Interviewing Mike Howard, Former Terrier Basketball Star

When I was kid, just old enough to start paying close attention to sports, Wofford basketball was a pretty sad affair.

From 1976 to 1980, the Terriers endured four losing seasons in a row, winning a total of 35 games and losing 87.

Two guys led the way in turning things around, and if you were a local youngster following the Terriers back then, they were a very big deal.

Mike Howard and James Blair came to Wofford from Alabama. Howard, a guard, was a junior college transfer out of Montgomery. He helped recruit Blair, a forward who came to Wofford out of high school in Birmingham.

The two became close friends – like family. They shared a bond on the court, too. Howard and Blair brought considerable talent but also energy, intensity, and an undeniable chemistry. They were exciting to watch, and they helped make Wofford a winner.

Wofford was in the NAIA in those years. The program has come a long way since, and the overall talent level is higher now among Wofford and its Southern Conference competition. But the best Wofford players of the NAIA and early NCAA years could have held their own in any era – and Howard and Blair were all-time greats.

At 6-4, Blair could do it all. He scored inside and outside, handled the ball well, and grabbed countless rebounds.

Howard was a dynamic guard. He was strong and fast and aggressive, and he brought an element of showmanship. He was drafted by the Washington Bullets. If not for a serious knee injury, there’s a good chance he would have had a career in the NBA.

In their first season at Wofford – Howard was a junior, Blair a freshman – the team went 7-25. “I lost more that season than I had in all the other years I’d played basketball,” Howard recalled. “I was like, ‘This ain’t gonna work for me.’”

He and Blair trained relentlessly over the summer and willed the program forward. In the 1980-81 season, the team went 19-12. Along the way, the Terriers upset Georgia Tech and beat USC-Spartanburg (at a time when the cross-town foes were fierce rivals) two out of three games. Wofford came within a point of upsetting The Citadel in a thriller on the opening night of the Benjamin Johnson Arena.

It was a memorable season – and one that helped establish the groundwork for greater triumphs to come. “Our goal was to change the Wofford program,” Howard said. “It was the most satisfying thing I ever did in my sports life.”

I had a chance to catch up with Howard recently. He talked about the ups-and-downs of his time at Wofford and the pride he takes in Wofford’s ongoing success. Howard also talked about his and Blair’s special friendship.

Each man went on to success after Wofford. Howard is in Montgomery, where he works in real estate. Blair worked with at-risk youth in Alabama and later in Texas. He was honored by the college in 2004 with the Distinguished Service Award.

In 2011, Blair collapsed while jogging and died. He was 51.

Two notes:  A special thanks to former Terrier basketball player Carl Hall for helping to facilitate this interview. More to come from Carl soon, I’m hoping. And this interview has been edited and condensed in some places for clarity and length.

Baker Maultsby: Did you and James Blair know each other from back home? How did y’all end up together at Wofford?

Mike Howard: I didn’t know anything about James. But I had started at Wofford in second semester – I wasn’t eligible to play at first, but I could practice with the team and all that – and Coach (Wayne) Earhardt told me, ‘We’ve got a kid from Birmingham we’re interested in. I want you to write him a letter.” He said the guy’s president of his class. I thought he was probably nerdy, so I wrote this letter with all these multi-syllable words and blah, blah, blah.

Well, to show you how fate is, my roommate at Wofford had dropped out of school and left. So when James came to visit, he stayed with me. We clicked immediately. We always told people it was like love at first sight. We talked every day for the next 30 years until he died.

To show you how much we talked to each other, we talked five times the day he died. I knew he was going for a jog. His wife called me and said they were following James to the hospital. I thought maybe he’d gotten hit. The thought of him having a heart attack and dying never crossed my mind. Ten years later, I still get choked up about it.

I remember that you played two seasons at Wofford. Where were you for your first two years?

I went to a junior college outside of Nashville my freshman year. I had an uncle who was a schoolteacher in Chicago and wanted me to come play there in a summer league. I was having the time of my life and decided to transfer up there. Of course, I made my decision in the summertime. You’ve heard about Chicago winters? The windchill. The snow and ice. Every morning, I wanted to get in my car and drive back to Alabama. It was crazy.

There was this one guy who recruited me and James and Adam Cohen, who only played at Wofford one year. A Wofford graduate named Mark Noel had heard about me. Out of the clear blue sky, he came to Montgomery to see me play. I didn’t want to go to Wofford – I was tired and discouraged, and I was planning to go to Alabama State (in Montgomery). But he kept after me and wanted me to go for a visit.

