School.  That meant white students wouldn’t have to be bused to the black high school. Federal officials weren’t satisfied, however, so the city and county merged school systems.  The city also closed its other downtown high school, Henry Clay, building a new Henry Clay High School in the eastern suburbs. Dunbar closed in the spring of 1967, and over the next two years, its students were disbursed to the four high schools out in the county, far from their inner-city homes.

The local politics didn’t matter much to Irvine Stewart that August morning as the school bus headed south on Broadway Avenue for several miles – passing by the  Campbell House Hotel, an aging white building with the stately look of a southern plantation.  A half-mile farther, the bus veered left onto Clays Mill Road, then took a sharp left  onto Springhill Drive, past rows of brick and stone houses with well-kept lawns, then pulled in behind his new high school.

There were several white students waiting to greet Stewart and his friends as they stepped off the bus.

“Go home niggers!” he remembers several of the students shouting. “We don’t want you here!  Go back downtown!”

Welcome to Lafayette High School.

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Lexington had changed again when Jock Sutherland returned late in the summer of 1970 at age 42.

Southland Park was no longer as busy as it was three summers ago when he first moved back to his hometown, staying for only one season before he was offered a job as an assistant at the University of Alabama.  Maybe because other parks and pools had been built in the south side of town by then.  Maybe because there was restlessness among young people that led them to less frivolous activities.  On May 5, 1970, the day after National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University, the sleepy University of Kentucky campus suddenly woke up to war protests.  Someone set the Air Force ROTC building on fire.  The building was only a block from Jock’s grandmother’s house, the house where he grew up.  It was right across the street from Alumni Gymnasium, where he had spent so many gleeful days as a child sneaking into UK basketball practices.

Jock’s family dynamics were changing, too.  For the first time in Jock’s coaching career, the Sutherlands were no longer together as a unit.  Their oldest son, Charlie, graduated high school before the family left Tuscaloosa.  He decided to stay behind at Alabama to play for the freshman basketball team. The house they rented on Lafayette Parkway felt empty at times to Snooks, although Jock and Glenn were usually right across the street at the high school, where the youngest Sutherland enrolled as a sophomore.

But the biggest change of all, the change Jock never anticipated when he decided to return to his alma mater, was Lafayette High School itself.   Redistricting in the fall of 1968 moved the school’s wealthiest families to the rival Tates Creek High district and brought the city’s poorest students from the Charlotte Court section of downtown all the way out to Lafayette Drive. Lafayette had 14 National Merit semifinalists in 1968, only two in 1970.

Lafayette integrated in 1963, but those kids were rural blacks and there weren’t many of them.  They blended quietly into the student body. The downtown black kids came with different attitude.  They didn’t want to be there.  They were reminded every day of what they didn’t have: cars, new clothes, the three-bedroom, one-and-half bath brick homes with nuclear families.   They carried themselves defiantly.  They refused to cower to racial taunts by the school’s white toughs, the guys who spent most of their days smoking in the restrooms, intimidating anyone, black or white, who just wanted to use a urinal.  I was a junior that year.  Like most of the white students, I avoided the rowdies and the rednecks. In fact, I stayed out of the main bathroom all three years I was in high school. But the downtown black kids fought back.   With fists.  Sometimes with knives.  There were days when the suburban school yard looked like a scene from West Side Story.

The worst of the fighting had subsided by the time Sutherland returned in 1970, but many of the black students continued to rebel.  Black teachers like Louis Stout Jr., who had been the last basketball coach at Dunbar High School before it closed, says he thought that the white teachers were afraid to discipline black students, only encouraging bad behavior. Chaos often resulted.

On the first day of school in August, 1970, Sutherland remembers walking into the cafeteria and saw black girls dancing on the table tops as their friends played loud music and cheered them on.

“Knock it off,” the coach called out.

Everyone ignored him.  They had never seen this man before.

“Knock it off, I said,” he repeated, his voice rising.

Again, they ignored him.

Sutherland said nothing.  He walked over to the light switch and shut it off.  The cafeteria went dark.

“Everybody out,” he bellowed.

The students scattered. 

“That old man’s crazy!” one girl yelled as she departed.

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Sutherland’s late decision to leave the University of Alabama didn’t give him much time to get acquainted with his new Lafayette basketball team.

Still, he liked what he saw at first.  

Irvine Stewart was a senior now.  He was only 5-foot-10½, but he was one of the fiercest rebounders Sutherland had ever coached.  Stewart’s buddy, 6-foot-1 guard D.K. Garth, and two other downtown kids, 6-foot-3 Chuck Scott 6-foot-3 Darrell Higgins, were all experienced players.  Steve Feck, a 6-foot-3 white senior, and two 6-foot-2 junior guards, David Moore and Van Berry, gave the team depth.

None of them was a dominant player like Gary Waddell or Toke Coleman, but all of these kids had good size and quickness. They were perfect, Jock was certain, for his style of basketball.

But there was so much he didn’t know about the downtown black kids.

He didn’t realize that when he scheduled a Saturday practice, they often had no one to drive them from the inner-city to the suburbs; nor that when they went home after school on the days of an away game that they had to catch a bus downtown in order to get back to the school in time to leave with the rest of the team.  He couldn’t see that the attitude they wore was a shield from the piercing intolerance they felt at the predominantly white high school.  He didn’t understand that “acting white” made them look weak to their peers.

