And last December coach Anthony Grant had Chapman – his former teammate on UD’s 1984 Elite Eight squad – talk to his players before the game against Colorado in Chicago.
Now Chapman – albeit from afar – is speaking to the Flyers again and this time he’s delivering his most important message ever.
These days Chapman lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and in exactly one month the Flyers will open a basketball season like no other in his city.
Dayton is part of an eight-team field playing in a relocated tournament called the Bad Boy Mowers Crossover Classic. The three-day event played at the Sanford Pentagon – a 3,250 seat arena known locally as just The Pentagon – begins Nov. 25 with four games, including the nightcap pitting UD against Wichita State.
Because of the COVID- 19 pandemic that is laying siege to our nation – and many other countries – several season-opening tournaments were cancelled or moved.
The pandemic upended the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas and that field – minus Duke – decided to come to the quickly-cobbled together event in South Dakota.
Meanwhile, Dayton saw the Myrtle Beach Invitational it was to play in moved to Orlando. It opted out of that relocation and instead took Duke’s place in Sioux Falls.
And that prompted some reflections from Chapman on Friday afternoon when we spoke by phone. His message was simple:
To win this year, a team will need to adhere to safety precautions. In other words, wearing a mask and practicing social distancing will be as important as being able to hit a jump shot and play in-your-face defense.
Yet, that’s no easy task.
This past week the University of Toledo shut down men’s basketball for two weeks after Coach Ted Kowalcyzk and six of his players tested positive for COVID-19. Marquette’s men’s and women’s hoops programs did the same.
Three days ago Illinois State put eight plyers in quarantine because a player tested positive. Earlier this month Duquesne dealt with COVID issues, too. Eleven days ago UNC Charlotte announced seven players and staff tested positive.
Villanova, Loyola, Archie Miller’s Indiana team, UNC Wilmington, James Madison, UNC Greensboro, North Carolina A & T, Marshall and several other teams all have had to quarantine people, as well.
The teams that have the most success this season might not be those that are most talented, but instead those that best deal with COVID, which is accelerating in nearly every region of the country now.
Friday, the U.S. recorded the most COVID cases in a single day – over 83,000 – since the pandemic began. Yet even with infections at an all-time high and hospitalizations and deaths reaching alarming levels, experts say the worst is yet to come.
Thirty four states have reported more COVID cases this past week than they did the week before. Eight – Ohio included – had record hospitalizations.
The two hardest hit states are North Dakota and South Dakota, which have more cases per 100,000 people than anywhere else. According to the New York Times, six of the 10 hardest hit places in the U.S. are counties in South Dakota.
So with the Flyers headed to South Dakota – a state where the Governor Kristi Noem has taken a hands-off approach to many precautions, but where tournament officials promise a controlled, safe environment with the players, coaches and staff routinely tested – it was worth hearing from Chapman, who knows a little about the virus.
He’s grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant and East Flatbush sections of Brooklyn. And at the onset of the pandemic, New York City was the epicenter.
“Many of my family members back there got sick, but they recovered,” he said. “But on the downside, I had several cousins who got sick and passed away.”
In Sioux Falls, he now regularly plays pool in leagues and tournaments.
“Four of my pool mates, elderly guys with prior conditions, all passed away from the virus, too,” he said. “So yeah, I definitely know something about it. It’s been right in front of my face.”
‘They still greet me with open arms’
South Dakota seems like an unlikely place for Chapman given his NYC roots and the decades long embrace he’s gotten here in Dayton, where Flyers fans still salute him as “Velvet.”
“He had all kinds of charisma,” legendary UD coach Don Donoher, who recruited him out of Westinghouse High in Brooklyn, once told me. “He was just a popular, popular kid from the time he got here.”
Chapman has said the bond here was immediate: “For some reason, Dayton fans and myself had a personal connection from the start. And they still greet me with open arms.”
He scored 2,233 points as a Flyer and carried his undersized team to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. Even though he played fewer games than players who made it to the Final Four that year, he ended up -- thanks in a big way to 41 in an upset of No. 7 Oklahoma – with the most points (104) in the tournament.
Grant was a freshman on that team and played behind Chapman, then a senior.
“Yeah, we shared the position,” Grant likes to joke. “He played 39 ½ minutes each game and I played the other 30 seconds.”
Last year Chapman came to the game in Chicago and said he reconnected with Grant for the first time in 35 years. In the process he fell in love with the Flyers team and especially Obi Toppin, the fellow New Yorker.
“He’s a very nice kid and he’s gonna be one hell of a pro!” Chapman said.
Chapman feels a special kinship to Dayton for several reasons, including the way Donoher and the late athletics director Tom Frericks pushed him to return to school several years after he’d left so he would finish his undergrad degree. He then went on and got his masters.
He moved to South Dakota a decade ago and initially served as a social studies teacher and basketball coach at the Crazy Horse School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
He met his wife Bobbie, who is Native American (Sioux), in Rapid City. For the past seven years they’ve lived in Sioux Falls, where he gives individual basketball instructions to middle school and high school athletes.
To contact him about lessons, his email is: velvetto3@yahoo.com.
Bubble success
The NBA just finished its season, playing all games in a bubble environment in Orlando. And during that time, as the virus swept across much of Florida, the pro players remained safe.
There was not one positive test in the bubble during the season.
And that was resounding proof that a mix of science, determination and a care for your fellow man really works.
Now college basketball is thinking about bubble competitions and Saturday the Monhegan Sun casino in Connecticut announced it was finalizing plans to bring in up to 35 teams for a series of protected, early-season tournaments and pod games at the 10,000 seat arena used by the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun.
In South Dakota the Bad Boy Mower organizers are taking a different approach than did the organizers and supporting politicians of the Sturgis Bike Rally across the state in August. That 10-day event drew nearly a half-million people – the biggest gathering in the nation during the pandemic – and very few people practiced social distancing or used masks.
The event is now considered a super-spreader of the virus and a big reason the Upper Midwest is being ravaged by COVID-19. Analysis of cellphone data shows Rally attendees travelled to half the counties in the United States afterward.
“Early on, when COVID first started, we didn’t have any cases,” Chapman said. “Now there’s a boom and people are taking it more seriously. I go in stores and see people wearing masks, but not that many are wearing them on the street.”
Dr. Jeremy Cauwels, who is a senior vice president at Sanford Health and a member of the NCAA’s COVID-19 medical advisory board, told reporters he hopes the Sioux Falls tournament will be a sign that sports can endure in the COVID-19 pandemic:
“We aim to provide the blueprint for safely returning to competition for college sports as we navigate COVID 19′s presence in our lives. We want student athletes to be able to play the sports they love, but we want them and everyone else around them to be in a safe environment.”
That assured Chapman and he hopes – depending on the number of spectators allowed into the games – to be there to support his alma mater:
“I’ll be there rooting the Flyers on.”
He’ll also be wearing a mask and standing six feet away.
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