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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Well Traveled
Central Indiana, IN
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Former hoops coach, who has been around some of the great teams in Indiana history, was a key cog in the RCA Dome’s beginnings.
Even as the RCA Dome’s Teflon roof is prepared for deflation, Jerry Oliver feels no sense of, well, deflation.
“No, I look back and think, hey, I was a part of that,” says Oliver. “And I still have pictures and memoirs and a lot of really good memories.”
More on that in a moment.
That’s because Oliver, now 77, is perhaps best known as the coach of the 1965 Indiana state high school basketball champion Washington Continentals, led by Billy Keller and Ralph Taylor. He left Washington in 1968 to become an assistant under Lou Watson at Indiana University, but didn’t leave the Continental cupboard bare.
Hardly.
Waiting in the wings was the Washington team led by George McGinnis and Steve Downing that, in 1969, won another state title for the Westside school under first-year head coach Bill Green.
At IU, Oliver served as interim coach one season as Watson recovered from back surgery, and he was there when McGinnis and Downing arrived to play under Watson for one year before Watson was dismissed and McGinnis exited after his sophomore year to play for his hometown Indiana Pacers.
Oliver was re-united with McGinnis when he joined the Pacers, having been hired by Bob “Slick” Leonard as his assistant coach. Leonard and Oliver remained the Pacers coaching tandem until 1980 when Leonard was fired by California owner Sam Nassi. Oliver served one year as director of player personnel before Sandy Knapp, then president of the fledgling Indiana Sports Corporation, let him know that someone with a sports background was being sought to work in a new building downtown.
Thus, Oliver became the first sports director of the then Hoosier Dome, serving in that role before the building opened and then remaining there through 1988, when he headed south to open yet another dome stadium, then the Florida Suncoast Dome, which is now known as Tropicana Field, home to Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays.
Now Oliver, who retired in 1993 and returned with his wife, Ann, to Indiana (Brownsburg), finds it difficult to comprehend the building he helped open is coming down.
"It’s hard to believe,” he said. “It’s not that it’s anything emotional about the Dome, but it’s just hard to believe they’re going to blow it up.”
Oliver fondly recalls the Purdue-Notre Dame dedication football game, the first Big Four Classic basketball doubleheader involving Indiana, Kentucky, Notre Dame and Purdue and the Pan American Games as signature events during his tenure.
He also recalls how difficult it was to duplicate the Hoosier Dome’s success at the dome in Florida, although he was on the bid team that brought the Final Four there in 1999.
His fondest memories, however, are still reserved for his days at Washington.
The ’65 state champs “weren’t very big,” he recalled. “But they were so coachable. We played that pressing defense and all of those guys knew where everybody was.
“I still look at it as the most fun I ever had. To be in the state tournament, to be coaching a team that was in it, and then winning it … well, it still amazes me that that happened.”
Also amazing to Oliver was when he first time he spotted a 6-5 George McGinnis. Of course, McGinnis was just in the seventh grade at the time. By the time he got to Oliver’s varsity as a freshman, he was 6-foot-6, 220 pounds.
“I just knew that guy was going to be something else.”
Oliver, a native of Rochester, Ind., and a Ball State graduate, is a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Had he chosen, he probably could have made it in golf, too. A scratch player, he still shoots his age.
Nothing to feel deflated about there, either.
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