The NAIA changed basketball, and Kansas City

Alcorn State was minutes away from tipping off a game at the 1974 NAIA Tournament when Braves coach Davey Whitney received a tap on the shoulder from a Municipal Auditorium official.

“Phone call,” he was told. Now? Whitney shooed away the messenger. A few minutes later came another tap. “I was told it was important and I had to take the call,” Whitney said. “So I left the bench and got on the phone.”

On the line was the school president. A bill had just been signed into Mississippi law to grant Alcorn university status. No longer was it Alcorn Agricultural & Mechanical College but Alcorn State University. The president wanted everybody at the NAIA to know.

“We had ’em change the scoreboard,” Whitney said. “It meant a lot to us to be called Alcorn State University at the NAIA. It was where we were welcomed. To us, it was a special place.”

Basketball's African American Pioneers

A forgotten ballplayer walked into a small reception room last week at the Reagan Building, had the privilege of meeting the famous Earl Monroe -- and promptly told the Pearl a story.

While Monroe was becoming NBA royalty in New York, Perry Wallace played for a pittance in the Eastern League, a basketball minor league, and moonlighted as a math teacher at the Pearl's alma mater, Philadelphia's John Bartram High School.

"And at the same time, Joe Bryant -- Kobe's father -- attended that school," Wallace said. "Isn't that something?"

From the Pearl to Perry, to Jellybean Bryant and on to his son, the entire evening became a game of human H-O-R-S-E. They bonded over coincidences and zero degrees of separation, of events of 30, 40 and 50 years ago, all told by living historians before the screening of "Black Magic."



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