Bob Collins championed Attucks amid threats, bigotry

"You know right where to find me," he barked at every last one of the critics, his Irish audacity leaking through while the letters poured in and the phones kept ringing and one after another they demanded Bob Collins be fired.

He wasn't writing what they wanted him to write, wasn't seeing it the way they saw it. No matter how many victories this team piled up, no matter how many opponents it overwhelmed with size and speed and skill, the players still weren't doing it the right way. They weren't doing it the way it had always been done.

This was Indianapolis, and these were the 1950s; the city's racial frictions were playing out through the prism of a high school basketball team that was challenging the very manner in which Hoosiers believed their beloved game ought to be played. Collins, a young sportswriter at The Indianapolis Star, found himself central to the conflict: He was a white reporter defending a black team in a city barely a generation removed from the height of the Ku Klux Klan.

"A communist," some called him in letters to The Star. Others shouted racial slurs while they drove past his house at night, honking their horns. Some called him at home and told him over the phone exactly what they hoped one of those black basketball players would do to one of his young daughters.

But Collins kept writing what he kept seeing — a team without peer, one led by the best coach in the state and the best basketball player he'd ever seen. The team was Crispus Attucks. The coach was Ray Crowe. The player was Oscar Robertson.

Yet a faction of the city's deeply conservative population wasn't ready for an all-black team to reign over its pastime. In Attucks they saw a threat to tradition, to basketball purity. They saw their horizontal game shifting vertical, a group of bigger, faster, stronger athletes uprooting convention and burying their white teams along the way.

Bobby Plump, star of Milan's 1954 state championship team, remembers walking around Downtown with teammates before they faced Attucks in the semistate title game that year. Drivers would roll down their windows and yell racial slurs.

"(They'd) shout at us, 'Go beat those (expletive)!" says Plump. "I'd never even heard (that language) before."

Even Collins' boss at The Star, sports editor Jep Cadou Jr., took issue with the Attucks phenomenon early on, once citing the sport's inventor, James Naismith, in a column. "Naismith never intended players with 'jumping jack legs' would be able to rewrite basketball's traditional patterns," Cadou wrote. He later decried that Attucks had six players who could — gasp — dunk the ball.

Collins never blinked. The letters poured in, the phones kept ringing. No sweat. Collins wasn't apologizing. If anyone took issue with it, that was their problem.

The conflict climaxed 60 years ago this month — March 1955 — when the Attucks players persevered over death threats, racial bigotry and partisan referees on their way to a historic state title.

"People really resented him for writing about us," Robertson says today. "A lot of white sportswriters wouldn't do it. But Bob Collins did. I can't even tell you in a few words how much he meant to our team at that time."

* * *

Even in the end he had his stories, and they always made him laugh. He'd beg a friend to pick up a six-pack and swing by the house, he'd top off his beer with tomato juice – it masked the smell of alcohol – and together, they'd relive the ride. Bob Collins was dying. All he wanted to talk about was how much fun he'd had living.

There was the time he'd burned through his travel money midway through a trip to Los Angeles to cover the Super Bowl. "Old money gone. Send new money," was the message he wired The Star's offices. When he returned and the bosses pressed him for an explanation, Collins came clean. He'd had a rough night at the gambling tables on a one-night jaunt to Las Vegas.

Somehow the expense was approved. "Research for a future story," Collins called it.

The time they couldn't find him after the 1975 Indianapolis 500. An hour to deadline, a copy boy opened his office door and found Collins face down on the floor, passed out drunk. So they sat him up in his chair, poured coffee down his throat and marveled while he dictated his column to his secretary. Still made the city edition.

And, of course, the time he grew so incensed at Indiana's bully of a basketball coach, Bob Knight, that Collins decided to publish Knight's phone number – office and home – in The Star.

No, really. The newspaper had run a photo of Knight grabbing a player that irked the combustible coach. A day later, on his weekly television show, Knight urged viewers not to read the paper.

