Growing up in the small town of Anacoco, Louisiana in the 1950’s and 1960’s could be very boring at times. Sports, hunting and fishing were our main forms of extracurricular entertainment. The student body was too small to field a football team. Basketball was king, and baseball came in a distant second. I was first and foremost a baseball player, horrible in the beginning (first 3 years of Little League), better as I grew older (Dixie League), and not so bad once I hit my high school years, playing Pelican League in the summer and second base for our high school team in the spring.
This was long before video games as we know the gaming industry today. In fact, Pong, the first video game, wasn’t released until 1972, six years after I graduated from high school. We only had one television station we could pick up with our antenna — KALB in Alexandria, about 65 miles east of Anacoco. It was an NBC affiliate and unless you had a really good antenna, you simply had to settle for some static on your screen. This was long before color TVs became all the rage, so we grew up watching a black and white TV.
Growing up on a farm, there was never any shortage of work for me, and my maternal grandfather (Papa Brown) saw to it I always had chores on the farm for me to take care of daily. Until I reached high school baseball was the one true love and passion that didn’t break up with me. I dreamed about becoming a shortstop for the Saint Louis Cardinals when I grew up. The Cardinal’s left fielder and first baseman Stan Musial was my hero. I was obsessed with him. To mimic how he looked when he wore a long-sleeved undershirt under his uniform, I would wear the top of my favorite long-sleeved pajamas underneath my jersey when I played (no one ever knew I was wearing pajamas underneath).
Despite my love for baseball, by the time I was 13 and entering high school my attraction to the opposite sex quickly became a powerful force in my life. By the time I was a high school freshman I became keenly aware of why very few girls ever came to the baseball park to watch my baseball team play during the summer months. Instead, Anacoco girls were fixated, if not obsessed, with watching boys basketball during the fall and winter months. As soon as I saw some of the cutest girls in school get all goo-goo eyed over the boys on the basketball team, I decided I wanted to try out for basketball team in the 9th grade. Besides, all my closest buddies were planning to play on the team.
Keep in mind this was a small school, with a small student body. If you could breath and had a heartbeat you had a pretty good shot at making the team in the early 60’s. But I was short, very short at 5′ 1″ — and probably weighed no more than 100 pounds soaking wet. Any coach with half a brain would have never let me step onto the court, but at Anacoco anyone that wanted to try out got a shot.
Although my peers may have not have realized it at the time, I was a highly competitive individual and never thought about not making the team, no matter how badly I sucked. Failing to make the team wasn’t an option as far as I was concerned. Looking back on those days I must have been a hilarious sight. I wasn’t good at any aspect of the game, but I was so competitive I tried to make up for my lack of basketball skills by outperforming my teammates in the warm-up’s before practice, always trying to lead the pack when we ran 50 laps around the court, doing my best to be near the top when we ran the bleachers (a difficult feat with my short legs), and rank among the top 3 to 5 when we would run wind sprints. I was determined to ultimately beat everyone in these physical drills. But on the court I was a nervous wreck and simply lacked the athleticism and skills to ever play in the starting lineup.
I quickly realized I wasn’t the best at dribbling, passing, shooting or speed. But I was too young and naive to realize that I would never be as good as my teammates. My competitive drive wouldn’t allow me to think I sucked or couldn’t make the team. I suffered through the tryouts, making numerous errors, but I ran like my heart out in all the drills we performed during the warm-ups. Probably because he felt sorry for me and respected the fact we weren’t overflowing with guys wanting to play, Coach Coburn put me on the team. Although he probably regretted it numerous times, I was jacked up, elated to be on the team, for this meant girls would come to watch me play (more like watch me keep the bench warm for other players).
When it came time for Coach to pass out uniforms to the team a day after he picked who would be on the team, he lined up by height — from tallest to shortest. The uniforms were owned by the school and had been used over and over, by many athletes who had gone before us. One by one Coach passed out the uniforms, working his way down the straight line we have formed, moving from the tallest guy at the opposite end of the line down to me at the end with the shortest players. Naturally, I was the last guy in the line.
