[h=1]From Brooklyn to the Pacers, a Story of Torment and Triumph[/h] [h=6]By WILLIAM C. RHODEN[/h] [h=6]Published: May 26, 2013[/h]
Two years ago, the filmmaker Ted Green began working on a segment about the early days of the Indiana Pacers. During his research, Green repeatedly came across the name Roger Brown. Brown’s imprint was all over the Pacers’ history and record books.
Enlarge This Image
[h=6]Rich Miller/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press[/h] Roger Brown in 1996, shortly before his death. He starred at Wingate High in Brooklyn.
When the Pacers became a charter member of the American Basketball Association in 1967, Brown was the first player the team signed. He was Reggie Miller before Reggie Miller, combining long-range shooting with an uncanny knack for getting to the basket.
“I really had no idea who he was,” Green said by telephone last week, referring to Brown, who died in 1997.
With each new piece of information, Green became more intrigued by Brown, an important but relatively unknown figure of Pacers lore. He read piles of clips. He spoke to Pacers officials and to Brown’s friends, former teammates and former opponents. He became especially close with Brown’s second wife, Jeannie, and his younger sister, Judy.
Green also read “Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story,” an eye-opening book by David Wolf that tells the story of Hawkins and Brown, schoolboy basketball stars in New York whose association with a notorious gambler nearly ruined their lives.
Two years later, Green has released “Undefeated,” a fascinating hourlong documentary that brings Brown’s story out from the shadows.
“I was just flabbergasted that his odyssey had not been told before,” Green said. “The more I got to know Roger’s family and friends, it really became more of a cause for me. I saw how much his story meant to them.”
Green added: “That’s what drove me through some really tough, bleak times. When the money was running out, and I had no idea how this was going to end up, it was the family that really kept me going.”
Green’s documentary traces Brown’s journey from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Dayton, Ohio, to exile and finally to the A.B.A., where he led the Pacers to three championships. He later won a seat on the Indianapolis City-County Council.
Green saw Brown’s life as an unfortunate convergence of powerful opposing forces.
“You have these gamblers out to fix games, and they’re willing to reach the depths to do it — wining and dining, and more, teenagers just to help get them on their side,” he said.
“On the other side, you got the district attorneys who are dead set on stopping the gamblers and would do anything it took to do that. Even if that meant stomping all over the rights of teenagers. In the middle of that, you have guys like Roger Brown and Connie Hawkins, arguably the best young players New York had seen at that time. They got caught in this vise, and it changed their lives forever.”
In Brooklyn, Brown was a star at Wingate High School, Hawkins at Boys High. They were the best players in New York City, easily among the top five in the country. Hawkins accepted a scholarship to Iowa, and Brown to Dayton.
During their senior year of high school, they were befriended — seduced is probably a better description — by Jack Molinas, who had been kicked out of the N.B.A. in the 1953-54 season for gambling on his own games with the Fort Wayne Pistons. Molinas later served time for a 1961 point-shaving scandal that erupted soon after Brown and Hawkins had started college.
Brown and Hawkins were not accused of shaving points. Their sin was accepting favors from and associating with Molinas, a former Columbia star. The association was enough to cost them their scholarships and to lead the N.B.A. to bar them. They never played a varsity game for their universities.
Brown lost six seasons of his basketball life: three when he lost his college scholarship and eligibility, three because the N.B.A. had banned him. Years later, Brown won a settlement from the N.B.A. Hawkins eventually played in the league, but Brown remained with the Pacers and the A.B.A.
In February, Brown was selected for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Brown and his first wife, Carol, had a son, Roger Brown Jr. He and Jeannie had a daughter, Gayle Brown Mayes. Brown’s children will speak for him in September when he is inducted.
“I only wish he could have been here to see this,” Mayes said. “I probably learned more about my dad this past year from doing this documentary than I have ever known my whole life.”
She was 21 when her father died from liver cancer in 1997 at age 54. She did not yet grasp the magnitude of what happened to him early on and how it affected him.
Mayes, a model living in Los Angeles with her husband and their 7-year-old son, Hudson, said she never fully grasped how deeply the expulsion from college and the ban in the N.B.A. hurt her father.
“I was probably too self-centered, too wrapped up in myself to really know how that affected him as a person,” she said. “I came back to it a little wiser, a little older, and really seeing and feeling that impact that I know it had on him. That really put things in perspective for me. I was captivated — and crying my eyes out.”
When the A.B.A. was formed in 1967, the Pacers’ general manager, Mike Storen, signed Brown on Oscar Robertson’s recommendation.
Brown was reluctant to sign with the Pacers: he had been disappointed so many times and did not want to see his hopes dashed.
“He did not want to be defeated,” Green said.
In 1967, at 25, Brown left his job as the night-shift injection machine operator at the General Motors plant in Dayton to become the first player to sign with the Pacers. He played in five A.B.A. finals.
I spoke with a weak Brown shortly before he died, and he described how the scandal had affected him.
“I went into a shell; I became an introvert,” he said. “The fact that here you had a life, and you had a future. Now it’s gone, taken away from you.”
Brown said the experience, for all of the pain and heartbreak, built inner strength and character.
“What happened to me and what happened to Connie could have been a blessing; obviously it was,” he said. “We got a chance to get up and show our wares from a professional standpoint.
“We took some real hard knocks, but we both rose above that, and we’re better for it. I know I am.”
