‘A Little Hole In My Heart’

Ken Mink has hang-glided off Chattanooga’s Lookout Mountain, parasailed over and scuba dived in the Caribbean, skied on the waters off Jamaica and climbed almost to the top of the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

He’s had a bit part in a Hollywood movie, written scripts for television and been a radio sports announcer. He’s been a reporter and an editor for newspapers of every size, including the Bristol Herald Courier.

He once played in an exhibition basketball game against the Harlem Globetrotters. He’s been recognized by his native state as an official “Kentucky Colonel.”

Clearly, Mink has done a lot in his lifetime, but he admits he has “a little hole in my heart” that nothing he’s done has been able to fill.

So at 73, he’s trying to do something about it.

Mink has gone back to college. He’s enrolled at Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tenn., and is taking classes such as Spanish and computer science that he believes will be useful.

More important, he is getting the chance to finish a college basketball career that was unceremoniously interrupted 52 years ago.

“I was out shooting baskets a couple of years ago in my neighbor’s driveway, and I kept thinking, ‘I can still play this game,’” the 6-foot, 195-pound Mink recalled last week.

As he kept knocking down long-range jump shots, Mink said, he decided to see if, indeed, he had what it took.

“I told my wife I wanted to try to see if I could play again, and she said, ‘You do realize you’re 72,’” he continued. “‘OK, I said, I might not be able to keep up athletically in terms of running and jumping, but I know I can still shoot the ball with any of those guys. Maybe I can be a spot-up shooter.”

One and done
Mink grew up in Vicco, a tiny coal mining town in southeastern Kentucky’s Hazard County. Dilce Combs Memorial High School in nearby Jeff didn’t offer football or baseball – there wasn’t enough level space for a field, Mink said – but its basketball program was excellent.

And Mink was one of its stars.

During his high school career, he single-handedly helped his team win five games with last-second jump shots or free throws. In 1954, he set a regional record by scoring 17 points in one quarter and, later, set another for most free throws in a single game, sinking 13 of his 17 attempts against eventual state champion Hazard High.

Mink moved on to Lees Junior College in Jackson, Ky., where he averaged 11.8 points as a freshman during the 1955-56 season. He scored 21 points in his first college game for the Generals, and he later surprised more than a few folks in his home state by connecting for 16 points against the University of Kentucky freshman team.

“I had a pretty good first year,” he said. “I was looking forward to my sophomore season.”

But he never got the chance to play it. Five days before the season was to begin, he was summoned to the office of the school president and informed that he’d been kicked off the team and expelled from school. He was accused of playing a nasty prank: smearing shaving cream all over the clothing and shoes of the basketball coaching staff.

Mink insisted he was innocent, but the president said a reliable witness had seen Mink leaving the gymnasium just after the prank allegedly occurred.

“I was shocked,” he said. “I did not do any of that, but there was no due process. It was a private school, and [officials] could do what they wanted. I felt trapped, and I was bitter and angry about being railroaded like that.”

On the 35-mile drive home that afternoon, Mink decided he’d had enough of school and basketball. The next morning, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.

Turns out, he wasn’t done with basketball – not by a long shot. Assigned to the Strategic Air Command base at Blytheville, Ark., Mink quickly became a valuable member of the base’s basketball team.

One season, he was MVP of a regional tournament at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.

Accurate from long range
Mink’s best asset as a basketball player was his deadly outside shot. Sometimes, he said, he tries to calculate what his scoring average might have been had the 3-point arc existed when he played.

Years later, as he demonstrated in his neighbor’s driveway and other times during Senior Olympics competitions, he still possesses that sweet shot.

But would it be enough, he wondered, to rate a look by a college team? Mink decided to find out, and he e-mailed the basketball coaches at eight colleges within an hour of his Knoxville, Tenn., home.

Both impressed and sympathetic, Roane coach Randy Nesbit decided to give Mink a chance. Nesbit told Mink that if he could enroll and satisfy the school’s academic requirements, he could join the team as a walk-on.