The players knew even less about him. They didn’t understand that when he yelled at them, he wasn’t trying to humiliate them; he was trying to push them out of the comfort zones, to use all of their abilities.  They didn’t know how he had protected his first black players, how he had been a father-figure to fatherless kids like Toke Coleman and Wendell Hudson. They also didn’t know much about his reputation as a coach. When he returned to Lafayette the first time, he had immediate credibility with the players, black and white.  But those kids were gone, and Sutherland had been away from high school basketball for two years.

The four black seniors were a little wary of him from the beginning.  He was their third head coach in their three years at the school.  Each coach employed different offenses and defenses; each coach treated them differently.  They had reached the regional tournament as juniors.  They figured this was their year to strut. This new coach needed to prove himself to them.

Practices became a war of wills almost from the first day.  Sutherland knew one way to coach – he talked, the players listened. He wasn’t going to change.  When any of the seniors challenged his authority, he erupted.  These seniors didn’t accept sharp rebuke from a white man easily. The tension increased every day. Between the players and the coach.  Between the black players and the white players. 

Yet the team held together for the first month of the season.  The players’ athletic skills and their basketball acumen were well suited for Sutherland’s increasingly complicated defensive schemes.  He kept a collection of  colored towels with him on the bench.  He’d wave a red one if he wanted his team in the basic zone defense, white to increase the half-court pressure and blue for full-court pressure, yellow for a straight zone.  Sometimes, if none of those worked, he’d just throw all the towels up in the air and let them play whatever they wanted.  That usually confused both teams.

Mostly, all the defenses were working in December of 1970.  After eight games, Lafayette had a 7-1 record and was ranked among the state’s top 10 teams.

Then came game No. 9, on Dec. 30, 1970, for the championship of the Bluegrass Festival, a holiday tournament at Lexington Catholic High School.  Lafayette won its first two games of the tournament easily.  Its opponent in the championship game was a highly disciplined but undersized Frankfort High team, which didn’t have a player in its starting lineup over 6-feet tall.  This should have been an easy victory for Lafayette. 

About four minutes into the game, Lafayette trailed 11-0.  Frankfort’s precision offense … bounce pass, bounce pass, bounce pass, bounce pass until someone worked open for an open shot … confounded the Generals’ multiple defenses.  But the bigger problem was on offense.  Nothing was working for Lafayette. Sutherland saw that two starters refused to pass the ball to one another, knocking everything out of synch.

He called time out.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” he says he bellowed at them.

They wouldn’t look at him.

He yelled at them some more before they returned to the court.

Afterward, a manager cautiously approached the angry coach.

The two players got into a fight in the locker room before the game when Sutherland was outside, the manager said.

“What about?”  Sutherland asked.

The manager hadn’t packed all of the team’s socks for the trip.  When the last two players arrived, there was only one pair with the school’s emblem, a red L, left.  The other player would have to wear a pair of plain socks.  These were kids who had to scrap for everything they got in life. They wrestled for the more stylish pair of socks.

Sutherland was livid.

“A pair of damn socks!” he shouted.

He pulled both players out of the game.

The berating continued at halftime, with Lafayette trailing 40-25.

Lafayette made a run in the second half, but Frankfort remained patient in the face of the Generals’ harassing defense and held on for a 59-53 victory despite 25 points by Stewart, who was named the tournament’s most valuable player.

Lafayette’s players didn’t show any disappointment after the defeat.  Maybe their lives were so full of disappointment that they had learned to mask it.  Sutherland was furious.  His anger increased when he saw some of the kids laughing and joking in the locker room.  Then Chuck Scott really lit the coach’s fuse.

“Hey, at least we got a trophy to put in the trophy case back at school,” the coaching remembers Scott saying, hoisting the runner-up award up high.

Jock lost it.  He wasn’t sure why.  Maybe it was the memory of all the Lafayette championship teams, the finely disciplined squads coached by Ralph Carlisle.  Maybe it was the frustration of knowing he left a Division I coaching job at Alabama to return to a school that he didn’t recognize anymore.   Maybe … maybe … he never has been able to explain what happened next as anything other than temporary insanity.

He grabbed the trophy from Scott, hurled it past the player’s head, into the locker room wall.

Wham!

Pieces flew all over the floor.

“You ain’t putting nothing into that trophy case until you can win something with the right damn attitude!” he screamed.

Finally, there was silence. A trophy and a team had been shattered.

As the others quietly left, Steve Feck, the lone white senior, gathered up the pieces, put them in his gym bag and carried them home.

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January and February of 1971 were the two most miserable months of Jock’s coaching career.  Nothing else quite compared … not losing his first 10 games at Gallatin County, not the last-second tournament defeats to Bourbon County and Shelby County when he was at Harrison County, not the injury to Gary Waddell before his first Lafayette team began tournament play.

