Dana Hunsinger Benbow

dana.benbow@indystar.com

He would crouch down low, platform shoes peeking from beneath his bell bottom pants. A cape flew from his neck, a felt hat slouched atop his head. Arms stretched out, he would wiggle his fingers menacingly.

This was a whammy. This was a hex that Dancin' Harry put on the teams that came to the Indiana Pacers' house to play basketball in the 1970s, the ABA days.

He was a magical mascot from basketball days gone by. From days when there were no other mascots and, really, no fanfare at professional games. No glitzy halftime shows. No Boomer catapulting off a trampoline for splashy dunks.

Yet Dancin' Harry, all alone, was mystical. He was captivating. Standing 6-foot-2, he put spells on opposing teams and was beloved by Pacers fans and players.

But Edward Marvin Cooper had a darker side. A scandalous one.

In the prime of his popularity, he was abruptly banned from games after the Pacers made the move to the NBA in 1976.

When he tried to return in the 1990s to Market Square Arena, police told him he was no longer welcome in the place he'd brought to its feet so many times.

Four decades later, it's still a mystery. No one from those days of the Pacers organization is talking, officially, about why Dancin' Harry disappeared.

Cooper says he isn't sure what went wrong.

"I had my ideas why so many people cut me loose at the same time," said Cooper, now 73, from his Baltimore apartment.

Maybe his costumes weren't flamboyant enough or maybe he should have varied his routine more.

Maybe it was the woman he was dating. He'd broken up with her and taken $40 from her nightstand. She told the Pacers, he said.

Or maybe. Well...

"It could have been the weed," he said.

The marijuana he packed in plastic bags and delivered to players.

***

These days Cooper plays chess and backgammon. He rides a mountain bike and hits golf balls at the driving range. He doesn't smoke anything anymore, he says. He doesn't even drink.

"I know that'll tear your insides up," he said.

Cooper has spent the past 40 years doing jobs much different from dancing. He was a cab driver in Baltimore and then worked 12 years as a skycap at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

All in all, most of his life — except for about five years — had nothing to do with dancing at professional basketball games.

Yet, no matter what direction the conversation goes, Cooper always returns to those days. The days when he could look up at a crowd and with a few simple moves make them go wild.

"I don’t think Dancin' Harry has hung up his hat. I'm waiting for somebody in Indianapolis to say, 'Come on out. We got ya,' " Cooper said. "I think the place would explode."

It sure used to.

"The crowd would go crazy in a way that it's hard for me to describe," said Sandy Knapp, who was promotions director for the Pacers and brought Cooper to the team. "It was magical. It really was. It was almost like he manipulated the crowd's emotions."

Paul Ruegamer remembers the spine-shivering feeling of a mesmerizing mascot. Some of his favorite memories of attending Pacers games as a boy with his grandpa were Cooper's performances.

"I remember Dancin’ Harry coming out in these colorful suits with a matching hat and cape," Ruegamer said. And he remembers watching his grandpa chuckle at Cooper's antics.

It was so novel for the time.

Cooper always performed to Leo Sayer's "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)." And sometimes, he would stand courtside before performing his act and have to pinch himself.

This wasn't how life was supposed to go for him. His name in lights on the Pacers' marquee. People cheering like he was a celebrity.

He was, after all, a nobody. A traveling sausage salesman who barely graduated high school.

***

When he was 8 or 9, Cooper, raised by a single mother who was a post office clerk, would sneak outside his Baltimore home and look for lights glaring from windows.

He was in search of a house with a television — his didn't have one — and one showing the Joe Louis fights.

When he found it, he'd stand there peeking in. It enthralled him. What must it feel like to be so popular, to kind of rule the world?

That little boy didn't know it, but Cooper would one day find out — albeit on a smaller scale.

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"What a sweetheart of a guy he was," said George McGinnis, who played for the ABA Pacers and the NBA for the Philadelphia 76ers. "He was really beloved by the fans, by the people in the organization, the players."

He is a Pacers legend, of sorts. A mysterious one.

***

Dancin' Harry started on a whim. He wasn't planned. He just happened. Cooper said alcohol was probably the inventor of Harry.

