Prairie hoops

Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: High School Basketball in Illinois
by Taylor H.A. Bell 2004, University of Illinois Press, Urbana
248 pages, $24.95

Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: High School Basketball in Illinois, by Taylor Bell, is the first comprehensive history of high school basketball in Illinois. The book brings together for the first time the stories of the great players, teams, and coaches of Illinois high school basketball from the 1940s to the 1990s. The title refers to the Illinois high school basketball legends Sweet Charlie Brown (Chicago, DuSable), Dike Eddleman (Centralia), Cazzie Russell (Chicago, Carver), and Bobby Joe Mason (Centralia). These four players reflect the unique quality of high school basketball in Illinois and their first names are enough to trigger memories from their fans.

Bell, an award-winning sports-writer and journalist with the Chicago Sun-Times (he retired in 2001), is one of the most respected sports journalists in Illinois. Until his retirement, he covered high school basketball in the state and was a permanent fixture at the Illinois state high school basketball tournament, attending every tournament since 1958. In addition, Bell wrote a column on high school basketball and covered the sport extensively throughout the state for more than 40 years. For this book Bell conducted 350 personal interviews with coaches, administrators, players, family members, and fans of high school basketball in the state. He traveled extensively and spent hours on the phone interviewing important legends in Illinois high school basketball history across the country.

His book is divided into six decades starting with the 1940s and ending with the 1990s. Each chapter covers a decade and contains ten stories. Bell covers Illinois high school basketball from Cobden to Hebron, Quincy to Paris, Peoria to Pinckneyville, and Champaign to Chicago. He writes about many of the outstanding teams, coaches, and players who helped make Illinois one of the most exciting places for high school basketball in the nation.

Sixty photos add depth to the stories, exploits, and accounts of important figures in Illinois high school basketball history. Bell succeeds in giving insights on all sections of the state with vivid portraits of the players, coaches, schools, and communities that make the game so compelling in Illinois.

Bell relives some of the greatest moments in Illinois high school basketball—the dramatic, last-second, game-winning shots and great finishes, the Cinderella stories, the legendary players and coaches, the great teams, and even the controversies. Bell maintains that the issue of race in the game is too important to ignore. "A history of high school basketball in Illinois cannot be written without reference to race," he writes.

Bell maintains that the most compelling figures in the sixty years he covered were Centralia's Dick Eddleman, who may have been the greatest athlete Illinois ever produced and; Chicago Carver's star Cazzie Russell, who played college basketball at the University of Michigan and had an excellent career as a professional player for the NBA. He argues that the 1954 Chicago DuSable High School basketball team with "Sweet" Charlie Brown and Paxton Pumpkin changed the face of the game, with its fast-break style and Harlem Globetrotter-type antics.

Bell credits his wife for inspiring the book and encouraging him to write about the sport he covered for so many years. In the introduction, Bell acknowledges the works of sportswriters Jim Enright and Bob Williams, who've tackled similar subjects in recent years. Enright, the longtime Chicago sportswriter, wrote March Madness in 1977. But that book, Bell notes, was simply a "year-by-year compilation of state tournament records, box scores, interviews with a handful of former players and coaches, and stories about the some of the greatest teams in state history." Williams, who wrote for the Indianapolis Star, penned Hoosier Hysteria in 1982, which Bell calls a "thoroughly compelling, comprehensive, and well-researched overview of the most celebrated players, teams, an coaches in the glorious history of high school basketball in Indiana."

"Before there was Milan, the small Indiana hamlet that won the 1954 state championship and was the impetus for the motion picture Hoosiers," Bell contends, "there was Hebron, which in 1952 became the smallest school ever to win a state title in Illinois."

Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: High School Basketball in Illinois is an excellent, well-researched and written book by a lifetime fan and authority on the sport. In the appendices, readers will find where every interviewed player, coach, and administrator is today, as well as the author's personal rankings of the best players and teams in over six decades of high school basketball in Illinois. In my opinion, this is a book that any fan of basketball will enjoy.

William E. Bessler is a lifelong fan of high school basketball. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

24 Illinois Heritage