From The Mag: Giving Thanks For IUPUI's Ron Hunter
By BILLY REED
Basketball Times
He is somewhere overseas, deep in the heart of an economically poor nation. For hours, he has been standing in the back of a truck, handing out shoes to kids with wide eyes and raggedy clothes. The kids have never had shoes, much less brand-new ones. They aren’t sure what to do with the shoes, but they look at him gratefully and curiously. But then, finally, the truck is empty. The shoes are gone. But the line of kids still stretches for miles, kids without shoes, and he gets this sinking, desperate feeling, and…
And then Ron Hunter jerks awake. Usually it’s somewhere around 5 a.m. He can’t go back to sleep. He has to get to work because he has a team to coach and calls to make and shoes to hustle. “Before the shoes, my purpose in life was winning basketball games,” Hunter says. “The shoes have changed my life … changed who I am.”
At this moment, he’s sitting in his modest office on the campus of the university that arguably has the most awkward name and vexing identity crisis in college basketball. That would be Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, or IUPUI, or “Ooey Pooey” as it’s laughingly known to its rivals.
Located more or less halfway between West Lafayette to the North and Bloomington to the South, IUPUI has more than 22,000 students on a sprawling campus very near the state capitol, Lucas Oil Stadium and NCAA headquarters. But it’s not even regarded as the best D-I program in Indianapolis, that distinction belonging to Butler, a consistent Top 25 team for the last decade or so.
It’s understandable that Butler refuses to cross town to play IUPUI in its home gym, a 1,200-seat bandbox known as “The Jungle.” But Butler also won’t schedule the Jaguars either in its home arena, historic Hinkle Fieldhouse, or in the Indiana Pacers’ Conseco Fieldhouse, where IUPUI will play four games this season.
Butler’s position is that it has nothing to gain by playing IUPUI and something to lose, be it prestige or a recruit. Almost all IUPUI’s players come from Indianapolis or very nearby. Since 1996, when the Jaguars joined Division I, Hunter has built a solid program by taking kids who, for one reason or another, were underrated or overlooked by Butler, Indiana, Purdue and the other top recruiters who relentlessly work the Indiana high-school ranks.
At IUPUI, rejection is a part of life. Neither Indiana nor Purdue will play the Jaguars, even though IUPUI graduates receive their degrees from one of those institutions. There is no such thing as an IUPUI degree, which gives Jaguars’ athletic director Mike Moore a unique fund-raising challenge: How do you tap into your alumni when there are none?
“The big challenge here is that there’s more loyalty to the schools (IU and Purdue) than to the campus as a whole,” Moore said. “But we see athletics as a vehicle to change that. Nothing makes me happier than when I walk across campus and see students wearing IUPUI hats and shirts.”
Nothing has been a more important catalyst for new campus pride than the Jaguars’ appearance in the 2003 NCAA tournament. After defeating arch-rival Valparaiso to win the Mid-Continent Conference’s automatic berth, they were assigned a No. 16 seed and pitted against Kentucky in the opening round. The Wildcats won easily, 95-64, but at least the world knew that IUPUI was more than just a funny name.
The phone call that changed Hunter’s life came late one evening in early January 2008. As Hunter was trying to go to sleep after a home game, he got a call from Todd Mellon, a friend who then was working for a North Carolina-based organization known as Samaritan’s Feet. When Mellon explained his group’s mission -- to accumulate and distribute shoes to poor kids around the world -- he got Hunter’s attention.
Although Hunter never lacked for Converse All-Stars when he was growing up, his Catholic training instilled in him a strong compassion for the needy. At one point in the conversation, Mellon said, “We need a coach who will go barefoot in a game.” To which Hunter replied, “Yeah, who can we get?” Then, said Hunter, “It really just hit me.”
Soon thereafter, pairs of shoes began arriving at Hunter’s office. The numbers became so huge that the governor of Indiana allowed Hunter to store them in a warehouse run by prisoners. As the shoe movement began to take on a life of its own, Hunter also had to focus on coaching the best team of his career. The Jags finished 26-7 but then got stiffed by both the NCAA and NIT tournament selection committees – another slap in the face to the program accustomed to it.
After the season, Hunter got another jolt when star player George Hill decided to give up his senior season and opt for the NBA draft, where the San Antonio Spurs shocked the hoops world by making him the first Summit League player ever selected in the first round. For Hunter, it was a mixed blessing – unprecedented recognition for his program, but also a huge loss for the 2008-09 season. “The George Hill thing caught us off guard,” Hunter says. “Teams like ours have a hard time recovering from that.”
