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Sunday, Nov. 02, 2008

Kentucky native back in the game

73-year-old seeks 'closure' to college hoops career

Ken Mink played his freshman year of college basketball in Kentucky when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House.

Mink will begin his sophomore year of college basketball in Tennessee during the final months of George W. Bush's tenure in the Oval Office.

People Magazine says 45 is the new 35. Ken Mink is out to show that 73 is the new 19.

At an age when most are getting their exercise from mall walking, Mink, a Perry County native, is playing college basketball.

He may be 73 according to his birth certificate, but he's No. 54 on the men's basketball roster of Roane State Community College.

"I guess I'm just out of my mind," Mink said via phone from his home in Knoxville, Tenn.

Actually, what has a retired newspaper man trying to play college hoops with and against people less than a third of his age has almost nothing to do with the mind.

It has everything to do with the hole left in his heart from his prior college basketball experience here in Kentucky.

"I guess I'm looking for — what would you say? — closure," Mink said Wednesday.

Thrown off team

Mink grew up in Vicco, a small community near Hazard. He played his high school basketball at the old Dilce Combs Memorial High School in Perry County.

In 1955-56, Mink broke into college basketball at Lees Junior College in Jackson. He says he averaged 11.8 points on a Lees team whose claim to fame was an upset of the University of Kentucky freshman team.

Going into his sophomore season at Lees, Mink hoped to play well enough to earn a scholarship to a four-year school like Morehead or Eastern.

Instead, he never made it to that sophomore season.

One day, Mink says he got a message he was to report to the office of Lees President Robert Landolt.

Once there, Mink says he was told someone had soaped the office of the school's basketball coach and put shaving cream in his shoes. The school regarded the prank as an act of vandalism.

Mink says Landolt told him that someone had seen Mink leaving the office soon after the soaping.

He was expelled from the school.

Mink says he did not do it.

"I wasn't above pulling pranks," he says, "but that one I did not do."

In the late 1950s, the idea of due process on college campuses was a concept whose time had not come.

"I had no recourse, nothing," Mink says. "There was no due process. It was an arbitrary decision and I was gone."

Mink soon wound up in the Air Force.

After that, he spent 38 years working in the newspaper industry, including a brief stint covering sports in the 1960s for the old Lexington Leader.

Throughout his life, he stayed involved in playing hoops in church and industrial leagues, three-on-three tournaments, and old-fashioned pickup games.

In all those years, that second season of college basketball he missed was a regret that never dulled.

One day in September 2007, Mink was shooting hoops in his own driveway.

He measured off the college three-point line. Having done so, he drained seven "three-pointers" in a row.

"I was thinking, 'Man, I can still shoot the ball,'" he says.

Which led to a wild thought: Why not?

Why not try to get back the year he'd lost and play that sophomore year of college basketball?

An e-mail campaign

When his wild hair of an idea first took life, Mink ran it past his wife, Emilia.

Ken: I can still play.

Emilia: Ken, you're 72 years old.

Ken: I can still do it.

Emilia: You're crazy. You can't play organized college basketball at your age.

Ken: I tell you, I can.

Mink took his conviction and penned a letter to college basketball coaches telling who he was and what he wanted to do.

Mink sent it via e-mail to eight small schools. The subject line read: Need a player? I'd like a shot.

In the body of the e-mail, Mink explained his situation, his age, what playing another year of college hoops would mean to him and that he would be willing to walk on without financial aid.

He concluded by saying, "You may think I'm crazy, but I believe I can still play."

Mink anxiously awaited a reply.

And waited. And waited. And waited. And ...

"Nothing. I was giving up," Mink says. "I just thought, 'Well, I guess I am crazy after all.'"

In Harriman, Tenn. (roughly 35 miles from Knoxville), one coach who had received Mink's e-mail couldn't put it out of his mind.

"I was curious," says Randy Nesbit, the Roane Community College head coach. "There was something about helping a guy make peace with his past, have another chance at his dream, that I guess intrigued me."

Nesbit and Mink exchanged e-mails.

That led to a one-on-one meeting.

"I wanted to see what kind of shape he was in," Nesbit said.

At 6-foot, 195 pounds, Mink passed the look test.

Nesbit told him if he was going to try playing, he would have to meet all the requirements of the other players.

He'd have to get a doctor's approval by passing a physical. He'd have to be a full-time student.

Given Mink's journalism background, Nesbit told him he could help write the team's news releases.

Says Mink: "He said if I wanted to try, he'd let me. There was no question that I wanted to try."

Move the ... rock?

At the risk of being indelicate, there is a question that sprang immediately to mind about a 73-year-old playing college hoops.

Aren't you afraid he might croak?

"Ken did pass his physical," Nesbit said. "And he is in really good shape for 73."

An old-school hoopster dropped into new-age basketball, Mink is having to learn a whole new language.

When he first started playing with his young teammates, he kept hearing, "C'mon Dawg, pass the ball; pass the ball, Dawg."

Mink all but started looking around the gym to see if someone was playing with a German Shepherd.

Another day, one of his young teammates told Mink to "move the rock."

"Did you know," Mink asked Wednesday, "that means pass the ball?"

Of course, the culture shock works both ways. Recently, Mink was showing his teammates a one-handed running shot that you don't see in modern basketball.

They asked where he'd learned it.

That's a Bob Cousy shot, Mink told them.

"They had no idea who that was," Mink says of the 1950s-era Boston Celtics great.

Playing basketball with a teammate old enough to be your grandpa can be a dilemma for a college kid, too.

"You don't know whether or not to play your hardest because you don't want to hurt him," says Roane freshman guard Antoni Magdos. "On the other hand, I don't know if it's respectful to give him anything but my best."

Not shockingly, a 73-year-old isn't going to play meaningful minutes this year for Roane's Raiders.

"My teammates play above the rim," Mink said. "My game is below the net."

The goal is to get Mink in at the end of enough blowout games that he scores at least one field goal in an authentic game.

"He gets up and down the floor and can get shots off in practice," says sophomore guard BJ Ware of Mink. "He can definitely still play for being that old."

The quest of an old man to get another chance at his sophomore year of college basketball has definitely struck a chord.

A video of Mink practicing at Roane State shot by one of his former employers, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, had drawn more than 354,000 views on YouTube as of Saturday evening.

Mink is enjoying the attention. For him, the coming basketball season is about closing a life chapter whose premature ending he never got over.

This is something I need to do," he said. "That's the only way I know to explain it."

Age 73, it's the new 19.