Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

Wally Cox doesn’t look delightful. I can tell you that right now. Not delightful. He sits in the front row at Hinkle Fieldhouse, behind the scorer’s table, the best seat in the house, and when he gets angry …

So how does someone come across the best seat in the house? Well, seniority. Wally Cox has been buying Butler season tickets since they cost $8 in 1958 and he walked into Tony Hinkle’s office with a $10 bill. Hinkle never did give Cox his $2 in change, come to think of it, and boy does that make …

Oh, sorry. Rambling here. Where were we? Right. Wally Cox. He’s 79 years old and he’s about 6-3 and he wears a different Butler jersey to every game. He used to tell people he had counted them one day and had 45 Butler shirts, but then realized he’d forgotten about the other closet, which ….

Right. Anyway, Wally Cox watches games from the best seat in Hinkle, and boy does he get angry. Referees, opposing coaches mainly. They feel the heat. A fan took a short video of Cox in 2013 staring down a referee and moving his arms straight out, like Frankenstein. That short video, a GIF they call them, went on the Internet titled “Cranky Old Butler Fan” and went what you’d call viral. Not sure Wally ever saw it, seeing how he’s 79, although …

Sorry. Back to the heat. Wally Cox starts most games in a fine mood, giving a thumbs up to Butler seniors Roosevelt Jones and Kellen Dunham and clapping ushers on the back, but you know referees. Blind as a bat, all of them, and soon Cox is at a low simmer, and then he’s stewing. When the referee does something really stupid, Cox is glowering. A few years ago he had a stare-down with veteran referee Mike Roberts, who came to the scorer’s table to announce a foul on Butler’s Kameron Woods and locked eyes on the 6-3 septuagenarian in the Butler jersey in the front row – and just stared at him. Cox stared back. It got awkward. People who sit around Cox still remember that one, and they say …

Anyway, he looks ferocious. Wally Cox, I mean. But I approach him during the Seton Hall game and ask his name. We talk for a few minutes, and it doesn’t take long to remember that looks can be deceiving. Because Wally Cox, this glowering Butler superfan, is delightful.

Oh, and another thing.

He was once a great player at Butler.

* * *

Information comes out in tangents, because Wally Cox has a memory issue: He remembers everything. So when I call him Thursday morning after the Seton Hall game and he starts telling me about growing up a basketball player in Indianapolis, near 17th and College, he mentions playing in the Dust Bowl with a Crispus Attucks sophomore named Oscar Robertson, which has him naming the other Crispus Attucks kids on his summer team, including Bill Scott (“Bless his soul,” Cox says), who played with him at Butler. That 1957-58 Butler team was loaded, with Cox and Bill Scott and Milan hero Bobby Plump. Cox spent four years throwing the ball to Plump, because that's …

Sorry. Lost focus there. Dust Bowl, remember? Cox names two more Dust Bowl teammates from Crispus Attucks, Cleveland Harp and Detroit Spencer. (“Aren’t those athletic names? 'Detroit Doyel.' How would that sound?”) And then we’re back to December 1957. Butler played in the Hoosier Classic that year and beat Indiana 84-78 and that made IU coach Branch McCracken (“Bless his soul,” Cox says) so angry that he dropped out of the Hoosier Classic. As Cox tells it, I’m saying. And now we're at the party he attended after that 1957 Hoosier Classic, at the home of a former classmate from Broad Ripple High School named Fred Oliver. The Olivers were a family of IU grads living at 52nd and Delaware, and after Cox scored 19 points to help beat the Hoosiers, old Freddie draped an arm around Cox’s shoulders and said, “We’re going to forgive you for beating the hell out of us.”

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Cox concludes the story by noting that Tony Hinkle tried to get Oscar Robertson to come to Butler (“Oscar lived so close, he could have walked there”) and that Cox and future Butler teammate Kenny Pennington were the only white guys on their team, or any team, at the annual summer Dust Bowl tournament (“We were integrating”) and that a group of young men came down from Detroit including Shellie McMillon (“He played for the Pistons”) thinking they’d clean up in Indianapolis and left with Oscar Robertson’s foot planted figuratively on their rear end.

My head’s spinning, but Wally Cox is just getting warmed up. He hasn’t told me yet about being a professional singer or a middle school coach, or about his son Steve scoring 1,000 points at Wabash or his daughter Lisa retiring as head nurse at North West Hendricks Schools ("she's in a cabin on a pond in Monrovia") or his grandchildren with the perfect score on the math SAT (Kenny Cox, now a basketball player at Wabash College) and the valedictorian from Franklin Central (Katie Cox, a future veterinarian at Purdue). Or his granddaughter Samantha Ricks, the girls coach at South Putnam and the all-time scoring leader at Tri-West. Or ... ("I am very proud of all of my six grandchildren.")

And here I thought we were going to talk about what Wally Cox does from the front row of Hinkle.

