The University of New Orleans basketball T-shirts are still on display and for sale at Big Bill’s New York Pizza in Littleton.
“Big Bill” is Bill Ficke, the longtime Denver-area resident and former Nuggets assistant coach with the heart the size of his native New York.
The other day, Ficke sent a check for more than $10,000 to a UNO foundation, representing some of the proceeds from his restaurant’s annual salute to the victims and heroes of Sept. 11, 2001. One day a year at Big Bill’s, all food is free and buckets and hats are passed for charitable contributions.
This year, the money went to the Tennyson Center for Children and to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Part went to support the relocation and the survival of the UNO basketball program, coached by former Nuggets guard Monte Towe. Towe was Mutt to David Thompson’s Jeff, both at North Carolina State and then with the Nuggets.
And now Towe is grateful – grateful to those who stepped up to give aid to the program with money, equipment, shoes and clothes. He was reluctant to begin listing names, because he didn’t want to leave anyone out, but mentioned Ficke, businessmen Dana and David Pump of Los Angeles, Adidas, a handful of his former pro and college teammates and players, plus many NBA franchises and players.
“It could have devastated our program,” Towe said Sunday. “I don’t think it’s going to. I’ve got players who don’t have homes to go back to. I’ve got coaches who don’t have homes to go back to.
“But right now, because of people like Bill Ficke and others around the country who have helped us, we’ve still got a basketball team and we’re going to have a season.”
The Privateers have been living and attending classes at the University of Texas-Tyler since the aftermath of Katrina, and they hope to be on their own campus in time for a Dec. 31 game against Tulane – and before their Jan. 5 opener in Sun Belt Conference play, coincidentally at the University of Denver.
When the hurricane threatened, Towe and his wife, P.D., were on a family trip to their other home in St. Augustine, Fla., and their plan was to go from there to Raleigh, N.C., to attend a fundraiser for a basketball scholarship named after former North Carolina State coach Norm Sloan.
“I got on the phone with my coaches and told them to get the kids out of there,” Towe said. “We had started classes Aug. 22. Our evacuation wasn’t perfect because a couple of kids chose to stay and ride it out. But the rest got out, some of them to go to the home of a player’s family in Mississippi.”
Towe’s home near Lake Pontchartrain was heavily damaged by 2 feet of water, but he said he believes insurance will cover much of the loss.
It took more than a week for arrangements to be made to relocate the players to UT-Tyler, about 435 miles from New Orleans. All 13 decided to go and made it to Tyler. There, though the NCAA had said it would be lenient about academic standards for programs forced to relocate, the Privateers enrolled in classes. They started practicing Saturday.
“People have been unbelievable,” Towe said. “We didn’t have any practice gear when we showed up. No practice shoes. Nothing. I still had kids in the first week of classes at Tyler who didn’t have anything but slippers because they left their apartments thinking they were going to be able to come back. But here it is, 45 days later, and they haven’t been able to get back to their apartments to see if they have anything there because the campus is off limits.”
Towe said he and the players talk “every day about how lucky we are to be together, that we have something to do and we have each other. You read every day about how 50,000 homes are gone, about how people might not come back, and jobs are gone. We’re blessed.”
Column update
On July 27, I wrote about former Longmont Daily Times-Call reporter Bruce Plasket’s battle to get his book about the embattled University of Colorado football program published following publisher Prentice Hall’s decision to back out of the project. I spoke with Plasket over the weekend, and he reports that he is self-publishing the book and that the plan is to have it available for purchase within the next few weeks.
He has slightly modified the title, which now is, “Buffaloed: How Race, Gender, and Media Bias Fueled a Season of Scandal.”
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
