Doyel: Butler's Joel Cornette 'elevated everybody around him'

INDIANAPOLIS — Casey McAlister was in his bed at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital when he sat up and started giggling. He was 3, he was trying to understand the word “leukemia,” and he was giggling.

Joel Cornette had walked into the room.

“His hair is spiky!” Casey squealed, and a friendship was born. Cornette and Butler teammate Mike Monserez spent 45 minutes on Thanksgiving 2002 hanging out with the 3-year-old.

Casey’s father, WLW radio host Lance McAlister, still has no idea how Joel Cornette knew about Casey.

“The only thing I can think,” McAlister was saying on Tuesday, “is that Joel heard I was a Butler guy. I talked on air about Butler all the time. Someone must have told Joel about Casey. He and Mike were home for one day for Thanksgiving, and they came to the hospital. They didn’t know Casey or me, but that’s the power of the Butler family.”

The family grieves today, grieves again, this time for Joel Cornette.

Cornette died Tuesday at age 35, the third member of the Butler family in eight months to die so terribly, terribly young. In January it was Andrew Smith, the big beloved moose, dying of cancer at 25. In February it was Baby Em, the son of Butler assistant coach Emerson Kampen III, dying of Leigh syndrome, a 40,000-to-1 genetic long shot. Emerson Kampen IV was 6 months old.

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Like giant-hearted Andrew Smith and innocent Baby Em, Joel Cornette represented the best of us. The legacy he left on the court at Butler is enormous, playing on those program-building teams of Barry Collier and Todd Lickliter from 1999-2003 and scoring 1,100 points and finishing among the top 10 in Butler history in rebounds (712), blocked shots (144) and field-goal shooting (54.5 percent).

The numbers Joel Cornette would want most to be remembered, though, are these: 100 (Butler’s win total in his four years), three (NCAA tournament appearances) and one (Sweet 16, the school’s first since 1962, in 2003).

“He was the consummate teammate,” Lickliter said Tuesday of Cornette, his team captain in 2002-03. “He was always about his team, teammates and the success of the university.”

Lickliter was telling me that around long gaps of phone silence, unable to get the words out as he remembered a young man he called “just a beautiful person. Such an honor to coach him.”

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The legacy Joel Cornette left off the court, see, was bigger than anything he did on it. And he was all-conference on the court, arguably the best defender in the Horizon League, owner of one of the biggest shots in Butler history – that last-second, follow dunk that beat Indiana in the 2001 Hoosier Classic.

But off the court …

Off the court Joel Cornette was the kind of kid who would drive home to Cincinnati for Thanksgiving and stop at a hospital to meet a kid, and a father, he didn’t know. Off the court he volunteered around Indianapolis at a soup kitchen, homeless shelter and home for battered women. He read to students in local elementary schools. Fellow students voted him Mr. Butler in 2003.

He also played basketball.

Joel Cornette’s final game at Butler was in that program-first Sweet 16 in 2003, when the Bulldogs lost to Oklahoma in Albany, N.Y. Cornette scored 21 points and had eight rebounds in that East Region semifinal, a 65-54 loss. Afterward, Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson said Cornette could have started "for everybody – Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas."

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Cornette met the media from the podium after the game, then walked back to the Butler locker room with teammate Brandon Miller. On their way they came across an arena custodian who had accidentally knocked over a can full of trash. Cornette and Miller stopped and helped the custodian pick up the trash off the floor.

“You cannot put into words the kind of person he was or what he meant to the people he associated with,” Lickliter said Tuesday. “He elevated everybody around him. Not just on the court – in life.”

Cornette kept elevating, long after they were no longer around him. Over the years, Butler teammate Darnell Archey has sought advice from Cornette on topics ranging from recruiting high school players to applying for jobs to making public speaking engagements.

“Whatever it was,” says Archey, an assistant coach at South Alabama, “Joel knew how to help you.”

“Special guy,” Butler coach Chris Holtmann says of Cornette. “We loved having him around. He spoke to our team and was an incredible encouragement to me personally these last few years. A very sad day."

There have been happier days. Like the one in 2007 when Lance McAlister and his son, Casey – who had beaten leukemia – drove from Cincinnati for a Butler game. Lance called his friend, Joel Cornette, and told him he was bringing Casey to Hinkle Fieldhouse. Cornette, who was working as an NBA players’ agent at the time of his death, was Butler’s director of operations in 2007.

Before the game Cornette sat in the stands with father and son, bringing Butler T-shirts and a bobblehead. The hair Cornette had been growing out in 2002 was long gone, not spiky anymore, but Casey knew him on sight. Their reunion was a joyous one.

They usually were, when Joel Cornette was around.

“I loved him, my wife and parents loved him, if you knew him you loved him,” Darnell Archey says. “We talked a lot, but the last time I saw him was at Andrew Smith’s funeral.”

Archey catches himself. He cannot believe what he is saying. He cannot believe this keeps happening at Butler.

“Not again,” he mutters.

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