His basketball record didn't make history in Virginia

PORTSMOUTH

At the March parade for I.C. Norcom’s state champion basketball team, politicians waved from convertibles and Hummers as lanky players standing in the bed of a truck trailer threw candy to the jubilant crowd lining London Boulevard.

Most people there that day hadn’t heard of Johnny Morris.

His old jersey – No. 11 – lies neatly folded in a small glass case in the school’s main hallway, the only number retired in Norcom basketball history.

Next to the uniform is a picture of a young, wiry Morris holding a basketball above his head. It hangs over the scorecard from one amazing game. That night in 1961, Johnny Morris was unforgettable.

At halftime, the visiting Norcom Greyhounds – wearing maroon jerseys and shorts, socks of the same color pulled to their knees, and tan Converse All-Stars – sat resting on two small locker room benches.

The team had just played two quarters of extraordinary basketball against the Mary N. Smith Bulldogs in rural Accomac on the Eastern Shore. The scoreboard read: Norcom 69, Mary N. Smith 19. Morris already had 59 points.

Norcom coach Bob Smith looked at Morris, a 5-foot, 11½-inch senior guard.

“How you feeling?” Smith asked. “You want to keep doing this?”

Yes, Morris said, he’d like to keep shooting.

The trim man with a silver-haired mustache and goatee is wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. He jumps up from the kitchen table at his Virginia Beach home and establishes a pivot foot, his Nike flip-flops scratching softly on the linoleum floor.

Johnny Morris, now 67, pulls his elbows back so his hands dip behind his head. He whips his wrists forward, launching an imaginary basketball with an unorthodox catapult form. The shot, almost impossible to block, allowed him to shoot over the most aggressive defenders.

He later learned what he calls “politically correct” shooting – today’s standard one-hand shot released in front of the head – but it was this two-handed, high-arcing, rainbow jumper that he used to near perfection in high school.

Once Morris got hot, he was unstoppable, especially from around the top of the key. Play a few games of H-O-R-S-E against him today and his accuracy is obvious as he easily buries 18-foot jumpers.

People still call him by his nickname – “Pep.”

Most of them don’t believe it when they hear about how many points he scored in that Accomac game. He can see it in their eyes. He hasn’t used a computer since retiring from coaching and teaching at Kellam High School in Virginia Beach eight years ago, but he knows what to tell skeptics.

“Google it.”

What Google won’t tell you is that when Morris was a Norcom senior in 1961, the school was part of the Virginia Interscholastic Association, which served black high schools during segregation.

Once a year, Hampton Roads’ VIA teams would take a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay – the bridge-tunnel would open three years later – and ride a school bus past miles of farm fields to play at Mary N. Smith. The country school, which today stands empty just north of the Perdue chicken plant on U.S. 13, was known for its baseball team but struggled at basketball, a sport dominated by urban teams.

Norcom and Booker T. Washington of Norfolk ruled the league and were fierce rivals. That year, Morris was locked in a battle with Booker T. star Milton Mason for the league scoring title. Both players averaged about 16 points a game.

Coach Smith calculated that Morris needed almost 50 points against Mary N. Smith to top Mason and win the scoring title. Morris had that by halftime, but what happened in the second half would land him in the history books – at least, most of them.

In the third quarter, Mary N. Smith came out with a strategy to stop Morris.

“We tried double-teaming. We tried picking him up at half-court,” said Russell Gaskins, 67, a retired defense contractor who lives in Pennsylvania. He was a Mary N. Smith guard who played that night against Morris.

“Just nothing was working. Everything he put up was going in.”

Morris’ accuracy allowed Norcom to set up its tenacious full-court press after scoring. Mary N. Smith players were overwhelmed and turned the ball over, allowing Norcom to quickly feed Morris the ball again.

Some opposing players seethed.

“It appeared to me they were staging something, and it was kind of selfish,” said Marshall Cropper, 66, a Mary N. Smith forward and former professional football player who now runs the golf academy at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

But Bulldogs fans who crowded into the small gym couldn’t help but start cheering Morris on.

Morris remembers hitting every shot he took in the third quarter, when he scored 36 points.

With one quarter to play, he was up to 95 points.

“I was there that night,” said Alvin Gatling, a small forward on Norcom’s 1961 team. “If they’d had 3-pointers, I would have liked to see what the final would have been.

“I want to say 80 percent of his shots were jumpers, and of those I’d say at least 65 percent would have been 3-pointers.”

