‘SAD TO SEE IT GO’
Archdeacon: Fairgrounds is hallowed sports ground
It happens when he comes out of downtown Dayton on South Main.
“When I’m driving by now — whether I’m going to Miami Valley Hospital or on out Main Street — I always look over there and find myself smiling,” Bing Davis said. “I remember all the wonderful experiences I had playing over in that arena. “That’s a shrine to us.” The nationally-acclaimed artist, educator and once-trumpeted athlete was talking about the Montgomery County Fairgrounds and, more specifically, the Fairgrounds Coliseum, where he first played basketball games with his Wilbur Wright High School team and later — after a college career at DePauw Univer
sity — returned to the old wooden court and played for more than a decade with some of this town’s fabled AAU teams, including Jones Brothers Mortuaries and then Inland Manufacturing. It was during those years that he teamed up with the legendary Roger Brown, the star-crossed University of Dayton basketball great, who was a hero like no other Flyer ever in Dayton’s black community, an unparalleled box-office draw for
whites and blacks across town and, years later, a four-time ABA All-Star who would end up in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
And yet Brown was not the fairgrounds’ biggest sporting headliner. That distinction is held by a
harness horse, as well as a race car driver competing against a daredevil aviator and also a couple of fabled hometown heroes who put on a show there.