The kids who played ball didn't care what color you were, as long as you could play. But at the big-name southern colleges in the '50s, it was a different story.
View full sizePaul Grier is in his 70s now, but there was a time when the semi-retired golf course worker was the best player in North Carolina. And that comes from the kid who grew up to be mayor of Charlotte, and played pick-up ball against him.By Peter St. Onge
Charlotte, N.C. -- On Saturdays and Sundays, in junior high and high school, Richard Vinroot walked to the bus near his parents' Charlotte home, and he headed up Providence Road looking to play basketball. It didn't much matter where those games might be. He didn't much care who he played with, so long as the basketball was good.
The best games, he learned, usually involved black players.
It was the 1950s, a decade after Jackie Robinson became the first black person in the 20th century to play Major League Baseball, but a decade before a black basketball player would put on a varsity uniform for an Atlantic Coast Conference school. Sports, just like the rest of America, was navigating the harsh currents of race. And compared to the rest of the America, the South was lagging.
In North Carolina, blacks and whites played sports together only in the most casual fashion, in old gymnasiums and on public playgrounds, where teenagers gathered for pickup games.
In Raleigh, some of the best college and high school players from around Eastern N.C. came to an old court outside an A&P grocery store in the Mordecai community. In Durham, they gathered at Carr Junior High.
In Charlotte, it was the Red Shield Club in Fourth Ward, or the Colonial Park courts and others. The players came from poor, inner city neighborhoods, or like Richard Vinroot, working class homes a few miles away. For some, the only thing more different than the paths they took to those games was the path their basketball lives took afterward.
None of which mattered at the time to Vinroot, who would later play for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels before coming back to Charlotte, where he would become mayor. "Nobody much cared it was blacks and whites," he says of those games. "We were kids playing basketball. I remember there were some great players out there."
To most of the city, those players would be forever anonymous -- ignored by white newspapers, shunned by major southern universities.
But one of them, whom Richard Vinroot remembers, might have been the best ever in Charlotte.
Talent and confidence
"You want to see the course?" Paul Grier says, pulling up in an electric golf cart. It's a chilly Wednesday morning at the venerable Charlotte Country Club. Grier, in a windbreaker and corduroys, has just finished a morning shift on the maintenance crew.
It's a good place, he says, driving past the stately white clubhouse. He's worked there since 1972, part-time now, with enough of his days left over to play a little golf. He could probably make some extra money with some on-the-side matches, he says, but everyone here knows better than to play him.
You learn this quickly about Paul Grier: He's never lacked for athletic confidence -- or the talent to back it up. By the time he graduated from West Charlotte in 1956, Grier was considered one of the best players in school history -- and one of the best ever in his city.
At 6 feet 2, Grier was quick enough to be a playmaking guard and strong enough to be a rebounding forward.
"He was the best I've seen come out of Charlotte," said George Young, a West Charlotte sports historian who later played with Grier on a touring Charlotte team called the Westside 5. "His play, his knowledge. Whatever it was, he had it."
Most of the city, however, had no clue. Mainstream newspapers didn't send their reporters to West Charlotte games, even during a run of state titles, instead paying a student a few dollars to call in games for box scores. And with blacks and whites playing in different N.C. high school basketball associations, the best black teams never got the opportunity -- or the recognition -- that came with playing the best whites.
Jeff Capel, now a Charlotte Bobcats assistant coach, remembers when his all-black high school, West Southern Pines, played for the state title in the mid-1960s.
"I remember getting the newspaper the next day and wanting to read about how they did," he says. "There was not one mention of them in the newspaper. I remember asking my dad about it and he said, 'They just don't write about us.'"
On the playground, though, everyone knew Paul Grier. He played mostly near his home in the Double Oaks neighborhood, but he also found games downtown and at other spots where whites came to play. Vinroot, who starred at East Mecklenburg, remembers playing against Grier at the Red Shield Club. "I remember him being very good," he says. "Better than me -- and I thought I was pretty good."
Says Grier: "The white boys would come down, and we would just kill them. They'd beat us in football, but in basketball, we'd just run them to death."
The games were informal with the same rules no matter which court, which city you played: Play until you lose. Play with whomever you could grab. Didn't matter what color your skin was. "If you could play, you could play," said Lawrence Dunn, a black high school star at the time in Raleigh.
Outside that A&P in Raleigh, the best high school talent, along with players from North Carolina, Duke and N.C. State, would wait their turns for a game. It was on those courts Dunn met first met Fayetteville's Rusty Clark and New Bern's Bill Bunting, white players who eventually were UNC starters.
