That One Time When I Made Terry Mead Disappear

Adult church league basketball in the early 1980’s in Cape Girardeau was a dangerous mix of frustration, testosterone, unfulfilled hoop dreams, and bad referees. It was also a mix of these two types of players:  the bona-fide players that could hope to dominate or re-live old glories, and it also had those marginal players that would be able to get the playing time they thought they deserved in high school. I was the latter.  I played for my church, Centenary Methodist Church off and on for a number of years, and lived to talk about it. The game itself was actually kind of a hybrid between traditional basketball, bumper cars and rugby. To be fair, the referees, whose only common personality trait was they couldn’t say no, were drafted off of other church league teams and were unpaid “volunteers”. Also, for some reason, they wore whistles around their necks, I’m not sure why.

This actually happened: one time, after playing nearly a half without enough fouls called to suit me, I told my teammate, Lonnie “The Ice Man” Lusk during a timeout that I was going to try to find out what it took to get a foul called in this game. I’m not particularly proud of this, but tempers were flaring on both sides, and somebody had to do something, right? When the guy I was guarding was passed the ball, I took a cartoonish run at the guy, raised up my left arm high above my head and karate chopped the guy right across the arms. As the ball bounded away, we both stopped, turned and looked to the ref, who shrugged his shoulders and indicated the out of bounds possession was ours.

One other memorable game, we played at Cape’s City Hall (the old Lorimer School), a smallish old gym that looked like it could have been in the movie Hoosiers. Our opponent that night was a south-side church loaded with ringers: Some of the guys I remember on this team were: Tony McClellon, Anthony Vinson, and most notably, Terry Mead. McClellon was a former Central High School star, and both Vinson and Mead were ex- SEMO Indian (now Redhawk) players. To say we were outmatched was a laughable understatement.

Mead in particular was a player I had admired for years since the early 1980’s. A class act all the way, Mead was a key player for Coach Ron Shumate’s early SEMO teams, just when they began reaching national prominence. He fit Shumate’s style.  Shumate recruited hungry players that were willing to hustle and play defense.  As Shumate said in his first press conference, when asked about his defensive philosophy:  “We’re going to pick them up at the airport”.  I had never met Terry, but as a fan I admired him for his hard-nosed style of play. Built like a linebacker at 6’2” he was an undersized but versatile player that was often forced to play inside against much taller forwards. He was the real deal.

Our Centenary team was hoping that the small gym would be somewhat of an equalizer, and make the contest a half-court type game more suited to our slower style of play. Wishful thinking. We did our best, but the game started fast and furious, and became a blowout early on. Our only chance had been to shoot the ball really well, which we didn’t. They owned the boards that night also. No surprise about that. We were thoroughly thrashed. I get it; they deserved to win. However, we had hoped to at least provide them with a competitive game.

Early in the second half, this happened: Terry Mead gracefully grabbed a rebound on one of our errant shots, and just as gracefully glided up the court filling the center lane on a fast break. I was the only guy on our team back on defense, retreating as quickly as I could. Terry continued to bear down on me. I made an impulsive fateful decision (not a particularly good one) when I got just inside the free throw lane. I stopped. This is where my memory gets a little fuzzy, and time starts to slow down for me. It is a phenomenon that sometimes happens when there is a real and impending danger. Ill-advised or not, I made the attempt to take a charging foul from Terry Mead while he was running toward me at full speed. I closed my eyes and braced myself for impact.

There would of course be two collisions…. the first one with Mead plowing in to me and the second, me hitting the floor. They never happened. Terry simply disappeared into thin air. Vaporized. Vanished.

When I opened my eyes, and looked up over my shoulder, there was Terry hanging from the rim. Yes, my friends, Terry Mead completely hurdled me and did ‘that nifty little shot where he forces it through the rim’. Ever the class act, and a gentleman, he did it without even riffling my hair.