“OK, sure,” Cox says. “I’m a little hoarse after helping those refs. I had to work my butt off last night. I’m not used to having to work that hard. That was a challenge, baby. Whew. I have to try to bring my ‘A’ game every time out, which isn’t easy when you’re almost 80. I don’t always have it in the first five minutes, but by the second half last night, I was rolling …”

* * *

Wally Cox sits so close to the scorer’s table he can see the replays on the television monitors. When referees miss a call, which is all the time, he pleasantly points to the monitor and tries to beckon them over for a look.

He’s a helpful guy, Wally Cox. He helped Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard so much the other night – offering inquiries as to who else might be available to defend the red-hot Dunham – that Willard looked in his direction and shouted, “Stop asking me stupid questions!”

So Cox gets the irony of his own coaching days at old Keystone Middle School, when his zone press was being chewed up, even if his guards were Brian Kight and Brian Catt ("my God were they great"). Kight became the athletic director at Southport Middle School. Catt was the son of longtime Tech AD Howard Catt. (“Howard Catt pretty much ran the IHSAA.”) Together they had Keystone running UNC’s four corners to perfection, and they were only in the eighth …

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OK, so the irony. The Keystone press was being torched, so Cox stood to call it off when he overheard a Keystone parent, Don Dietel. Ever heard of Mr. D’s grocery store in Whiteland? That was Don Dietel. Yeah, it closed a few years ago, but back in …

Well, Don Dietel was grumbling aloud, “I wish Cox would come out of that zone,” and Cox sat back down.

“I didn’t want a father to think he was coaching the team, but eventually I had no choice but to call it off,” Cox says. “I talked to him after the game and I said to Don Dietel, ‘I want to thank you for reminding me to get out of that zone.’ That was 30 years ago, OK? Well, I went to a funeral showing six weeks ago and saw Don Dietel and he said, ‘Cox, have you come out of that zone yet?’ We hugged each other.”

Where were we? Oh, who cares anymore.

* * *

So there’s just no room for all of this stuff. This is what I’m telling Wally Cox after two fast hours on the phone, complaining to this delightful man that every story he tells is worth putting in the paper and there’s no room. Like the one about almost going to Miami (“Bruce Hale, he played for the Indianapolis Olympians, was going to be the first basketball coach”) to play (“I already bought five or six flowery shirts to wear on the beach”), but then getting a recruiting visit from Tony Hinkle and deciding over a pot of coffee to play at Butler.

At Broad Ripple, Cox led the city in scoring with 429 points in 23 games in 1954. At Butler he was all-conference twice and set a Butler freshman scoring record with 254 points, averaged 10.3 ppg over four years and scored exactly 999 career points. Perhaps. Cox recalls the Butler student paper giving him 21 points – 10 field goals, one free throw – in his final game against St. John’s in the 1958 NIT at New York City, but the stats from New York came back with Cox scoring 19 points and teammate Ted Guzek with 26 instead of 24.

“They gave Guzek my two points!” Cox hollers, then says he’s not sure about that and doesn’t even care: “You know what I like about it, Gregg? Hey, nobody in Butler history scored more points than I did but didn’t get 1,000. Nobody’s going to break that record.”

The athletic ability comes from his dad, John Lloyd Cox, who played pro baseball in western Indiana in the old Three-I League and used to pitch both ends of a doubleheader (“Left-handed in the first game, right-handed in the second game”) and take Wally into the backyard for a game of burnout. Father and son took turns pitching to each other, trying with fastballs to knock the other out of his crouch and onto his back ("no mercy").

The singing ability comes from his mom, Thelma, a ragtime piano player who played taverns and Knights of Columbus halls around town. She took Wally with her (“Back then you could take a 5-year-old into a tavern”) and they sang duets. Wally became a ukulele and piano player, sang in barber shop quartets and sold a few thousands records of “Sooner or Later” from the Disney musical "Song of the South" with a big band quartet named the Fi Dells. For years they sang almost every high school prom and graduation dance in the area.

He still fiddles on his baritone ukulele and sings in the church choir, though he gave up competitive basketball five years ago. He was a ringer on AAU teams from Nebraska and Colorado, winning national titles in the over-55 and over-60 tournaments, but he was playing for a team from Chicago in the over-70 tournament in 2011 with former Indiana State star athlete Alan Barcus. Does this sound familiar? Rattle, rattle, thunder clatter, boom boom boom! Don't worry, call the Car-X man. Turn outs, good ol’ Al Barcus was an ad man in Chicago. (“He wrote that jingle!”)

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Right. So anyway, Wally Cox was warming up for that over-70 tournament in Florida.

“I told Al: ‘Watch this jump shot here – I’ve got a problem,” Cox says. “Al Barcus tells me, ‘I know the problem you have, same as mine: Your feet hit the floor before you get the shot off.’ ”

Wally Cox is laughing and moving on to another Tony Hinkle story, something involving the old Two By Four Tavern (“at 16th and Lafayette”) and coaches from Cathedral and Sacred Heart and Scecina and the way recruiting really went down in Indianapolis in the 1950s. (“Fathers of kids would have a beer with Hinkle and that would sew it up.”)

Which reminds Wally of the way Hinkle recruited him. Just showed up out of the blue at his house that day and Thelma Cox went running into the kitchen to put on the coffee and …

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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