Doyel: Former New Castle and IU basketball player Ray Pavy's biggest victory came after paralysis
NEW CASTLE – We’re in the hallway of a nursing home, celebrating the 61st birthday of the most famous regular-season game in Indiana high school basketball history. The Church Street Shootout, they called that bit of brilliance between New Castle’s Ray Pavy and Kokomo’s Jimmy Rayl, who were dueling for the conference scoring championship in 1959 and combined to score 100 points on the night. We’re eating cake and swapping stories, and the guest of honor is smiling.
But then, Ray Pavy is always smiling.
Damndest thing, really. Want to see someone with every right to be angry at the God of his father? Ray Pavy’s your guy.
The car crash that ended his playing career in 1961, the brutally unfair firing that ended his coaching career in 1973. The stroke. The nursing home. That much stress could wear down a man, but not this one. That’s why we’re drawn to this hallway at Hickory Creek at New Castle, where Ray’s been staying for a while now. We’re drawn to that smile of his, to that quick-witted brain, to the soft-spoken kindness of a man who …
Wait, where did Ray go? He was sitting right there just a moment ago! He couldn’t have gone far – he’s in a mechanized wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down since 1961 – but where is he?
That’s what I’m asking his wife, Karen, who’s sitting next to Nancy Rayl – yes, Jimmy Rayl’s widow – and Karen is just rolling her eyes. Welcome to her life.
“He’s a socializer,” she says of her husband, Ray Pavy, and now I hear him. Sounds like he’s around the corner … ah yes, there he is. He’s rolled his chair up to a resident of the nursing home, a man in a green sweater and a wheelchair of his own. Ray’s doing all the talking, because the man in the green sweater doesn’t speak; he’s just staring vacantly.
Ray Pavy sees the search party coming his way, so he pats the man gently on the arm and says, “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”
Pavy, 78, rolls back down the hall with a smile on his face.
Pavy’s secret: Leather gloves
He was always so strong with the basketball. That was the beauty behind Ray Pavy’s game, not the way he could shoot, though he could do that a little bit too. In that Church Street Shootout on Feb. 20, 1959, Pavy scored 51 points.
But Jimmy Rayl was the shooter, so skinny it made you wonder what his parents were feeding him, if they were feeding him at all. Rayl was 6-1 and about 135 pounds, weak as far as that goes, but considered one of the best shooters in the history of this basketball state. Before playing for IU and the Indiana Pacers, he’d scored 49 points for Kokomo in the Church Street Shootout, enough to hold off Pavy and claim the conference scoring title by eight points.
Doyel from 2015: Jimmy Rayl’s life after basketball started early
Pavy wasn’t that kind of player. He was built like a bull, a physical specimen who was big and rugged and still one of the state’s top sprinters as a senior at New Castle. We’ll never know where he rated in the 220-yard dash, though, because the 1959 Indiana state track meet was the same day as his high school graduation. And Ray Pavy wanted to walk with his classmates.
He went to IU, and as a 6-2, 195-pound junior in 1961-62 was poised to join Jimmy Rayl, of all people, in the best backcourt in college basketball. Pavy owed his ball skills to those cold Indiana winters. He had a goal rigged to the family’s house, and when it was too cold to be outside without gloves, he wore them and played anyway. Not easy to control the ball in gloves, but he made do.
That got Ray Pavy to thinking … what if he practiced in gloves year ‘round?
“Gloves are a great teacher,” he says, so that’s what he did: He wore leather gloves when he worked on his game, which was all the time. He’s describing the gloves for me when Jim Callane walks up. Remember Callane? Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, class of 2008, because of his exploits as a player at Rushville and DePauw, and as a coach at Danville, Linton-Stockton and Kokomo Haworth. Callane worked his final 18 years as the athletic director at Kokomo High.
Callane and Pavy are friends, despite what happened in 1959. Callane’s about to tell me about it.