At home Jock rarely spoke.  The Sutherlands’ regular 6:30 p.m. dinners were no longer happy meals.  Snooks tried to console him, tell him that the players and he would adjust to each other, they always had.  Give it time, she said. Glenn stayed out of the line of fire.  He was playing on the school’s promising junior varsity team.  He saw his dad suffer every day. He didn’t want to talk about it at home.  Charlie called regularly from Tuscaloosa.  He recognized that his dad’s voice no longer carried his usual enthusiasm for basketball.

School was even worse.  The man who grew up in love with basketball, dreaded the final bell every day and the start of another practice.

The coaching office he built for himself in an old equipment cage seemed more like a jail cell now.  The office had always been a place where players and the press could stop by for a chat.  Whatever happened on the basketball court, he always seemed jovial when you found him in his office.  Three seasons earlier, I had been an invisible jayvee player during his first return to Lafayette.  Now I was an 18-year-old sports writer for The Lexington Herald, assigned to cover the local high school teams. I often found him in the office after practice, head buried in his hands.  He seemed so isolated there.

Some days when I stopped by for an interview, I felt more like a psychiatrist than a journalist. I couldn’t print much of what he said.  It wouldn’t have been fair to the players.  I knew them, too.  My basketball career ended after my sophomore year, but the next season, when Stewart, Scott, Garth, Higgins and Feck were sophomores, I worked out with them in the preseason before I was the last player cut from the team.  Then I traveled with them all year as the team’s statistician. The four players from downtown were good kids.  They actually had a lot in common with Jock’s childhood -– they barely had a father figures in their lives, if at all; basketball gave them their identity.

But it seemed that the coach and the players would never find that common ground.

The team lost seven of its next nine games and Sutherland’s  frustration intensified.  For the first time as a coach, he couldn’t communicate with his players, especially the black players.  He thought he understood them.  He had gotten along with black people since he was a kid, even though he grew up in a southern city where the newspaper printed “Colored News and Notes” on Sundays.  He had shepherded Toke Coleman and the other black players at Harrison County through the rigors of integration in a rural community. On his first team at Lafayette, Sutherland’s black and white players blended together like keys on a piano. He recruited the first black athlete at Alabama, Wendell Hudson.  But these kids, these kids from downtown Lexington … he couldn’t reach them. He became so frustrated that he didn’t even want the team to win.  If these guys weren’t going to play the way he wanted them to play, then they deserved to lose, he told me off the record. 

The players dealt with Sutherland’s tirades in their own way.  Stewart was the leader of the group. Basketball meant the most to him.  He saw the sport as his way out of poverty, as a chance to go to college.  Now all that seemed to be disappearing. When he was with the others, he was the most defiant.  But in private he tried to mediate with the coach, to bring everyone together.

Scott was the cocky one. He was an intimidating figure, with an Afro, mustache and neatly trimmed beard. He was a brash talker.  He wasn’t the type to back down, to respond quietly, calmly, to a coach or anybody.

Higgins retreated into his own world, simply ignoring his coach, another male figure who wasn’t there in his life.

Maybe Garth internalized his anguish more than the others.  Outwardly, he appeared almost oblivious to the strife between players and coach, like he didn’t care.  Inside, though, something was going on that not even his best friend, Stewart, understood.

Feck, the lone white senior, kept his head down, trying to keep playing hard through it all.  He was enduring enough trauma at home – his parents were divorcing.

By early February, the team’s 7-1 record had fallen to 9-9.  After another blistering lecture by the coach, Garth left the team and refused to return.

Stewart tried shuttle diplomacy between his buddy and his coach.  Nothing worked.  Garth was resolute.  He had had enough.  Basketball wasn’t worth it anymore.

A couple of days later, on Feb. 6, the team was preparing to leave on a trip to northern Kentucky for a night game against Ft. Thomas Highlands High School.  Sutherland got a call from Stewart.  He, Higgins, Scott and junior Van Berry had missed their bus from downtown.

“It’ll be a half hour before another one comes, Coach. Can you wait for us?”

“Then you’ve missed two buses,” Sutherland replied, “because we’re out of here in five minutes.”

The bus left the school without the players, but the team hadn’t gotten out of town when Sutherland heard a horn honking and honking from a car traveling beside the bus.   The driver motioned for the bus to pull over.  The coach saw that Stewart was in the car.  The bus stopped.  Stewart got on without saying a word. 

Sutherland had ordered the managers not to pack the uniforms of the players who didn’t show up.  So Stewart wore a jayvee jersey that night.  He didn’t start, but he came off the bench to score 15 points, even though Lafayette got clobbered 74-50.

Just a few nights later, the team traveled across town to play rival Bryan Station.  The players who had been left behind on the Ft. Thomas trip staged a mini-protest.  They kept tapping on the bus window with quarters.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Cut it out,” Sutherland yelled.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“If you don’t cut it out, I’ll put you off the bus.”

“You can’t put us off the bus,” one of them said.

Sutherland ordered the driver to stop.  The bus was in downtown Lexington, near where the players lived.

“Get off and go home,” he said.

They didn’t budge. 

Sutherland saw a police officer nearby and called him over.

“Sir, these kids are disrupting my team,” the coach said.  “Would you remove them from this bus.”

The players left.  Lafayette lost again as the season tumbled out of control.  February ended and the team’s   record was 11 wins, 14 losses.  Only tournament play remained.  No one gave this team much of a chance to go very far.

