Henry Logan: The Stuff of Legend

By Jim Hughes

Writ large acorss the North Carolina mountains is the legend of Henry Logan. A transcedent basketball talent who helped put Jim Crow in its grave. He broke the color line in Southern college basketball in 1964, enrolling in a snall teachers' college in the North Carolina mountains and establishing scoring records that still stand sixty years later. Before inuries cut short his career, he was known as The Little Guy Who Could Fly. Henry Logan: The Stuff of Legend details his meteoric rise, his tragic fall and his ultimate redemption through Jesus Christ.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Hughes
• Release date: Dec 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223388371

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Stuff of Legend

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Any second now, Henry Logan will break free of this sentence and go bounding across the page, running like lightning through a morass of words, dribbling a basketball between his legs and behind his back, making the perfect pass to a teammate breaking for the basket. Or jump straight up, spin a full revolution in the air and stuff the ball through a hoop ten feet above the floor.

Those were two of the moves he perfected in 1962 at all-black Stephens-Lee High School in Asheville, North Carolina in the last days of the segregated South. Back then he was a rising star with unlimited promise, the path before him clearly marked: This way to money, fame and the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen.

Now he has truly and finally broken free. Henry Lee Logan died on July 26, 2023. He was 78 years old. Most people must be content with one life. Henry Logan lived three. The idolized basketball star. The hopeless street drunk. And finally the Servant of Christ, redeemed by faith.

I began writing this story in 1997. Like the man I was writing about, it started with so much promise. I’d been told, by a man who was supposed to know, that Henry Logan was the Jackie Robinson of Southern college basketball, the first black to play for a white school in the Jim Crow South. So it wasn’t just a sports story, it was also a civil rights story. After I met him, I learned he could not read until he was 35 years old, and that he could not quit drinking until he was nearly 50. I thought the story would write itself. I could not have imagined that 25 years later I would still be working on it.

Late last year, I came across a box full of notebooks and papers and yellowed newspaper clips and several unpublished manuscripts. I submitted versions to The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, and the like. No takers. I had one short piece published by a magazine called Business:NC – The Amazing Story of Basketball Legend Henry Logan. That’s been the extent of it.

Along the way I’ve taken many approaches. I’d read a lot of Southern history and literature at Chapel Hill and I knew more than most people about 20th Century Southern politics, especially North Carolina politics. I thought it would be a good idea to quote some of these writers and make deep-thought references to their work, with a few snarky asides aimed at the ones I didn’t like. In the end, I’ve struck all those attempts at literary pretension, leaving only brief selections from C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1965) and Pat Jordan’s Black Coach (1971).

During those 25 years, I’d started and stopped working on the story more than a few times. I never could get it right. The main problem was it had too many pieces, too many angles. Was it a sports story? A civil rights story? A story about the South at the end of segregation? A story about a terrible addiction and a heroic recovery? A story about one man’s journey back to Christ? I could never get all those pieces working in concert.

After finding the box, I decided to take one more shot at it. I felt I owed it to him, that I had let him down. I planned to finish by August, get it printed and bound and make a surprise visit to Asheville to present it to him. I was almost done when I learned of his death.

One more note: Some of the sentences you’re about to read are 25 years old. They appear as if I was unaware of his death. I decided to keep them as they are. At the end of this long process, I decided it should read less like an academic treatise and more like a conversation in a sports bar or the reminisces of a few old men at an Asheville rest home.

What follows is the story of one man’s life, a man who squandered a great gift, struggled mightily, suffered terribly, and at the end became the hero he was always meant to be.  

JPH/October 2023

I

Bully with a Badge

On a spring morning in 1954, a boy shoots baskets in Asheville’s Aston Park. The boy is on fire. He cannot miss.

The scene is as clean as a movie set. An immaculately trimmed lawn runs to the edge of the concrete court. Neat rows of thick-trunked oaks stand guard around it. The shadowy nubs of the Pisgah Mountains rise on the horizon.

The boy doesn’t see the fat man lurking at the edge of the park. The man wears the uniform of the Asheville Police Department. He starts running for the boy.

Get your black ass outta here, the man yells. This park white only. No niggers allowed. The boy drops his basketball and runs away.

Forty-four years later, the man that boy became returns to Aston Park. He’s in his fifties now, with only the barest recollection of the thick Afro he sported in the Age of Disco. His face is as smooth as the top of his head. His brown eyes are clear. He walks with a limp. He sits on a bench near where the court used to be. The court is long gone, but the memory remains.

It’s the scaredest I’ve ever been. I don’t know what that man wanted to do to me, but I wasn’t going to find out. I took off running and didn’t look back. Left my ball. It was almost brand-new. Didn’t know I couldn’t be there. I was nine years old. It was the best court I’d ever been on. There was nothing like it in my neighborhood. We had a red-dirt court up the hill from our house on Bartlett Street. Backboard nailed to a tree, bent rim, no net. I played on that court every day until the sun went down and Momma called me in for supper.

Such was the Jim Crow South, where a bully with a badge could chase a nine-year boy from a public park for the crime of shooting hoops. But George Wallace and his gang of latter-day night-riders were wrong. Segregation was not