Chuck Klosterman X Read online

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  “IF YOU WRITE a story about this,” Barry Webster tells me, “you need to explain how much I ripped it up that season.” I’m speaking to Mr. Webster over the telephone. He lives in Macy, Neb., the same reservation town where he grew up. He’s standing in his kitchen, having just taken his Labrador and his dachshund for a walk around the town, which probably did not take very long (the population of Macy is 1,200). When his son meanders into the room, Webster hands him the phone, just to prove that a guy from ESPN is on the other line. Barry can’t believe someone is asking him about a game that happened more than two decades ago, but that doesn’t mean he’s not ready to talk: Our extemporaneous interview lasts over an hour.

  “I really did rip it up that year,” he repeats. “I think I averaged twenty-seven points a game, with a high of forty-six. I really remember that . . . As a Native, you always start with a strike against you. People always thought they were gonna kick our ass when we showed up in the gym, and that made me want to blow them away. I know I must sound cocky, but that’s not how it was. I just knew the world was against me.”

  I don’t need to remind Webster that he was the leader of the ’88 Thunderbirds. He knows he was the star. A five-foot-ten lead guard with dynamic quickness (he claims to have run a 4.3 40 as a high school quarterback), Webster received casual attention from a few Division I programs, but he knows he never had a real chance of going there. “According to my high school coach, I was getting looked at by Colorado,” Webster says. “But I was a jack around. I didn’t take academics seriously. The junior college route was really my only option.”

  Webster’s trajectory is not unusual—in fact, it’s the reason 1980s junior college basketball intermittently bordered on the spectacular. Since major colleges were finally growing cognizant of academic standards and potential scholastic violations, there tended to be two types of kids who played hoops at the JUCO level: undersized high school gunners and D-1 prospects who didn’t like to read. The master of this universe was San Jacinto’s Walter Berry, the southpaw superfreak who dominated the 1984 NJCAA tourney before transferring to St. John’s and winning the John Wooden Award. JUCOs were the collegiate equivalent of the ABA, saturated with shoot-first superpowers. Webster wasn’t even the best junior college player in North Dakota that year; that was Dan Schilz of UND–Lake Region, a 2-guard who led the nation in scoring with 35.3 points a game (still the ninth-highest single-season tally in JUCO history, one slot ahead of Latrell Sprewell).

  It was into this world that Webster stumbled, almost by accident. He majored in auto mechanics.

  “I’d never been to North Dakota,” Webster recalls. “I didn’t even know the United Tribes existed.”

  Not many people do. At the time, enrollment at United Tribes Technical College was somewhere between two hundred and three hundred students.2 The school was founded in 1969 by the five tribes of North Dakota, but its brick campus buildings were built at the turn of the twentieth century, intended as a military base. During World War II, the base was used as an alien internment camp. Attending school at UT is the polar opposite of idyllic. But that’s how college life was (and still is) for so many Native American students—it’s just that nobody pays attention. No American minority is less represented in the national consciousness.3 This was a collegiate program where the basketball team could not afford to print the name of its school on the front of their jerseys.

  “We didn’t even have warm-up clothes,” says former United Tribes coach Ken Hall. “And Bottineau had those tear-away sweatpants! Half their team was dunking during pregame, and I didn’t have one guy over six foot. But as anyone who ever played for me will tell you, everybody on our roster was in the best shape of his life. We could run all day.”

  This is how five Indians—and then four, and then three—defeated a team that should have crushed them by 30: They ran and they ran and they ran. And then they stopped.

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  “THEY HAD FIVE KIDS they called the Iron Five.”

  These are the words of Buster Gilliss, the current athletic director at Bismarck Junior College and the head coach of NDSU-Bottineau in 1988. In his high school and collegiate coaching career, Gilliss won 508 games. When I reach him by phone, he’s not especially excited to talk about a loss that (a) the world doesn’t remember, but (b) he can’t forget. But he talks anyway.

  “They had those five kids they called the Iron Five, and they played the whole game. They were a little older than most junior college kids—I feel like a few of them were in their mid-twenties. But these were good players. I think they shot something like seventy-eight percent from the field that night.”

  The actual percentage was 61, but his general perception is accurate: The Thunderbirds were on fire, especially during the first half. Coming into the game, NDSU-Bottineau had a record of 17-8 and had beaten United Tribes twice during the regular season; nobody seems to recall what UT’s record was, but it was definitely below .500 (Webster thinks they might have won ten games that year, but Hall suspects it was more like seven or eight). The Tribe opened the season with a full twelve-man roster, but people kept quitting or getting hurt or losing their eligibility. By tournament time, they were down to five. It was peculiar to watch them take the court before tip-off—they didn’t have enough bodies for a layup line. They just casually shot around for twenty minutes.

  “It was always so goofy to play those guys,” says Keith Braunberger, the Lumberjacks point guard in 1987–88. Today, Braunberger owns a Honda dealership in Minot. “I don’t want to dis them, but—at the time—they were kind of a joke. They would just run and shoot. That was the whole offense. I remember they had one guy who would pull up and shoot from half court if you didn’t pick him up immediately.”

