PLYMOUTH, Ind. — The drive north from Indianapolis along U.S. Route 31 is peaceful this gray autumn morning.
Farmland often dots the landscape as the road winds through, or around, towns and cities called Kokomo, Peru, Rochester and Argos.
After an hour and 45 minutes, you reach the exit, a left turn onto Michigan Road.
A sign sits along the right shoulder of that street.
“Welcome to Plymouth,” it reads. “Home of the Marshall County Blueberry Festival.”
This is it: the small, northern Indiana city where Orlando Magic coach Scott Skiles lived from the time he was 12 years old until he went off to college.
This place shaped him.
It fostered his love of basketball and surrounded him with friends, teachers and coaches who treated him like a normal teenager even though he became one of the best basketball players in this basketball-crazed state.
“Nobody ever equated, when I was growing up, the word ‘success’ with money,” Skiles said recently. “Success meant just doing something you loved to do and doing it well.”
* * *
A short walk from the Plymouth welcome sign, on the other side of Michigan Road, sits a small, tri-level home that now has gray siding, a white garage and white shutters.
This used to be the Skiles family’s home, the place Scott shared with his dad, Rick; his mom, Marilyn; and his sister, Brenda.
A rectangular basketball court sits perpendicular to the driveway. Gravel and small white rocks serve as the court’s surface. The stanchion and hoop lean forward now, and the rim doesn’t have a net.
Scott Skiles rarely shot baskets there.
In the summertime, he often hopped on his bike in the morning and pedaled along the main road, his basketball and baseball glove in tow.
The city had about 7,500 people in the mid-1970s, and Plymouth looked a lot like it looks now.
He would pass Oak Hill Cemetery on his left and bike along the tree-lined streets before he reached the central business district. About eight-tenths of a mile from downtown sits Centennial Park and its four basketball hoops, baseball and softball diamonds and a community pool.
Sports helped him develop friendships — friendships with kids such as Todd Samuelson, Ron Sissel and Phil Wendel.
If they didn’t play in Centennial Park, they’d play in friends’ driveways or in open gyms. Once they were old enough to drive, they sought out pick-up games in neighboring towns and cities.
“It was kind of the way of life,” Samuelson said. “You didn’t have all these distractions with video games. There just wasn’t that kind of stuff. I honestly don’t remember how we would communicate, but we knew there was either a tournament or guys in another community.”
* * *
Plymouth High School, which Skiles attended, is about a two-mile drive from his old house.
Even today, 33 years after Skiles’ senior year, he remains a presence in the school.
Walk through the school’s main entrance, continue down a long hallway and then turn left. You’ll eventually reach the gym.
You can’t miss the school’s trophy case. It’s across from the gym entrance.
Skiles’ red No. 22 jersey, which was retired in 1992, is encased in a frame.
A photograph of him during his senior year sits on the bottom row of the trophy case. He’s smiling in that shot, wearing a red, white and blue Indiana All-Star Team jersey.
In capital letters, his accomplishments are written on a small plaque on the picture’s upper-right corner: Parade All-American — 3rd Team; MVP — State Finals; PHS Scoring Record — 1,788 Pts.; PHS Home Game Record — 53 Pts.; PHS Away Game Record — 56 Pts.
He went on to play four seasons at Michigan State and five of his 10 NBA seasons for the Magic. Another picture rests in the trophy case: an autographed photo of him as a Magic player, taking a shot against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Plymouth High’s gym looks a lot like it did three decades ago, though it since has received fresh paint on the bleachers.
It can seat up to 5,000 people, and it typically was packed during Skiles’ playing days, said assistant athletic director John Scott, who used to be the school’s freshman coach and an assistant coach for the varsity team.
Perhaps no one in Plymouth knows about Skiles as a player better than Jack Edison.
Edison, who was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005, coached Skiles for four years in high school.
“By his own admission, he didn’t have the speed,” Edison said. “He wasn’t a great leaper, a great jumper or anything like that. He didn’t have great flexibility. He didn’t have athleticism.
“But he did have that hand-eye coordination that you could see early on. That, along with moxie — the savvy, the court awareness, the basketball IQ. He just was aware of things around him.”
Skiles admires Edison, too.
From Edison, Skiles learned that preparation — drilling on every possible scenario — can give average players an edge against a more talented foe.
“He was a big proponent that defense and rebounding wins,” Skiles said. “We heard that every day.”
That lesson sticks with Skiles.
He has stressed defense and rebounding throughout his 13 previous seasons as an NBA head coach and ever since the Magic hired him in May.
