Bob McLaughlin hates to travel.
Part of it may have to do with the rule declaring it a violation in the game of basketball. Point guards like McLaughlin, a Loyola basketball player from 1955-59, don’t lead their unaffiliated teams to the 24-squad NCAA tournament twice and earn a 2008 Hall of Fame induction if officials whistle them for too much traveling.
But a lot of it has to do with McLaughlin’s spending his first three years after graduation in the Army on U.S. State Department-sponsored goodwill missions to places like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and the Philippines. During it, his eyes witnessed poverty unlike anything he had ever seen, and his limbs absorbed abuse unlike anything rival American basketball players dished out during his Wolfpack career.
“By the time I was done touring,” McLaughlin said, “I didn’t need to travel anymore. Not to see things like that.”
‘I PRETTY MUCH THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO DIE’
It was supposed to be peacetime for the U.S. Army.
Both sides in the Korean War had resolved hostilities six years prior to McLaughlin’s graduation, and 15 years before the start of his goodwill tour, the U.S. had wrapped up both the wars in Europe and in the Pacific.
But that didn’t mean life wasn’t dangerous on basketball courts in Baghdad for a Hoosier playing for the U.S. Army against competitive Iraqis.
“We were there to teach them basketball and play against them,” said McLaughlin, a native of New Albany, Ind.
“But you see, they wanted to beat us. And there was just no way.”
Not when the Army counted on players like McLaughlin, who was capable of dropping 21 points on the Louisiana State University Tigers in an 82-70 win in Baton Rouge his junior year and 30 points on the University of Memphis his senior year.
So, whenever they faced a steep deficit, the locals vented their frustration by “shoving us, tripping us, doing whatever it took to stop us,” McLaughlin said. “No one was really refereeing the games.”
And sometimes that meant inciting a riot.
In one exhibition George Soares, one of McLaughlin’s teammates from West Virginia, scooped up a loose ball in stride and broke toward the Iraqis’ basketball goal.
As Soares leapt up to roll in a layup and finish the breakaway, a frustrated Iraqi pursuer shoved Soares in the back “and wrapped him around this metallic basketball goal they had at one end of the court,” McLaughlin said.
Soares lost it.
Regaining his balance and footing, he threw a haymaker at his opponent “and floored him.”
“At that point, I pretty much thought we were going to die,” a bemused McLaughlin said, his face (which resembles character Martin Crane’s of “Frasier”) cracking a smirk across it some four decades after the incident.
The downed Iraqi’s teammates crowded Soares and shoved him. As the American soldiers rushed to their teammate’s defense, the home team drew reinforcements from the grandstands, as several spectators stormed past the lax courtside security and threw themselves into the shoving melee under the American hoop.
Finally, the police roped in the chaos, ejected who they needed to and formed a wall of bodies along the sidelines, facing what was left of the crowd wearing dour expressions and rifles across their chests, McLaughlin remembered.
“They formed like a corridor so we could walk through safely when the game was over.”
While that was the only incident involving the crowd, shoving matches and cheap shots were the norm for McLaughlin’s crew.
“It was difficult diplomatically for us to do our job when they got rough with us,” McLaughlin said. “We were supposed to teach them the game. It was tough.”
What he saw away from the game’s venues didn’t much lift his spirits, either.
Natives rinsed what few clothes they had in river streams. They couldn’t count on basic plumbing or bathroom facilities.
“There was this young student in Iran who we got to know that practically begged us to write letters to our government to give him a chance to get out of that situation,” McLaughlin said. “He just saw us and wanted to be like us.”
Maybe it was because McLaughlin and his teammates got to dine with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s shah, during the goodwill tours. Or that in Rome, he shook hands with Pope John XXIII.
But the boy, whose name McLaughlin couldn’t remember, probably just envied the soldiers’ socks and basketball sneakers.
“The poverty is what sticks in your mind the most,” he said solemnly.
SMALL-TOWN BOY
McLaughlin has spent almost all of his post-tour years in tiny Greenwood, S.C., where he owns a tire store and a fresh seafood stand in neighboring locales. He raised two sons (Tom and Kevin) and two daughters (Maureen and Mary Pat) there.
And, as you now know, “he doesn’t like to travel because he says he’s been everywhere in the world playing basketball,” his wife Susan said, minutes before her husband’s induction speech. “I say, ‘I want to go there,’ and he’ll just say, ‘Naw, it’s just another big city. Let’s not go there.'”
When asked what’s the one city she’d most like to visit, Susan didn’t say Paris, Tokyo or Cairo.
“Boston,” she said. “I’d like to go to Boston, but he won’t take me.” Their big vacation before their New Orleans getaway for Hall of Fame weekend was Apalachicola, Fla.
“We moved to Greenwood when I was 6 and Kevin was 2,” Tom McLaughlin added. “We’ve lived there ever since. This is our first time down in New Orleans.”
After Loyola and after the tours, “I lost my big town desires,” McLaughlin explained. “All I wanted to do was go somewhere South where I could just wear my shorts and be warm. I didn’t want to travel at all. I just became a small-town boy.”
Ramon Antonio Vargas can be reached at [email protected].
