‘Growing up I definitely adjusted to my name. I really embraced it.’
Miami sophomore guard name! He’s a deacon!’”
Thanks to his mom, he said the taunts never really bothered him:
“She always told me, ‘When you say your whole name — Bishop James — it’s like a title. It meant something to me and I took pride in it. Even with the jokes that came with it, I loved it.”
He said Central State coach Joseph Price and his family are “really, really close,” going back to Price’s days as coach at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, 21 miles from Port Arthur.
“He’d come to our house and we’d talk every now and then and he’d ask about my basketball,” said James, who played at Port Arthur Memorial High School.
“By the time I was a senior, he was at Central State and he told my mom it would be a great opportunity for me to come to school here and expand my knowledge of other places. I could play college basketball and learn to grow up without my mother right on my hip.”
He walked onto the team last season and this year serves as a student assistant, working as a manager for the Marauders and helping sports information director Nick Novy.
In the process he’s learned something else, too.
He said he always thought his name came from the 1992 movie “Juice,” about four black youths growing up in Harlem:
“I always thought that’s where my mom got the name. In the movie, Tupac’s (Shakor) name was (Roland) Bishop.
“But then I called my mom and she was like, ‘Naah, that’s not right. I was watching a football game one day and saw a guy named Bishop and
thought that was neat.’”
She was talking about Blaine Bishop, the AllPro safety for the Houston Oilers turned Tennessee Titans.
“It didn’t really matter to me,” Bishop said. “I’ve gotten to really love my name.”
‘This is me’
Calamity grew up on a ranch outside of Kiowa, Oklahoma where her family was known for raising cattle, rodeoing and music.
Her great grandfather and her grandpa were both world champion steer wrestlers.
Her dad, Pake — a spinoff of the mythical cowboy Pecos Pete — was a rancher who competed on the rodeo circuit and also performed on stage as part of the Singing McEntires.
He sang lead and his younger sister, Reba Nell, and baby sister, Martha Susan or Susie as she’s known, sang harmony. Eventually the two girls went to college and Reba was spotted by country legend Red Steagall as she sang the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo.
He convinced her to come to Nashville and record with him and that helped launch a legendary career that includes three Grammys, seven top female vocalist of the year awards from the Academy of Country Music and just last Saturday, a lifetime achievement award at the Kennedy Center.
Calamity said Reba was her role model as she grew up on the ranch and was involved in 4H projects, showed horses, briefly tried her own hand at rodeoing, was the president of her Future Farmers of America club in high school, played basketball and, along with sisters Autumn and Chism, took dancing, singing and piano lessons.
She said her dad came up with the idea of a second generation Singing McEntires and eventually they had a summer gig in Branson, Missouri:
“We had our own show with no other opening act or closing act. We tap danced and sang. My dad played the fiddle. We had a band.
“They all loved it. I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t my passion. I wasn’t as good as my sisters. Autumn is a brilliant songwriter in Nashville now and Chism can really sing. Me, I just wanted to play basketball. That was my passion.”
She said she first developed her game at an old hoop behind her house:
“It was on a pole and there was never any concrete slab under it, just dirt. There was a bob wire fence not 10 feet from it and after that you went down a hill. So if your ball bounced and went through the fence, it went down the hill. It made you not want to miss.”
She became a prep standout at Kiowa High and then played junior college basketball at Eastern Oklahoma State before eventually transferring to the University of Tennessee, after meeting hall of fame coach Pat Summitt, all thanks to her mom.
“My mom is a dreamer, a real ambitious woman and she posed it to me that we were just going to take a look at the campus,” Calamity said with a smile. “Once we got there, we walked right into Pat’s office.
“Her secretary, Katy, was sitting there and she said, ‘Oh yeah, you can go down to the court and watch practice.’ That’s the first day I met Pat.”
Calamity enrolled at Tennessee and Summitt eventually made her a manager of her fabled women’s team.
“It was such an amazing opportunity for me,” she said. “She was a role model to me. She was a great coach and someone who gave me my first opportunity at a Division I school. Being in her practices every day, being there for every timeout, every huddle, for me she was just a great teacher of the game.
“She was honest and forward and just very consistent in who she was and what she was going to bring every day.”
After graduating from Tennessee, Calamity immediately began her own coaching career, landing a job as a 23-yearold assistant coach and recruiter at Fresno State. She then went to UC Santa Barbara, Boise State, spent four seasons at Arizona and was an assistant at Hawaii.
She said she relishes the opportunity at Dayton not only because she’s part of a successful program with a good reputation, but also because, for the first time in her career, she’s just five hours away from Nashville where her mom, sisters and Reba live.
While she’s outfitted them in some Flyers gear the past two seasons, they help her reconnect with the foundation on which she’s built her coaching career.
Although she certainly draws on the lessons of Summitt and some of the other people she’s coached with in her career, she said she’s found the underpinnings of her career go back to her upbringing:
“One thing I’ve kept leaning on is the lessons I learned back home. Things like being really kind to people and working your butt off and going after whatever the task in front of you is.”
But while those old lessons have provided her with answers over the years, she said her name still elicits questions:
“I get asked about it all the time and the one place I always get comments is when I travel. TSA, whoever checks me in, they usually have something to say.
“A lot of times people don’t think before they speak. They’ll look at my driver’s license and say, ‘You’re momma named you THAT?’
“I’m like, ‘Well...yeah... And I like my momma and I like my name.”
Over at Miami, Nike Sibande summed it up best:
“You grow up and you embrace your name, whatever it is. You finally just say, ‘This is me.’”