Sorrow of 1977 Evansville plane crash felt in Pittsburgh
‘I watched a team help heal a community’
Some were just boys, eager to take on the world as part of a new Division I basketball program at the University of Evansville. They were the Purple Aces, stepping up to the NCAA big leagues, with a new coach, new branding, new expectations.
Division I meant upscale travel, fewer long bus rides. So they boarded the two-propeller charter airplane on a foggy evening in Evansville, Ind., charged into a sky heavy with clouds, and took off.
Ninety seconds later, they were gone.
Dec. 13 marks 40 years since the accident. Fourteen members of the team, their head coach, Bethel Park native Bobby Watson, and 14 others en route to a game in Murfreesboro, Tenn. — including athletic department staff and the local radio play-by-play man — perished when their flight failed to gain altitude.
Indiana Air Flight 216 left Evansville Dress Regional Airport and crashed into brushy hillside, ultimately taking with it 29 souls and the heart of a town.
“People old enough to remember what happened at the time, they talk about it the way you might the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger disaster. They can tell you what they were doing, what time of day it was,” said Tom Kazee, the University of
Evansville’s current president.
“It’s left an imprint on the psyche of the city that’s really quite remarkable.”
Evansville is a solidly Midwestern city in southwestern Indiana, and yet the events of what was commonly described as “the night it rained tears” would be wed to Pittsburgh in more ways than one.
There was Watson, of course, a high school star for the Black Hawks in the late 1950s. There also were odd bookends: Evansville played the University of Pittsburgh Panthers seven days before the crash.
The following year, with yet another new head coach, Dick Walters, and an entirely new team, the Purple Aces would make their first plane trip to play in Pittsburgh, at Fitzgerald Field House.
Somehow, the Pittsburgh Steelers and a couple of table tennis champions from Carrick wound up in this story, too.
‘It’s the Aces’
Mike Blake remembers hearing something about a plane crash as he returned to his office at WFIE-TV in Evansville.
“I was the sports director and had just covered two high school games,” Mr. Blake said. “I came into the station around 8 o’clock, Central time. The GM would rarely be in the newsroom at that hour, but he was there and he said ‘It’s the Aces.’ “Andeverythingchanged.” Evansville had a population of around 131,000 in 1977. Roberts Stadium, home of the Aces, seated 10,000 comfortably. It was a time of victories, and peculiarities: legendary coach Arad McCutchan was dressing the team in, of all things, Tshirt uniform tops, orange for away games. Instead of warmup suits, the players wore boxing robes on the bench.
Everyone loved it, and sellouts were common.
When McCutchan retired at the end of the 1976-77 season, the head coaching job went to a beloved alum and former Evansville star, Jerry Sloan. But Mr. Sloan changed his mind less than a week into the job. Watson was waiting in the wings.
“I called him a ‘sophisticated Fonzie,’” Mr. Blake said. “He was about 6-foot-8, and whether you were a big booster with big pockets, or a guy sitting in a bar, or an Aces student or in the media, he connected.”
“Bob was a great storyteller, he could capture an audience,” said Watson’s sister, Lois Watson Ford, of Lexington, Va. “He could draw people to him, and was very loyal to his friends.”
Their father, Carl Watson, moved his family from Latrobe to Harrisburg, finally settling in Bethel Park, when Bobby was in seventh grade. He played various sports but nothing compared to basketball. Bobby’s mother, Olga Villani Watson, had been a softball player, and Carl played football at Saint Vincent College.
Watson surprised everyone by choosing Virginia Military Institute after graduation from Bethel Park. “A big shock to us,” Ms. Watson Ford said, adding that in the days when NCAA basketball coaches weren’t limited to visiting recruits, the Keydets’ staff practically lived at their home to sell the program.
Although VMI was a .500 team in his senior season, Watson helped it win the Southern Conference. The Keydets lost to Bill Bradley’s Princeton Tigers in the 1964 NCAA Division I tournament.
His personal coaching history began with a year at William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Va.
This was followed by two tours in Vietnam; VMI grads had a two-year military requirement. Watson earned five Purple Hearts for injuries during his service.
“He was a very courageous guy who didn’t talk much about that, but he did like to talk [about everything else],” said former Pitt basketball coach Tim Grgurich, now an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, an old friend of Watson’s.
The night of the crash, Mr. Grgurich said, he and a small group of Pittsburgharea coaches and boosters including Bill Shay of Allegheny County Community College, Dick Black of Mt. Lebanon High School and Mike Rossman went to Bethel Park to pay their respects to Olga Watson.
Upon his return to the U.S., Watson became an assistant at Xavier University in Cincinnati, then Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, N.C., and was head coach at Ferrum Junior College in Virginia.
The Watson family was always close-knit, and when he moved on to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., his sister followed. By then, Watson had a wife, Deirdra, a 7-year-old daughter, Angela, and twins Chandra and Leigh, 2.
“He was my family there, so when he went to Evansville, I was alone in Tulsa,” Ms. Watson Ford said. “I went to Cincinnati because we had some mutual friends there.”
Months before the plane crash, Watson helped his sister move.
“As he walked out the door, he turned around and said to his friend, ‘ Thanks for taking care of my little sister.’ And that was the last time I saw him.”
Watson takes charge
When Watson took over the Aces program, he made changes.