No one except Irvine Stewart.

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Stewart knew there wasn’t much demand among college coaches  for 5-foot-10½ forwards, even though he had averaged 17 points and more than 10 rebounds during the tumultuous season. Still, he believed in himself, believed that someone would take notice if he performed on a big enough stage.  There was still time, he remembers thinking.

He called yet another team meeting.  It was time, he told the other players, to put an end to the resistance.  It was time to do it the coach’s way. “He was a coach at Alabama. He’s taken a lot of teams to the state tournament,” Stewart said.  “He must know basketball.”

Sutherland was surprised when he saw several of the players gather outside his office. 

Stewart spoke up.

“We know you are an old-fashioned man and you ain’t gonna change,” the senior forward said. “You won’t see our way, but the only way we’re going to do anything in the tournament is if we do it your way.  So we’re going to do it your way from now on.  We want you to understand, sir, that we don’t like you, but we’re going to do it your way because you’re the man.  There won’t be no more arguin’ from us.”

Sutherland smiled for maybe the first time in weeks.

“If you mean that,” he said, “we’ll win some games.”

The battle with each other was over.  The other teams were the enemy for now.

And Stewart became a warrior.

He scored 28 points and owned the backboards with 21 rebounds as Lafayette opened play in the 43^rd District tournament with a 54-43 victory over Bryan Station, which was now coached by Sutherland’s old rival from the 10^th Region, Bob Barlow.

Stewart added 31 points and another dozen rebounds in the district semifinals, a 79-73 triumph over Sayre, a private school in Lexington.

That victory guaranteed Lafayette a berth in the 11^th Region tournament, so it didn’t matter that the Generals lost to rival Tates Creek in the district championship game.  Both teams advanced to the regional tournament the next week at UK’s Memorial Coliseum.

Tates Creek, coached by Louis Stout Jr., was the heavy favorite to win the tournament and advance to The Sweet Sixteen.  Stout, Toke’s Coleman’s half brother, was the last link to Dunbar High’s basketball greatness.  He had been an assistant to Roach, then took over as head coach for the final two years of the school’s existence after Roach retired in 1965. But on the opening night of the regional tournament, the little Frankfort team pulled another surprise, upsetting Tates Creek on a 40-foot bank shot at the final buzzer.

That eliminated a major obstacle for Lafayette, which advanced with a 66-61 victory over Madison Central in the first round of the tournament.

That advanced the Generals to the semifinals against Woodford County, a team that had beaten them by more than 20 points during the regular season.

Sutherland’s players liked to run up and down the court and shoot whenever the mood struck. He knew that kind of fast-paced game would mean certain defeat against a team like Woodford County, which had size, talent and discipline.

This would be a real test of how sincere his players were about following his instructions.

He decided to offer them a little incentive.

When the players showed up at their dressing room in the Coliseum that Friday night, they saw five stacks of 10 silver dollars aligned on the bench. They once had belonged to Sutherland’s grandmother.  She left them for him.  Now was the time to pass them on.

“What you got there, man?” one player asked.

“That’s your money,” the coach said.  “One of these stacks belongs to each of you five starters.”

The players started slapping hands.

“Aww-right, man. Let me at my money.”

“Wait a minute,” Sutherland said.   “There’s a catch.”

“A catch, man. What kind of catch?”

“You don’t get the money until after the game,” the coach said. “And each time one of you misses a shot, I’m going to take one of the silver dollars off the stack.”

The players started slapping hands again.

“I ain’t gonna take no muther-fuckin’ shot, man,” said one.

“Me neither.  You take the shots, man.”

The first time Lafayette got the ball, the players kept passing and passing and passing.  Nobody would shoot.  Finally, Stewart was fouled.

He called time out.

“What the hell did you waste a timeout like that for?” Sutherland asked.

“Do free throws count if you miss them?” he asked.

“Yes,” the coach said, “and there’s one more catch.  If we lose, nobody gets any silver dollars.”

Every time Lafayette got the ball after that, the players ran their patterns over and over until someone broke free. Usually it was Higgins, the team’s best shooter and fastest player.  He made 13 of 15 field goal attempts and scored 30 points.  Midway through the fourth quarter, Lafayette  had attempted only 37 shots, but had made 80 percent of them.  By then, the Generals led by 20 points and Sutherland called another timeout.  

“You don’t have to worry about missing anymore,” he said. “The silver dollars are all yours.’

Lafayette won 64-49, advancing to Saturday’s 11^th Region championship game.

Its opponent:  Frankfort.  The team that had beaten the Generals for the Bluegrass Festival title, the night back in December when Sutherland smashed the tournament’s runner-up trophy.

After the Friday night game, Sutherland went to the Lafayette gym alone.  He wanted to get his mind focused on basketball.  These kids believed in him now.  He couldn’t let them down.  He walked the floor for hours, mimicking Frankfort’s offense, and Lafayette’s defense. By early Saturday morning, he had his plan.

That afternoon, Sutherland gathered his team for a workout at the Lafayette gym.  Frankfort’s offensive trademark was the bounce pass, a throwback to another generation, when players weren’t quick and athletic.  It worked now, because defensive players are taught to play with their hands up, blocking their opponents’ passing lanes.  The Quickest Thinking Coach in America drilled his kids that afternoon on playing defense with their hands down, close to the floor.

