1981 Lincoln Bumblebees Set Gold Standard

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1981 Bumblebees set gold standard

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By Dave Rogers - The News staff writer Posted: 03/12/06 - 12:47:03 am CST

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AUSTIN - They were kids and they did what kids do.

"We were all pretty close," Kirk Jones recalls. "We would call one or another up, go play at TJ's gym, or go play at the park near McDonald's off Savannah."

But these kids were special. Hindsight makes it oh-so-clear.

Jones and his boyhood pals grew up to play basketball at Port Arthur's Lincoln High School and on March 21, 1981, at the new Frank Erwin Center in Austin - aka the "Super Drum" - Jones' group of Bumblebees defeated San Antonio Marshall 92-84 to win the Class 5A state basketball championship.

It was Lincoln's first UIL state championship.

And it was so much more.

Coach James Gamble explains:

"It was very important, not only to me and the kids and assistant coaches who participated, but it was important to our student body, it was important to the community that supports the school and it was important to the city.

"It put us on the map. And it started a tradition for us. From that, our younger kids realized they could accomplish some things a lot of people just talk about and dream about."

The 1981 Lincoln basketball team gave birth to a tradition.

It was the first of four Gamble-coached teams to win state championships and it was the first of seven Lincoln state championship squads in a span of 15 years.

Port Arthur, where high school football had long been king, gained a whole new place in the state's collective basketball consciousness. Regulars at the state tournament had to check the newspapers to see who Lincoln was going to play, but they could count, year after year, on Lincoln being there to play.

Overall, the Bees made 10 state tournament appearances in 15 years, 11 in 19.

Jones, a 5-foot, 4-1/2-inch point guard, and Michael "Juice" Jaco, a 6-1 forward, were the spiritual leaders on Gamble's 1981 team. The squad included 12 seniors and was led, physically, by the often dominating performances of 6-foot-9 center Leonard Allen.

Other starters included 6-6 Barron Prevost and guard Darrell Thomas.

Point guard Tracy Smith, 6-5 post Mecheal Jackson and off-guard Frank Neal were usually the first off the bench, and guard Terry Ceburn, a senior-year move-in from Houston also routinely saw a lot of action.

Rounding out the team were seniors Warren Trahan, Nolan Nurse and Patrick Barnes, juniors Alvincent Comeaux, Tim McKyer and Greg Joubert and 6-6 sophomore R.C. Mullin.

That squad, along with Gamble, assistant coaches James Knowles and Melvin Getwood, was honored at halftime of Saturday night's Class 5A state championship game on the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough win.

Jones, the team captain, said the 1981 state championship team was created the night Houston Madison eliminated Lincoln's 1980 team from the Region III tournament.

"After the 1980 team lost to Madison, on the bus going back home, we said 'We're going to win it next year. Next year is our year,' " Jones recalled.

"We knew because of our past records from the eighth grade on up. In the eighth, ninth and 10th grade, we were undefeated. Our junior year (on the JV team), we lost one game. From winning, we knew we would go far."

But Port Arthur's winning basketball tradition started much earlier.

Gamble arrived in Port Arthur in 1962 and began to put his polish on a basketball program that had brought home the 1956 state title in the segregated Prairie View Interscholastic League. Six times he coached Bumblebee teams as far as the regional tournament.

The 1981 players came from the "east side" and the "west side" of Lincoln's attendance zone, with Houston Street then the dividing line.

Jones and his best friend Jaco lived on the east side, along with Smith, Trahan and Neal.

"We were always together," Jaco recalls. "We played football, baseball, basketball games at the local park, 503 Park we called it, because that's the number on the railroad engine out in front."

Nurse, a quarterback on Lincoln's football team, recalls that Thomas, Allen and Jackson lived on the west side. And because he lived so close - on 10th Street - he joined them in going to Lincoln in the ninth grade. The east side boys went to Woodrow Wilson in the ninth grade.

"My bunch," says Comeaux, "was a little different, the underclassmen, Greg Joubert, Tim (McKyer), Mullin, people like that. One of the places everybody would go was right there at Lamar Elementary School.

"Coach Gamble would open up the girls' gym every summer. It wasn't anything that was organized, but we played a ton of games in there during that time. That was one way we got to be real close.

“When they said it was a team, it was actually a team in every sense of the word."

Still is.

Neal says those who remained or returned to Port Arthur passed into adulthood playing in rec leagues and pickup games at neighborhood gyms.

"After we graduated, in the 80s and early 90s, we all just played together," he says. "We had a team and we went five or six years without losing a game in city league. We used to play against James Gulley and James Nance and those boys from Lamar. They ain't never beat us.

"Now, probably Juice is the only one that's still playing. Everybody else got big. Huge."

A huge decision was the one made by a core of the players during their ninth grade year to give up football and concentrate on hoops.

"It didn't seem like the football athletes were focused like the basketball athletes," Jaco said. "We just decided to focus in."

A lot of focus in Southeast Texas fell on Lincoln's 1980 Bumblebees.

"Athletically, the '80 team was probably the best, but I think we had better basketball players on the '81 team," Gamble said.

The 1980 team was built around 6-8 Rueben "Too Tall" Prevost and included standouts like Barry Ford, Bernard Whitaker, Milton Benson and Bonnie Hall. Michael Jaco was the only full-time underclassman starter.

