“Any time we were going to go somewhere in the van to play, we had to pay up first,” Cliff “Sput” Nelson, a 42-year-old former Mohawks player who now has a family of his own, said with a smile.
“You had to tell Mr. Pearson a Bible verse you memorized. That bought your ticket. And if you didn’t know one, he wouldn’t let you go. And it had to be a good one. You couldn’t just say, ‘Jesus wept.’ ”
The other evening a few former Mohawk players and coaches and Zell Pearson, Troy’s effervescent wife of 52 years, were remembering the rules, teachings and encouragements of the man who ran the Mohawks — the youth basketball program that for some three decades touched the lives of thousands of kids: boys and girls, black and white, from Dayton’s West Side and places like Beavercreek and Centerville.
“He stressed respect for adults, no sassing back,” said former coach Ray Knight. “And no running up the score.”
“And you had to show your report cards to play,” said former coach John Draper. “If you needed help, he got you tutoring.”
Vertis Duncan, another former coach, laughed: “He wanted the kids to eat one balanced meal a day. If it was up to them, they’d have eaten just at McDonald’s. So when we were travelling — I especially remember one trip to San Antonio — we ate at a smorgasbord every day. At first kids said, ‘What’s a smorgasbord?’ I said, ‘You’re about to find out.’ ”
One belief that was unbending was that no player gets cut. “He’d say, ‘Honey, don’t say the boy can’t play. This might be the only team he makes in his life,’ ” Zell said.
And so one year the Mohawks ended up with four fourth-grade teams and 16 teams overall.
“When I started coaching,” said former Mohawk and current Trotwood youth basketball director Brian Dunson, “he got hold of me and said, ‘Remember, don’t cut anyone. Let the kids play.’ ”
And a lot of them did for Pearson. They include former college players like Kirk Taylor, “TuTu” Brown, Ray Springer, Jamie Skelton, Chris McGuire, Carlos Knox and Darnell Hoskins. Some of them are area high school coaches today. Others, like Jeff Graham and Keith Byars, went on to the NFL, and Derrick Brown is an NBA rookie with the Charlotte Bobcats.
Many are family men and women and community leaders, including Dunson, the vice president of the local NAACP chapter.
“I consider him, especially for black kids, the father of youth basketball in Dayton,” Dunson said. “He was a father figure, a role model. And he taught us way more than just basketball.”
Award in his name
The Mohawks have been defunct for four years, about the time the now 78-year-old Pearson’s bout with Alzheimer’s began to change his life.
Pearson will be honored Friday night, March 12, when the Trotwood youth basketball program holds its awards banquet at Trotwood-Madison Middle School.
The annual Troy Pearson award will be unveiled as well. Dunson, the event organizer, said it will go to a player from each team who “comes to practice on time, doesn’t back-talk, is a good student and shows the highest level of character. It doesn’t matter if he or she plays a lot. It’s the other stuff that counts.”
Anybody once connected to the Mohawk program is invited to take part in the event that begins at 6 p.m.
“Everything he did was from the heart,” Knight said. “It was just a love of kids and basketball.”
Pearson had been a basketball star at Toledo Libbey High School and then at Fort Valley State, which is where Zell met him: “Oooh back then, he had a hook shot and when he just started with that arm going up, the fans in the stands would go crazy.”
A revenue officer with the IRS, his job eventually brought him from Cincinnati to Dayton in 1973. At each stop, he took an interest in youths in need.
Mohawk pride
“We didn’t have anything either,” said Zell, who raised five college-educated children with Troy. “The first trophy he gave out he made himself out of wood and then painted red.
“At first we didn’t have any money for uniforms, so we got some T-shirts and I used my lipstick to write the numbers on them.”
The Mohawks sought donations from area businessmen, and they always raised money on their own. “We had fish fries, sold barbecue and we washed cars and school buses, even hearses,” said Duncan.
For more than 15 years the Mohawks charged players only $25 to play, and when kids didn’t have the funds, Pearson footed the bill himself.
“We bought kids shoes and coats, we’d go to a tournament and do everything from take them shopping to teach them the importance of taking a bath and being polite,” Zell said.
Eventually the Mohawks had orange and white warm-ups and, as usual, they continued to win. Dunson remembers the sixth-grade team he was on — with Nelson and Ron Tillman, both of whom reminisced with him the other night — going 56-2.
“I grew up in Residence Park and played first for Westwood,” Tillman said. “But when you saw the Mohawks walk into the gym, there was just a presence about them: The warm-ups, the structure to the program, Coach Pearson — you just wanted to be a Mohawk.”
And to do so, it took just a few dollars, a lot of respect, good grades and, of course, those Bible verses.
“Miss Pearson told me one time one of the players’ parents were agnostic,” Dunson grinned. “He said he didn’t have a Bible. So she went out and got him one.”
The existence of God may still have been a question to some of the players’ parents, but not the requirements of Troy Pearson:
No ticket, no ride.
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