NEWS
4A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2006
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3A
Though he was just a freshman, everyone was in awe of the young player. Chamberlain had never experienced segregation on the east coast, King said, and no one wanted to upset him when he got to Kansas. Restaurants, hotels, theaters and other public places desegregated for him. "When Wilt Chamberlain came to that campus, a lot of that foolishness stopped." King said.
According to King, today's minority athletes take their acceptance for granted.
"I was busy just trying to survive," he said. "If I came to this university and failed, that was going to be a setback for other minority athletes. When I came here, I was scared to death of failure."
Contributed photo
Chamberlain may have been the most talented player on the team, but King had talent too, a basketball star from grade school on.
"I didn't know what I was going to do," he said. "In my family, we didn't talk about stuff like that. We talked about what we would eat that night," King said.
He said dealing with segregation only added to the burden of working hard in practice — being physically exhausted and then having to go home and read 1000 pages to be prepared for class the next day.
King was born to a working class family and raised in Kansas City, Mo. His parents, Maurice King and Lillian Walker, divorced when he was five years old, and his father moved to New York City. King said his mother worked hard as a waitress and tried to find other ways to make a little extra money, but the family also relied on welfare checks.
King discovered basketball on the playground in sixth grade. People watched him play there, and soon he was invited to play on church teams at the YMCA.
Road trips were even harder. "School still goes on while you're out there on the road." he said.
King figured he would end up working at a blue-collar job after graduating high school, if he graduated at all. Not only did he graduate. King ended up being the first in his family to earn a college degree.
Joe King, his brother, recalled seeing Maurice play in Paseo Park with other kids. He played a game called "goal high," which was like basketball, only the goal had no backboard. Joe credits this game with giving Maurice his most valuable basketball skills.
The goal was made of a metal pole and a rim about three feet in circumference, Joe said. Kids would play three-on-three. Not having a backboard required more accuracy than regular basketball.
He went on to become a high school star. "Playing against other people, I found out I was pretty doggone good at it," he said.
King attended all-black R.T. Coles Vocational High School in Kansas City, Mo. There he excelled at basketball and received attention from several colleges and The Call, a local newspaper that wrote about black America, especially with regard to sports.
"It was a really big thing for a kid to have his name written up in The Call," King said.
In high school he dated many girls, including his future wife, and another girl with whom he fathered his oldest daughter, Yasmin. Though the couple never married, Yasmin did live with King later in his life.
King lived during an era when African-Americans "had to be super" to even get noticed, and King was, said Jack Bush, King's high school assistant coach.
He was thinking about attending a black college like Lincoln University or Tennessee State University, but KU assistant coach Dick Harpwent to watch King play during his junior year in high school.
Jerry Waugh, KU assistant coach, said "Reece," as his teammates called King, was a "sweet-like-candy player" and a quiet guy with a great sense of humor.
"If you were going to choose up a team, you'd want Maurice on your team." Waugh said.
Harp made him feel wanted, and his high school coach pushed King to attend KU, so that's where he ended up.
The University was the first integrated school King ever attended. While basketball came easy, he didn't think he would have made it through the University without the help of Jesse Milan, a graduate student in education, and a member and advisor for King's black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi. Milan said he helped "Pauncho," as he called King, develop good study habits.
After four years of playing for Kansas, the Celtics drafted King in after the 1957 season. He was Kansas' second-leading scorer in 1956, averaging of 14 points per game, and the third-leading scorer in 1957 averaging 9.7 points per
game. A few credits sh of graduation, he elected to go to the Celtics because of their prestige. The NBA had only eight teams at the time, and he felt fortunate to be offered a position.
While playing for the Celtics he was drafted into the Army, where he served a mandatory two years and played basketball for the Fifth Army team at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. He joined several other All-Americans on that team.
While at Fort Leonard Wood he reconnected with Jelena Nicholson, whom he'd dated in high school, when King played a game against Lincoln University, Jelena, a student at Lincoln, said she'd always had a crush on King and even tried out for cheerleading in high school to be closer to him. The two married in 1958. After his time in
the Army, he went back to the Celtics but Jelena stayed home in Kansas City. The long distance relationship didn't last. The pay in the NBA at the time wasn't enough for him to support her coming to live with him in Boston. They divorced.
"Life in professional wasn't all that glamorous in those days," he said.
The Celtics traded him to the Chicago Zephyr, where he earned his highest pay in the NBA — $10.000. When the Zephyr moved to Baltimore, King stayed in Kansas City and played for the Steers of the old American Basketball League before it folded.
When he moved back to Kansas City after completing his degree at the University in 1964, he taught physical education at Northwest Junior High
for four years, and he and Jelena remarried.
In 1966, he took a part time job at Hallmark Cards and ended up leaving his teaching job two years later to be a Hallmark human resources representative. He retired in 1991.
He and Jelena like to spend time with their grandchildren, and he listens to jazz and "yesterday's rock and roll," plays cards, drinks coffee, and chats with golf friends, one of whom was his high school coach, Jack Bush.
"You don't find too many former high school students 40 years later being a close friend of a former teacher," Bush said.
Although retired, King worked with the Kansas City Board of Education to start an alternative school program, and as a small-business consultant until 2000.
He is a trustee and sings in the male choir at Concord Fortress of Hope Baptist Church. He always dresses with class: a long leather jacket cinched along the waistline, a turtleneck sweater and dress pants.
His family is close-knit and close by. His daughter, Kimberly, and her two kids see King several times a week. She said he wanted to make sure his grandchildren did well in school and keep the family tradition of attending KU
"I went to KU too," Kimberly said.
"It was the only school he allowed me to apply to. Thank goodness I got in because he would have been heartbroken."
Her eldest daughter, Danielle, 11, is tall like King and loves to play basketball in the driveway with her grandpa. She wants to go to Kansas and be just like him.
Danielle wrote a paper in school about the most important person in her life and chose King, or "Papa" as she calls him. At grandparents' night at the school, Jelena said, King was flattered but embarrassed to find out he was the subject of her paper.
If she ends up as a KU student, she will learn that her grandfather, Maurice King, won more than basketball games. Off the court, he was instrumental in winning civil rights for her and many others.
- Edited by Matt Wilson