HOOPTOWN
HALL OF FAME

By the first Hoopfest in 1990, Bobby Jack Sumler had played on and ruled nearly every basketball court in Spokane.

It was only natural that he would take part in the 3-on-3 tournament between the curbs on Spokane Falls Boulevard in his hometown.

Of course, there wasn't an official elite division in that very first Hoopfest, but Bobby Jack played anyway. And after the tournament godfathers approved an elite division, he rose to the top, and won the first two championships in 1991 and 1992 with Swackhammer's team that included Randy Smith, David Peed, Arnold Brown, Dexter Griffin, and Kemo Patrick. Names Hoopfest aficionados appreciate.

Bobby didn’t know he would become a foundational part of something that would put the city on the map—the largest 3-on-3 basketball event and the Best Basketball Weekend on Earth, as they say.

Bobby Jack Sumler is the first playing inductee in the Hoopfest wing of the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

The tournament was a success from the beginning, and Sumler's participation gave it instant credibility. He was, and three decades later, remains Spokane's one enduring playground legend, although he maintains that he never looked at it that way. "I never played the game for accolades or trophies or what people were saying," Sumler said, "I never set out to be an MVP. I just played because I love basketball and I love to compete."

When he was a teenager, Sumler moved to Spokane with his family from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He had never heard of Spokane and thought they were headed to Washington, D.C.

His team had just beaten UCLA after 27 consecutive losses to the Bruins, and the students who had helped pack Beasley Coliseum were demanding a curtain call from the coach. “We want George!” They chanted, “we want George!” From the student side, it spread around the arena. The shouting went on for three minutes, then five. Clapping and foot-stomping provided the percussion, and almost no one among the 11,742 people who crowded their way in for tipoff had left.

Underneath the stands, Washington State athletic director Sam Jankovich hurried into the Cougars' locker room and grabbed George Raveling by the elbow. "If you don't go back on the court, there's going to be a riot."

And when he went back down the ramp into the arena and picked up the microphone to address the congregation, George Raveling wept. "Of all my moments in basketball," he would say years later, "that was probably the most special."

It was a Hall of Fame moment. George Raveling has a way with those, and now there is another one. He's a charter member of the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

The essence of Hooptown is the connection basketball can engender in a community, and Raveling embraces that essence. It was true throughout the 11 years he coached at Washington State University, and in the years since. He's become one of the game's most recognized and loyal ambassadors, and an elder sought after for his big-picture perspective. He's also been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a contributor. As the 1970s closed and the ‘80s dawned, Raveling was among the key figures in the Inland Northwest during the sport’s expansion here, helping to make basketball part of the community's consciousness.

Raised in Washington, D.C., and a basketball star at Villanova, Raveling was hired at WSU in 1972, the first African-American head coach in Pac-12 history. He had no previous head coaching experience and no ties to an area with scant ethnic diversity. "On the surface," he said, "Washington State was the last school that should have hired a black coach."

But what Cougar basketball and the sport in the region needed was a recruiter, a showman, a drummer, and an Energizer bunny, all of which Raveling was. And in the end, the 167 wins he amassed in 11 years on the job at WSU may have been the least of his accomplishments.

Even a week earlier, it was an outcome that seemed no more reachable than Jupiter for a school with little history in the way of basketball pedigree. While the party raged on in the stands and outside, Gonzaga coach Dan Monson, disheveled and drained, stood before his team in the assigned locker room. The short turnaround time between games in the tournament required celebrations to be abridged, and Monson needed everyone to pivot to the next challenge.

"Guys," he told the Zags, "we're 40 minutes from the final four. We've got to..." His train of thought was derailed, and so he began again. "We're 40 minutes from the final four. What we've got to do is..." Nothing. Monson smiled and lifted his arms in a helpless shrug. "I don't know what we have to do." He broke into laughter that spread across the room.