“A week before the Church Street Shootout,” Callane’s saying, and pointing at Pavy, “I held this guy to 16 points.”
He pauses.
“In the first quarter!”
That’s how it goes in the hallway of Hickory Creek at New Castle, where we’re trying to keep it down as residents roll past.
“You’re not in the way at all,” one nurse tells us, and I’m thinking the party just ended when she throws her arms around Ray Pavy and gives him a hug. She wasn’t being sarcastic, but serious: This party isn’t in the way at all. Not if Ray Pavy is the guest of honor.
“OK movie star, what’s up?” she asks Pavy. “All this attention – don’t let it go to your head.”
She walks away, but I can hear her as she turns the corner.
“So sweet,” she’s saying of Ray Pavy.
“Fine as frog’s hair”
The cake is for Karen, by the way. The Church Street Shootout isn’t the only birthday we’re celebrating today at this New Castle nursing home. Karen Pavy is turning 73, and she’s blowing out the candles — just a handful of them, for efficiency’s sake, though it’s possible I’m making a joke about the fire code frowning on that many candles inside a nursing home — and this is when it occurs to me to ask:
Ray? You married a woman whose birthday falls on the same day as the Church Street Shootout?
Karen’s piping up.
“It’s the only way I can remember it!” she’s saying of the Shootout’s anniversary. Or maybe she’s referring to her birthday. Because the Shootout was kind of a big deal, and the high-water mark of her future husband’s playing career.
A few years later, after sitting out as an IU freshman and playing a reserve role alongside Jimmy Rayl on the Hoosiers’ 15-9 team of 1960-61, Ray Pavy was less than one month from starting practice for his junior season when the crash happened. He was driving his fiancée, as well as his sister and her three children, on a rain-slicked country highway northwest of Fowler in Benton County when their car crashed head-on into a trailer pulling horses. Pavy’s fiancée, Betty Sue Pierce, sitting next to him, was killed. His nephew, sitting next to Pierce, shot through the windshield and suffered a massive brain injury.
Ray Pavy was paralyzed from the chest down.
That’s not why he’s in the nursing home, you need to understand. Pavy returned to IU eventually and got his degree, then a master’s, then a Ph.D in business at Ball State. He became a teacher and coached at several schools, including as an assistant at New Castle, where he fell in love with the English teacher down the hall; that was Karen.
Pavy’s self-sufficient — he drives a hand-operated car, for example — but lately he’s been dealing with a lesion on his back, a bed sore that requires occasional help from his wife. Thing is, Karen’s been dealing with knee pain of her own, which rendered her unable to walk for a few weeks, which is why Ray Pavy came to this nursing home. But he’ll be leaving the day after this party, returning home.
That’s tomorrow. Today, eating cake in the hallway of Hickory Creek at New Castle, I’m trying to learn everyone’s name. Over here is his boyhood friend from Sullivan, Ind., Phil Eskew Jr., whose father was IHSAA commissioner from 1962-76. Over there are Jim and Jackie Callane. They’re talking to Tom Tolen, a basketball-loving, 52-year-old Kokomo city employee whose idea it was to celebrate the Church Street Shootout’s anniversary with Pavy and as many of Jimmy Rayl’s relatives as he can find. That’s why Jimmy’s widow, Nancy Rayl, is here. So is their son, Jimbo, who happened to play for Jim Callane at Kokomo Hayworth in the 1980s.
Small world, this Indiana high school basketball scene.
Besides, says Tom Tolen, “It’s not a Church Street Shootout party without a Rayl here.”
More: Doyel: IU's Van Arsdale twins remain a work of art
More: Doyel: Desperately seeking Rick Mount
Nancy Rayl is a princess, just the nicest woman on planet earth, something Ray Pavy figured out almost 60 years ago. He was Jimmy Rayl’s roommate, and Nancy was Jimmy’s high school sweetheart. Every week, Jimmy would write Nancy a letter from IU. Before he could seal it and put it into the mail, Pavy would get his hands on that envelope and write the future Mrs. Rayl a note. Usually, he wrote these words:
Hi, Nancy. I hope you’re as fine as frog’s hair.
