Meeting Mr. Basketball

I know some of you have heard bits and pieces of this story so I thought I would write it all out for everybody.
The story begins with my assignment for Newslink a couple of weeks ago. My assignment was a story about a Muncie City Park superintendent who had not been reappointed by the new mayor of Muncie. (The Muncie Mayoral ordeal is another story but in a nutshell...the Democrat won the election by 9 votes. Then during the recount some votes were ruled not to be counted so the Republican won the recount by 12 votes or something like that...there are still legal issues as I'm sure you can imagine but as for now Republican McSherley is the Mayor of Muncie.)
Anyway...Ron Bonham was the superintedent of this park for 38 years so it was a significant story when McSherley chose not to reappoint him to his position. However, there was an unusually loud outcry from the community. So I worked on the story with a buddy of mine and we interviewed the mayor as well as Ron Bonham. Now, I can't say that I truly recognized Bonham's name but I did think that I had read it before and as I came to find out...I had. Bonham was actually Indiana's Mr. Basketball in 1960. He played for the hometown Muncie Central Bearcats and lead the Bearcats to an undefeated season until the state championship where MC lost to (I think) East Chicago. Bonham told me that the state championship game was the only game in his entire career in which he fouled out and he also said the loss could be chalked up to his team being over confident. I can understand why...you see...Muncie Central beat the #2 team in the state in the semifinals game of the tournament by around 40 points. Bonham's success didn't end with high school graduation however. In fact, he was only getting started. Bonham went on to play at Cincinatti (I can never spell it right) and won TWO national championships with those Bearcats. He was then drafted by the Boston Celtics where he played for (I think) 3 seasons and won TWO NBA championships along side Bill Russell and some of the other Celtic greats.
After finding all of this out...what I had originally thought was an unusually loud outcry from the community made perfect sense. You simply don't mess with Mr. Basketball. Especially in a city which calls itself the "Basketball Capital of Indiana" or where the school has won more state championships (8) than any other high school.
I thought all of this was pretty cool and I'm hoping to do a story on Ron Bonham's life a little later on this semester. I'll keep you updated on where this goes.