Knock, knock.
It was 7 p.m. and I wasn’t ready. “Come in Sam,” I said as I hustled into my gym shorts and T-shirt.
Sam walked into my dorm room with a basketball under his arm and a big smile. “Let’s get going,” he said. “Time to play some hoops.”
And so we did.
Every night at 7 p.m., unless he had a game, like clockwork Sam Leggett would knock on my door and we would go to the gym and play “Make It Take It” until we would practically fall down. I had one rule for Sam. At 6’5” and a great leaper, he could back me down and dunk every time, so Sam wasn’t allowed to dunk. Otherwise it was each man for himself.
For those who have never played “Make It Take It,” the rules are simple. Each made basket is worth one point and if you make a basket, you get the ball back until the other fellow gets a rebound. The game is played to 21 with the winner declared only when they are two points ahead when they reach 21.
Sam had several advantages over me. One, he was three years older. Two, he could shoot with both hands and jump to the moon. Plus, he dribbled as well with either hand so if I forced him to go one-way or the other, he was happy to take a free lane to the hoop. Sam was crafty, smart, and cagey on the court. Until we had played maybe 30 games I wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he was trying to go to the basket.
One night after I blocked one of his shots he called timeout.
“You can’t jump with me, so how are you getting to my shot?” he asked.
I explained that Wayne Jonson, a player from Grand Marais, had taught me how to get a player to commit to a shot and when they were going up, to slide by and snap the ball off of their wrist before the shot got into the air.
My advantages—such as they were— were that I had faster hands than he did and I was a little stronger in the cardio department. Plus, I was too dumb to know that I really didn’t have a chance against Sam, which evened things up a bit.
How good was Sam? He was first team All-Conference in 1974-75 and was named NIC conference player of the year in 1975- 76. He was also a two-time honorable mention NAIA All-American. Sam was inducted into the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Hall of Fame in 2012, and of course into the Southwest State Hall of Fame earlier.
Our games weren’t as lopsided as one might think. I was usually even with Sam until the score reached 17-17 or 18-18, then Sam would back me into the basket and shoot what he would call high lay-ups. No, he didn’t dunk, but he put he ball in the basket gently.
“Do you really want to win that badly?” I would ask him when it got close at the end of a game.
“Yes,” he would say with a smile as he backed me in for one high lay-up after another.
All I could do was laugh and shake my head.
At lunch sometimes I would eat with Sam, Carl Harris and Clarence Hightower. They were starters on the basketball team and had come together from North Carolina after playing junior college ball at the College of Albemarle in N.C. One day at lunch I asked Sam if he ever went across the street from the campus to the local beer joint. Back then, if you were 18 you could legally drink.
“My mama says don’t drink alcohol. So I don’t drink alcohol,” he said.
Clarence and Carl nodded their heads in agreement.
Do you ever take a night off from studying? You know, just goof off? I asked.
“Nope. My mama said I’m here to get my education, so I study every night,” he said.
Carl and Clarence nodded their heads in agreement.
Well Sam, there’s lots of pretty girls on campus, do you ever date?”
“My mama said there would be plenty of time to date girls after college, so no, I don’t date.”
At that point I put my head in my hands and exclaimed, “You’re killing me here, Sam.”
Carl started to laugh and then asked me, “Well, what does your mama tell you to do?”
Well, I replied, I think Sam’s mama and my mama have been corresponding. With that all three of them burst into laughter.
Carl and Clarence were excellent basketball players but the pros were looking at Sam. Sam was supposed to play guard his senior year but Southwest lost the first game of the season and Sam went to Coach Honeck and asked him if the team would have won with him at center.
Coach Honeck admitted the team would have won with Sam in the middle that night and that was that, Sam played center for the rest of the season. He averaged 25.9 points and 9.4 rebounds per game, but most of his points were on put-backs. He was a pass-first player on offense and a wicked defender.
After college Sam had a try out with the Chicago Bulls. He didn’t make the team and returned to North Carolina where he worked with exceptional children for 30 years at Washington High School. He also coached basketball and golf before retiring in 2008. He is married and has two children, Athledia and Sam Jr. Today he volunteers at his church for “Meals on Wheels” and he plays drums and guitar in the church band. He goes to the driving range nearly every day and hits a bucket of balls and he restores cars.
Carl Harris also had a career in education. He was a high school superintendent before being named to President Obama’s Education Department.
Clarence Hightower, Ph.D., became head of the Minneapolis Urban League between 1998 and 2008 and is now executive director of Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington counties.
All three were seriously nice guys, serious students, serious athletes and most certainly serious when it came to listening to their mamas.
As far as “Make It Take It,” the last game I played against Sam I led 20-19 but he had the ball. Sam backed me into the basket and went up for his two-inch lay-up and somehow the ball rolled off the rim and I rebounded it. Laughing, I started to dribble to the red line (now the three point line) and kept going to the half court line with Sam hot on my tail. I dribbled to one side of the half court and dribbled down the line and just before I went out of bounds I threw a shot at the basket from my hip. The minute I let it go I knew it was good. I finally won a game on a miracle heave from half-court.
Sam was beside himself. “I’ve never lost a game of ‘Make It Take It.’ You can’t tell anyone that you beat me,” he said.
“I promise, Sam. I won’t tell anyone.” And we shook on it. I kept my word and didn’t “tell” anyone about my miracle win.
Days later, when I sat down to lunch with Sam, Carl and Clarence, Sam asked me about my T-shirt with the messy black magic marker words scrolled across the front that, when I stretched the shirt out so it could be read exclaimed, “I beat Sam in a game of Make It Take It.”
Well, that was his turn to smile and shake his head.
Leave a Reply