“I’m sort of an impulsive guy,” Nesbit said. “He asked for a shot, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ He felt he’d been wrongly treated the first time, and he just couldn’t let it go. Hopefully, this will give him some closure with it.”

The first conversation between coach and player occurred more than a year ago – too late for Mink to join the team for the 2007-08 season. Mink began to attend Roane games, and Nesbit allowed him to sit on the bench. That gave him the chance to get to know the players who are now his teammates.

Asked how he’s been accepted by players who are young enough to be his grandsons, Mink laughed. He’s treated well, he said, because none of them sees him a threat for playing time. He doesn’t, either, because he doesn’t expect to ever play more than five minutes a game.

Though he’s at every practice, Mink is exempted from some conditioning drills because of his age. No one, he said, expects him to have to be in the same shape as his younger teammates.

“I want to get to the point where I can play one half of a half without getting so run down that I couldn’t handle it,” he said.

His teammates kid Mink constantly about his age, and he milks it for all it’s worth by telling them about the college and professional players who were his contemporaries.

They just stared at him when he mentioned Bob Cousy, so he stunned them by swishing a shot from behind the 3-point arc using the kind of running 1-hander the former Boston Celtics great made famous. On another occasion, he demonstrated the sweeping hook shot that was the trademark of former University of Kentucky and St. Louis Hawks star Cliff Hagen.

Nesbit isn’t quite as impressed as his players are with such shooting stunts. Though he tends to cut Mink a lot of slack, Nesbit is very strict with the team in terms of the kinds of shots they can take.
Running 1-handers from behind the arc and sweeping hook shots are not allowed, he said.

“Ken is definitely in a time warp in terms of his skills,” Nesbit said.

The Raiders played for the first time last weekend during an exhibition tournament in Alabama, but Mink never got off the bench. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play, he said, but the games were all so close that he never got the chance.

He expects to play Nov. 3, when Roane plays a home exhibition game against the King College junior varsity.

A career journalist
Mink continued more than his basketball career in the Air Force. He had written for school newspapers in high school and college, and during his four years in Blytheville, Ark., he worked as editor of the base newspaper.

His enlistment over, he eventually wound up in Bristol, Va., where he worked for nearly a decade as a reporter and managing editor for the Bristol Virginian-Tennessean and later the Herald Courier.

“I still consider Bristol my home base,” he said.

He worked briefly as a reporter for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and as an assistant metro editor for the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, before returning to the Tri-Cities to work for the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News. He later worked for the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel and finished his newspaper career at the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News Record. He retired in 1998.

Mink continues to write. He is editor of an online travel magazine, The Traveling Adventurer. Not surprisingly, he is writing a book about his basketball experience at Roane, entitled “A Season from the Past,” and is already on his sixth chapter.

As a journalist and author, Mink documents history. As a septuagenarian college basketball player, he is making it.

After a Knoxville television station recently did a story on Mink, it passed the video along to ESPN. The sports network broadcast that footage during its morning programming last Thursday. By noon, Mink’s and Nesbit’s phones were ringing constantly with interview requests from newspapers, radio shows and television stations around the country.

Mink has heard from Sports Illustrated, the New York Daily News and the Wall Street Journal, all of which want to tell his story. “The Today Show” wants him as a guest. A Hollywood screen writer is interested in using Mink’s story as the basis for a script.

Nesbit is hearing from many of the same media outlets, including radio stations in Honolulu, Hawaii and Vancouver, Canada.

“Oh, my goodness,” Nesbit said of his basketball program’s sudden notoriety. “I can’t even begin to keep up.”

Mink figures he’s got a good story to tell – that’s why he’s writing the book – but even he’s amazed at the attention he’s getting for doing something he loves to do.

“I just figure if I’m physically able to do it, there’s no reason not to try it,” he said.

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