That joy and shared camaraderie has never subsided with the Zags. But the identity of Gonzaga basketball, over two decades later—the number one rankings, the number one recruits, trips to the final four—would not have materialized without the trailblazing of the 1999 Zags, who are now charter members of the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

Naturally, their roots had roots. The program had made a leap to 20-wins per year earlier in the decade, and the influence of young assistants like Monson, Mark Few, and Bill Grier, on Dan Fitzgerald’s staff elevated the recruited talent. The maiden trip to the NCAAs in 1995 was a breakthrough.

After Monson's promotion to head coach came a boost in scheduling and ambition, but also the disappointment of not making the tournament in 1998. That defeat seemed to harden a new resolve in a cast now recognized as Gonzaga royalty.

Matt Santangelo was the ringleader Gonzaga got on the recruiting rebound when Stanford opted to offer a scholarship to another player. Quentin Hall, just 5-foot-8 and an impish motormouth from the Bahamas, gave the Zags a second point guard in the backcourt and a different degree of competitive fire. Richie Frahm was among the nation's best 3-point marksmen, which made it easy to underestimate the rest of his game. At 6-11, Jeremy Eaton resembled a too-tall-in-the-saddle rodeo cowboy, which in fact he was. Casey Calvary's every dunk seemed like an assault on gravity and glass backboards. Axel Dench, the no-worries Aussie, set sticky screens and canned timely jumpers. From one time walk-ons, Ryan Floyd and Mike Nilson came bench pop and defensive grit. And last but not least, Mark Spink and Mike Leasure made their most significant contributions in practice—until they were so desperately needed in the tournament.

She wore her hair short enough to pass as a boy and had a speech impediment, things that could send a kid in search of ways to be accepted or special.

Growing up in Walla Walla, Jeanne idolized her older brother, Don, and tagged along to all the neighborhood pick-up games. "I always wanted my brother to want me on his team," she said, "that sort of drove me from the earliest age." She didn't just play every sport her brother and his friends played, she competed, and she never stopped.

Her jest for sports took her from being a hometown basketball sensation in Walla Walla to being the first female scholarship athlete at Washington State University.

A few years later, she began her high school coaching career and cemented Spokane's reputation for creating champions.

By the time she retired, the funniest thing had happened. The girls who followed in her wake had taken on a similar competitive aura. No longer a misfit. Jeanne became a role model for the modern fit. And now, Jeanne Helfer is a charter member of the Hooptown Hall of Fame, in any category you want to name, athlete, coach, even pioneer, though she never quite felt like one.

Opportunity and acceptance compel a sense of responsibility to go at things hard, something she learned at an early age. "I had opportunity," she said, "I was blessed to have a coach in high school, Charlotte Worth, who took those first steps through the snow. I lived in a community that embraced girl’s and women's sports. Our teams were good, and a lot of times some of the fans would watch our games and leave before the boys played."

They happened in the driveway of his boyhood home in Spokane, across from the Catholic Girls School and the dormitory patrolled by the sisters of the Holy Names. It was there on north Superior Street that pick-up games between sides of various numbers and skills rambled on. But often as not, it was just Stockton and his older brother Steve waging sweaty combat of ever-increasing intensity and volume.

On one occasion, as the brothers recall, John split Steve's lip. Older brother responded with a hard elbow to John's stomach. Little brother retreated to the porch and issued a loud and comprehensive stream of profanity that didn't seem to faze Mom or Dad just inside the back door. "But you could hear the nuns slamming the windows across the street," John said.

If the competitive spirit of John Stockton is innate, this is where it was given its edge, and it carried him to places maybe no one beyond the man himself could imagine—capped by his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And now he's in the first class of Hooptown's Hall of Fame.

Stockton's ascendance in the game put several things on the national basketball map: his hometown, his college alma mater of Gonzaga, and his father's tavern, Jack and Dan's, where a satellite dish sprouted in 1984 so Utah Jazz telecasts could be pulled from the sky.