Darrell Thomas was a sometime starter at point guard. Barron Prevost and Leonard Allen logged a lot of minutes backing up in the post.

The 1980 JV team featured a starting lineup of Kirk Jones, Tracy Smith, Warren Trahan, Frank Neal and Mecheal Jackson. Those players joined the varsity for tournaments and late-season action.

Lincoln's 1981 season ended with a 36-3 record that included a 15-1 push to the District 22-5A championship. It included two close wins over Houston's Booker T. Washington (70-68 and 60-59), both won on late shots by Jaco; and it included no less than four meetings with longtime rival Beaumont Hebert.

The Panthers, who would go on to win the 1981 Class 4A title, the centerpiece of three straight state titles for Hebert, split the 1981 games with Lincoln 2-2. The Bees won 72-62 on their homecourt, lost 57-54 in the YMBL tournament, won again (48-46) at the Nederland tournament and, lost 53-45 in the finals of the TJ tournament.

"What really made that year special to me," says Andre Boutte, a two-time state champion coach at Lincoln who was on the 1981 Hebert team, "was we battled so many times that year.

"To both end up in the state tournament, staying at same hotel, and both of us end up champions was pretty special."

Lincoln's only other loss in 1981 came at the hands of West Orange-Stark, 72-68 in 22-5A play. The Bees swept two games each from Beaumont-Charlton-Pollard, Beaumont French, Beaumont Forest Park, Vidor, Port Neches-Groves, Nederland and Thomas Jefferson in district.

They played several of the teams additional games in area tournaments, going 4-0 over PN-G that year. But the players respected their foes.

"I remember one time I was supposed to be guarding Monte Wainwright and he hit a shot on me," Neal said, mentioning the PN-G star whose long curly hairstyle rivaled Neal's Afro for adding inches to his height. "They didn't have the three-point shot back then, but if they had, that would have been good for four."

Lincoln played Aldine MacArthur in bidistrict and won easily 67-50 to qualify for the Region III tournament at the University of Houston's Hofheinz Pavilion.

Hofheinz had become a graveyard for the state tournament ambitions of every good Southeast Texas team playing in the state's highest classification (Class 4A until 1981, when it became 5A).

Beaumont South Park won the Class 4A state title in 1960, but after school integration in the late 1960s, Houston Wheatley and Houston Kashmere came to dominate the state tournament (winning five and three titles, respectively), and no team from the Triangle succeeded in getting "through Houston" to the state tourney in Austin.

Making matters tougher was the fact that Lincoln, the No. 4-ranked team in the state, had to play No. 1-ranked Clear Lake in the regional tourney opener.

The Falcons were coached by the legendary Bill Krueger, who already had 600 wins to his credit by then. Also, they had the advantages of being from a well-to-do Houston suburb, advantages that included wearing flashy new white leather Adidas shoes.

"Clear Lake had those very nice sneakers, and we had (canvas) Chuck Taylors," Jaco recalls. "Someone wrote a story about (Clear Lake's shoes) and that got everybody's attention. I know they were really nice."

A few years later, one of Spike Lee's TV commercials for Nike included the line "Must be the shoes." At Hofheinz that year, Chuck Taylor ruled.

The Bees dispatched Clear Lake 78-63 and then blew out Madison 63-46 in the regional final. They beat the Hofheinz Curse and were headed for Austin.

But it wasn't as simple as that. Jones recalls Gamble's speech at a pre-tournament pep rally in Lincoln's auditorium.

"Coach Gamble said he was interviewed and a reporter asked him 'How was it to draw the No. 1 team in the state?' Coach Gamble's reply to him was 'I didn't draw the No. 1 team in the state. I coached the No. 1 team in the state.'

"When he said that, we could have jumped to the moon. That set the tone."

In the two regional games, Allen had combined for 32 points, 21 rebounds and 14 blocked shots. And the Bees' reward for finally getting past Hofheinz?

A date with No. 2-ranked Fort Worth Dunbar in the state semifinals. Dallas Roosevelt played Marshall in the other semifinal.

"I think they wanted Fort Worth Dunbar or Roosevelt for the finals," Neal said, "but we balled there. I think we were destined. It was coach Gamble's time."

Comeaux said "Dunbar was the cockiest bunch of guys I ever saw in my life. They were talking a ton of trash. We just played the game."

Lincoln beat Dunbar 60-59 in overtime. Jaco hit a free throw for the game-winner and finished with a game-high 27 points. The Bees had to sweat a last-second three-quarter shot by Robert Hughes, Jr., the son of the legendary Dunbar coach.

"He threw the ball from the free throw line on the other end of the court and that ball almost went in," Prevost recalled Wednesday. "I would have died if it had gone in."

In the championship game, Lincoln led by 12 points midway through the third period only to trail by four, 84-80, with 1:27 left in the game.

In a 73-second span, Allen scored 11 consecutive points, grabbed two rebounds and blocked a shot as Lincoln outscored Marshall 13-0 down the stretch.

Allen balked Saturday when asked to recall the big finish.

“It was a blur, to be honest with you,†he said. “I didn't realize what happened.â€

None of the game's participants had any way of knowing the importance of their run to the top in 1981. But a quarter of a century of hindsight changes things.

“I love the fact that I have kids that will share in this,†Jones said of Saturday's tribute. “I never thought it'd be this big. I thought it'd be something that was swept under the rug. I'm just so thankful.â€