Doyel: Only after death do we learn of IU, Pacers legend George McGinnis' true greatness
INDIANAPOLIS – A church in Haughville. A man in a pew is crying, because funerals are hard, but people are laughing too. They’re singing and lifting hands and encouraging various speakers to say what they have to say. “Go ahead,” they’re murmuring to whoever has the microphone at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, and if the ceremony is running long, nobody’s complaining.
Because we’re about to bury George McGinnis.
Nobody wants this service to end, because everybody knows what comes next. Ashes to ashes, comes next. Dust to dust, comes next.
Big Mac to some, Big George to others – a wonderful human being to everyone who knew him – goes into the ground at Crown Hill. That’s what comes next.
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Doyel in 2017: Was NBA Hall of Famer George McGinnis better at football?!?
But first there are stories to tell, and to know George McGinnis is to have a story that sounds impossible, and this goes well beyond the basketball court. McGinnis was a 6-8, 235-pound power forward for Washington High, IU basketball and the ABA Pacers, and he did things that haven’t been done before or since – I can show you the numbers, if you’re interested – but we didn’t come here to remember that George. Not entirely.
That George, larger than life in every way – he’s in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but famed Dallas Cowboys scout Gil Brandt swears McGinnis was a better prospect in football – couldn’t obscure the gentility, the beauty, of this man lying in his final repose surrounded by flowers and friends and organ pipes.
Did we know George McGinnis in life? We did. But there are some things you learn only after he’s gone, when the stories are safe to tell, because Big George isn’t around to stop anyone from saying just how wonderful he was.
Scared of needles and sea monsters
People are laughing about the needles and the kelp.
These are some of the other stories folks are telling now that we’re all here at the church in Haughville. Details of the ceremony were shared only with about 200 friends and family, because otherwise the crowd would’ve been overflowing. Two police cars are outside, manned by officers eyeballing everyone who turns into the parking lot.
Inside, former ABA and NBA teammates of McGinnis, including Doug Collins and Dave Robisch, are here. So is IU coach Mike Woodson and ex-Pacers Derrick McKey and David Harrison. Executives from Lilly, the Indianapolis YMCA and Indianapolis Airport Authority also are here, just some of the friends George accumulated over the years. Hall of Fame Pacers coach Slick Leonard can’t be here – he died in 2021 – but his widow is, and Nancy Leonard is saying, “Slick was a father figure to George.”
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Holding the microphone now is longtime Pacers trainer David Craig, and he’s talking about the flu shots Big George didn’t want to take as he was leading the Pacers to ABA titles in 1972 and ’73 and winning league MVP in 1975. McGinnis was superhuman that season, averaging 29.8 points, 14.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists, but Craig’s telling the folks at Friendship Missionary about George’s scaredy-cat side.
“I pulled out the needle and George took off running,” Craig says. “I had to tell Darnell (Hillman) to go get George and bring him back!”
The crowd’s loving this, and Hillman’s laughing harder than anyone. Imagine the stories he can tell. He's known McGinnis since they entered the ABA as rookies in 1971, starting that season at Media Day where Hillman was mostly ignored and watching reporters crowd around a guy he’d never seen.
“I’d never heard of George McGinnis,” says Hillman, also a former track star at San Jose State. “But then the crowd parted and I saw him there and let me tell you something: I’d never seen anything like it.”
Hillman and McGinnis became friends, two charismatic magnets drawn to one another, but McGinnis eventually made a rule: No more rides in Hillman’s car. Not if Hillman was driving, not after that day on Interstate 65 when they were approaching 100 mph when Hillman hit the 10th Street exit. Poor George was in the passenger seat, grabbing onto the dashboard with one hand and Hillman’s neck with another, howling in fear.
Apparently he was doing the same a few years later in San Diego, where the ABA Pacers were playing the Conquistadors. Some team members had gone sailing that day on the Pacific Ocean, found enormous forests of kelp, and brought back a piece about 30 feet long. Someone got the idea to break into George’s room, shove part of that kelp down the toilet and stretch the rest of it throughout the room like a sea serpent. Teammates hid on the balcony and waited for George to come home.
It’s safe to wonder which was louder: George’s shrieking 50 years ago when he found that sea monster in his room – or the crowd last week at Friendship Missionary, loving George with laughter.
Gifts, rings and other secret things
That Indiana state championship from 1969, when Washington went undefeated and McGinnis scored 35 points and grabbed 27 rebounds in the title game, was a long time ago. Championship rings were awarded, but time passes. Things happen. That team was close, meeting once a month for lunch at The Workingman’s Friend in Speedway – George’s idea – and when George heard one too many stories about a damaged or lost ring, he decided in 2019 to buy the team a new batch of 50th anniversary rings.
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“And they were huge,” says Wayne Pack, McGinnis' teammate at Washington High and the Pacers. “These were not rings you could wear, but that was George. He wanted it to be special.”
That’s one of those stories nobody had told publicly until McGinnis' memorial service, because McGinnis didn’t want credit. Just wanted his guys to have their rings.
So many stories are coming out now about George’s generosity, and it’s not like his generosity was any secret. See the obituaries, how so many people refer to his game being surpassed only by his character. People knew George, which means they also knew he didn’t want attention, so only now are some of us hearing about the rings or the $100 bills he’d hand strangers in Downtown Indianapolis – “I saw him do it,” says former Crispus Attucks and IU star Hallie Bryant – and the $10,000 he gave annually to Indianapolis children for Christmas gifts. He worked every year with local groups to identify 100 at-risk kids, and George gave $100 for each kid to have presents.
“I didn’t know about that,” Pack says quietly, when I tell him about George’s annual Christmas spending. “But I’m not surprised. I’m sure there were many things he did that I never knew about. He wasn’t one to talk about it.”
Like the Indiana Athletic Teen Basketball Association, which launched in 1998 and had more than 150 players on 10 teams in its first year. That season was such a success, it earned a resolution of appreciation from the Indianapolis City-County Council. Among all the whereas and wherefores, not a word in the resolution mentions the man whose donation made the league possible, because he kept it a secret from most of his closest friends. Don’t make me identify the man here. Big George didn’t do it for the publicity.
“The best thing about George,” Pack says, “was his loyalty. If you played with him at (IPS) No. 5 or ran around with him as a kid at Military Park, he never forgot you and he never changed.”
Then Pack tells me one more story, but only on the condition that I don’t name the boyhood friend.
Jumped off roofs, shot chickens
People know the player in this story. The other player, I mean. Not McGinnis. The man with the failing health, McGinnis’ childhood friend and teammate who worked at a plant until the diabetes took one leg, then another, and finally left the man in a nursing home on the northside.
“George went every week to visit him,” Pack says. “Didn’t tell anybody. I’m not even sure how I found out. He went every week until (the boyhood friend) died.”
Was George perfect? No. The stories from his memorial were inclusive. Bishop Theoangelo Perkins, the McGinnis family pastor back in Harpersville, Alabama, spoke at the service and used the letters in G-E-O-R-G-E to illuminate McGinnis’ character. Most of those letters were devoted to praise – “G” for gentle, “E” for excellence and so on – but Perkins had another idea for “R”.
“Rough!” he said, and while the crowd chuckled, Perkins described George as a child who’d climb onto your roof just to jump off it, and who received a BB gun at Christmas and then shot the neighbor’s chickens.
If young George had the occasional rough patches of childhood, so be it. The adult smoothed them out. In his final years George worked behind the scenes to get former Butler star Oscar Evans into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, and when news broke last year that Evans was being inducted, George organized a celebration for a dozen friends at a Downtown restaurant. After paying the bill, George pulled out a basketball he'd had painted, with Evans' accomplishments written onto each panel.
"You should have seen Oscar's face," Pack says. "And Oscar went to Shortridge! Didn't even go to Washington, but that's how George was."
Two years ago McGinnis organized an event to honor Bryant, who in 1953 had been named IndyStar Mr. Basketball 16 years before McGinnis earned the same at Washington. Bryant played 27 years for the Harlem Globetrotters before embarking on his greatest career yet, one of philanthropy and mentorship.
The reason for the 2022 event honoring Bryant?
“No reason,” says Ralph Taylor, who helped Washington win a state title in 1965, four years before George did the same, then starred at Purdue. “Lots of people get their tributes after they’re deceased, you know. George just wanted something for Hallie while he was still around to enjoy it.”
Bryant attended McGinnis’ private services last week. He’s 89 now, and when I asked him about the party McGinnis organized at the Jewel Event Center, capacity 380 – “and it was full,” Bryant says – he tells of a party McGinnis had thrown a year earlier, another tribute he wanted to extend to the living.
“He did one for Clifford Robinson,” Bryant says of the man who played at Crispus Attucks for Ray Crowe in the 1950s, and later coached McGinnis and hundreds of others at IPS No. 5. “George was very empathetic and sharing, just an incredibly generous person.”
Robinson was 87 when he died in March, two years after receiving that surprise tribute from McGinnis. Several of Robinson’s family members were at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church last week, and like Hallie Bryant and Oscar Evans and scores more, they were there to honor a man who preferred honoring others.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: George McGinnis' funeral stories describe a greatness larger than life
