Coach John McLendon

Mice was an elderly gentleman and we hit it off immediately. After a few minutes of conversation I asked Mice if he knew Coach John McLendon.

“Know him, I played for and coached under John McLendon.”

That was all I needed to hear as Coach McLendon was a hero of mine as I met him in 1985 in Kansas City during the NAIA national tournament where my team had earned a berth. I knew of Coach McLendon’s groundbreaking work to break the color barriers of college basketball. He guided the first historically black college and university to three consecutive NAIA national championships in 1957-58-59 with the great Dick ‘Skull’ Barnett.

McLendon was also the first African-American to coach a professional team as the head coach of the Cleveland Pipers in the old ABA.

Mice shared with me many stories that day but at one point he pulled me close to him and whispered in my ear, “Mark, have you ever heard of the Secret Game?”

I had not and then Mice shared this amazing story with me. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day I wanted to share it with you.

In 1944 in Durham, NC during the days of the Jim Crow Laws, Coach John McLendon has the head coach at the North Carolina College for Negroes. McLendon was a young 28 year old head coach and he was preparing his team for possibilities.

The Duke Medical School basketball team was a collection of post graduate All-Americans and All-Stars and they were considered by many in 1944 to be the best collegiate basketball team in the land in WWII America.

Dick Thistlethwaite was a former hoops star at the University of Richmond and played the center position. David Hubbell played forward as a former star on the Duke University team. Homer Sieber came from Roanoke College. Dick Symmonds played at Central Methodist in Missouri. Jack Burgess was a former player for the Montana Grizzlies.

Burgess was known for his anti-segregation beliefs and he was not just a man who talked about his beliefs but was more than willing to take action against the prejudice he witnessed.

The North Carolina College for Negroes Eagles were coming off of their most successful season. John B. McLendon had just led his team to a one loss season. Aubrey Stanley, Henry (Big Dog) Thomas, Floyd (Cootie) Brown and James (Boogie-Woogie) Hardy were the stars on a team that ran the fast break with great precision.

“We could have beaten anyone,” said McClendon, who eventually became a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Even with their gaudy record and success McLendon was frustrated as his team was not eligible for participation in the National Invitational Tournament or the N.C.A.A. tournament simply because they were African-Americans.

Burgess and others attended a meeting at the local Y in Durham, NC where students from both sides of the tracks would meet secretly to discuss ways to overcome racism. During one of those meetings the conversation turned to basketball and a bold challenge was issued. What about a secret game between the Eagles and the Duke Medical School teams?

John McLendon supported the clandestine game as he was curious about how his team would fair but more importantly he was a visionary who wanted to, “Prepare the team for the possibilities someday for integration.”

At Duke there was trepidation among the team. Jack Burgess wanted to play the game in the worst way, but some of the team members weren’t so sure. Finally, the team came to a competitive conclusion, “We thought we could whup ‘em,” David Hubbell said in an earlier interview. “So we decided to find out.”

On Sunday morning just after 11:00AM on March 12, 1944 all of the Durham, NC citizens were attending church but not the Duke Medical School team members. They were driving across town toward a tiny gym on a campus that might only be a few miles away from the Duke campus but for all intents and purposes might as well be in another country. Affluent Duke was a place for whites only vs. McLendon’s team which was all black.

“To keep from being followed, we took this winding route through town,” Hubbell recalled. To avoid detection they pulled their jackets up over their heads as they arrived on campus and this band of white basketball players snuck into the gym.

“I had never played basketball against a white person before, and I was a little shaky,” Aubrey Stanley recalled. “You did not know what might happen if there was a hard foul, or if a fight broke out. I kept looking over at Big Dog and Boogie to see what to do. They were both from up North.”

“On that particular morning, you didn’t exactly need to play skins and shirts,” recalled Hubbell. They began to play and the Duke Medical School got off to an early lead. There was a lot of nervousness on both sides but after a few minutes the Eagles realized that these white players from Duke were not invincible. The Eagles realized that they could not only play with these white men but maybe even dominate them.

“About midway through the first half,” Stanley says, “I suddenly realized: ‘Hey, we can beat these guys. They aren’t supermen. They’re just men like us.’ ”

“They just beat the heck out of us. They were very, very good.” Jack Burgess said on a Ted Koppel, ABC interview.
The Duke players had never seen anything like this in their barnstorming games across the south. By the end of the game, the scoreboard told the entire story: Eagles 88, Duke 44.

After the two teams took a break following this history making contest the two teams came together and visited. They decided to play some more but this time the teams would be mixed. Two or three black guys matched up with two or three white guys and they played together. They had fun and they made new friendships.

After the game Coach McLendon called the teams together and they made a pact to never speak of this game for fear of repercussions from the law and any other Jim Crow activists in Durham at that time.
The Durham authorities were never tipped off and the community as a whole left church that morning and for the most part never knew of this game. There was no score sheet, no stats and no record, just memories of a game held tightly by a coach and his players. Yes, they were all McClendon’s players now.

“Oh, I wonder if I told you that we played basketball against a Negro college team,” Jack Burgess wrote to his family in Montana after the game. He knew his secret was safe in Montana. “Well, we did and we sure had fun and I especially had a good time, for most of the fellows playing with me were Southerners. . . . And when the evening was over, most of them had changed their views quite a lot.”

Mice stopped abruptly as we reviewed old interviews and articles together. He wiped tears from his eyes and I did the same. Mice had now shared his secret with a white man he trusted. I was most honored.

Note: Quotes used for this article were taken from earlier articles from Duke University publications and TV interviews with Ted Koppel from a Nightline show on ABC. Mice had saved everything he could to commemorate this great game in American history.