That night, Frankfort’s bounce passes turned into steals and deflections.  At one point, Frankfort went eight minutes without scoring a basket.  Stewart scored 25 points and grabbed nine rebounds as Lafayette pulled ahead by 13 in the final quarter and won by a final score of 49-39.

And it was time, once again, for Sutherland and his team to cut down the nets.

Irvine Stewart and the Lafayette Generals were going to The Sweet Sixteen, the first time the school had been back to the state tournament since it won the championship in 1957.

Sutherland had been the first coach to take Gallatin County to the state tournament and the first to take Harrison County.  This victory provided a couple of more firsts for him.  He became the first coach in tournament history to take three different schools to The Sweet Sixteen, The Sunday Herald-Leader reported. And Lafayette became the first team ever to reach the tournament after finishing the regular season with a losing record.

None of that seemed to matter with Sutherland as he spoke to reporters after the game. He was more contrite than celebratory.

“I wanted to win this one so bad because I’ve mistreated these guys all year long,” he said. “I apologized to them in a team meeting and I want to apologize to them publicly now.”

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The summer before he returned to Lafayette, while he was on a scouting trip for Alabama, Sutherland visited a basketball camp run by his old friend Harold Cole, the coach of the Ashland Tomcats.

Jock had always zealously guarded the secrets of his Mad Dog defense, but when Cole asked if he would share the technique with him and his players, Sutherland relented – he figured he was finished with high school coaching anyway.

So, of course, Lafayette was paired against Ashland in the first game of the 1971 state tournament at Freedom Hall in Louisville.

Sutherland had abandoned the basic Mad Dog because teams with quicker, more athletic players could break it down when they had time to practice against it.  Ashland played in the northeast, predominantly white corner of the state.  Sutherland didn’t know what to expect from the team.  He forgot about the Mad Dog and didn’t rehearse his team for it. The defense’s half-court trap surprised Lafayette’s guards early in the game and forced them into several walking violations. Ashland pulled ahead by as many as a dozen points.

But Irvine Stewart was playing on the biggest stage of his life and he wasn’t going to let the moment pass. Even though he was the shortest player on the court that day, his performance in the second half that was larger than life, one of the best in the tournament’s history.

Stewart had perfected a baseline move that he learned as a sophomore.  He would drive his man toward the baseline, then turn his body parallel to the line and slide toward the basket until he was actually behind the backboard, facing out of bounds with the defensive player on his back.  Then he would use his jumping ability to spring himself in reverse until his was in front of the rim.  His back became a shield that prevented even players six or seven inches taller than him from blocking his shot.

In the second half against Ashland, he made that move from the right side and from the left side, hurling his body into the mass of taller players again and again and again, scoring basket after basket.  He scored 22 points in the final two quarters.

Yet with 48 seconds left to play, Ashland still led 71-65.

Higgins scored on a jumper to cut Lafayette’s deficit to four points with 35 seconds remaining.  Then Steve Feck intercepted a pass and made a lay-up.   Ashland led by two.  Seventeen seconds still to play.

Sixteen.  Fifteen.  Fourteen.  Ashland cautiously worked the ball up the court against the Lafayette press. 

Ten.  Nine. Eight. The Generals didn’t foul.  Six. Five. Four.  Higgins stole the ball.  He passed it ahead  to Stewart. 

There was no time to drive to the basket now.

Stewart pulled up for a jump shot.  Beyond his normal shooting range.

The ball danced on the rim for a moment.  Then it fell off.

Ashland 71.  Lafayette 69.

The Tomcat fans, whose teams had been embarrassed by Sutherland teams in the past, whooped and hollered.  But hundreds of fans from all over the 17,000-seat arena also stood and applauded as Irvine Stewart walked off the floor.

He finished the game with 29 points and 11 rebounds, an effort that earned him a spot on the All-Tournament team.  In seven tournament games, three in the district, three in the region and one in The Sweet Sixteen, he averaged 22 points and more than a dozen rebounds.  At least a few college scouts noticed the undersized forward.

He couldn’t thoroughly enjoy his moment, though, not so much because his team had lost; because his lifelong friend, D.K. Garth, hadn’t been there to share the season-ending triumphs with him. 

Sutherland accepted some of the blame for that.  Stewart didn’t pass judgment.  When the senior finally reached the locker room, the coach already was surrounded by a battery of reporters, eager for a few colorful quotes to fill their game stories.  Stewart walked by the pack, turned toward Sutherland, stretched out his arm and clasped the coach’s shoulder.  They looked at each other without saying a word. They didn’t have to.  The mutual respect was obvious.

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Three weeks later, the Lafayette team gathered for its annual team banquet.

At the end of the program, Jock Sutherland held up the 11^th Region championship trophy.

“I’ve never been prouder to put anything in the school’s trophy case,” he said.

But the celebration wasn’t over. 

Steve Feck’s senior year at Lafayette had been a thunderstorm of emotion.  There was constant strife at practice and the divorce at home.  When he turned 18 after the first semester, he moved out and rented an apartment, paying for it with his earnings from a part-time job. Ever since he was a child, he had enjoyed rebuilding things that had been broken. His unselfish play helped the team repair itself in the final weeks of the season.  And alone at his apartment, he worked on a special project.

