LOYOLA LEGEND HARKNESS DIES
Pioneer helped Loyola to national title while symbolizing a shift in college hoops
INDIANAPOLIS — Former Loyola star Jerry Harkness, one of the original Indiana Pacers and a civil rights pioneer who played in college basketball’s Game of Change in 1963, has died. He was 81.
Harkness credited Jackie Robinson for changing the course of his life, which was one of firsts. His Loyola team was the first to win the NCAA Tournament with as many as four Black starters. He was Quaker Oats’ first Black salesman and Indianapolis’ first Black sportscaster.
“All of us at Loyola have heavy hearts today,” Loyola men’s basketball coach Drew Valentine said Tuesday. “Jerry was a true trailblazer, not only in basketball but in so many different walks of life, and the impact he made was immeasurable.”
The Ramblers’ surprise run to the Final Four in 2018 gave Harkness a new platform to revisit the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
“And it’s not by chance — I think the Lord is in this,” he once told the Indianapolis Star. “You get older and see, at least in my case, how my life came together.”
Redefining the rules
Harkness was one of four Black starters recruited to Loyola by coach George Ireland, who broke the unwritten rule of having no more than three Black players on the floor at one time. Loyola’s lineup featured Harkness and Ron Miller, both of New York, and Vic Rouse and Les Hunter, both of Nashville, Tennessee, along with white guard John Egan of Chicago. Loyola rose to No. 2 in the national polls in the 1962-63 season.
The Ramblers reached the Final Four by beating Big Ten champ Illinois 79-64, with Harkness scoring 33 points, then defeated Duke 94-75 in the national semifinal and No. 1 Cincinnati 60-58 in overtime in the title game.
That was March. Before that, there was madness. Loyola won 62-58 at Houston on Feb. 23. Fans there shouted racist epithets and menaced the team as it left for the locker room. “I was scared to death,” Harkness recalled.
It got worse. Harkness received threatening letters ahead of the NCAA Tournament. The Ramblers’ emotions manifested in an opening 111-42 rout of Tennessee Tech, the most lopsided score in tourney history. Then Loyola was pitted against Mississippi State in the Mideast Regional at East Lansing, Michigan, in what became known as the Game of Change.
Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, filed an injunction to prohibit the team from leaving the state. But Bulldogs coach Babe McCarthy had already crossed the border. The players all wanted to go, and off they went.
When Harkness and Joe Dan Gold, the Mississippi State captain, met at center court, it was as if all strife around them vanished. Their eyes met. They shook hands. There were so many photographers capturing the image, Harkness said, he could still
hear the “pop, pop, pop” of flash bulbs.
“I knew at that point this was more than a game,” he said.
Loyola won 61-51. Sixteen months after the game, Mississippi State enrolled its first Black student.
Another moment for the books
Harkness was selected in the second round of the 1963 NBA draft by his hometown Knicks but was released after five games. He landed a sales job with Quaker and was on track toward a management position when he took a chance on a new pro league, the ABA.
At 27, he made the Pacers’ roster in 1967. He played 81 games in two seasons, long enough to make history. On Nov. 13, 1967, his heave of 88 feet beat the Dallas Chaparrals 119-118 as time expired. It remains the longest game-winning shot in pro basketball.