When Stockton became not just a Jazz starter but a bonafide NBA star, the young players in Spokane had a role model who had made the climb from their very own town. It cut the notion down from impossible to improbable and bridged a great gulf—something John Stockton achieved by the relentlessness at his core.

The boyhood world of John Houston Stockton was a plot maybe a half-mile in circumference—the perimeters being Mission Park across the street, St. Aloysius Grade School, Gonzaga Prep, and Gonzaga University. Grandfather Houston had been a former football star there, often regarded as the best in Gonzaga history.

In his senior year, Stockton inched his way to national prominence and became West Coast Conference Player of the Year. He survived until the last cut of the 1984 U.S. Olympic trials and, to the bewilderment of many Jazz fans, was the 16th pick in the NBA Draft. Within four seasons, he was an NBA All-Star, defining the point guard position as a pass-first creator. The puzzle had been solved—and the legend continued to grow.

John Stockton’s final numbers are staggering. A 19-year NBA career, all with the Jazz. NBA records for career assists (15,806) and steals (3,265) that appear out of reach. Less than 300 points from the 20,000 threshold. Ten All-Star Games along with 11 appearances on the All-NBA team. And for Stockton, a more important distinction: the Jazz making the playoffs in each of his 19 seasons, with two appearances in the NBA Finals.

"There is nobody that can distribute the ball, plus lead his team, like John Stockton," said Los Angeles Lakers great Magic Johnson when Stockton was on the verge of breaking the career assists record a full decade before retirement. "He is the best at it."

Not at all lost amid the grueling pro seasons were two special summers in 1992 and 1996—the Olympic gold medals he won with the original editions of the Dream Team, gratifying in their own right and the happy resolution to that Olympic team miss that nagged him back in 1984. In 1996, a league-assembled panel named John one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history.

But for all the thinking that went into Spokane's centerpiece summer event, no one imagined it would grow into the Best Basketball Weekend on Earth and lure 28,000 players to the streets and upwards of a quarter-million people to downtown. That crazy explosion in popularity and the manifestation of what makes Spokane Hooptown belongs to the participants, the volunteers, and the spectators.

But none of this could have happened without the idea guys who brought it to life, Rick Betts and Jerry Schmidt, charter members of the Hooptown Hall of Fame special Hoopfest wing. Not that 3-on-3 basketball in the streets hadn't been tried. Betts and Schmidt admit they borrowed the concept from the Hoop It Up tour Betts stumbled on during a business trip to Washington, D.C., from the Gus Macker tournament in Michigan known as the original, and from a Seattle event in the old Kingdome parking lot that Betts and Schmidt attended. They both remember thinking, we will do it so much better over here. And they have. Better and much, much bigger. But that's getting ahead of the story.

The trip to D.C. in 1989 was the spark for Betts, a Lewis and Clark graduate and Spokane CPA, who took in all the rhythms—the music, the bounce of the ball, and the fun being had by kids and adults, whether they were playing or watching. With a basketball-obsessed son of his own and some background helping with Bloomsday's Corporate Cup, he sensed a possibility that would appeal to Spokane's participatory nature.

Schmidt, a Gonzaga Prep alumni whose career was in social services, started with a more specific mission. A board member of the Special Olympics, he was looking to restore $25,000 in lost revenue. He had played in the Seattle 3-on-3 and saw the makings of a good fundraiser.

Soon, they were separately making the rounds of civic organizations, unaware of each other's vision. When Schmidt was told after a meeting with the Downtown Business Association that Betts was out drumming up support for a similar event, his first reaction was, "Man, somebody's stealing my idea!"

But there was never much of a turf war. Mutual friends brought Betts and Schmidt together, and a founding committee took shape: Betts, Schmidt, Dave Jackson, Jerry Karstetter, Terry Kelly, Dennis Magner, and Rick Steltenpohl. They found a philosophical middle ground by balancing the charity aspect with the fun aspect of a basketball weekend and set about tackling the practical obstacles.