Doyel: Jimmy Rayl’s life after basketball started young

This story was originally published Sept. 5, 2015. Jimmy Rayl died at 77 on Sunday.

Jimmy Rayl lived the fairy tale, once upon a time.

Mr. Basketball and a state championship game at Kokomo High, when he broke an Oscar Robertson record. At Indiana he set scoring marks that still stand. Started for the ABA Pacers. Married his high school sweetheart. Had four great kids, one of whom also played in a state championship game at Kokomo. The player’s face on Memorial Gym across from the high school? That’s Jimmy Rayl’s face.

Real life was a fairy tale, but the pages turn. All these years later, Jimmy Rayl is 74.

It’s never what you think, the path to Happily Ever After.

* * *

“I went through a bad spell,” are pretty much the first words out of Jimmy Rayl’s mouth when I find him at his home in Kokomo, where he has soft chairs and a hardwood floor and a painted basketball on his mantle, the only basketball in the house.

The ball is a chapter in the fairy tale, the night Rayl scored 56 points for the Hoosiers. He had a genius for scoring, shooting range that defied defense, and while a recent stroke has obscured his short-term memory — “I’ll probably forget we talked,” he tells me, half-kidding — he remembers that night in Bloomington. The feel of the ball in his hands, and of it leaving those hands for the final time. The sound inside Gladstein Fieldhouse on the IU campus when that last shot, his 55th and 56th points, splashed home from 25 feet to beat Minnesota 105-104.

More:IU legend, Kokomo star Jimmy Rayl, the 'Splendid Splinter', dies at 77

Let’s fast forward a bit, skipping some chapters we’ll touch on later, to assure you of this: Jimmy Rayl is fine. Still married to Nancy. Still has great kids, three of whom are alive and well.

But his health, it’s been better. That’s one of those things they don’t put in the fairy tale, when you’re getting out of your car and a bomb goes off inside your head and you’re falling down in the driveway, crawling into the house, wondering what happened. A friend called the ambulance. Doctors called it a stroke.

That was three years ago. Rayl was still in the hospital when doctors decided he needed open-heart surgery, too. They gave him a new valve, sent Rayl home, told him to get exercise. So here’s what Indiana’s 1959 Mr. Basketball does: He walks inside his house, a route that covers a quarter-mile after about 30 laps. He fell once getting out of the chair, tangled up in his blanket. Broke his hip.

“It’s as freak as can be,” Rayl says.

From his chair in the living room, he can see that basketball with “56” painted on it. He doesn’t look at it very often. Hasn’t held it in years. Let’s go back to the beginning.

* * *

When Jimmy Rayl was playing, 7,500 fans filled Memorial Gym. There was a waiting list for season tickets.

Carrying just 138 pounds on his 6-1 frame, Rayl averaged 29.6 points for coach Joe Platt as a Kokomo senior, broke Oscar Robertson’s record with 114 points in the final four games of the state tournament and engaged future IU teammate Ray Pavy in the “Church Street Shootout.” Rayl scored 49 points but Pavy had 51, leading New Castle past Kokomo.

Rayl worked his game at Foster Park, where 25 or 30 men waited to play the winners. Lose, and you didn’t play for hours; the men wanted Rayl on their team. They’d seen him with coach Gary Nielander at Congregational Church, or Congo as the kids called it – Going down to Congo and playing ball? – and boy could he shoot. One time he and some buddies were shooting free throws, 10 at a time, taking turns. Jimmy Rayl was on his 54th turn before he missed.

“I hit 532 in a row,” he says. “I thought that was pretty good.”

Rayl was an All-American at IU in 1962 and ’63, and his 32.4 ppg in 1962 Big Ten play is a school record. He owns four of the Hoosiers’ top eight single-game scoring totals, and 10 of the top 50. No other Hoosier has reached 50 points; Rayl got 56 twice, and when he beat Minnesota at the buzzer, Nancy was watching on black-and-white TV.

“I think everybody in Kokomo watched those games on Channel 4,” Nancy’s telling me. “Jimmy was a show.”

The night he scored 56 against Michigan State, the show ended early. IU was winning handily and Branch McCracken removed Rayl with 3½ minutes left.

“The crowd booed him!” Rayl says, and please indulge the exclamation mark. Rayl wasn’t shouting, but he delivered those words – The crowd booed him – with as much intensity as he’s likely to muster.

This is how he remembers playing at Kokomo High: “It was a pleasant time, is all I can say.”

The stroke, the heart surgery, the broken hip? “I had a few things I wasn’t planning on,” he says, “put it that way.”