This was Collins' retort, in the Feb. 10, 1976, edition of The Star:

"In his usual straightforward manner, the coach took his case to the public and chided The Star on his weekly television program," Collins wrote through a thick vein of sarcasm. "I think coach would appreciate how many Hoosiers out there are behind him. All it will take is a phone call. His office number is: 812-337-2238. His home: 812-336-0508."

One can only imagine Knight's reaction when he picked up the paper – or answered the phone.

Who else but Collins? Who else can say they held on for dear life in the passenger seat of an Italian sports car while Bobby Unser zipped through the French countryside? Toured the Vatican with Mario Andretti? Took time off from the newspaper to run a mayoral campaign for his friend Bob Welch? Dictated a column from a phone booth in Chicago while tear gas soaked the air and policemen billy-clubbed rioters mere feet from him during the 1968 Democratic National Convention?

Who else found time to gather six investors at a country club in Lafayette in 1967 and persuade them to pony up nine grand each to start up a pro basketball team?

You might've heard of that team – the Indiana Pacers.

Only Robert Joseph Collins, the Cathedral grad and Butler student who showed up at The Star in 1947 for a three-week internship and stayed 43 years.

He was the writer Indianapolis woke up with for four decades. "No one at The Star has ever had a bigger following, I can guarantee you that," Plump says. Collins became an institution in the 1950s when he darted to every corner of the state to chronicle the golden age of Hoosier high school hoops for his beloved "Shootin' the Stars" column. He sat courtside for Plump's shot and Oscar's mastery and wrote about it better than anyone else.

"If you'd have missed that jumper, you'd have pumped gas in Pierceville the rest of your life," Collins would say to Plump, whom he affectionally called "One Shot." They became good friends over the years, same with Robertson and even the surly Knight.

Collins' prose – short, snappy, sublime – was delicious. Of Oscar: "He beats you to death with a pillow, finesses you off the floor." Of Knight: "Controversy trails him like a trained puppy." Of A.J. Foyt's Indy 500 dominance: "Tony Hulman doesn't need to establish a purse for the race anymore – he just asks Foyt how much he needs."

He turned down gigs in bigger cities and kept Indianapolis home, raising two sons and six daughters in three marriages. He reluctantly became sports editor in 1964 but continued with his columns – on sports, family, whatever tickled his curiosity. By the time he retired in 1991, he'd chased deadlines from the greens of Augusta to the Olympic torch in Rome to arenas, racetracks and stadiums across the globe. He'd also drank himself to death.

Collins' greatest vice was the Manhattan – a shot of Early Times whiskey and a dash of vermouth. He'd pour them in the office. Knock a few back at lunch. At a game. After deadline and sometimes before. Drinking was commonplace in The Star's offices back then. Rules were loosely enforced. Collins' habit spiraled out of control as the years wore on and his paycheck grew.

"Before long a half-dozen were my standard fare," Collins admitted in a 1995 article published in Indianapolis Monthly months before he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 68. Of his drives home after several cocktails: "I bounced off enough steel and concrete to build the Empire State Building."

"I think a lot of us are surprised he made it to the '90s," said the great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, a close Collins friend for decades.

But as he lay on his deathbed during those final months, sipping those beers topped with tomato juice, laughing, reminiscing, one topic would cause his words to slow and his voice to crack.

That was Attucks.

"The day he died, there was nothing he was more proud of than what he wrote about Attucks," says Dale Ogden, a curator of history at the Indiana State Museum and a Collins friend. "It made him feel like he did at least one thing right. In his eyes, Attucks made his life important."

* * *

Crispus Attucks High School was formed in 1927 to rid Indianapolis public schools of black students. The day Attucks opened its doors, the Ku Klux Klan led a parade past the school. The procession lasted an hour.

