2001 Tribune Article about the camp

Rite of summer at an end

By Rick Morrissey

Chicago Tribune

Jul 31, 2001 at 12:00 am

Well sure. Of course. Absolutely. Ray Meyer technically is supposed to remain in the golf cart. Everyone agrees on that. Those are the doctor's orders, after all.

But outside of Dr. J, Doc Rivers and Dr. Jack Ramsay, what would a doctor know about the subtleties of the pick and roll? And clearly, the player standing here on the asphalt court does not understand that once he makes contact on a pick, he should move immediately to the basket. So Coach Ray is out of the cart quickly, or as quickly as his leaky heart valve will allow.

"Go to the basket, son!" he pleads, looking completely crestfallen that this rudimentary basketball skill, this fundamental building block of the game is not being fully grasped. The look on his face says, Why can't Johnny read?

"When that kid learns this and gets back to school, he'll kill the competition," Meyer says proudly a few moments later.

The kid is 9.

As far as Meyer's family knows--the family that doesn't want him out of that golf cart either--it's another quiet morning of drills in another year of Ray Meyer's Basketball Camp. But he can't help himself, and so he's in and out of his vehicle like a state trooper. He can't help himself, and that's why he's a coach and always will be a coach, even when he shutters the place for good Monday, the day a basketball institution will say goodbye to the basketball institution he started in 1947.

If you're a male of a certain age--say, anywhere from 30 to 60--who played basketball competitively or hoped to, you probably have heard of Meyer's camp in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. This is where boys came to learn the game from a master. This is where city kids stared wide-eyed at the brilliant stars in the night sky, where they later fell sound asleep in a sweet, basketball-induced slumber.

Bob Pettit was a camper. So was Dan Issel. So were Dave Corzine and Mark Aguirre and Eddie Johnson. So were about 20,000 boys aged 9 to 16 over the last 54 years. They mostly came from the Chicago area and Wisconsin, and they were surprised to learn that heaven is located in the middle of nowhere and comes equipped with five courts and 20 baskets. Some campers came from other states, a few came from other countries, looking for wisdom from the famous DePaul coach. One came from Iceland ("Had to bathe him in sun block," Meyer says.)

Competition, that same thing Meyer has lived for all these years, is the exact thing killing his true love. Where once the camp was one of a handful from which Chicago-area players could choose, now there are too many options. Other camps. Summer leagues. Traveling teams. Year after year, Meyer could count on eight one-week sessions a summer with 180 players each. Now he oversees four sessions with 50 kids per session. The economics don't add up, and even a romantic basketball coach can see that.

His health isn't helping matters either. The heart valve problem makes him short of breath, and his five children are worried. He'll be 88 in December. His head and heart valve understand the situation, the rest of his heart doesn't.

"I have a lot of mixed feelings about closing this," he says. "It's part of my life. I spent every summer up here."

This is another page turning in Ray Meyer's life and he's sick of the sound of riffling pages. He retired as DePaul's coach in 1984 after 42 years, 724 victories and two Final Four appearances, but the camp kept him occupied. Now that is leaking away, too, and he doesn't know what will fill his days. It worries him.

"Maybe I'll travel," he says.

Man in the wilderness

A priest from DePaul who had a summer home in the area suggested Meyer start a basketball camp for kids. The idea sounded good to the coach, who came up with $500 as a down payment for an $18,000 property on Little Fork Lake in 1946. He and his late wife, Marge, eventually built a home here.

He cleared the area with his own callused hands. He "invited" one of his DePaul players, Ed Mikan, to come up for a few days, and they cut down 200 trees with hand saws to make room for the courts and cabins. The area was so densely wooded that when they woke up for the second day of tree clearing, they initially couldn't find where they had cut the day before. Their hands vaguely resembled ground chuck.

Meyer spread and rolled the asphalt for one of the courts on a 90-degree day. I'm trying to picture Rick Pitino doing this.

"Everything here is hand-made, but it's crude," Meyer says. "There isn't anything we bought. We made the backboards. I can't do that type of thing anymore. That's part of the problem."

He started with 30 kids in 1947. During the camp's heyday, entire high school teams would come to Three Lakes for tutoring. Judges from Chicago would ask Meyer to take in kids who were a misdemeanor away from juvenile detention facilities. Sometimes he had as many as 40 boys each session who couldn't afford the camp. Not good for business. Good for the kids, though. Good for the soul.

"Anybody who comes here, he gets more than basketball," Meyer says. "We talk to them about life a lot--what they should do and how they should act."

There was the time, for example, when Aguirre found himself being shaken from his sleep for another life lesson. This lesson was entitled: "Whoever Messed Up the Cabin Better Admit to It Now."

"Coach Ray stepped into our cabin and kicked everyone's butt," Aguirre says, laughing. "I mean whupped everybody. Knocking people around. We had just trashed a cabin, and he found out. He snatched everybody out of bed and made everybody stand in the cold until somebody told."

You can't do that sort of thing to high school kids now. If someone were to trash a cabin, there would be a town hall meeting on what societal forces might have caused someone to "act out." But back then, in the mid-1970s, if you "acted up," you were "punished."

Another life lesson was, "How to Make the Track Team." In the early days of the camp, the rule was to stay on marked trails because there were bears in the area. One camper wasn't especially concerned and bet some of the other boys $30 that he could last the night outside.

Meyer had shot a marauding bear a few years before, then had it stuffed. He and some of the campers carried it out and placed it strategically near where the brave boy's cot would be in the forest.

"The whole camp stood outside and waited," Meyer says. "He came out of the woods, and I don't think his feet were touching the ground. I never saw a kid run so fast."

Mostly, though, the camp was about basketball, about dribbling drills and defensive positioning and simply getting better. Pettit would pay a kid a quarter to rebound so he could practice shooting all afternoon. Former DePaul player Randy Ramsey would run hills every day.

"And the teaching was phenomenal," Aguirre says. "Coach Ray taught me things up there that I used all the way through college and in the NBA. The teaching part of Ray Meyer's camp was A-plus. You'd go to a Five Star camp to see all the stars. But if you wanted to learn basketball, you got all of that at Ray Meyer's."

The coach still gets letters from former campers, thanking him for what he taught. He shrugs, almost embarrassed. It's like thanking him for knowing how to breathe.

"I just love to coach kids," he says. "There's so much satisfaction. We had an all-star game the other day. A parent came up to watch his son play, and he couldn't believe how much he improved. He said, `You can't shut down the camp.'"

But he can and he will. And he'll hate that day.

No task too small

On a sunny morning, a young camper, maybe 10, approaches the golf cart sniffling.

"Coach, I jammed my finger," he says.

This is another one of Meyer's jobs, camp medic. He hobbles back to the mess hall to tend to the boy's hand. The coach had knee-replacement surgery several years ago. The surgeon was a former camper, of course.

"There's an undertaker who was a camper too," Meyer says, smiling his gap-toothed smile. "So I'm taken care of."

So are the kids. Band-Aids. Ice packs. Whatever they need, for one more week, at least. The coach's family is coming up for a vacation after that. He doesn't like them visiting when camp is in session because he has things to do, cuts to bandage, players to teach.

The coach will keep the property, but the campers will stop coming soon and the sound of balls bouncing on asphalt won't echo in the woods anymore. It will be a sad quiet, a lonely quiet.

But that's for later. Right now, there's this kid who keeps looking the wrong way on defense, and Coach Ray is out of the cart again.

"I'll be right back," he says. "I've got to show them this, otherwise they'll do it wrong."

He can't help himself.