For years, Gatling, an avid bowler, has been telling his buddies at the lanes about his teammate’s incredible game. No one believes him.

Gatling, a 68-year-old public television engineer, decided to meet Morris in April to get a copy of the game scorecard.

Morris pulled up in front of the Commodore Theatre in downtown Portsmouth. He sprang from his shiny Nissan Maxima and grabbed Gatling’s hand, giving him a shoulder bump hug.

Morris handed Gatling the scorecard. They pored over the numbers.

Gatling stared at the card. A long line of 2s, each representing a basket, is crammed next to Morris’ name.

“Look!” Morris said, his booming laugh careening down High Street. “He was the second-leading scorer!”

“I sure was,” Gatling said. “Three points.”

They went down the roster from that night, stopping on a player named Robert Windley, a wide-body forward who is pastor at Christian Antioch Church in Portsmouth.

Morris and Gatling decided to find Windley.

“Fast Bob – we called him that because he was slow,” Morris explained. “Everything he did was in slow motion.”

Morris pulled up to a brick ranch in Cavalier Manor, where the hulking shape of Windley, 67, stood on the porch.

“Fast Bob, Fast Bob,” Morris said, ambling up the driveway.

In a pastor’s booming voice, Windley responded: “Johnny Morris. Johnny Morris.” The two ex-teammates filled the small porch.

Morris has played so much basketball in his life that it all runs together, even details from that ’61 game.

But Windley remembers. He worked the low post, where he would step to the corner to catch passes. He would then swing the ball to Morris for open jumpers.

On defense, Norcom’s press forced the other team’s ball handler to his weak side and into a double-team trap. Other players would rotate to intercept errant passes.

“The crazy man or man-to-man slough, coach called it,” Windley said.

“The slough! How’d you remember that?” Morris laughed, slapping his knee.

In the fourth quarter, Morris continued to shoot as teammates funneled him the ball.

His energy – he played all 32 minutes – and accuracy proved too much for the Mary N. Smith players, who finally gave up double-teaming him and played him man-to-man.

Morris scored 32 points in the fourth quarter. The final score was 139-33.

Morris’ contribution: 127 points. His total shot attempts are lost to history, but Morris made 57 field goals, a bucket about every 30 seconds. He was 13 for 21 from the foul line, shooting underhanded “granny-style,” as required by coach Smith.

The question he gets most about that night is: “Weren’t you tired?”

His answer: “I ain’t ever been tired in my life playing basketball.”

Morris’ point total still stands as the second-highest nationwide for a high school player. The record, set a year earlier in 1960, is 135. Morris is one of 15 high school boys to score more than 100 in a game, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

His 57 field goals that night are a national record.

Morris holds another record from that night for which he’s not recognized: highest point total in a Virginia high school basketball game.

The Virginia High School League, the group that keeps state records, lists Freddie James of Churchland High School as the player who scored the most points in one game: 83, in 1954.

I.C. Norcom couldn’t be part of the all-white Virginia High School League in the segregated South in 1961. The school belonged to the VIA from 1954 until integration in 1969.

The VHSL maintains records for schools that were part of its league when the record was set, said Ken Tilley, VHSL executive director.

“VIA was a separate organization, and we don’t have access to that information,” Tilley said.

Lucious Edwards, archivist at Virginia State University in Petersburg, which maintains VIA records, said the records are open to review.

“They don’t want to come down here and look,” he said. “They have made no effort to do anything.”

Tilley said listing Morris’ 127 points, a well-documented feat, without having other VIA records would be an unacceptable, “piecemeal” approach.

“We would be happy to expand our listings, but it needs to be done in an orderly, comprehensive manner,” he said.

“That’s not the reason,” Edwards said. “They don’t want to do that because the guy is black and played for a black school. They don’t want to acknowledge it.”

Morris’ feat has been listed in the national record book since 1978, the first year it was published. The Virginia High School League had to sign off on the record before the national group would accept it, said John Gillis, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations and editor of the group’s record book.

The key component is the state association endorsement,” he said. He’s not aware of any other records in the national book that aren’t in the respective state’s record book, Gillis said.

Morris said he hopes one day to be in the Virginia record book.

“They could put an asterisk by it and say it was the old VIA, but they act like it never happened.”

Aaron Applegate, (757) 222-5122. aaron.applegate@pilotonline.com