Teammates Reflect On The Life Of A Terrier Legend – Their Friend, Don Fowler

Had it not been for the intervention of Don Fowler, Bill Tinder isn’t sure he would be a Wofford College graduate.

They were basketball teammates in 1957 – Tinder was a freshman, and Fowler was a senior and team captain.

After a game in Macon, Georgia against Mercer – a loss, as Tinder recalls it – the Wofford players were set to stay for the night in a room beside the gym made available to visiting teams. But a few of the guys, including Tinder, sneaked off campus with several Mercer coeds in a station wagon that belonged to the team.

“We didn’t do anything bad – we were Wofford gentlemen,” said Tinder. “We took the girls to a diner and had Cokes and something to eat. The only thing we really did wrong was taking the college’s station wagon.”

Head basketball coach Joel Robertson was not pleased. When the young men got back to the Mercer campus, “he had bus tickets for us. He was going to kick us off the team,” Tinder recalls.

“Don took Coach Robertson aside and convinced him he didn’t have to go that far. He didn’t follow through, thanks to Don, and I have always been grateful.”

A lot of people have been grateful over the years to Don Fowler, who died earlier this month in Columbia at the age of 85.

Fowler spent his career in education and politics, rising through the ranks of the Democratic Party to become its national chairman during the mid-1990s. Along the way, he opened doors and helped make connections for countless candidates and aspiring party operatives.

He helped Bill Clinton win a second term as President.

And according to an obituary article in The State newspaper, it was Fowler who decades ago introduced Joe Biden to Rep. Jim Clyburn. The President-elect’s win in the South Carolina Democratic primary last winter propelled him to his party’s nomination, and it has been largely credited to his endorsement from Clyburn.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national publications also reported Fowler’s death. Friends and admirers (numerous Democrats, but also several prominent Republicans) gave quotes noting Fowler’s loyalty, generosity, big-picture thinking, and ability to lead – all the qualities that made the difference for Tinder that night in Macon.

“Determination And Energy”

Fowler was described as an “icon” and a “legend” in the Democratic Party, and those words certainly apply to his standing in the annals of Wofford College – and Wofford basketball – history. In 1983, he was inducted into the Wofford athletics Hall of Fame.

Fowler was a great player.

To be sure, it was a different era. College basketball was not yet integrated. And Wofford competed in the NAIA, a small college league that situated Terrier athletics a rung below in-state foes Furman and The Citadel, who were members of the Southern Conference (though the Wofford hoopsters had an overall winning record against The Citadel during the Fowler years). In short, it was a different basketball world from the one inhabited by Storm Murphy and Fletcher Magee and Cameron Jackson and highlighted by national headline-making wins in Chapel Hill and in the NCAA Tournament.

Still, Fowler’s numbers speak for themselves. He averaged 20 points and nearly 16 rebounds a game for his career.

He had good size and athleticism. But, as with his future success in politics, Fowler’s prowess as a basketball player was linked to his effort, attention to detail, leadership skill, and good instincts.

“He rebounded very well – fought the backboards better than anybody,” recalled Ray Eubanks, who shared frontcourt duties with Fowler at Wofford and, before that, at Spartanburg High School.

“He was always in the right place. He seemed to know little tricks to get good position.”

And he went hard for the ball, recalled teammate Will Carpenter, known in college by his middle name, Twitty. “Donnie had the element of determination and high energy,” Carpenter said. “It seemed like he was all in when it came to rebounding.”

Fowler put extra work into all areas of his game, Eubanks said: “Don was the type of fellow who would not let something go. He had to do it right.

“He wasn’t the best dribbler in the world. He played forward, so he didn’t have to be our main ball-handler. But he worked and worked and worked at his dribbling to make sure he wasn’t going to lose the ball for us.”

Even though Eubanks was a year older, he said Fowler was a teammate everyone looked up to. “No question about it,” he said. “Don would run an extra lap at practice, and I felt obliged to do that, too. I wanted to be as in shape as he was.”

Carpenter was only one class behind Fowler at Wofford but said that “Donnie seemed several years more mature. He was like an older brother.”

As team captain during his senior year, Tinder said, “Don just knew how to handle us and get the most out of us.”

He was the kind of leader who brought people together and promoted positive relationships. “He didn’t come at it in terms of putting people down or being adversarial,” Carpenter said.

This isn’t to say that Fowler was always easygoing. He had a tough edge, when needed. Carpenter recalled a locker room confrontation that was “the only time I saw him really angry.”

One of the guys was “going on about something,” and Fowler made his position clear. Or, as Carpenter put it, “Donnie was unequivocal in his communication.” The teammate “backed off,” and the disagreement was resolved peacefully.

There’s no need to overstate the obvious here – but it isn’t difficult to imagine that Fowler’s powers of persuasion in the face of conflict, honed as a leader at Wofford, served him well in a career that involved political strategy with the very highest stakes in play.

Lifelong Bonds

Relationships formed in college can be pivotal in life. Tinder had a sense of this upon first meeting both Fowler and Carpenter:

“I was from Indiana, and I didn’t even know where Wofford was. But I’d gotten a recruiting letter and took a bus down to visit. Coach Robertson turned me over to Don and (Twitty). You couldn’t have found two more impressive guys. I thought, ‘If these are the kind of people who are at Wofford, then it might be a good place for me.’”

As with their friend Fowler, each of the men interviewed for this article went on to great success and fulfillment after graduating from Wofford.

Tinder served in the Army and earned the rank of Colonel. He returned to Wofford in the 1980s to lead the college’s ROTC program. He has served as an assistant coach for the Wofford women’s basketball team and, more recently, for the USC-Upstate women’s team.

Eubanks served as a Spartanburg County probate judge until his retirement in 2005. He is known for his advocacy on behalf of those struggling with mental health issues.

Carpenter is a nationally respected psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, in Baltimore. With a primary focus in the study of schizophrenia, he was an expert witness in the trial of John Hinckley.

In 1994, Carpenter received an honorary degree from Wofford. He says Fowler proposed the award and did much of the supporting work on the nomination. “It was a very, very meaningful honor,” Carpenter said.

Each of these friends had been in touch with Fowler in recent months.

Tinder was happy to have seen him last winter in his element – a campaign event during the Democratic primary.

Eubanks said he and Fowler visited several months ago. “He was in town, and we had a nice chat. We used to always talk about the old times.” Usually, they’d end up having a laugh about the time when one of their teammates, ordered to check into the game, stripped off his warm-up pants as he made his way onto the court and accidentally “pulled down his uniform shorts, too, all the way to the floor – right in front of the whole gym.”

When Fowler was traveling to Washington, DC on a regular basis, he and Carpenter would sometimes meet up for lunch. They’d talked by phone recently, and Fowler shared that he had been diagnosed with leukemia.

“I think what worried him most was that he was very fatigued,” Carpenter said.

Then he added: “Donnie was such a high energy person.”