RE: CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS FLUFF FROM THE JC PRESS?
Really- if I'm the publisher of the Press I'm calling Lap Dog Hodge in for some answers.
HONOLULU — Scheduling a week in Hawaii was a holiday treat for East Tennessee State’s basketball players, many of whom will likely never pass this way again.
For athletic director Dave Mullins, it was also a chance to reconnect with his youth.
Mullins spent his formative years in the islands in the 1950s and ’60s, first on Maui and then here, on Oahu. His first taste of mainstream sports — baseball, basketball and tennis, which would become his vocation — came with a Hawaiian flavor, and he also learned a lot of things a kid doesn’t learn on the mainland.
“Hawaii was a great place to grow up,” said Mullins, who is part of the ETSU entourage of 25 or so here to support the Bucs this week in the Rainbow Classic. “At the time, being just a kid, living on the beach in paradise didn’t seem very uncommon.”
The years, of course, put things in better perspective.
Mullins has come back a few times, most recently when the Bucs played in the Classic in 2003. He and wife Jackie honeymooned here in 1998. There are always old haunts, old acquaintances to be revisited.
The last time Mullins was on Oahu, he went out to a favorite Chinese restaurant and saw a painting hanging on the wall that his father had given the owners more than 20 years ago.
“It’s kind of like everything is different, but everything is just the same,” he said. “There are more hotels and restaurants around the cities, but you get out to the north shore, or the northwest shore where I grew up, and very little has changed. It hasn’t developed.”
Mullins made the strange cultural move from Alabama as a nine-year-old in 1955. His father was a Baptist minister in Birmingham, and both his parents were getting into missionary work. The family landed in Hawaii.
They lived for two years on Maui, then moved to the Waianae area of Oahu. (Kaena Apana, the ETSU volleyball standout, is from the town.) Mullins graduated from Waianae High School in 1964 and went back to Birmingham to attend college at Samford.
In some ways, it seems like he never left.
“When I’m here, it feels a lot like home,” he said. “You keep looking for people you know, which is kind of funny after all this time.”
Mullins’ local knowledge can be dangerous. Just ask Wayne Andrews, the former ETSU vice president who is now the president of Morehead State.
After hearing about all the great bodysurfing spots around the island, Andrews decided he wanted a piece of the action on that 2003 visit. He wished he hadn’t.
“I had asked Wayne several times if he knew how to body surf. He’d say, ‘sure,’” said Mullins. “I told him, ‘These are not those little Florida ripples. These are big breakers.’ We got to the beach that day and he was all excited. I said, ‘You do know how to body surf?’ and he said, ‘sure.’
“We swam out 15 or 20 yards and the waves were breaking pretty strong. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen them much stronger, to be honest. Then the famous last words: Here comes a good one.”
Needless to say, Andrews was not prepared for a good one.
“I flipped out of the wave like you do to avoid injury,” said Mullins, “and just looked back over my shoulder. I saw Wayne with his arms outstretched, going headfirst into the sand. He probably washed 35 or 40 yards onto the beach and I jumped up to go help him. Right about them the backwash broke on top of him and about drowned him.”
With the help of another onlooker, Andrews was fished out of the surf and taken to see the medical staff at the University of Hawaii.
“He spent the next week taking painkillers and walking very gingerly,” said Mullins. “Every time we talk now, he brings it up. He says he’s still feeling the effects and I’ll be hearing from his attorney any day now.”
Andrews wasn’t the only ETSU partisan to have a rather painful experience here in ’03. The Bucs lost two of their three games in the Rainbow Classic and left coach Murry Bartow scowling in his Hawaiian shirt.
The team was able to look back on the trip as a turning point, however. It ripped off 16 wins in a row after returning home and ended up making the NCAA tournament.
Maybe the Bucs can recapture that karma this year.
“It would be nice to get on another roll,” said Mullins. “When the team came out here last time, we didn’t play particularly well and Murry said he wouldn’t be back. But we were looking to reward the team for last year and get in an exempt event where three games count as one. We had a couple of options — Anaheim and Puerto Rico — and then this became available. We’ll get three good teams on a neutral court and hopefully a great experience for everybody.”
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