It turned out that the first black newscaster on the local NBC affiliate was a good friend of my dad’s. He told me that the vice-president of the affiliate was a Wofford graduate. My dad’s friend told me, “Go to Wofford. It’ll be the best decision you ever made.” He had no skin in the game. He just cared about me.

OK, so your first year at Wofford, y’all really struggled.

I lost more games my first year at Wofford than I’d lost my whole life. And it was like, a hundred people would come to the game, we’d lose, and everybody would go home. I was like, “This ain’t gonna work for me.” I just wasn’t going to do it my senior year.

I did like Coach Earhardt as a man. He was a good man. We just did not see eye to eye about how to win a basketball game. He wanted you to come across picks and have a set structure. I wanted to run up on a fast break and take a shot from wherever, pass behind my back, behind my head … I said, “If you give me this ball, I guarantee you we will win.”

I remember that next season – there was a sense of excitement. The Benjamin Johnson Arena opened, and that was a big deal. But you guys also were fun to watch, and it caught on.

My first year, nobody came to see us play. James and I both came from high school programs where we played in front of packed houses. So we would go to football games, baseball games, soccer games, fencing matches, everywhere – and we recruited people to come out to the games. We said, “We’re here to support y’all, so come out during basketball season and support us.”

Then, my senior year, we beat Georgia Tech. That was huge. It was Christmas holidays when we played them. When we came back to school, we were like semi-celebrities. Me and James were known as “the Alabama boys.” It really changed our lives.

I would tell people that I never wanted to play basketball after I quit playing. But now, basketball is being played like I used to like to play it: run, pull up from anywhere, shoot. Everybody can pass, dribble, and shoot the ball. That was a “no-no” for a lot of coaches in those days.

But one of the things people loved coming to the games for was me throwing James behind-the-back passes and James dunking. That kind of thing. The kids loved that.

I remember seeing on the news that Wofford had beaten Georgia Tech. As you said, it was huge – Wofford had beaten an ACC team! How did y’all do it?

Georgia Tech beat us my first year by something like 30 points. Their coach – it was before Bobby Cremins was there – trash-talked us the whole game. He kept saying, “Welcome to ACC. Quit complaining about the call.” Stuff like that. I’d never been trash-talked by a coach.

So we worked like crazy in the off-season. We didn’t focus on any other game – we were going to beat Georgia Tech. When we went home from Spartanburg, we’d go down I-85, right by their gym in Atlanta. We’d point out the window and holler, “We’re gonna beat y’all’s ass next year!” We’d come back to Spartanburg and go right by there again. “We’re gonna beat y’all’s ass!”

That was the most satisfying victory I’ve been part of. Nobody thought we could beat them. And the headline in the newspaper was, “Wofford Welcomes Georgia Tech to the NAIA.”

You’ve been famous in the world of Wofford basketball, in part, for coming really close to making the NBA. Wofford has had a great run of putting players into pro leagues around the world. But the NBA – and for a guy back in the NAIA days – that’s a major deal. My understanding is that the Washington Bullets drafted you and you were one of the last guys they cut, but they wanted you to come back the next year.

They told me, “We want you to train and come back.” I ran and lifted weights – I trained like I had never trained before. And, literally, weeks before I was going to go to the Bullets camp, I tore up my knee. I had never had a serious injury in my life. It was heartbreaking. I was in a cast for six months. Then I kept getting injured again – nitpicky stuff.

While the overall talent level at Wofford might be higher now, the best small college players of your era were seriously talented.

In the spring of my senior year, Al Wood, who was NCAA player of year at UNC, and Larry Nance, from Clemson, those guys came to Spartanburg. Back in the day, the ACC used to have an all-star team travel all over North Carolina and South Carolina and play against local guys. They would raise money going from town to town. They had those guys on the team, and they had Zam Frederick, from South Carolina, who was the leading scorer in the nation.

We had four players from our program. We had some from USCS. We played at the Wofford gym, and we sent them back to the house. We beat their butts real good. Everybody was stunned.

When you think about your basketball journey and everything that went along with it, are you glad you ended up going to Wofford? And do you feel a sense of pride in the success of Wofford basketball in recent years?

Oh, I loved Wofford. I had a heck of a time there. Wofford was the time of my life. James was one of the reasons. But, overall, I was treated great at Wofford.

I was there for the first game in the Jerry Richardson arena. It was emotional for me to think about where Wofford had come from – the old Andrews Fieldhouse to Ben Johnson Arena to that new place. And the miracle of Wofford coming from a time when hardly anybody went to the games to filling up that new gym. It was really satisfying.