And the car crash that killed his son, Timmy?

“It was a sad time.”

Oh, Timmy. T-Bone, they called him. He played on Kokomo’s 1989 state finalist, then at Lake Michigan Junior College. He was back home in Kokomo, working odd jobs at the golf course or Subaru dealership – “Feeling his way,” his dad says – when a buddy’s Chevy Blazer went off the road in October 1997, flipped and crashed into trees just west of Kokomo. Three of the car’s occupants walked away. Timmy was the fourth. Dead at the scene. He was 25.

“Everybody liked him,” Jimmy Rayl says.

When Jimmy was T-Bone’s age, 25 and finding his own way, he found himself in Akron, working for Goodyear and playing for Goodyear’s professional industrial team. The NBA had just 10 teams in the mid-1960s, and salaries weren’t all that great anyway. Rayl and 7-foot Mike McCoy of Fort Wayne South – back-to-back Mr. Basketball winners, McCoy in 1958 and Rayl in ’59 – played for the Goodyear Wingfoots.

“It was a good little deal,” Rayl says. “I got to know lots of people in the factory.”

The ABA formed in 1967 and Rayl came home to join the Pacers. He averaged 12 points that year, but was averaging just 8.9 ppg after 27 games of his second ABA season.

This was before the stroke, the heart surgery, the broken hip. Before T-Bone. It was a few days before Christmas, 1968, and life was still a fairy tale for Jimmy Rayl.

But turn the page. See what happens next.

* * *

The numbers didn’t add up. The papers said the Pacers were signing a new player, but the roster was full.

“Everybody knew they had to release one of us,” Rayl says. “We were at practice, wondering who it would be.”

Pacers coach Slick Leonard told Rayl he needed to see him.

For years basketball was his life – “like eating and breathing,” he says – but that day something inside Jimmy Rayl broke.

“When they cut me, it left a pretty bitter taste in my mouth,” he says. “Slick and I, I considered him a good friend of mine. He was one of the people involved in releasing me. I wasn’t happy about that. I haven’t been, for a long time.”

Jimmy Rayl was 27, and he was done playing.

“I felt I had nothing to prove,” he says, but he did put a basket in the driveway for his kids. All three sons played – Jimbo, Tom, T-Bone – and Rayl shot with them.

He got a job with Xerox, and for 30 years had a sales route in central Indiana. T-Bone was playing for Kokomo in the late 1980s when Jimmy Rayl scouted for Wildkats coach Basil Mawbey – which is how Jimmy discovered a Muncie Delta High player named Matt Painter.

“What a high school player should be,” Rayl says of the current Purdue basketball coach, and he became friends with the whole family. On trips to Muncie, Rayl spent the night at the Painter home.

Back then Rayl called Michigan State’s Jud Heathcote about recruiting Painter. Heathcote wasn’t there when Rayl scored 100 points in two games against the Spartans as a senior – 56 and 44 – but he came on the line and thundered, “Jimmy Rayl! Indiana’s all-time leading scorer!”

Answered Rayl: “No, I wasn’t the all-time leading scorer – but if I played you every night, I would’ve been.”

Rayl and Painter are still friends, though Rayl doesn’t get to Purdue any more. Or to IU. His health, you know. Not long ago some old IU teammates came to see him in Kokomo, but Rayl wasn’t home. They scrawled a note on their empty McDonald’s bag, left it by the front door:

Mr. Ginger Rayl

Just messing around tonight and thought we would come by. Sorry we missed you.

(Tom and Dick) Van Arsdale, (Steve) Redenbaugh

Ginger Rayl?

“That’s what they called him,” Nancy Rayl says. “Say it out loud.”

Ginger Rayl … ah. Ginger ale, like the soda. Jimmy Rayl liked it so much, he named his daughter Ginger. She lives in New Hampshire, gave Jimmy two grandkids. They call him “Hoodie.”

Last summer, Rayl was watching baseball on TV when someone knocked on the door. It was former Pacers coach Slick Leonard, wanting to check up on his old friend and player. Slick stayed maybe 30 minutes.

“I treated him cordial,” Rayl says. “I wasn’t going to be like that.”

We’re talking basketball again, about the old days, and Jimmy Rayl changes the topic. “I just don’t like to talk about it that much,” he says.

Who needs basketball anyway? Jimmy and Nancy Rayl have each other, and they have it pretty good. They have five grandkids, and Jimmy’s health is getting better. That hip? It loosens up after a few steps.

Thirty laps at a time, Jimmy Rayl walks his house. Hardwood floors. Basketball on the mantle. Over and over, right past the basketball.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel