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GREGG DOYEL

Doyel: Willie Gardner had so much, lost so much

Gregg Doyel
gregg.doyel@indystar.com

He was given so much, and so much was taken away. Piece by piece the doctors came for him until the day comes when he has had enough.

Cleveland Harp and Willie Gardner play around at the Lockefield Gardens Dust Bowl.

Willie Gardner, the former Crispus Attucks basketball star, climbs down from his hospital bed and lowers himself to the floor. He knocks the wheelchair out of his way and starts to crawl across the tile. He’s making such an awful racket, nurses at the old Winona Memorial Hospital come into his room.

They see where he is headed. They are running now.

Willie Gardner is crawling toward the window. He is pulling himself up.

The nurses are yelling at him to stop.

Willie Gardner is telling them, “I don’t care.”

He is climbing higher.

* * *

Slick Leonard is telling me how good Willie Gardner was. He says crazy stuff like this:

“I’ve seen everybody that’s come down the pike for 60 years,” says Leonard, the Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer who played for IU and in the NBA and coached the Pacers to ABA titles in 1970, '72 and '73, “and Willie Gardner is one of the greatest talents I’ve ever seen.”

Leonard says: “You talk about a guy who would be in the Hall of Fame, I tell you it was Wee Willie Gardner.”

He adds: “You know Oscar Robertson played at Crispus Attucks a few years after Willie, right? Well, there’s guys who came up to me back in those days, and they said … there’s a guy down there from Crispus Attucks who was as good as Oscar Robertson. The guys I talked to, it was a toss-up who was really the best of the two. “

Who, I ask Slick Leonard, did Gardner play like? I’ve heard some comparisons. I’d like yours.

Leonard is silent for a bit, then says, “What names were you given?”

Connie Hawkins, I tell him. Julius Erving.

“That’s good,” Leonard says. “But he was a better shooter than Julius Erving.”

Julius Erving, only better?

“Oh ho!” Slick Leonard says. “I’m telling you. Willie Gardner was a whole other ballgame, baby.”

* * *

The first hole in his heart came in 1953.

Willie Gardner showed his Attucks teammates his ball-handling skills.

In those days Willie Gardner often played without shoes. He went to the Dust Bowl, the old court at Lockefield Gardens public housing complex, and he dominated either way. He was a freak athlete, a guard of about 6-2 who passed the time between games by turning no-hand flips. He was bound for Crispus Attucks, an all-black high school created in 1927 by the city's many pro-segregation forces, and a school whose story will be told in a documentary to be released in August by Indianapolis filmmaker Ted Green.

And Gardner was not done growing.

“We were friends since fourth grade, and I was taller than him most of the time,” says 6-3 former Crispus Attucks teammate Hallie Bryant, Indiana’s Mr. Basketball in 1953. “But then he got tall, fast.”

Gardner grew to be 6-7, a big man in the 1950s, but he had those guard skills. He was one of the state’s best players in 1951 and ’52, averaging about 20 ppg over 37 games and leading Attucks deep into the state playoffs as a sophomore and junior.

For years Attucks coach Ray Crowe had pointed toward winning the 1953 state title, the senior year of Gardner and Bryant, but the IHSAA had other ideas. It enforced an arcane, since-erased eligibility rule – Gardner had played as a freshman, making him ineligible as a senior – and Attucks settled for reaching the semifinals with the state’s tallest, most talented team manager.

Two years later, behind Oscar Robertson, Attucks in 1955 became the first predominantly African-American school to win a championship in this or any other state.

“We’d have won state with Willie Gardner,” says 1953 Crispus Attucks teammate Cleveland Harp. “That hurt him.”

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Coach Branch McCracken tried to recruit Gardner to Indiana, but he signed with the Harlem Globetrotters and sent the money home.

“There were 33 rookies in camp – 31 college players and us,” says Harp, who also signed out of high school. “Rookies practiced on one court, and Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes and the other veterans on another. Willie practiced one day with the rookies. The next day they put him with the main team. He was probably the best ballplayer in the country in 1953.”

Wait, I tell Harp. Best in the country in 1953? At any level?

“That’s what I’m saying,” Harp says.

In those days the best African-American players often played for the Globetrotters. Also in those days: the World Series of Basketball, a 21-game, 26-day barnstorming series pitting the Globetrotters against a team of college All-Americans. The 1954 college team had Slick Leonard and two other future Hall of Famers – Cliff Hagan and Frank Ramsey – plus eventual NBA all-stars Johnny Kerr, Gene Shue and Frank Selvy.

The Globetrotters won 15 of 21 games. The series MVP was Willie Gardner. At 20.

Gardner was named World Series MVP again in 1957. He didn’t win in 1955 or ’56, but he was busy; he was in the U.S. Army.

“He had it all,” Leonard is telling me. “This guy could run the floor, jump out of the gym, shooting, ballhandling. Willie Gardner had everything.”

And soon, another hole in his heart. For real this time.

* * *

Willie Gardner was headed to the NBA in 1957. The New York Knicks won a bidding war and purchased his contract from the Globetrotters for a record $35,000.

He played two games, both exhibitions.

“He averaged damn near 30 points and 18 rebounds,” says Slick Leonard. “I was with the Minneapolis Lakers, but I followed Willie’s career. The first time I saw Willie, Branch (McCracken) was recruiting him at IU. I walked onto the fieldhouse floor, and Willie was out there with a sweatsuit and a towel wrapped around his neck, doing a little workout. He was incredible.”

Two exhibitions into his NBA career, he was finished. A routine physical by the Knicks found a hole in his heart. Gardner spent 25 days under observation at St. Clare’s Hospital in Dover, N.J.  A “silent heart attack” is how the Knicks’ doctor explained Gardner’s condition to him. His career was over.

Gardner never understood that diagnosis – Silent heart attack? What’s that? – and kept playing around Indianapolis. One day 6-11 IU All-American Walt Bellamy visited the old Fall Creek YMCA near Lockefield Gardens. He went on to become an NBA star, a Hall of Famer, but Bellamy never returned to that YMCA.

“Willie destroyed him,” says Buddy Rogan, a childhood friend of Gardner. “He ran over Bellamy and those guys like they were little kids. Willie was god-gifted with that talent. Had he played in the NBA, he would’ve been talked about the same as Oscar.”

Oscar Robertson, third from left, said of Willie Gardner, second from right: “He was a great talent. I didn’t see him play much because he was older. Of course I heard the legend.”
In the photo, from left: Herschel Turner (former Shortridge basketball star), Bob Collins, Oscar Robertson, Ray Crowe, Willie Gardner and Bailey Robertson.

Last week Oscar Robertson was talking about Gardner. He attended the Indiana-Kentucky All-Star games at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Oscar and a friend from Crispus Attucks named Ronald Crowe. I bring up Gardner’s name. Oscar smiles.

“He was a great talent,” Oscar says. “I didn’t see him play much because he was older. Of course I heard the legend.”

Here, Ronald Crowe adds to it.

“This was after that heart condition ended his career with the Knicks,” Crowe says. “I’m in the YMCA, and Willie comes at me like this” – Crowe puts two hands on his own neck – “and lifted me up. He said, ‘I heard what you said about me. You said Oscar Robertson was better than me.’ I said, ‘He is!’ ”

Willie Gardner met his wife at that YMCA, a lovely and gentle woman named Margaret. This was 1963, six years after the Knicks sent him home. She was working at the VA Hospital, renting a room at the Y, where she met him. They were happy together, Willie and Margaret. He sold beer for Stroh’s, then became a sheriff’s deputy. But the way his basketball career ended? Hard to accept.

“Very hard,” Margaret says. “He never talked about it. But I truly don’t think he ever got over it.”

In the 1970s Willie Gardner was diagnosed with diabetes, and it was ruthless. It took his lower right leg, then it came for the big toe on his left foot. Then the lower left leg.

“Tragic,” Margaret says. “Once they start cutting, they don’t stop.”

In September 2000, Willie Gardner was 66 and dying. He was at Winona. He was crawling across the floor toward that window.

“Willie was really dejected,” Bryant says. “He told the nurses, ‘I don’t care.’ ”

Nurses put him back in bed, monitored him more closely. Margaret Gardner was coming every day, right up to late September.

“On this day I told him I’m just so tired, I can’t come tomorrow. I’m going to stay home and rest,” Margaret says. “He asked me to come. I said, ‘Honey I can’t make it, I’ll be there the next day.’ ”

Before she could see him the next day, Willie Gardner died in his hospital bed. It was Sept. 28, 2000.

“That was hard,” she says, “you know?”

The whole story sounds hard. The whole damn thing.

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