Feck carried a brown bag with him as he and the other seniors approached Sutherland. Feck opened the bag and pulled out that runner-up trophy from the Bluegrass Festival, mended with glue and tape.

He handed it to the coach.  The players and the rest of the crowd applauded loudly.  Jock was speechless for one of the few times in his life.

The trophy of a team that was torn apart then put back together remained on display at Lafayette High School for more than 30 years.

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By Deb Van Tassel Warner

On the southeast side of the corridor leading to the editorial board offices at 44 E.  Exchange St. sat a windowless room decorated top to bottom, walls, floor and upholstery, in deep shades of red.

Akron Beacon Journal employees referred to the room, neither surprisingly nor creatively, as the Red Room. Reporters took advantage of its privacy to conduct interviews, hold confidential conversations and have spirited discussions over brown bag lunches about the craft of writing. Editors used it for planning and training sessions, to deliver performance reviews, and occasionally to melt down privately from stress.  No one remembers who deemed red suitable for the room’s purpose. But as our cafeteria had been decorated in blue tones (yes, we called it the Blue Room!) in the same renovation, some decision-maker must have thought red was just the ticket. 

On an auspicious day in mid-1992, seven staffers occupied the Red Room for an entire shift, not to be interrupted, to brainstorm ideas for a project on race relations, an initiative that two years later would win the newspaper the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal.

The idea hatched after the April 29, 1992, trial verdict clearing four white Los Angeles police officers in the brutal, videotaped beating of Rodney King. Gathering community reaction, the Beacon had run a story of a white woman in Canton holding up a sign that simply said: “I’m sorry.”

For Black Americans, the verdict “underscored . . . the years of unfair treatment by police and the criminal justice system,” reporter Yalinda Rhoden recalled. It triggered a series of arguments between Rhoden and Assistant City Editor David Hertz, including a debate over which was more horrific, American slavery or the Holocaust.

“To me, anti-Semitism and racism have a great deal in common,” Hertz said. “I became convinced that the ABJ should examine race relations in our community and help the residents come to grips with racism.”

Hertz took the idea to senior editors, who called a meeting for input and buy-in from the entire newsroom. The staff packed into the hallowed John S. Knight conference room, and Hertz led the discussion.

“I was petrified,” he said. A relative newcomer to the Beacon, 30-year-old Hertz was then one of the youngest editors on staff.

Everyone supported the concept, but agreeing on the project’s scope proved contentious. A few staffers argued that any examination of race relations must include Akron’s suburbs and other minority groups. Most favored limiting the project to blacks and whites in Akron only. The rationale was twofold: The predominantly white suburbs would not illustrate the issues underpinning racial tension; and blacks formed Akron’s largest minority group. After all, the impetus was a black man’s beating at the hands of white cops. 

At the time, the decision seemed to make sense. We knew it would be an enormous undertaking requiring deft management and skillful diplomacy to keep newsroom egos on task. Today, some of us would certainly support a broader approach. Ignoring Akron’s other minority groups ran counter to the project’s goal, which was to foster inclusivity. 

After a second staff discussion, Editor Dale Allen advised Hertz to pick a smaller but diverse cross-section of newsroom talent to sharpen the focus. Offering the black perspective were reporter Rhoden, local columnist Carl Chancellor and editorial writer Laura Ofobike. For the white perspective were projects editor Bob Paynter, copy editor Sarah Vradenburg and myself, then the Sunday news editor.

That’s how we landed in the Red Room for eight intense, emotional hours, launching the discussion with the experiences that had shaped our own attitudes about race. We challenged and teased each other. We were variously loud, angry, contemplative, sorrowful, joyful, tearful, confrontational. We stayed in the room for lunch, leaving only for bathroom breaks. At the end of the day, no one was dry-eyed.

I told of growing up in a lily-white, working-class suburb in New Jersey, where my interactions with blacks were mostly positive. The worst racially motivated incident in my lifetime happened after I moved to Akron in 1982. I was driving through a benighted area of North Hill when a young black man threw a lit cigarette through my car window and called me a white bitch. I learned to drive through the ’hoods with doors locked and windows closed.

Akron also delivered my most illuminating epiphany about race, at a baby shower for Yuvonne Bruce, a black reporter who would become the copy editor on the project, at the Highland Square home of Cristal Williams, a black assistant editor. There were as many whites as blacks at the party when it began in the afternoon. By nightfall, the group had shrunk to about six or eight dedicated card players. I was the only white person.

I never felt unsafe. These were my friends, my colleagues. But I did wonder how I would feel if I were the only white in a group of blacks I did not know. Then I realized this uncertainty about safety, about how one will be treated, is what my black friends must experience most days of their lives as minorities in this country.

Rhoden, a versatile and gutsy newswoman as well as a good friend, chuckled, and said something to this effect: You’re right about that. When I started here I was covering northern Summit County. No one looks like me there.

A graduate of Akron’s Central-Hower High School and Ohio Wesleyan University, Rhoden was the youngest in the room. Family members had strong ties to the rubber companies and ran a funeral business. She provided invaluable context, having witnessed firsthand the demographic shifts along Copley Road and Hawkins Avenue, the near west side, North Hill and other neighborhoods as tire jobs, Akron’s economic spine, vanished.