In Charlotte, Grier remembers whites and blacks drinking Cokes together after games. It was integration years before four black youths ordered sodas, along with coffee and donuts, at a Greensboro whites-only lunch counter in 1960. Says Vinroot: "We didn't feel like we were sinful or anything. At some point we develop our biases and behaviors, but kids don't care."
Kids also don't notice, and Vinroot didn't think much more about Grier until Vinroot started getting named to all-city teams in high school. Grier was on none of those teams.
"That," says Vinroot, "is when I finally started to think, 'This ain't right.'"
Barnstorming
Nine years after Grier graduated from West Charlotte, Maryland native Billy Jones became the first black to play for an ACC school when he suited up for his home-state Terrapins. A year later, New York native Charlie Scott became the first black scholarship athlete for UNC, Paul Grier's favorite team.
Integration would soon allow blacks the path their talents had marked out for them, and N.C. cities and towns would see some of their best -- Rocky Mount's Phil Ford, Shelby's David Thompson, Wilmington's Michael Jordan -- launch heralded careers at state universities.
Grier had a different choice.
"Those days, you could either play up north or go to a historically black college," says Charles McCullough, coach at West Charlotte from 1961 to 1987. "That's just the way things were, and the players understood that."
Grier says he was recruited by a couple of northern schools, including Purdue. But, he says: "My mom didn't want me that far away," so he chose N.C. A&T, where he played immediately on a team that included future NBA player Al Attles.
During his sophomore year, he came back to Charlotte on a weekend Goose Tatum's Harlem Stars were playing an exhibition. "Goose asked around about any local players that could play against them," Grier says.
Grier scored 26 points in the exhibition. He made $45, but says he lost his college eligibility.
Instead he went barnstorming with the Stars, then later with the Harlem Hobos and the Court Jesters. He traveled across the United States -- and even to Havana, Cuba, before the Castro regime took over. "It was a great life," he says. "I was making a lot of money then."
In 1964, while leaving a Chicago bar, he was hit in the hip with a stray bullet. His basketball career was over.
He took up golf for a while -- seriously enough to play on a black pro tour -- then came back to Charlotte and the job at Charlotte Country Club.
Some time later, he noticed one of the club's members, former Charlotte mayor Richard Vinroot. Grier recognized him, of course. "Oh yeah," he says now, standing on the driving range. "He played for Carolina."
Back in the gym
Another chilly Wednesday. West Charlotte High School. Paul Grier, now 74 and in a sweater and slacks, walks into the gymnasium, where a photographer begins setting up to take his picture. Across the gym, Richard Vinroot begins to walk his way. "You know," says Grier. "I've never met him."
They shake hands, then embrace. "Glad to see you, sir," Vinroot says, and Grier says the same. Then Vinroot jokes: "I don't want to play you on your home court," and soon the pair are talking about basketball.
Vinroot, now 69, graduated from East Meck in 1959, then attended UNC on a Morehead Scholarship. He saw the court in nine games for the Tar Heels and scored his only point for Dean Smith on Jan. 6, 1962, when he was fouled in a game against Notre Dame and hit his first of two free throws.
He thrived at Chapel Hill, becoming class president his junior and senior years, then later earned a law degree there. In Charlotte, he served eight years on the city council, then as mayor from 1991-1995. He is now an attorney at an Uptown Charlotte firm.
Before all of that, he grew up the son of poor, immigrant parents, in a household not that far removed economically from Paul Grier's. But whites, no matter the background, had different choices, different opportunities, he says. "I got a lot of breaks," Vinroot says, "and sports had a lot to do with those breaks."
Grier shrugs at questions about that. He says he didn't think much then about chances he missed -- until Charlie Scott went to UNC.
"That kind of hit my mind," he says. And now, well, there's no way to know how opportunities would have played out.
On this day, in this gym, he and Vinroot talk about the best players they've seen -- including Charlotte's and UNC's Walter Davis and Bobby Jones, names this basketball state will forever celebrate.
And the player some say was better than any in this city? Grier tells Vinroot about getting interviewed by a Charlotte Observer reporter in 1987 -- 31 years after he graduated from West Charlotte. "It was the first interview I ever did," he said. "I had tears in my eyes."
Vinroot puts his hand on Grier's shoulder. "I used to have an interview every week back then," he says. "And you were a lot better than me."
They talk some more about basketball, about kids and grandkids, until it's time for the photo shoot. The West Charlotte girls varsity team has come into the gym, and as they stretch they point at Grier's way. They don't know the man dribbling a basketball for the camera.
That's Paul Grier, they're told. They look blankly.
Some think he's the best ever to play in Charlotte, they're told. "For real?" "Did you hear that?" "Grier?"
They go quiet and watch the old basketball player, still dribbling, gracefully.
"Maybe," says one, "he can teach me a few things."