It took two decades for the Indiana High School Athletic Association to allow the Tigers entrance into the state basketball tournament, and six more years for a group of white referees to rob them of a semistate title. Late in a closely contested 1953 semistate championship game, Attucks star Hallie Bryant – that year's Mr. Basketball – drove to the basket, lofted a shot and was knocked to the floor by two Shelbyville players. The whistle blew. Bryant was called for charging. The basket was wiped out, Shelbyville was awarded free throws and Attucks' season was over.

Ray Crowe later called it "the worst call he'd seen in a lifetime of watching sports."

Collins, by then a staunch supporter of Attucks, openly questioned the officiating in the following day's Star.

"He called it like he saw it," Bryant, another close friend, says today. "He was a man who was simply doing the right thing at a time when it wasn't easy to do the right thing. He was fair and he was courageous."

Following that '53 loss, the only hitch to Attucks' continued ascension over the next three years came in the form of Plump's Milan team. The Milan Indians downed the Tigers in the '54 semistate title game. After that, Crowe's boys wouldn't lose in the state tournament for two years.

Collins wasn't the only journalist to champion Attucks (Jimmie Angelopoulos of The Indianapolis Times did so, as did the city's black publication, The Indianapolis Recorder), but he was certainly the loudest. The close relationships he formed with the players he defended during that time — legends like Crowe and Bryant and Robertson — held firm until the day he died.

"What he did for us was tremendous," Robertson says. "I was told he got a lot of hate mail for the things he wrote, and I believe it."

It was the Tigers' style and success that rankled so many traditionalists. With each win, Crowe's team debunked the myth that Milan had furthered with their title in '54. That was: Teams built on a foundation of fundamentals and a patient, deliberate offense would triumph. Attucks never bought in. Attucks ran the floor. Its players dunked. They scored in bunches. They shattered previous perceptions.

Consider: Plump's Milan team scored 32 points in its state title game victory over Muncie Central. A year later, in the same game, Attucks scored 97. If Milan employed a square dance of an offense — a methodical, plodding version of cat-and-mouse — Attucks did just the opposite. The Tigers played a smooth jazz.

"What Milan proved was that you win a state championship by being more disciplined than everyone else, more team-oriented, better coached," Ogden says. "Attucks comes along and does all those things, and the white fans say, 'This can't possibly be. The only way they're winning is because they have freak athletes. They're bigger. They're faster. It's not fair. It's not cheating, but it's not fair.'

"Bob essentially said, 'The hell with all that.' He believed he was writing the truth and he told them, 'I won't back off, I won't issue a retraction. If you can't handle it, if you don't like it, then that's your problem.'"

A new age of racial integration in Indianapolis was dawning, and thanks in part to Collins, the Attucks team became the most popular symbol of black culture in the city.

"He was in our corner every time," Ray Crowe's widow, Betty, says today. "He took a lot of heat for what he wrote, but nobody was in Ray's corner like Bob was."

Collins was chronicling history. He called Attucks the greatest team in the annals of Indiana high school basketball. He called Crowe the finest coach in the state. He called Robertson a legend in the making.

Turns, out he was right about it all. The '55 and '56 Attucks teams went 60-1 and won back-to-back state titles. Crowe coached just seven seasons, but went 193-20 over that span. Hoops in the Hoosier state would never be the same.

"They swept through state like a chemical fire," Collins wrote, "building and exploding and growing into an awesome, almost uncontrollable force. The success of Attucks basketball integrated the high schools of Indianapolis. They became so dominant that the other schools had to get black basketball players, or forget about it."

No milestone meant more than what they achieved March 19, 1955, the night the long climb for Crowe's boys culminated in their first state championship. They were the first team from Indianapolis to hoist the crown and the first all-black team in the country to win a state tournament.

"Pull out your adjectives, garble the syntax, throw it in one big stream and you'll have a word defining the show Attucks gave 15,000 high school addicts last night," Collins wrote in The Star the next day.

What he wrote next was as true then as it is today: "Their names will be remembered as long as there is high school basketball played in Indiana."

Star researcher Cathy Knapp contributed to this story. Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.