In the summer of 2008, Hunter took his team, along with several thousand pairs of shoes, to Peru for a series of exhibitions. It was there that he had the experience that led to the dreams that haunt him to this day.
“We loaded up the shoes on this old bus, must have been built in the 1930s, and drove out to the middle of nowhere,” Hunter said. “When we ran out of shoes, they started shaking the bus. I remember looking out and seeing mothers holding babies. They had been standing in line for hours. I took off my shoes and gave ’em to some kid. But we just didn’t have enough. Don’t you see? All these kids needed shoes and we just didn’t have enough. I knew that would have an effect on me the rest of my life.”
Without Hill, the Jags struggled to a 16-14 record last season. But then they went overseas again, taking 20,000 pairs of shoes to Nigeria even though Hunter couldn’t go with them. Laid up by surgery for a herniated disc, the coach nevertheless worked the phones from his bed, trying to get more shoes and enlist more coaches in the cause. He also did some serious soul-searching. The publicity from the shoes, along with his record in a tough situation, had increased his coaching stock to the point that IUPUI fans were worried about keeping him.
“For six weeks, I had the time to think about my quality of life,” he said. “Sometimes we as coaches think that money is everything. But it’s not. Coaching is what I do, but it’s not what I am. There are a lot of places where I wouldn’t be allowed to do the shoes thing because it takes up so much time, but IUPUI lets me do it. So my quality of life is terrific. I live in what I consider to be the best city in America and get to do what I believe God wants me to do. I’m supposed to be here. I’m very comfortable.”
But also very busy. Hunter concedes that his passion for the shoes program has grown to the point that it now amounts to a second full-time job. He’s on the phone constantly, encouraging his fellow coaches to take shoes with them whenever they go overseas. Last August, the Bowling Green women’s team, and the Bethune-Cookman men’s team took shoes with them when they visited Central America.
The most important game on IUPUI’s schedule is Oral Roberts on Jan. 17 at Conseco. That’s the day that Hunter will coach barefoot again to dramatize the Samaritan’s Feet crusade and to honor Dr. King. He’s been talking to ESPN about doing the game live and to the National Basketball Coaches Association about getting its endorsement. He hopes that at least half of all D-I coaches will work barefoot that day, including the coaches at IU, Purdue and Butler. They won’t play him, but maybe they’ll join him.
Hunter believes his involvement with Samaritan’s Feet has made him a better teacher and given his players a perspective on life that’s more important than anything they’ll learn on the court.
“We take things for granted in this country,” Hunter said. “We’re spoiled. Our kids want to have this particular brand or that particular brand. I’ve taken my team to places where kids come up to me and pray for a meal. It’s been great for our kids, and it’s has brought them closer together. It’s inspiring to see young people do things not only for the city and the institution, but for the world.”
Who would have thought that a coach from a curiously named, easily ignored school in Indiana could make such a difference? All told, more than two million shoes have been donated and distributed since Hunter first coached barefoot – and he wants the number to grow to five million by the end of this season.
Oh, yeah. There’s also his other job. His day job, if you will. He also wants his Jaguars to be back in the hunt for the Summit championship and the program’s second NCAA trip. The Jags return seven of last season’s top eight scorers, led by forward Robert Glenn, whose 13.9 scoring average made him the Summit’s “newcomer of the year.” Hunter also is excited about freshman Greg Rice, one of the best high-school point guards in Indiana last season.
Whatever happens on the court, however, the nation will be watching the coach who not only talks the talk but walks the walk – literally and barefoot, at that. Without even thinking about it, Hunter has enhanced his profession’s reputation by proving that even in these cynical, selfish times, there is, indeed, more to college basketball than winning games and making money and moving up the ladder.
Whenever he gets tired, he thinks about how he felt when he looked into the wide eyes of a barefoot urchin in Peru and told him he had run out of shoes. The memory haunts him in his dreams, but it’s balanced by the encouragement he gets from his family, friends, colleagues, and, sometimes, unlikely sources.
“I do every speaking engagement I can,” Hunter says. “At one, there was this raggedy old guy in a wheelchair. As I was on the way out, he called me over and took off these old running shoes he had on. He said, ‘Coach, I can’t afford to buy a new pair of shoes, but take these.’ He made me take them, and I kept them as a reminder. I look at them every day.”
Billy Reed is a Kentucky-based newspaper columnist, magazine writer, radio talk-show host and guest, TV commentator, political pundit, communications specialist, public speaker, and book author.
Photo Credit: www.iupui.edu
To subscribe to Basketball Times, please follow this link.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment