For more than 40 years, Billy Lewis carried an ache inside from the torment of what he considered an unfulfilled college basketball career at the University of Colorado.
Lewis came out of Manual High School in 1956 with premier credentials, having played on two Denver Prep League championship teams as well as a state champion in his junior year. He gathered every individual honor in basketball that was available under coach Al Oviatt and stood toe-to-toe with talented teammate Dennis Boone.
When Lewis played in his first varsity game for Colorado in the 1957-58 season, he became the first black basketball player at CU.
“I didn’t feel intimidated at all,” Lewis said. “There probably were less than 30 black students at CU at the time, but I had come from one of the most diversified high schools in the country. . . . I don’t remember there being any racial problems.”
But on the court, things didn’t go so well. During three seasons playing for the Buffaloes in the Big Seven and Big Eight conferences, Lewis’ best season was his junior year in 1958-59, when he averaged 5.9 points. His biggest game was a 21-point performance against Nebraska at the CU Fieldhouse. But otherwise, the highlight of his collegiate athletic career came when he stepped off the basketball floor for a moment and recorded a 6-foot-7 high jump during an indoor track and field meet.
After leaving CU he entered the legal profession, but he couldn’t forget a bitterness aimed at CU coach Sox Walseth.
“I didn’t feel that Sox treated me right, and I carried that for more than 40 years,” Lewis said. “Bebe Lee was the coach who recruited me out of Manual. But when I got to CU, Walseth was the coach. He played a slowdown style of game, and I didn’t think my talents were used the way they should have been.”
As Lewis prepared to enter law school, eventually at Howard University after being turned down at the University of Denver, he worked for former Colorado Sen. Peter Dominick. While on Dominick’s staff, Lewis joined his boss on the Senate floor in Washington and was told he was the first black, not including janitors, to be on the floor since the days of Reconstruction.
Lewis practiced law in Denver for a time and was on the legal staffs for IBM and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
He received a telephone call four years ago while working as a lobbyist for health care in the Georgia legislature that changed his life. Things were happening back in Boulder.
Walseth was losing a battle with cancer and he summoned Bill Harris, a former CU football player and its assistant athletic director for the Alumni C-Club, to a meeting at his home.
“Sox had three things for me,” Harris said. “The first was to give me a donation for the C-Club. Then he told me to go downstairs and take whatever I thought would be of historical interest for display in the Events Center. Then he asked me to find Billy Lewis.”
Harris got the information to Lewis that Walseth wanted to talk to him. The two hadn’t spoken in years.
“It was a difficult telephone call for me to make,” Lewis said. “But it turned out to be one of the most emotional and pivotal things in my life. He said, ‘Billy, I didn’t do a good job coaching you.’ I told him how much that meant to me. But I said that I probably had not played up to my abilities. Sometimes players believe their abilities are greater than they actually are.”
Lewis finally threw off the demons. He had shaken hands over the telephone and was at peace with the memories.
Walseth died Jan. 29, 2004, at age 77. He was at peace, too.
Billy Lewis bio
Born: May 20, 1938, Denver.
High School: Manual, 1953-56.
Colleges: Colorado, 1956-60; Howard University 1961-64.
Family: Wife, Dr. Portia Shields; sons, Hank Lewis and Michael Lewis; daughters, Leslye Mundy (deceased) and Cynthia Lewis.
Wishes: Tracing family roots on both sides of his family’s history in Africa and the United States.
