How to go
What: Documentary,"The Blur: The Dwight Anderson Story"
When: 6 p.m., Wednesday
Where: The Salvation Army Dayton Kroc Center, 1000 N. Keowee St.
Cost: Free
It was about eight years ago that The Blur was brought into focus for him.
Branson Wright, a Cleveland Plain Dealer sports writer who once interned at the Dayton Daily News, was covering the Cleveland Cavaliers at the pre-draft camp in Chicago when he bumped into Sedric Toney, the former Wilbur Wright High and University of Dayton star, who had played five years in the NBA and had tutored many players since on their way to the league.
Wright remembers their conversation:
“I asked Sedric, ‘Was Dwight Anderson really that good?’”
Wright had heard about Anderson for a long time:
“I’d gone to college for a few years at West Virginia University and back then we’d all brag on where we’d come from and who was the best athlete from our town. And every time I ran into people from Dayton, the same name would come up: Dwight Anderson. They called him, ‘The Blur,’ because of how fast he was on the basketball court.”
Wright had heard how Anderson, as just a sophomore, had led Dayton Roth to the state title in 1976. How, by the time he was a senior, he was rated the top prep player in the nation and how today he still is considered by most to be the greatest basketball talent Dayton had ever produced.
‘Was he that good?’
A Parade Magazine All-American who averaged 38 points 14 rebounds and 11 assists per game as a senior, Anderson had been recruited by nearly every major program in the nation and had chosen Kentucky, where he starred as freshman.
After one more season he transferred to Southern Cal, was first team All-Pac 10, and though his bright light was beginning to wane amidst dark rumors, he was a second round NBA pick of the Washington Bullets in 1982.
Soon after, his NBA hopes fizzled, he starred for a while in the Continental Basketball Association, and then he all but disappeared — turning into “a ghost” as he once described himself to me in the early 1990s — as he descended into the netherworld of drugs, alcohol, homelessness and hopelessness.
All that made him something of a mythical figure to those who learned of him second hand. And that’s why Wright quizzed Toney, who was a bit incredulous and wanted to dispel any doubt.
“He says to me ‘Was he that good? OK, come with me!’” Wright recalled. “In that room were Mark Aguirre, Isiah Thomas and Dominique Wilkins. He took me up to each guy and said, ‘Tell him about Dwight.’
“Well, they all just raved.”
Thomas called Anderson the Michael Jordan of his time.
“All that kind of took it over the top for me,” Wright said. “I knew I had to get on that project I’d been thinking about.”
Initially, he’d thought of writing about Anderson, but the more Wright heard about his speed on the court — the more he learned about The Blur — the more he believed the story would be best served as a documentary.
Believing in project
He said a copy editor at the Plain Dealer was into film and so was another friend. So the trio set out to tell Anderson’s story. But they had no money and finding the elusive Anderson wasn’t always easy back then and the venture took years to complete.
“Unfortunately over the years, the other guys dropped out because it took so long,” Wright said. “I stuck with it and by begging and borrowing …and believing, I finally got it done.”
The documentary — “The Blur: The Dwight Anderson Story” — will have its debut 6 p.m., Wednesday at the Salvation Army Dayton Kroc Center, 1000 N. Keowee St.
The people of the Dayton area are invited. Admission is free, although donations will be accepted.
The City of Dayton Human Relations Council is helping to host the show.
As Catherine Crosby, the council’s executive director, said in a statement: “We hope that the documentary will engage young people in refection and discussion on perseverance, leadership and personal responsibility.”
Wright will be at the Kroc Center to talk about the film he has produced and he said Anderson — now clean and sober and renewed after decades in the shadows — will be there to “sign autographs, take pictures, kiss babies…and share the lessons of his story.”
Although he admitted being excited and nervous about the unveiling of his eight-year labor of love, Wright said, there is one thing of which he’s sure: “I knew the debut had to be in Dayton.”
After all, this is the place where Anderson’s fame was at its peak. It’s where he plummeted to the depths for more than 25 years; and it’s where, against all odds, he’s now had a phoenix-like rise.
Dream destroyed, reclaimed
In his prep heyday, Anderson was one of the most talked about figures in this town. The Roth games were events. The gym, with people stacked five-deep around the sideline, would regularly sell out and finally games were moved to UD Arena.
The crowd often would include a who’s who of college coaches, guys like North Carolina’s Dean Smith, Notre Dame’s Digger Phelps, UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian and Kentucky’s Joe B. Hall.
As he approached the NBA draft, Anderson might be found driving a Mercedes 300 SD Turbo Diesel around Dayton or flashing a thick roll of bills on The Strip in Las Vegas.
By then the allure of cocaine and cognac — and later crack cocaine and whatever he could find to drink — was dominating everything until The Blur was so far out of focus that the basketball dream was destroyed.
Anderson found himself back on the streets of West Dayton, sleeping in abandoned warehouses and for a while in an old garage on Hoover Avenue that had no heat, running water or plumbing. He ducked around alleys so he would not be seen by those who once cheered him; and in 1999 he witnessed the murder of a young, college-bound basketball talent who had been selling drugs.
Over the years various people here tried to help him, and a few years ago Toney and Stivers coach Eric Bradley finally were instrumental in getting him into the John Lucas Treatment Center in Houston.
Anderson came home clean and by all accounts has stayed that way. He has found some coaching jobs in the areas — including assisting at Fairmont High a while — and now does personal basketball training and plays for a Dayton team in a national old-time basketball league.
“It’s taken eight years for me to tell this story, because I didn’t have the money to do the project in one,” Wright said. “But there’s a good side to that, too.
“If I’d finished it that first year, Dwight was still on the street. But over eight years, he has changed and now the story has a happy ending.”
The Blur is back in focus.
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