Leaping Over Barriers

It was during practice at the beginning of the 1961 high school basketball season. Eddie Whitehead stood under the basket staring up at the orange rim. The skinny junior had grown nearly 4 inches in the off-season, and the goal appeared much closer that day than it ever had before.

Eddie and Lynn Whitehead before a U of L home basketball game.

That’s when Whitehead did something that surprised him as much as it did his coaches and teammates. “I just took one step and dunked it. I had been trying forever, and it just happened. It was unbelievable. Dunking was always a big thing and most players can remember their first one.”

That momentous leap changed Whitehead as a player and would eventually land him at the University of Louisville.

Lincoln Heights

Eddie Whitehead developed a fondness for basketball as a young kid playing on the dirt courts of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, a small, self-contained African American community just north of Cincinnati. The seventh of nine kids, he had migrated north with his family from rural Mississippi when he was 2. Basketball was one of the few recreational options available to kids at that time.

“Parents were adamant that their kids not play football,” he recalls. “That was when they didn’t play with face guards, and kids would typically get their teeth knocked out very early.”

Whitehead grew up watching his older brother Jody Jr., who became a Cincinnati hoops legend when he led tiny Lockland-Wayne High School (with an enrollment of fewer than 100) to an Ohio state basketball championship.

“It was basically Ohio basketball’s version of Hoosiers,” Whitehead says, referring to the popular 1986 Gene Hackman film.

Inspired by his brother’s exploits and his own love of the game, Whitehead was possessed by basketball when he entered high school.

“Studying was kind of forced on us,” he says. “Being in a black community, the teachers were very tough because they knew what it would take for us to be able to go to a university. They wanted to make sure we were prepared.

“But basketball was my passion.”

Although he admittedly wasn’t all that good as a youngster, he started getting more serious about hoops during his freshman and sophomore years. Then he dunked it and, along with the rest of his body, his confidence soared.

“I became known as a leaper,” he says. “Once I broke that barrier, my jumping just accelerated.”

It wouldn’t be the first barrier Whitehead would break.

The Accidental Pioneer

During his senior year at Lincoln Heights High School, Whitehead was one of the top basketball players in the region, and several college recruiters came calling. He knew all about the process because he’d paid close attention when Jody was recruited in his senior year.

Eddie, who was in the eighth grade at that time, recalls “seeing all the people visit the house and listening in and just wondering why his brother never took them up on the offer.

“But he just didn’t have any confidence in himself. And in our community, very few kids left to go to college. He didn’t have any role models to follow and felt like he wasn’t capable of doing it. So he took a factory job. He worked in a factory until he retired.”

But attitudes had changed by the time Eddie reached college age.

“There were more expectations of us to leave the community and go to college and get an education,” he says.

One of his options was to play for the mighty University of Cincinnati Bearcats during their glory years. Oscar Robertson had played there from 1957–60, “single-handedly” changing everybody’s jump shot, Whitehead says. “Everybody became a one-handed shooter.”

In the two years since the Big O’s departure—1961 and 1962—the Bearcats had won back-to-back NCAA National Championships.

“But I didn’t want to go there,” Whitehead says. “To me that was like a commute. I wanted to get away from home. I thought that was part of the college experience—to get out and not be home on a daily basis.”

But he also was not all that tempted by the recruiter who showed up from the University of Alaska. “I didn’t want to be too far away from home,” he says.

“When I was recruited by Louisville, it just felt like the perfect ticket. It was the Missouri Valley Conference. It was within driving distance of my parents’ house, but I still had to move away. And academically it was ranked rather high. I just thought it was a good fit.”

What Whitehead didn’t know was that no other African American had ever played basketball for the Cardinals.

“I was totally surprised. I knew there had been some great African American football players at U of L like Lenny Lyles and Ernie Green. I just assumed that basketball was the same.”

Whitehead had committed to U of L before he realized the basketball program’s history. More disturbingly, he was told of a statement made somewhere in the program’s past that said “blacks weren’t good enough to play for the team.”