* * *
In Indiana, no sport rivaled basketball in terms of popularity.
A radio station, 94.3 FM (WNZE at the time), broadcast all of Plymouth’s games with two announcers, Rick Derf and Corky Lingle.
The ultimate goal, of course, was to win Indiana’s famed state tournament. In Skiles’ day, and in the decades before that, schools were not divided into separate classes by enrollment. Small schools competed against large schools.
In 1954, tiny Milan High School won the state title, inspiring the movie “Hoosiers.”
During the 1980-81 season, Skiles’ junior year, the Plymouth Pilgrims thought they at least could win the sectional portion of the tournament. But they lost the sectional title game.
Just about every Plymouth player, including Skiles, had tears in his eyes in their postgame locker room, Derf remembered.
But in the midst of that disappointment, Skiles made a pledge.
“Next year,” Skiles told Derf, “we’re going to win the state.”
At the time, Derf thought to himself that Skiles was more than a bit overly optimistic. No Plymouth team ever had reached the final four, let alone won the state title.
“He actually believed and knew that that was going to happen the next year,” Derf said. “He makes things happen. He has such a level of belief. I came away learning a great deal from him, and it takes that level of belief to be successful in the things you do, whatever it is in life. He wasn’t a one-man show. He just was the element that brought the cohesiveness.”
Of all the teams Edison coached, none was better than his 1981-82 team. Skiles, a senior, was the leading scorer and its heart and soul. Wendel and Samuelson were fellow guards, and Sissel was the team’s tallest starter at 6 feet 2.
The tone was set early that season, in a game against Elkhart Memorial.
Plymouth led by double digits entering the fourth quarter but soon lost that lead.
When Elkhart Memorial took a two-point lead and inbounded the ball, a Plymouth player who rarely played, Pete Rockaway, drew a charging foul. Before Rockaway went to the free-throw line, Skiles attempted to take the pressure off him. Skiles said, “It doesn’t matter if you make ’em or not because you made the right play.”
Rockaway made both foul shots, and Plymouth won the game.
Sectional champions had a difficult path to reach the state final four.
You had to win two games at the regional level — with the games played on the same day.
Then, you had to win two games at the semi-state level — with the games played on the same day.
And, finally, in the state final four at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, you’d have to win two games — once again, on the same day.
The 1982 championship game between Roosevelt High of Gary and Plymouth remains legendary in Indiana. The Pilgrims trailed by two points with a few seconds to go, but Skiles sank a long jumper to tie the score and send the game into overtime.
Plymouth won 75-74 in double overtime, and Skiles finished with 39 points.
Plymouth became the smallest school to win Indiana’s championship since Milan.
Skiles, now 51 years old, isn’t sentimental by nature, but even he acknowledges that he occasionally thinks back to that title run with his friends.
“For better or worse, you’re playing for your school and your family and all that, but you’re playing for each other,” Skiles said. “Even back then, even though I was much younger, much more immature, that still resonated with me on that day: that I’m going on to play and these other guys I grew up with probably aren’t.”
* * *
Perhaps the only thing more improbable than the victory itself was the celebration that followed.
The day after the victory, the Pilgrims boarded a school bus from Indianapolis for the 125-mile drive back north to Plymouth.
But, first, some of the cities and towns along the way — the same cities and towns with their own schools that were Plymouth’s rivals — wanted to cheer for the Pilgrims.
Hundreds of people lined the streets of Rochester to greet the team, according to a report published in Plymouth’s newspaper, The Pilot-News.
In Argos, people stood eight deep and cheered on the Pilgrims.
The Pilgrims’ story captured the state’s imagination.
“He couldn’t have gone anywhere in the state of Indiana without being recognized,” Edison said. “I mean north, south, east, west — not just his name but his face.”
That team’s accomplishment still resonates.
Samuelson works as a financial adviser to cities, towns and schools throughout the state and the Midwest, and not long ago, he gave a presentation to a large group of people. After his talk, a stranger approached him and told him how much he appreciated Plymouth’s run to the state title in 1982.
“I wasn’t a star player,” Samuelson said. “But they remember.”
And they remember Skiles, too.
He was a statewide celebrity.
But to his friends and family, he was just “Scott.”
“I feel incredibly fortunate that I grew up in the environment I grew up in,” he said. “I’m also fortunate that I didn’t have anybody tolerate any of my immaturity from family to teachers to coaches. I would wish that upon anyone, any athlete or any person.”
jrobbins@orlandosentinel.com. Read his blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/magicblog and follow him on Twitter at @JoshuaBRobbins.