  The five Thunderbirds would have dominated any six-foot-and-under league—they were all guards and wings, and everyone had range. But they were completely overmatched by NDSU-Bottineau. Gillis was in his second year as head coach and had developed a recruiting pipeline into Illinois and Maryland. The Lumberjacks roster included hyperbolic talent like Jerome Gaines4 (a six-five helicopter) and Keith “The Total Package” Offutt5 (a six-six rebounding machine). Offutt had nicknamed himself.

  “You had to know Keith to understand,” explains Darrell Oswald, the Jacks’ six-six swingman. “He’d had a terrible upbringing and some emotional problems. He gave himself that name. Probably the best athlete I’ve ever been around. Had a forty-two-inch vertical.”

  The Bottineau roster represented the template for North Dakota JUCO basketball throughout the 1980s: a handful of hyperathletic (read: black) players who were destined to play elsewhere, and a core group of local (read: white) players who were small-town legends. Braunberger was from Max, N.D., a community of 334. Oswald hailed from Wing, N.D., a town with fewer than two hundred people (there were nine kids in Oswald’s graduating class—and that included Anika, an exchange student from Sweden). The Jacks’ leading scorer was shooting guard Dan Taylor from New Rockford, N.D. (pop. 1,400), a player everyone called “Opie” due to his resemblance to a young Ron Howard. On paper, there’s no way the United Tribes should have been able to compete with this team. They probably shouldn’t have been in the same tournament.

  But they did. And they were.

  “You’d think a game like that would have made national headlines, because the idea of playing three-on-five is so odd,” says Taylor, now a banker in his old hometown. “But no one even noticed.”

  Even by North Dakota standards, Bottineau6 is a pretty small town to have its own college; according to the 2011 census, there are only 2,211 residents in the metro area. That’s part of the reason so little is known of this game: The Lumberjacks had a good team and real talent, but the weirdness of their season-ending defeat was like a comedic rumor that died in the translation. It wasn’t that embarrassing, simply because there weren’t enough people to mock it.

  “By the time our bus got back to Bottineau, we’d supposedly played the whole second half against three Indians, which of course is not what happened,” says Gilliss. “But you know, to be honest, there were probably ten people in the whole town who cared that we got beat.”

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  FEBRUARY 21, 1988, was an extremely North Dakota–like day in southeast North Dakota: It had been 45 degrees during the afternoon, but the temperature had plummeted to 7 when the sun disappeared. There was a trace of snow, but nothing cataclysmic; the United Tribes van arrived in Wahpeton, N.D., without any problem. The official site of the game was the North Dakota State College of Science campus, the host school for that season’s NDJCAA tournament (with the tournament winner advancing to the regional). With a seating capacity of 4,100 and a pristine red-and-black tartan floor, NDSCS’s facility was as good as that of any junior college in the country. It was also empty as a mule barn. As the Tribes and Bottineau got loose, the squeak of sneakers and the cacophony of dribbling dwarfed any murmuring from the stands. There might have been two thousand people in the gym by the time NDSCS took on Bismarck State at 8:30 p.m., but the 6:30 opener didn’t even feel like a high school game. It was more like a swim meet without water.

  This was Ken Hall’s first JUCO tournament, as this was his first year as the United Tribes coach. At the time, he was twenty-eight. Hall is arguably the most recognizable Native American athlete in North Dakota history, but not because of this game or anything else that happened at UT—regionally, he’s best known as a high school icon, first as a player in Newtown, N.D. (where he twice took the team to state in the ’70s), and later as the head coach in Parshall, N.D. (ending his twenty-two-year career with a Class B
title in 2007). But 1987–88 had been a frustrating season for Hall. He couldn’t keep anyone on the roster. With only five guys on the team, it became impossible to hold normal practices; when I asked Hall how they scrimmaged, he said (only half joking), “Shadows.” But after a while, they got used to it. And over time, he figured out how to win with a nonrotating five-man rotation.

  “We had a very strict game plan,” says Hall. “This was ’88, so the shot clock was still forty-five seconds. We set up a shot clock during practice and got used to running it down to ten seconds on every possession. We’d spread the floor, and then Barry [Webster] would try to take his guy one-on-one. Bottineau played man-to-man the whole game. Barry would collapse the defense and kick it out to the perimeter. And if they didn’t collapse, Barry just went to the hole. We controlled the whole game, start to finish. It was really Barry who controlled it. He was a coach’s dream.”

  Webster finished the night with 33 points. He remembers scoring 35, but that’s still pretty accurate for a twenty-three-year-old memory.7 Webster fouled out with four minutes remaining (he’d picked up his third foul before halftime), which initially felt like a deathblow. “Truthfully, I threw in the towel when I fouled out,” he says. “I was dejected. I thought the season was over. But then I looked over at the other coach, and he was just so confused. How do you play defense against four people? Who prepares for that situation? I could see them panicking. So we still ran our basic set. We just didn’t have a fifth option.”

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  “THERE WASN’T A LOT of teamwork,” concedes Oswald. “There might have been a little panic. When it was five-on-four, we should have just pounded the ball inside. But defense wasn’t our forte, and we were behind by four points. We still wanted to run. We pushed the panic button and tried to get it all back in two possessions.”

