If you asked the late Jerry Harkness when his remarkable life began, he would tell you about the day he heard someone’s voice as he was shooting baskets at the YMCA in Harlem, New York, the summer before his senior year of high school.
“You know, you’re not bad. Maybe you can get a scholarship.”
When Harkness turned around to thank the man he recognized Jackie Robinson, who had retired from baseball and spent his days mentoring boys at the Y.
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Robinson asked Harkness if he played basketball for his high school team. When Harkness said he didn’t, Robinson encouraged him to try out. Harkness made the team, became its best player, and the school, DeWitt Clinton, won the city championship.
Harkness received a scholarship to Loyola University Chicago, where he became the team’s captain and a consensus All-American during his senior year when the Ramblers made the NCAA Tournament.
On March 23, 1963, Loyola won the NCAA championship game. It remains the only Illinois-based, Division 1 basketball team to win the NCAA Tournament.
Harkness, who died Aug. 24, 2021, often talked about the profound impact that Robinson had on his life.
Major League Baseball will commemorate Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s first game in the major leagues. Robinson died 50 years ago. His epitaph reads, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
What’s lost in the discussions about Robinson will probably be the impact he had on the lives of so many people, including Harkness.
Until Robinson praised Harkness that day in the Harlem YMCA gym, Harkness didn’t think he was good enough to make the high school team. He didn’t think he was good at anything — except cross country and track. He struggled as a student at his Bronx high school.
But mostly Harkness dealt with poverty and racism. Like Robinson, Harkness was raised by a single mother and the family rarely had enough to eat. Like Robinson, Harkness used his athleticism to go to college and then to confront racial discrimination.
During the second round of the 1963 tournament, Loyola, which had four Black starters, played the all-white Mississippi State University, which had defied the state’s governor who had ordered the team not to leave the state to play in the integrated game in East Lansing, Michigan.
Before the game, Harkness was photographed shaking hands with Mississippi State captain Joe Dan Gold. Loyola won the game, which is called the “Game of Change,” because it pitted a Black team against a white Southern team from a university in the Deep South during the days when freedom riders and lunch counter sit-ins were confronting segregation laws. Gold and Harkness remained friends for the rest of their lives.
Loyola won the game, 61-51, and advanced to the championship game, where they defeated the University of Cincinnati Bearcats, the two-time defending NCAA champions, in overtime, 60-58.
Harkness played briefly in the NBA for the New York Knicks and then played for the Indiana Pacers in the American Basketball Association, where he made the longest shot in professional basketball history, a record that stood for decades.
He became the first Black salesperson for Quaker Oats and the first Black fundraiser for the United Way of Greater Indianapolis. He worked as a sportscaster for an Indianapolis television station. He became active in civil rights, working for the Southern Christian Leadership Council and serving as executive director of the Indianapolis charter of 100 Black Men, an organization that mentors young Black men.
In 2013, Harkness and his Loyola teammates went to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama on the 50th anniversary of the team’s championship.
I used to have breakfast every so often with Harkness and two or three other guys in Indianapolis. He canceled on us one day in March 2018 because he was going to see Loyola play in the NCAA Tournament. The team advanced to the Final Four. I saw him on national television talking about the team’s incredible run in 1963.
I asked Harkness if he ever saw Jackie Robinson again after he went to Loyola.
Yes, he said, he saw Robinson on a street corner in New York City talking with another person. He said he wanted to thank Robinson, but he didn’t want to intrude. Harkness said he always regretted not thanking Robinson.
Chris Lamb is chair of the journalism and public relations department at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
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