She broke into tears recalling how one of her best friends in childhood, a white girl, told her they couldn’t play together any longer.

Hertz, a native of Shaker Heights, recalled how older black students would try to shake down the younger white kids every day at lunch time at Woodbury Junior High School.  “I had to figure out a way to fool these kids, as they were much bigger than I. So I bluffed and told them I had no money, even though I did. I saw this as a racial thing, as everyone I sat with was white. … For years after I told this story, Carl Chancellor and I would joke about it. Every so often, he would come up to me and ask me for my lunch money.”

So many years later, it is impossible to capture all we discussed that day. I am not the best person to be writing this chapter. I had been the business editor for about five years when Stuart Warner, my husband, got promoted to deputy managing editor, overseeing business and local news. As I could not report to him, I was named Sunday news editor, a new position without portfolio. Heck, for months I didn’t even have a dedicated seat.

I no longer created content or directed reporters, which is what I do best. I worked Tuesday through Saturday to plan and design the big Sunday paper, as well as elections and special sections. Mine were the last eyes on major projects, checking mainbars, sidebars, headlines, captions, page toppers, pull quotes, photos and graphics, before they went into the paper. That was my contribution for the first three installments of A Question of Color, a five-part series. But I was never comfortable in the role and left for The Seattle Times in September, before the series concluded at the end of 1993. Stuart stayed in Akron to see the project through. Key people involved in the day-to-day wrangling were not available to author this chapter.

Here is what I have reconstructed from my memories, Beacon Journal archives and interviews: We agreed to do something ambitious and important and with impact. It would be expensive. We would examine black/white relations in Akron, a city where African Americans made up 25 percent of the population. We would inform our reporting using Census data and professionally managed focus groups of blacks and whites. We would ask for polling money for the University of Akron to survey city residents about race, pivoting off the 30^th anniversary of  Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We would use the polling, focus groups and Census data to drill down into what we suspected would emerge as “hot-button issues”: education, economic opportunity, crime and punishment, and housing. Hertz suggested  a community component.

I proposed that the focus groups be racially mixed but got roundly shouted down; my colleagues said that blacks and whites would hold back if we put them in the same room at the same time. To accomplish anything at all, they said, we needed to create a safe environment for people to discuss their feelings candidly. Ultimately, we decided on three focus groups for each installment – one white, one black, and one mixed to be drawn from members of the first two groups.

Paynter, the venerable and highly decorated projects editor who introduced computer-assisted reporting to the Beacon newsroom, drew up a comprehensive proposal for Allen’s review.  Always supportive of big-picture projects with a strong sense of place, Allen signed off quickly.

Allen anointed Paynter to lead the project. He began working on the survey and drafting reporters, one black, one white, for each topic. Officially, Paynter had carte blanche to ask for anyone he wanted and reached into the features, sports, business and local news departments. In reality, Stuart conducted delicate negotiations with more than one territorial editor. Fine writers who should have been chosen were not. Some could not be spared; others were casualties of hoary grudges.

The final team, however, a diverse collection of 29 writers, editors, photographers and artists, did superb work. Assistant Managing Editor Susan “Mango” Curtis oversaw the design and graphics. Chancellor and feature writer/columnist Bob Dyer sat in on the focus groups with Assistant Managing Editor Doug Oplinger and wrote for all but one installment, kicking off with “30 Years After the Dream.” Paynter often shared a byline. Other writers were Leona Allen, Carole Cannon, Sheryl Harris, Michael Holley, Colette Jenkins, Kevin Johnson, Ron Kirksey, David Knox, Steve Love, Maura McEnaney, Bill O’Connor and Will Outlaw. Also rotating onto the team were news editor Gloria Irwin; photographers Mike Cardew, Lew Stamp, Paul Tople and Jocelyn Williams; and artists Chuck Ayers, John Backderf, Deborah Kauffman, Art Krummel and Terence Oliver.

I started styling prototypes with my dear friend Mango, who has one of the best eyes for design in the business.  After hours of mocking up, which involves placing dummy type, photos and graphics on a full-page grid, I would unveil my work for her. In the blink of an eye, she would have suggestions for improvement: Change that font. Make that bold. Use two-line subheads. Lose this. Add that.

Another huge talent in the art department was its director, Krummel, who created the project’s signature composite of a black-and-white face forming a ragged, ill-fitting puzzle, plus templates for all the infographics. 

The project gestated during an interregnum of managing editors. Jim Crutchfield had left to be editor in Long Beach, Calif. Allen was searching for his replacement. The steadying presence of a managing editor might have prevented the blow-up that occurred during a status meeting before the first part was published in February of 1993,  but probably not.

Mango and I simultaneously mentioned that we had to go beyond traditional reporting and somehow make a lasting, meaningful statement. We didn’t want to do another big-ass spectacular package that landed with acclaim, won awards for reporting and design, then went nowhere. The novel concept of public journalism was invading newsrooms nationwide, for better and worse.  Journalists either hated it or loved it.