  This, it seems, is what paradoxically slew the Lumberjacks: their own tempo. They refused to make the Tribes play half-court defense, which fueled Hall’s strategy. The Jacks were designed to outscore people; when I finally located Mr. Oswald,8 he assumed I wanted to ask him about an altogether different game—a 1989 track meet vs. Northland College where the two squads combined for 308 points.9 Taylor echoed that sentiment. “Most of our games were more like 120 to 118,” he says. “I made 115 three-pointers as a freshman.10 That was just how we played.”

  When Webster fouled out at the four-minute mark, the Thunderbirds were still ahead by 4. The remaining Birds—Miles Fighter, Vernon Woodhall, Roger Yellow Card, and Harold Pay Pay—were now tasked with breaking the Jacks’ press without their best ball handler (and with no one to physically replace him). The lead melted. Fighter picked up his fifth foul with 1:06 on the clock,11 allowing Bottineau to tie the game at 81. With a two-man advantage, it seemed unfathomable that the Tribes could hold on. But then they got a break: The Lumberjacks’ Mark Peltier was called for charging, giving the rock back to UT. Hall called time-out, and the Thunderbirds had to inbound the ball at midcourt.

  This is when it happened.

  Now, imagine you’re Ken Hall or Buster Gilliss. What do you do in this dead-ball situation? Hall had limited options; all he could really do was stack up two of his remaining three players and hope they set screens for each other. But Bottineau made a tragic—yet perhaps understandable—mistake: They covered the man throwing the ball in, and they surrounded the other two Thunderbirds. It was like a little human prison—they face-guarded the front Bird, they played directly behind the back Bird, and they sandwiched the stack from both sides. Since one Thunderbird had to throw the ball in, it was a four-on-two situation. The Jacks assumed United Tribes would skew conservative and simply try to sneak the ball inbounds. Instead, Pay Pay spontaneously broke to the basket. Woodhall12 lobbed the ball over Pay Pay’s shoulder, which he converted into a breakaway layup. United Tribes were now up 2 with less than a minute to go, and it suddenly seemed obvious that they were going to win. There were still 40 seconds on the clock, but it was over. The Jacks had broken.

  The crowd lost its collective mind. It felt like we were watching the Olympics.

  “We had a psychological advantage, and that increased as the game went on,” says Hall, slightly understating the situation. “We literally had nothing to lose. We were the sixth seed in a six-team tournament.”

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  THE PRECISE CONCLUSION of this game is something of a mess. It’s a little like a murder trial where every eyewitness slightly contradicts every other testimony. What we do know is this: The Lumberjacks hustled the ball up court but lost possession without taking a shot. They immediately fouled Pay Pay, who went 1 of 2 from the line. With the Jacks now down 3, Roger McGillis launched multiple treys in an attempt to tie; Offutt kept snaring the offensive rebounds, but Bottineau was never able to convert. Offutt laid in a meaningless bunny as the buzzer sounded, but the officials waved it off. 84–81. It was over.

  “We didn’t know how to act,” says Webster. “We didn’t know how you celebrate something like that. We were all jumping around and celebrating, and I got hit right in the nuts. I actually slumped onto the ground. It was almost like someone said, ‘Great job,’ but then twisted my balls. But that’s still a good memory. We all went back to the hotel and called our parents, and then I went to sleep. I was pretty exhausted . . . I probably cried, honestly. I wish my dad could have seen that game, but he was too sickly. He had diabetes real bad. But if I did cry, I didn’t cry in front of anyone else.”

  This being a single-elimination tournament, the United Tribes had to play again on Monday, this time facing UND–Lake Region and the aforementioned Schilz. Amazingly, they somehow won again, 63–61 (Webster had 28). But they didn’t advance to the regional. In Tuesday’s championship, they lost to NDSCS, 77–65. They were tired. They deserved to be tired: Most of the Iron Five had logged 120 minutes of floor time over the span of three days.

  A handful of players from this game ultimately finished their hoop careers at four-year colleges. Webster did not—he hurt his knee and ended up applying to the University of Nebraska, where he got a teaching degree and met his future wife. However, he continues to be heavily involved with the sport: He runs the Native Elite basketball camp in Nebraska, a networking program that tries to connect Native American high school players with college programs searching for talent. It’s not easy. There continues to be a curious gap between the American Indian community and the larger world of basketball. Despite the intense basketball tradition within many reservation cultures, there’s never been a high-profile Native American player at the pro (or even the collegiate) level. They’re almost never recruited.

  “The stigma is that Native kids aren’t mentally tough,” Webster says. “There is this belief that if you recruit a Native kid, he’ll get homesick and quit school.” I mention that another long-standing prejudice—that Native kids tend to be heavy drinkers—might be just as detrimental (the fact that United Tribes’ nickname was the same as a cheap brand of wine was an insular joke when I was growing up). Webster concedes that this is true, but he didn’t want to mention it—it’s the kind of bias he doesn’t even like to demystify (since a denial only reinforces the original perception). Certain ideas will never disappear.