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assistant coach for four years and used to live
across the street from him. But how that came to
be is such an incredible story, to this day Helton
shakes his head in wonder as he retells it.
Hoosier hysteria
Basketball was invented in Springfield, Mass., by
Dr. James Naismith. But people in Indiana will
tell you they perfected it.
Helton is a big believer in that mystique. He
played basketball at tiny Austin High School
for coach Ray Green, a member of the Indiana
Basketball Hall of Fame and the father of Steve
Green, coach Bobby Knight’s first recruit at
Indiana University.
“We bled basketball,” Helton said. “We were
dead serious about the game.”
After a stint in junior college he found himself
in a lucrative but unfulfilling factory job, but
one day he saw in the newspaper that a local
player had gotten a scholarship to NewMexico
Highlands University. Helton told his buddy Bill
Sullivan about it, and they hatched a plan: They
were going to drive there and see if they could get
scholarships, too.
“We left on June 1, 1965,” Helton said.
“Hopped in his 1949 Rambler and we headed
west. We’d never been farther west than
Vincennes, Indiana. Had no idea where we were
going —we just took off. And we get farther
west and I’m looking at all the desert cactus and
saying, ‘Oh my God, what are we getting into?’”
They got to NewMexico Highlands and
learned that the coach was on a recruiting trip
… in Indiana, about 20 minutes fromwhere they
lived. Try Western NewMexico University, they
were told.
They got to Western NewMexico… and the
coach didn’t have any available scholarships. Try
Grand Canyon College in Phoenix, he said.
They got to Phoenix and called Grand
Canyon, but Lindsey, who had just been hired,
wasn’t there. They got his home phone number.
He was playing golf. Still not giving up, they
called back in the evening. Bingo. Lindsey told
them to come to the gym the next morning for
a tryout.
When they drove down 35th Avenue in the
morning, they went right past Isaac Middle
School, where Helton later would win all those
games as a coach and where the gymnasium
is now named after him. The tryout went
well — “We held our own,” said Helton, ever
the competitor — and Lindsey offered them
scholarships, right on the spot.
“I knew Indiana was a good basketball state,”
Gary Ernst
Ben Lindsey