Paynter hated it. He is a brilliant, ballsy, compassionate, dedicated journalist with a large personality and a mind for detail.  He began to bristle as I was speaking.

“No fucking way are we doing anything that makes us part of the story. That’s not our job,” he said, or something like.

Mango and I pushed back hard, begging Paynter to let us talk our ideas through, maybe with a larger group. We screamed at each other. Finally, Mango and I shrugged and left. There was no point in staying if we wouldn’t be heard.

Stuart watched it all quietly from a seat in the corner. He thought the idea had merit. He also understood Paynter’s resistance. He described the shouting match to Allen, who enjoyed an occasional donnybrook and probably regretted missing this one.  Most important, he appreciated what Mango and I wanted and figured out how to do it. 

The solution, he told Stuart the next day, came to him in the middle of the night. The Beacon  would bring in a number of prominent people from the community and put the question to them:  “How could we take A Question of Color beyond the reporting?”  He invited 10 or so business and political leaders and Stuart, a former religion writer, reached out to the same number of religious folks and social activists.  

“I can’t remember who all was there,” Stuart said.  “Deputy Mayor Dorothy Jackson and the Rev. Knute Larson (pastor of The Chapel) for sure … but a robust discussion took place.  I remember the saintly Dorothy saying, ‘The Beacon should be the facilitator, should bring people to the table, but then get out of the way and let them decide a course of action.’ That’s what happened and that’s how the Coming Together part of the project was born.” 

Allen also built a firewall: None of the reporters or editors working on A Question of Color, except Stuart, the project’s supervisor, would be involved in Coming Together.

“Solomon had indeed split the baby in two,” Stuart said.

A Question of Color was published in five, multi-day installments from February 1993 to December 1993. Day One opened with this introduction: “Many whites are tired of hearing about it. Most blacks wish it would go away. All seem powerless to move it…. Thirty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream of a colorblind America, race seems as huge and divisive a force as ever.”  

The project concluded in January of 1994 with a 12-page supplement bearing the names of more than 20,000 readers who accepted the newspaper’s pledge to fight racism.

That was also the beginning of Coming Together Akron, the non-profit formed through private and corporate memberships.  While it operated, CTA sponsored overseas missions to Africa and an annual race walk, as well as workshops, forums, and theatrical and musical events to raise awareness of Akron’s diversity. It lasted almost 15 years, dissolving in January 2008 when it ran out of money.

In 1997, though, CTA was still going strong. Citing its success, President Bill Clinton launched his national conversation on race with a Town Hall meeting at the University of Akron on Dec. 3, 1997. The choice was controversial – critics said the Midwest was too white and Akron was too small – but Clinton’s visit did boost Coming Together’s profile beyond Northeast Ohio. In a short time, numerous cities expressed an interest in developing local efforts, recalled longtime director Dr. Fannie Brown, and CTA became a model for a national project, Coming Together USA.

“I would estimate in excess of 3 million people were touched by the organizations,” Brown said.

Sadly, hard feelings linger over the newsroom’s management of A Question of Color. Some resentment is justified, some not. A black reporter said her editor blocked her from rotating into the project, yet forced her to turn over her contacts among business leaders to a white reporter. Badly done! Another reporter, a white man, sniped recently on social media, “While you guys were working on race, the rest of us were putting out the paper.” Nonsense!

For the record, Paynter was the only one who worked exclusively on race – the project wouldn’t have succeeded without someone’s full-time attention. The rest of us, while hitting our marks on race, also were putting out the rest of the paper. I know. We still had a composing room with printers and engravers for cold-type production. And that’s where I was every Saturday night as printer Mike Jewell placed type and photos on Page One and the A section. Deputy News Editor Tom Moore and I stayed well after midnight when the presses started rolling, to give the paper – every section – a final check, usually wrapping around 1 in the morning.

The Pulitzer Board awarded the 1994 Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service not to named individuals but to the Akron Beacon Journal, for the newspaper’s “broad examination of local racial attitudes and its subsequent effort to promote improved communication in the community.”  Everyone in the newsroom made it happen and shares the kudos, now as then.  Stuart and I were both in Seattle by then, in another time zone. Paynter and I traded congratulatory voicemails. Stuart called Allen, who told us to have a celebratory dinner and send him the bill.

Examining race relations has proven to be a prize-winning formula for newspapers. In an ironic twist, the New York Times wrote of the black/white divide in the Beacon’s own newsroom as part of a series on contemporary racial attitudes across America. That series won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Has any of it made a difference? Carl Chancellor wonders, “So here we are 56 years since Dr. King’s iconic March on Washington;  25 years since the Beacon’s last Pulitzer Prize; in the wake of Tamir Rice, Ferguson, Missouri, Mother Emanuel Charleston Church Shooting, Black Lives Matter, Orlando Castillo, Eric Garner, Charlottesville, [Colin] Kaepernick, Trump, and the question still remains to be answered: What becomes of a dream too long deferred?”

Fannie Brown thinks it would be worthwhile to revive Coming Together Akron.

“Many acknowledge the need for it and offer accolades for the work we were able to accomplish,” she said. “I can easily say it was the most important work of my life.  The students we worked with continually share with me that  diversity-related concepts learned as a part of the project have and will continue to govern the way they live their lives.

“What can top that?