“I kind of thought about that for a minute. But then I said, ‘Forget it. I’ve already committed to do it.’ I knew that Wade Houston had already committed. And I said, ‘If I back out, he’s going to be there by himself.’ ”

Indeed, another black player, Wade Houston of Alcoa, Tenn., signed his scholarship papers within a day of Whitehead.

“We came from very similar surroundings,” Whitehead says. “Alcoa was a little town outside of Knoxville. It was very similar to the little town I was from outside Cincinnati.”

Although they were breaking the color barrier in Kentucky college basketball, Whitehead, Houston and another African American basketball signee, Sam Smith, arrived on campus with zero publicity.

“There was absolutely no hoopla,” Whitehead says. “It was a very quiet process. After I had done it, I was surprised to find out that there was anything to do with breaking a color barrier.

“I didn’t know I was a pioneer, but I didn’t back away from it.”

Petrified at the Palestra

In a small office on U of L’s campus, Eddie Whitehead and his wife, Lynn, look over the yearbook from 1963, Eddie’s freshman year. Forty years later, he easily names every player on the freshman team.

“We were very close,” he says. “As a freshman, you kind of have to find your group to bond with, and that was our group. It becomes a very close-knit group because we’re all away from home for the first time. That became our fraternity.”

During his sophomore year at the varsity level he got his “first dose of reality” in terms of the racial situation. “There seemed to be some reluctance to get us on the court. We felt like we were out-competing the other players in practice, but that wasn’t being translated into playing time.

“But we had a very experienced team—six seniors. So playing time was hard to come by anyway.”

Whitehead finally made his Cardinal debut during the fourth game of his sophomore season (1963–64) against La Salle University at the storied Palestra gymnasium in Philadelphia.

“I absolutely froze,” he laughs. “It was a transforming moment because I had had some success my freshman year and I had competed very hard in practices. When I finally got my break in the game, I was petrified. I mean literally petrified. I had to overcome more than the jitters. I was literally frozen.”

But Whitehead eventually thawed out and embarked on a solid career in a Cardinal uniform. Memorable basketball moments include guarding Wichita State All-American Dave “the Rave” Stallworth and playing with Wes Unseld.

“When you think about defining moments, you think about the players you played with and against,” he says.

Whitehead recalls going with a group of players to recruit Unseld when the future All American was a senior at Louisville’s Seneca High School.

“He was just a physical specimen,” Whitehead recalls. “This kid was 6 feet 6 inches, 245 pounds. He was agile, had a soft shooting touch and was a ferocious rebounder. You just knew he was going to be everything that he turned out to be.”

Whitehead says it was gratifying to play with an athlete of Unseld’s caliber.

“There was such confidence when you played with a guy like that. You knew he had your back. You knew he was in there. You knew he was going to get the rebound.”

Air Whitehead

Like his son Luke Whitehead, who last month finished his own stellar four years as a Cardinal basketball player, Eddie’s college hoops career had its ups and downs. At the end of his sophomore year, he became disenchanted when he realized that his dreams of one day playing pro ball seemed out of reach.

“After that season, I felt like that dream wasn’t going to come true because I wasn’t getting the playing time or putting up the kind of numbers that will lead you into the pros,” he says.

At the beginning of his junior year, the university started a two-year ROTC program. Whitehead joined so he could develop another career. He excelled in the ROTC during his junior and senior years—but he also made huge improvements on the basketball court and his dream of playing in the pros resurfaced.

“So I went in to talk to the commandant and said, ‘Hey listen, things have changed and I think I want to do something different,’” Whitehead remembers.

But with the Vietnam War escalating, 1966 was not the best year to drop out of an ROTC program, his commandant told him.

“He said I could do what I want, but if I dropped out I would probably hit the top of the draft list. That didn’t sound too good.”