Brown’s legacy will be memorialized in the Hall of Fame, and his memory will be extended through the new documentary. Roger Brown was resilient, unbowed and unbroke
Two years ago, the filmmaker Ted Green began working on a segment about the early days of the Indiana Pacers. During his research, Green repeatedly came across the name Roger Brown. Brown’s imprint was all over the Pacers’ history and record books.
Enlarge This Image
[h=6]Rich Miller/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press[/h] Roger Brown in 1996, shortly before his death. He starred at Wingate High in Brooklyn.
When the Pacers became a charter member of the American Basketball Association in 1967, Brown was the first player the team signed. He was Reggie Miller before Reggie Miller, combining long-range shooting with an uncanny knack for getting to the basket.
“I really had no idea who he was,” Green said by telephone last week, referring to Brown, who died in 1997.
With each new piece of information, Green became more intrigued by Brown, an important but relatively unknown figure of Pacers lore. He read piles of clips. He spoke to Pacers officials and to Brown’s friends, former teammates and former opponents. He became especially close with Brown’s second wife, Jeannie, and his younger sister, Judy.
Green also read “Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story,” an eye-opening book by David Wolf that tells the story of Hawkins and Brown, schoolboy basketball stars in New York whose association with a notorious gambler nearly ruined their lives.
Two years later, Green has released “Undefeated,” a fascinating hourlong documentary that brings Brown’s story out from the shadows.
“I was just flabbergasted that his odyssey had not been told before,” Green said. “The more I got to know Roger’s family and friends, it really became more of a cause for me. I saw how much his story meant to them.”
Green added: “That’s what drove me through some really tough, bleak times. When the money was running out, and I had no idea how this was going to end up, it was the family that really kept me going.”
Green’s documentary traces Brown’s journey from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Dayton, Ohio, to exile and finally to the A.B.A., where he led the Pacers to three championships. He later won a seat on the Indianapolis City-County Council.
Green saw Brown’s life as an unfortunate convergence of powerful opposing forces.
“You have these gamblers out to fix games, and they’re willing to reach the depths to do it — wining and dining, and more, teenagers just to help get them on their side,” he said.
“On the other side, you got the district attorneys who are dead set on stopping the gamblers and would do anything it took to do that. Even if that meant stomping all over the rights of teenagers. In the middle of that, you have guys like Roger Brown and Connie Hawkins, arguably the best young players New York had seen at that time. They got caught in this vise, and it changed their lives forever.”
In Brooklyn, Brown was a star at Wingate High School, Hawkins at Boys High. They were the best players in New York City, easily among the top five in the country. Hawkins accepted a scholarship to Iowa, and Brown to Dayton.
During their senior year of high school, they were befriended — seduced is probably a better description — by Jack Molinas, who had been kicked out of the N.B.A. in the 1953-54 season for gambling on his own games with the Fort Wayne Pistons. Molinas later served time for a 1961 point-shaving scandal that erupted soon after Brown and Hawkins had started college.
Brown and Hawkins were not accused of shaving points. Their sin was accepting favors from and associating with Molinas, a former Columbia star. The association was enough to cost them their scholarships and to lead the N.B.A. to bar them. They never played a varsity game for their universities.
Brown lost six seasons of his basketball life: three when he lost his college scholarship and eligibility, three because the N.B.A. had banned him. Years later, Brown won a settlement from the N.B.A. Hawkins eventually played in the league, but Brown remained with the Pacers and the A.B.A.
In February, Brown was selected for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Brown and his first wife, Carol, had a son, Roger Brown Jr. He and Jeannie had a daughter, Gayle Brown Mayes. Brown’s children will speak for him in September when he is inducted.
“I only wish he could have been here to see this,” Mayes said. “I probably learned more about my dad this past year from doing this documentary than I have ever known my whole life.”
She was 21 when her father died from liver cancer in 1997 at age 54. She did not yet grasp the magnitude of what happened to him early on and how it affected him.
Mayes, a model living in Los Angeles with her husband and their 7-year-old son, Hudson, said she never fully grasped how deeply the expulsion from college and the ban in the N.B.A. hurt her father.
“I was probably too self-centered, too wrapped up in myself to really know how that affected him as a person,” she said. “I came back to it a little wiser, a little older, and really seeing and feeling that impact that I know it had on him. That really put things in perspective for me. I was captivated — and crying my eyes out.”
When the A.B.A. was formed in 1967, the Pacers’ general manager, Mike Storen, signed Brown on Oscar Robertson’s recommendation.
Brown was reluctant to sign with the Pacers: he had been disappointed so many times and did not want to see his hopes dashed.
“He did not want to be defeated,” Green said.
In 1967, at 25, Brown left his job as the night-shift injection machine operator at the General Motors plant in Dayton to become the first player to sign with the Pacers. He played in five A.B.A. finals.
I spoke with a weak Brown shortly before he died, and he described how the scandal had affected him.
“I went into a shell; I became an introvert,” he said. “The fact that here you had a life, and you had a future. Now it’s gone, taken away from you.”
Brown said the experience, for all of the pain and heartbreak, built inner strength and character.
“What happened to me and what happened to Connie could have been a blessing; obviously it was,” he said. “We got a chance to get up and show our wares from a professional standpoint.
“We took some real hard knocks, but we both rose above that, and we’re better for it. I know I am.”
Brown’s legacy will be memorialized in the Hall of Fame, and his memory will be extended through the new documentary. Roger Brown was resilient, unbowed and unbroke
