GeoCities.us
» Colosseum » Bleachers|
GeoCities.us
» Colosseum » Bleachers |
Get your FREE home page! |
 |
|
|
My name is Robert Macmillan. I sell insurance in Valparaiso now, but from 1970 to 1972 I was the point guard for
Coach Kenneth Velasquez at Calhaven High School, and as far as I'm concerned, that's still the most important job
I ever had.
Coach V died on Thursday, March 4, 1999, during sectional week, at 76. Anybody who knew him will tell you that if he'd been given a choice of weeks, that's the one he'd have picked. Some of us who played for him decided somebody ought to put his story down where people could find it. I got elected because I'm the one with a computer at the office. If you played for him, there's a page for you at the end.
Kenneth Velasquez was born in 1922 in Indiana Harbor, the son of Mexican immigrants. His father came up from Mexico around 1920 to work in the steel mills, like a lot of men did then, and his mother followed with his two older sisters. They lived in a company neighborhood within sight of the furnaces, and his father worked the open hearth for thirty-one years. Coach used to say he grew up thinking the sky was supposed to be orange at night. In the Depression, a lot of Mexican families in the Harbor were pushed to go back to Mexico. His father had steady work and they stayed. Coach was about ten. He told me once that half the kids in his class were gone by Christmas that year, and that he never forgot what it felt like to be told you didn't belong someplace you'd been born. He didn't tell that story often. When he did, you listened. He played guard in high school, five foot nine and quick as a cat. After graduation he went into the mill, then into the Army in 1942, and spent the war in Europe. He came home in 1945, went to the teachers college in Terre Haute on the GI Bill, and was the first person in his family to finish college. In 1950 he took a job teaching American history at Calhaven High School, eleven miles from where he was born, and the next year they gave him the basketball team. He kept it for thirty-six years. Calhaven is a mill town. In the years he coached, most of the boys on his teams had fathers in the mill, and a lot of them were going into the mill themselves. Coach knew that. He never let any of us think basketball was going to be our ticket somewhere. But he made sure every boy who played for him had his grades up, his shirt tucked in, and at least one grown man in his life who expected something of him. For a lot of us, that was the ticket. He married Gertrude, Trudy to everybody, in 1949. She kept the scorebook at every home game for thirty-six years and sent a birthday card to every one of his players every year until the list got too long, and then she kept sending them anyway.
Thirty-six seasons. 514 wins, 286 losses. Nine sectional championships. Two regional championships. No state title, in an Indiana tournament where every school, big or small, played in the same bracket, and where a mill town in Lake County had to get through some of the best basketball in the state just to get out of its own sectional. Trudy's scorebooks are where these numbers came from. If you see a mistake, tell me.
About 1971-72. We won the sectional on our home floor in front of what looked like the whole town, then won two games at the regional on the same Saturday. The next week at the semistate we lost the afternoon game by five to a school four times our size. In the locker room afterward Coach didn't yell and he didn't make a speech. He went around the room and shook every one of our hands and looked each of us in the eye, and when he got to me he said, "Bobby, you ran my team." I have been trying to live up to that sentence for twenty-seven years.
These were painted on the locker room wall, in red, in his own lettering, sometime in the 1950s. When they remodeled the locker room in 1988, the year after he retired, the painters were told to work around them. They're still there.
Number 6 he enforced himself. He got every player's report card from the office on the day they came out, before we did, and if you were failing anything you sat, starter or not. I sat for one game in 1971 for failing chemistry. We lost. He didn't care. Number 7 he enforced at every away game. Mr. Richardson, who drove the team bus for twenty-nine years, says he was never once not thanked. Number 9 was the one that worked best.
In the 1997-98 season, Indiana split the boys' tournament into four classes by school size, after more than eighty years of one tournament for everybody. You can probably guess what Coach V thought about that. He thought it was the worst idea anybody in Indianapolis ever had. He said the whole point of the Indiana tournament was that every boy in the state had the same chance to beat everybody else, and that the little school that got hot in March and knocked off the big school was the best thing about living here. He brought up Milan in 1954 every chance he got, the little school that won the whole thing. He said four state champions meant there wasn't a state champion at all, just four trophies. He went to the state finals nearly every year from the 1950s on, usually with a carload of his old players. After the change, he wouldn't go. On the day of the finals in March of 1998 he stayed home and raked out the flower beds, and told Trudy the whole thing felt like somebody else's family reunion. I'll say this, though: he never once said a word against the boys who won those new trophies. He said they'd played their hearts out and deserved every bit of it. It was the grown-ups he was mad at.
Coach had been slowing down for a couple of years, but he still came to every home game and sat in the same seat, top row behind the Calhaven bench, where he could see the whole floor. On Thursday night, March 4, the Ironmen played in the sectional, and Coach was home listening on the radio because Trudy wouldn't let him go out in the cold. She says they won, and he said "good," and went in to lie down, and he died in his sleep that night. His heart. The funeral was Monday morning, March 8, at St. Jude's in Calhaven. Somebody started a phone chain on Friday, and by the weekend it had gone around the country. On Monday morning there were more than a hundred and fifty of us, players from every one of his thirty-six teams, standing on both sides of the church steps in our letter jackets. Some of those jackets were forty-five years old. Some of us couldn't get them zipped anymore, and some carried them over an arm, and nobody cared. When they brought him out, nobody said anything. We just stood up straight, with our shirts tucked in. Trudy told me afterward that he'd have pretended to be embarrassed and that he'd have loved every minute. The Ironmen wore black patches on their jerseys for the rest of the tournament. I was there for the sectional final on Saturday. When they announced a moment of silence for him before the tip, the whole gym, both sides, stood up and was as quiet as I have ever heard a gym be. Letters from players, 1952 to 1987 P.S. If you're a guy over 40 who still thinks you can play, Ed Brannon keeps a page for his Saturday morning game, Over-40 Pickup Basketball, where by the sound of it there's a lot of yelling about boxing out. Coach V would have approved of the yelling. |
|