Some 60 years later, Nancy Rayl walks into Hickory Creek at New Castle on the 61st anniversary of the Church Street Shootout. She turns the corner, finds the party outside Ray Pavy’s room, and gives her late husband’s roommate a hug.
“Hi, Ray,” she says. “I hope you’re fine as frog’s hair.”
Brutally unfair firing
You haven’t met everyone here. New Castle mayor Greg York showed up earlier, but he had to leave to honor another commitment, so I didn’t get to see him. I’m talking with Bill Walker, 68, whom Ray Pavy had introduced an hour ago as “my nephew,” and it took me the full hour to make the connection – and only then because someone is asking Walker if he still has that metal plate in his head from the car crash.
“Are you the nephew?” I’m asking Bill Walker. “The one who went through the windshield in 1961?”
Walker’s nodding and rapping on his forehead, above the scar, where the metal plate lies beneath the surface. I pull Walker aside and ask him: How often do you and Ray talk about that day in 1961?
“Not once,” he says. “We’ve never talked about it.”
It was a dark day, to be sure, and Ray Pavy has had others. He suffered a stroke several years back, and while it has messed just a little bit with his beautiful mind – Dr. Ray Pavy, Ph.D., was an all-state basketball player, and every bit as good in the classroom – he counts himself as lucky.
“Could have been so much worse,” he’s saying of the stroke, and that’s Ray Pavy, the pastor’s son. His father, Raymond, instilled in his boy a deep faith in God and an unrelentingly positive attitude. It was Raymond Pavy who reminded his son over the years, as doubt or darkness would threaten to creep in, that he was lucky in so many ways: Basketball had paid for his education and helped him achieve his two dream jobs, teacher and coach.
“My dad was sort of my hero,” Pavy says. “No matter what happened, the expectation never changed: Whatever you can do, do your very best. He’d tell me: ‘Son, you don’t know how lucky you are.’ And I decided he was right.”
Leaning back in his motorized wheelchair, Pavy isn’t bitter about anything, not even his firing in 1973 as the basketball coach at Shenandoah, where he’d posted a 90-43 record with two sectional titles in six seasons. He was coming off a 19-5 season in 1973 when the school board fired him, and IndyStar archives paint an ugly picture of that decision.
According to Hall of Fame journalist Thomas Keating, the school board voted 3-2 to fire Pavy without explaining the decision.
One board member, Robert Clevenger, told Keating: “I don’t have to give you or anybody a reason for wanting Pavy gone. I’m elected to the school board and I don’t have to answer to anyone, and I don’t plan to.”
Another board member, Hugh Huff, told Keating: “Sure, Pavy was 19-5 last year. But what about the year before that, huh? What about the year before that?”
Shenandoah had gone 9-12 in 1972, but school board president Norma Lewis suspected another motive behind the firing of Pavy:
“The men who voted against Pavy won’t come out and give a reason,” she told Keating. “I know Mr. Huff has been bitter because Mr. Pavy cut his son from the team five years ago.”
Seriously.
I’m asking Pavy about that dismissal — as brutally unfair a firing as I’ve ever heard about — and Pavy’s just smiling. He let that go a long time ago. He’s let so much go over the years, which is why he’s beloved to this day, happily serving as treasurer of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame and running the Henry County Community Foundation’s annual $350,000 scholarship program. He has a head for numbers, and more. He has that unrelenting optimism instilled by his father.
“I’m a lucky man,” Ray Pavy says, smiling at his wife and his friends, including Jimmy Rayl’s widow and son, on the day we’re celebrating the 61st birthday of the Church Street Shootout. And with that, Pavy grabs a fork and digs into some more dessert.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.