The coaches switched back to purple uniforms and tried to enforce a sense of “we belong in the big leagues” pride. There were some in town who thought Evansville should not have abandoned a proven winner at the College Division level.
“A lot of people said, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Let’s stay in Division II,’” said Mr. Blake, who has been with WFIE-TV for 47 years. “One writer wrote sort of a negative story but rather than get ticked off, Watson said, ‘Let me take you out to lunch.’
“He said ‘look, you can criticize me, but we haven’t played a game yet. These kids haven’t played a game yet … and that [writer] became a disciple. That was the kind of guy Bobby was. He had a real impact in the short time he was coach.”
The 1977 season began with a home loss to Western Kentucky on Nov. 30. Three days later, the Aces lost at DePaul. But things were looking up after a 90-83 defeat of Pitt at Roberts Stadium. Another loss followed on Dec. 10, to Indiana State University and its star, Larry Bird.
And then, the crash. Almost a year would pass before Evansville would play another game, and the fact that it could was testimony to the school and town’s determination to, as then-university president Wallace Graves would predict at a memorial days after the crash, “From the Ashes, This University Will Arise.”
“It was a powerful statement and beautifully in tune with the sadness that people felt,” Mr. Kazee said. “There was just this tradition, this identity between the Purple Aces basketball team and the people of Evansville.”
Beyond the shock of what happened, there were practical concerns. This was a preESPN era when schools depended on ticket sales to help support their athletic programs.
Donations poured in from across the country, as well as offers of fundraisers. Accounts vary, but one credited then-Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri with setting up a charity basketball game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and former Purple Aces players.
“It was a fantastic night out there,” said Tom O’Malley, director of the Steelers hoops program, then assistant to Baldy Regan, judge and former Pittsburgh city councilman. “It was very emotional. To tell the truth, I’m getting a little emotional just thinking about it.
“We ran out there and the place was just filled, But it was strange, it was dead quiet. Not a murmur. But once the game got started, people got into it, big time.”
The Steelers, already on their way to establishing their Super Bowl dynasty, did not send the B Team. Among the stars playing at Roberts Stadium that day was Franco Harris.
University of Arizona head coach Sean Miller, who grew up in Beaver County and played for Pitt, was the ballboy that night. He and Mr. Regan’s son, Patrick, also put on fancy basketball skills exhibitions, and the halftime show featured Carrick natives Rick and Danny Seemiller, who were among the best table tennis players in the world.
“It was clearly a big, big night,” Mr. Miller said. “You held your hat that night on how big sports can really be, what a difference people like the Pittsburgh Steelers can make in the lives of others beyond what they do on NFL Sunday.
“I watched a team help heal a community. I’ve run into people throughout my lifetime who are from that part of Indiana or Evansville who would bring up that day, or remember the Steelers.”
Joe Atkinson, a UE faculty member, has filmed a documentary about the crash: “From the Ashes.” It will be released on DVD Wednesday, but he hopes to get it picked up by PBS stations — possibly WQED in Pittsburgh — for wider distribution.
For the project, he interviewed Stafford Stephenson, an Evansville assistant coach who was not with the team because he was recruiting that week. “Stafford Stephenson described that [Steelers] game: ‘To me, that was the first time after the plane crash there was any joy in Roberts Stadium.’ That game meant a LOT.”
Remembrance
On the campus of the University of Evansville there is a bricked area called Memorial Plaza. Limestone panels with engraved names of the dead flank a fountain. The official name of this water feature is “The Weeping Basketball,” a sphere with sprays of water catching the light.
“When it captures the rays of the sun, it is powerful,” Mr. Kazee said. “It has sort of a life-affirming quality to it … it captures a spirit, both a sadness and yet a pride, in what these young people represented.”
There will be memorials Wednesday, as there are each year. Among them are a service at the downtown Ford Center, built after Roberts Stadium was razed in 2013. A memorial wall was dedicated at the center several years ago.
A separate memorial is for first responders, those who, upon arriving on the scene, were shocked to discover the Purple Aces’ duffel bags strewn across the landscape.
Ms. Watson Ford has attended a few of these events but said she cannot bring herself to speak at them. “It’s kind of like managing pain,” she said. “It never goes away, but you just deal with it.”
Watson’s widow, Deirdra, has not spoken publicly. The family’s younger girls are now successful folk pop singers, The Watson Twins, living in Nashville, Tenn. They are graduates of UE; one of their songs is heard in the closing credits of “From the Ashes.”
Because there was no voice recorder on board Flight 216, it took the National Transportation Safety Board well into the next summer to finalize its report on what caused the plane crash. It concluded that in addition to the crew’s failure to remove gust locks on the rudder before takeoff, luggage had been improperly stowed, creating a weight imbalance.
In one of life’s horrible epilogues, David Furr, a player who didn’t make the trip due to an ankle injury, died in a car crash two weeks later.
The years pass. The team is not forgotten. In 1982, the Purple Aces qualified for the NCAA tournament, a mere five seasons after hatching a basketball phoenix from those ashes.
Bobby Watson has been enshrined in various halls of fame, from Bethel Park to VMI and Evansville. Ms. Watson Ford sponsors a scholarship in Bobby’s name at VMI because “I think that’s what he would have done.
“He would have given back. He didn’t have that chance, so I feel like I’m giving back in his memory.”