West Baden Springs Hotel may be the ultimate multipurpose
facility considering the costume changes it’s been though over 116 years.
It was once a seminary, a college, and even an Army hospital
with a Christmas circus show in the atrium for the soldiers. More recently, car
shows and concerts have taken place in the atrium. Back in the day, you could
even hit a golf ball from the veranda when teeing off on the first hole of an
adjacent golf course.
Then there was the stint as a temporary hoops arena.
With basketball season upon us, it’s a good time to flash
back to when Larry Bird hosted a basketball camp at West Baden Springs Hotel
about 35 years ago. You’re probably familiar with Bird’s background: he grew up
a poor kid in French Lick who found an outlet in basketball, starred at Indiana
State University, then was a three-time NBA MVP in his 13-year pro career. In
the midst of all that, Bird came back home to host his basketball camp for a
few summers in the early 1980s.
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| Registration in the atrium at the beginning of camp week. |
In the process, Bird put an empty local landmark to good use.
It was around the time when Northwood Institute, the college
that had operated at West Baden Springs Hotel since 1966, was in its final
years inhabiting the building. Doug Partenheimer now works here at French Lick
Resort as a purchasing manager, and back then he was a grade-school kid whose
parents signed him up for the camp. Doug can recall showing up at an impressive
yet slightly eerie-looking and run-down West Baden Springs Hotel that looked
like it hadn’t been inhabited for a while.
“When your parents take you there and drop you off, you don’t
know anyone … I just remember freaking out there for a minute, because you’re like,
‘What kind of place are they taking me to?’ You go in there and it’s kind of
dark and I just remember the floor being cracked and they’ve got these strange
looking statues. When you go into this place, it’s like, ‘How are you going to
play basketball in here?’”
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| Setting up temporary goals outside the hotel, in the area that's now the main entrance. |
In terms of a playing surface, it wasn’t ideal. Portable
basketball goals — Doug figures probably a dozen or more — were wheeled in and
set up throughout the atrium. Lines had to be taped down on the floor. Doug
recalls how sometimes you’d be dribbling the ball and it would hit a gaping
crack in the floor. “The ball would just take off and you’d have to go chase it
down,” he remembers.
There are only so many rims in a town of less than 2,000,
which is why West Baden Springs Hotel turned into the command center of the
camp.
“You’d spend most of your day in there just going to different
stations and working on different fundamentals. Then you’d play games; they’d
split you up and you played some outside. I remember there used to be a court
outside (the hotel), probably around where the valet area is now, it was just
one goal and we’d play out there. Every once in a while, they’d put you on a
bus and take you up to the high school, and at the tennis courts they’d have
goals and you’d play out there also.”
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He remembers being in his room and hearing other kids crying on the other side of the wall — a side effect of staying in a vast, vacant and aged hotel that was about 80 years old at the time. And they weren’t the spacious, luxuriously furnished rooms as they are now. Back then, in the post-Northwood days, the rooms were tiny and plain with just a couple bunk beds.
“That was something. You’d be sitting there sleeping, you’d
hear kids crying. At 10:00 every night, your instructor would come by and (say)
lights out and you’d have to turn the lights out and go to sleep. And of course
back in those days you didn’t have cell phones or anything else to do. Some of
them, you’d hear them in there crying, I guess they’d get homesick.”
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| Larry Bird's high school coaches Gary Holland and Jim Jones (far left and far right) served as some of the instructors at the camp, along with Chris Ford (second from left) who was an assistant coach for Bird's Boston Celtics. On the far left, you can see one of the temporary goals set up in the West Baden Springs Hotel atrium. |
Some of them came from as far as 300 miles away, according
to a story in the local newspaper. That stands to reason when you consider the
people you’d see there. Doug remembers being in the towering presence of NBA
Hall of Famer Kevin McHale, one of Bird’s teammates from the Boston Celtics.
Some of Bird’s former teammates at Indiana State and former coaches served as
the camp instructors.
And while Larry himself wasn’t around much for the
instructional portion of the week, he greeted the kids when they got there,
posed for individual pictures with the campers and participated in the send-off
at the end of camp.
As an excerpt from a local newspaper article detailed: At an awards ceremony on Friday afternoon at
the Springs Valley High School gym, Bird saw to it that every boy was a winner.
Each participant received a certificate, T-shirt, a poster and a Larry Bird
basketball.
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| Larry Bird during a separate appearance at the French Lick Sheraton (now French Lick Springs Hotel). |
It all went down with very little fanfare. In true Larry Bird
style, reflecting the modest roots he came from growing up in French Lick. Bird
was adamant about conducting the camp without any major coverage: “no press, no
media, no nothing,” he told the local newspaper.
“People are saying I
put this on for the money. That’s wrong — I did it for the kids,” Bird also
said in the newspaper story. “Every kid needs a chance.”
A chance to meet a basketball legend, and to play and stay
inside a National Historic Landmark. It added up to the opportunity of a
lifetime for some lucky youngsters in the early ’80s.