When he got to the guy before me I noticed that all he had left was two pairs of shorts and one jersey. He gave my teammate the jersey and one pair of shorts, then turned to me and said, “I’m sorry Whitley, but this is all we have left for you.” Everyone laughed while I turned blood red, embarrassed that I didn’t have a jersey like everyone else, not to mention the fact that the shorts were about 3 sizes too big for me.
I went home and told my mother what had happened. She felt sorry for me and said, “Let’s go shopping in Leesville and see if we can’t find you a jersey.” The one small sporting goods store we had gave us disappointing news. “We don’t sell basketball uniforms Mrs. Whitley.” My head dropped, Mom knelt down, but her hand under my chin, and said, “Don’t you worry buddy, I have an idea.”
We got in the car and she drove to West Department Store. We went in and she bought me an undershirt, what many people refer to these days as a “wife-beater’s undershirt,” the sleeveless kind made from ribbed cotton. It had shoulder straps, just like a basketball jersey. In those days quite a few stores sold clothes dye. Our school colors were purple and gold. The uniforms Coach Coburn has passed out to us were purple with gold lettering. Mom went to a nearby clothing store, purchased some purple dye and two large yellow iron-on patches. Such patches were used to mend clothes with holes in them back in the day, but was a relatively new product, having only been marketed for a few years at the time. Most of the time you only saw the patches in blue denim, because they were frequently used to patch torn knees in blue jeans. But we were in luck, the store had several colors and yellow was just what Mom was hoping to buy.
We came home and she gave me a pair of scissors and told me to take the rectangle-shaped iron-on patches, cut off the corners and cut a large hole in each of them to to make two zeros, each resembling a zero in the Harvard font style. She dyed and dried the undershirt, then ironed on a big yellow zero on both the front and back sides of the undershirt. Once completed, she said, “There you go Buddy, you now have your own basketball jersey.”
A few days later, as were were getting dressed in the boys locker room before our first game of the season, I pulled out my jersey to put it on. Everyone started laughing at me for wearing a zero. “Look at the zero wearing a zero,” one said. It was very embarrassing, but somehow I persevered through the moment. I ran out onto the court bouncing my basketball and suddenly a ripple of laughter began on the opposite side of the court and traveled around the gym like a giant wave.
Although we make take for granted a uniform with number zero today, it definitely was a first for Vernon Parish, Louisiana, if not the entire state. The crowd was laughing their butts off at the thought of anyone being so stupid as to choose the number zero, but better yet wear it on the court. Girls were pointing at me and snickering, but it didn’t slow me down. I started shooting jump shots, probably missing 3 out of every 4 shots I took, clanging each one off the rim while people laughed and pointed. But I didn’t give up, I didn’t quit. I played, or shall I say, “I rode the bench” as number zero throughout my entire freshman year.
I’m not sure if I scored any points that year, and being on the team didn’t land me the “girl of my dreams” like I thought it would. After all, who wants to make it publicly known that you’re dating a “real life zero?” No girl wanted to be caught dead with anyone labeled “Zero.” These days, even NBA stars wear the number zero proudly. But in the basketball season of 1962-1963, one could say that I made a major branding and publicity error by picking zero.
One might ask why my Mom chose number zero for me. I know I asked her that question a hundred times. She said when she saw the rectangle-shaped iron-on patches she realized they were not wide enough to make a double-digit number, and making a zero was the simplest thing to do with a rectangle. The way she viewed it, we saved cost by not having to buy 4 patches to make a double digit number and we saved time by making a zero. Later, she admitted that making the number one would be even simpler, but she wanted to save me the embarrassment of getting teased for wearing the number 1 when my quality of play was closer to a zero. Thus, we swapped one form of embarrassment for another form of embarrassment.
I was indeed the Rodney Dangerfield of Anacoco basketball. Funny, but I no longer recall the jersey number I wore in subsequent years, but I’ve never forgotten my time riding the bench as little number Zero!”