So upon graduation from U of L with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, Whitehead accepted his commission and went into the Air Force. During his first year, he played in a series of basketball tournaments throughout the military, eventually earning a spot on the State Department’s armed services all-star team made up of 12 top players from each branch of the military.

“You had people in there like Garfield Smith who played at Eastern Kentucky,” Whitehead says. “You had Mike Philemon who played high school ball at St. X. We had Darnell Hillman who won the first slam-dunk contest in the ABA. Mike Krzyzewski from West Point was on that team.

“We had a dynamite team. We competed internationally and went undefeated. I traveled the world. We played in Greece. We played all over Europe. We played in South America. It was an awesome opportunity.”

So while he didn’t pursue pro basketball, Whitehead played hoops for his entire stint in the Air Force. When his four years were up, his choices included playing in the ABA. But by that time his goal of playing professional basketball had been replaced.

The military all-star team had practiced at the Presidio in San Francisco, and Whitehead had developed a connection to the city—a connection made stronger by a Bay Area girl.

He first met Lynn Demarest in the Azores during his last year in the military. She was a recreation director there. But her permanent residence was next to the Presidio.

“When I got out of the military, I looked her up and she was there—in the city I loved,” Whitehead says. The two eventually wed.

After Basketball

Although his basketball career was over, Whitehead found plenty of success in other arenas. He attended the University of California-Berkeley for the next seven years, earning master’s degrees in social welfare in 1974 and public health epidemiology in 1979. He was three years into his doctoral program when he decided to tend to other priorities.

“I had taken my orals and had my dissertation topic,” he recalls. “But I was married with two kids, and I realized that I couldn’t lock myself away for two years to finish my dissertation. I had little ones to feed.

“I studied hard. I was a good student, and I was serious about it. But during the course of studying, we got involved with real estate out of necessity because we were looking for a place to raise our kids. We kind of got nudged into real estate as an investment—investing, not selling.”

Between classes Whitehead would conduct business transactions with brokers on a campus bench. “Slowly, we started parlaying real estate and getting higher value, more properties, and after a while we realized we were sitting on a nice portfolio.”

After a decade in real estate, Eddie and Lynn became concerned about having all of their eggs in one basket. It was the late ’80s and interest rates were more than 20 percent.

“We learned through research that there were some opportunities in broadcasting for minority-owned companies,” Lynn says. “There is less than 2 percent minority ownership in all of broadcasting—radio and television.”

So they founded Whitehead Broadcasting.

“Over the years, we would attend these conventions and you just don’t see any minorities. So it was kind of like basketball at U of L for Eddie. He was pioneering again,” Lynn adds.

Two years ago, after some 15 years in broadcasting, the Whiteheads sold the five-station broadcasting company they had grown.

Eddie and Lynn's son Luke Whitehead pulls down one of his more than 650 career rebounds as a Cardinal.

“We’re now doing what we enjoy,” Eddie says, “which is travel a lot and participate with our kids and get them established in what they’re doing. Oh yes, and watching them play basketball.”

LUUUUUKE!

“When we first heard it, we thought it was booing,” says Eddie Whitehead of the first time he heard the Freedom Hall faithful chant his son’s name. Luke Whitehead, Eddie and Lynn’s youngest of three children, followed in his father’s footsteps to U of L, even wearing his dad’s No. 24 during a four-year career that saw him score more than 1,000 points and pull down more than 650 rebounds.

“I have to say it is exciting to sit there and hear a good percentage of 19,000 people all saying your son’s name at the same time.”

Was there a 40-year contrast between a Freedom Hall crowd screaming “Luuuuuke” in 2004 and what some people might have been yelling at Eddie Whitehead in the mid-60s?

“There was a racial focus that created a lot of obstacles,” Eddie says of his time at U of L. “But I think the fans helped balance that out because when we hit the court the fans embraced us. There might have been a few who said some other things, but as a whole we were accepted by the fans and they gave us support.

“The fans are so great here.”

Return to Spring 2004 home