The hex started one night when Cooper was at the Civic Center watching his Baltimore Bullets play. He did a dance and a whammy just because he felt like it. People liked it. So he did it some more.

Cooper was pretty well known within the Bullets franchise. He had befriended some of the players and had grown especially close to star guard Earl Monroe.

When Monroe was traded to the Knicks during the 1971-72 season, Cooper decided to follow him to New York and into Madison Square Garden.

"I didn't even have a ticket to get in," Cooper said. "Plus I'd already put the hex on the Knicks a while back and they couldn't stand me in New York."

Monroe got him a ticket. But the Knicks' front office caught wind that Cooper was there and told him he couldn't perform. When the Knicks started losing soundly, people started yelling for Dancin' Harry to work some magic.

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"So I jumped up and went to the edge of the court and I remember the fans in Madison Square Garden went wild," he said.

So did the Knicks' offense, which made a dramatic comeback to win.

Cooper became a fixture at Knicks' games and became known far beyond the Garden. He was sought after to do ads for New York businesses, including a chain of shoe stores called Sneaker Circus. He also made appearances at local night clubs, getting a couple hundred dollars a gig.

But the Knicks ownership never really warmed to Cooper. After the 1973-74 season he was told to not come back.

Dejected, Cooper started doing his thing at Long Island Nets games. It looked as if his chance at true stardom had fizzled out.

Then came the call from Knapp, out of the blue. The Pacers needed him badly.

***

It was 1975 and the Pacers were in the playoffs. Their opponent was San Antonio, a team coach Slick Leonard hated, to put it mildly.

Leonard had threatened to kick the butt of Spurs' coach Bob Bass and wanted to fight all of San Antonio, said Bill Benner, who covered the Pacers for IndyStar at the time.

Leonard wanted to win this series and he wanted it bad.

"Bob called and said, 'You've got to get some enthusiasm in this arena,' " said Nancy Leonard, the coach's wife.

Leonard and Knapp went to work. They created the theme "Hang 'Em High" for the series, hanging a Spurs' effigy from Market Square Arena rafters. They hung a ladder so that Spurs players would have to walk underneath it to get to the court.

It was crazy and novel, but they needed more to electrify the place. Something magical.

"Somebody on the stat crew said to me, 'Have you ever heard of this guy named Dancin' Harry?'" said Knapp.

Somehow, in the days before internet or Google or social media, she tracked him down, made an offer to fly him to Indy and put him up in a hotel room.

He said yes. The arena was deafening when he took the court.

The Pacers not only beat San Antonio, they won a conference finals series with Denver before losing to Kentucky in the ABA finals.

"We weren’t supposed to win," said Knapp. "Well, we had Dancin' Harry and we were winning."

***

The players didn't know much about Cooper when he came in, said Bob Netolicky, the Pacers' power forward.

"I don't know exactly what the whole situation was with his background," he said. "The players looked at him as a novelty. He got the fans fired up."

Cooper gave the team a much-needed pump, some adrenaline.

"Back then, we needed something," Netolicky said. "He gave us a little bit of a shot."

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Cooper stayed for the next season, the final one of the ABA. But when the team joined the NBA in 1976, the league made it clear that Cooper was no longer welcome.

He hung on for another year or two, but the pressure from the NBA grew too strong.

"Harry was persona non grata in the NBA," said Knapp. "He was fun in Indianapolis, seemed harmless and I didn’t know anything was really wrong. When we go into the NBA, it was made very clear."

Dancin' Harry was not welcome.

***

In the end, rumors swirled that Cooper was dealing drugs to players.

No one from those days of the Pacers organization will say now that they knew any of that.

"We didn't know anything about him," said Slick Leonard. "He was nuts."

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But Cooper came clean.

Yes, marijuana was his drug of choice, he said.

And did he deal to the players?

"Um, well, I'm going to take the fifth," he said. "Let's put it this way: I didn't make any money. If I'm a friend of a player? Back then you could fly, you could put something, an ounce in a packet. That's usually all they asked for."

Whether or not the drugs ended the career of a Pacers mascot, no one knows.

But really, Dancin' Harry is bigger than any of that.

He's a throwback, a relic from the days of basketball when a man in a cape could sidle onto the court and curse a team with his whammy.

Follow IndyStar reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow.