Last ride of the ‘Pony Express’: Keeping alive the memory of Hillside’s 1966 basketball team

After a long time away, Daniel McLaurin returned home and visited Durham in 2004. He wanted to show his daughter where he’d grown up in the 1950s and ‘60s, wanted her to see parts of the city through his eyes, as it was when it was segregated. He took her by his childhood home and then where he went to high school, too — the old Hillside High, or at least what was left of it.

When he made his way to Hillside, it was almost too late. The place where he’d grown into a young man, where he received an education, where he and his teammates became the highest-scoring high school basketball team in North Carolina history — their records still unbroken, more than 50 years later — was almost no more. McLaurin became somber. The building was being torn down.

At once he was angry and heartbroken. Parts of his past sat in piles of rubble and crumbling walls.

It was progress, in a way, and maybe something positive. The building, after all, had been a standing reminder of the days of segregation, a tangible artifact of what McLaurin and so many young Black people throughout Durham and the rest of South endured. Those walls had been confining when McLaurin attended and until he graduated in 1966, a place that offered refuge, but also not much of a metaphorical escape.

McLaurin and his teammates, who did things on a basketball court that no other high school team in North Carolina had ever done, before or since, so desperately wanted to prove themselves beyond the limits of the day. They wanted their chance against Raleigh’s Broughton High, and a young Pistol Pete Maravich. They wanted their chance against Durham High, then led by the “dashing” Brad Evan, as the local paper described him, who was a quarterback who also played basketball.

Evans had been a “big time” athlete, as McLaurin recently recalled, his voice worn with age but still steady, the memories still fresh, after more than 50 years. The idea came back then, at least among McLaurin and his teammates, to stage a cross-city championship, the high-flying Hillside Hornets vs. Dashing Brad Evans and Durham High, one night only to see “who was the best team in the city,” McLaurin said.

But, he said, “they wouldn’t play us,” and that wasn’t anything new. The white high schools played in the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. The Black schools in the North Carolina High School Athletic Conference. Separate associations. Separate schedules. Separate everything, “and they (Durham High) wouldn’t scrimmage against us, either,” McLaurin said.

“So growing up like that, nobody knew who we were except some of the people in our own neighborhood. And that’s how that went.”

Well, they had Hillside, at least. They had the magic of the end of the ‘65 season, when the Hornets won the NCHSAC state championship with an improbable victory against West Charlotte — improbable because Hillside recovered from a 19-point deficit in the second quarter. The Charlotte Observer the next day described Hillside as “the Cinderella team of the Negro 4-A basketball tournament,” and so began some of the fairy-tale mythology that soon enveloped the Hornets.

They began the next season with a 138-70 victory against Little River in front of an “over-flow standing-room-only crowd” at Hillside Gymnasium, as the Durham Herald-Sun covered it, and it was in that story that the writer, Earl Mason, first used the phrase that came to follow those ‘65-66 Hornets: The Pony Express.

Indeed, coach Carl Easterling’s Pony Express “lived up to some of the pre-season reports,” as Mason wrote after that first game, what with at least 30 points in every quarter and eight players in double-figures, including Michael Hayes, with 26, and John “Goat” Bullock with 20 months before he essentially vanished and became a mystery that endures to this day.

McLaurin started and finished with 10, himself.

Almost 40 years later, he was back at his old school for one last look before it completely disappeared. He could see the streets he and his teammates used to run to keep in shape, the hill that burned their legs, the walls. In his mind it was the ‘60s again and the woman behind the lunch counter in the Five and Dime was ordering him out after he asked for a hot dog and orange soda; his sister was being arrested in the march near Durham’s old Howard Johnson’s, and he could hear the epithets as he walked down the street.

But the gym.

“That was our haven,” McLaurin said. “That’s where we could go get loose.”

The gym was where teenagers not afforded the larger benefits of their time became something larger than themselves, where they became the Pony Express. That was why the sight of the old Hillside’s razing made McLaurin feel like “they’re tearing down my history, like I didn’t exist,” and that’s part of why he has remained determined, all these years later, to keep alive the legacy and memory of his old high school team. It has as much to do with the records as it does the fear of one more injustice.

“They were getting ready to erase us, man,” McLaurin said.

If anything, he wants people to know what drove Hillside to score all those points, and he wants the Hornets and their coach, a man who’s been gone for more than 40 years, to receive their due. It has been a long time.

Artistry and speed

McLaurin entered high school in 1963, in the summer of Medgar Evers’ assassination and in the autumn of President John F. Kennedy’s. It was Kennedy, especially, who’d inspired a greater hope that things might change, “that we could be treated like human beings like everyone else,” McLaurin said. “But then, he was gone.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 came the next year, and the Voting Rights Act the year after that. It was a time of great change, and of great resistance to that change, and as the Hillside Hornets transformed into the Pony Express, basketball allowed a respite “from how bad they were treating us in society,” McLaurin, now 75, said.

“When we were out there, we owned everything. Nobody couldn’t tell us nothing, yeah. We didn’t have to worry about anything else.”

The 138 points the Hornets scored against Little River at the start of the ‘65-66 season set a state record. It stood until they scored 139 in a victory against P.W. Moore, of Elizabeth City, in January of ‘66. And then that record stood until Hillside scored 147 a few weeks later in a victory against Booker T. Washington High, of Rocky Mount.

Hillside played with an artistry and speed not of its time. The Hornets pressed on defense and sprinted on offense, overwhelming opponents with stamina and finesse that proved difficult to match. The 3-point shot didn’t exist then. Teams didn’t just run up and down the court, scoring at will. Well, at least they didn’t before Easterling demanded it out of his players.

All was not perfect. The Hornets lost three times in the regular season and then suffered a 29-point defeat against redemption-driven West Charlotte in a state championship rematch. The game was tied at halftime before West Charlotte seized control. The Hornets’ records, though, endure. In the past 57 years, no North Carolina high school team has scored more than 147 points in a game. No team has averaged more than 105 points, which is what Hillside averaged that season.

The game to remember came in January of ‘66. Hillside vs. Laurinburg Institute. McLaurin remembers it in such clear detail, in part, because it was the first time he ever saw a white college coach come to a game at Hillside. The coach was Lefty Driesell, years before his tenure at Maryland and then of Davidson College, there to scout and recruit a Laurinburg player named Charles Scott.

McLaurin remembers the game, too, because it ended in a 110-106 Hillside victory in a “thriller,” as the Herald-Sun headline went the next day. Bullock, a guard blessed with talent that allowed him to play larger than his 6-foot-2 frame, finished with 41 points, 25 rebounds and 13 assists. Scott finished with 15 points and fouled out with seven minutes remaining.

Searching for memories

Later that year, Scott became the first Black scholarship athlete at North Carolina, forever a part of Dean Smith’s legacy as a Civil Rights advocate. Bullock, meanwhile, disappeared after the state championship defeat against West Charlotte. He’d only arrived at Hillside the year before, with prodigious game and the nickname of “Goat,” from the playgrounds of New York City. Word was that after the season ended in ‘66, Goat went back home. Just stopped going to school and left.

Nobody was sure back then why they called Bullock “Goat,” just as nobody is sure now what became of him. McLaurin carries with him snippets of rumors, a misty haze of unformed leads as impossible to grab hold of as wisps of smoke. There was the time an old classmate on Facebook posted of running into Goat in New York sometime in the ‘70s; another account that someone spotted Goat in Durham years after he’d left Hillside.

When ESPN did a short documentary on the Pony Express in 2004, none of the people who put it together could find Goat. Neither could researchers at The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer, when The N&O wrote about Bullock in 2010. Today, Goat might’ve gone viral for posting a triple-double against a prospect the caliber of Charles Scott; Goat, himself, might’ve commanded scholarship offers on the spot, or shot up the recruiting rankings.

In his day, though, and in the America of the mid-1960s, he faded away, a forgotten name on a yellowing newspaper page, the question of what happened to him as great as what might’ve been if he’d come along in a different era. McLaurin is sure that Goat could’ve made a living playing basketball — “college, pro ball, Harlem Globetrotters, all of that,” he said, and because he doesn’t know any better, he said, “I’ll just put him among the living.”

What McLaurin knows for sure, though, is that the Hillside Hornets of 1966 are growing fewer in number. By the early 1990s, a murder-suicide had claimed one player and a drug overdose another, according to a 1991 story in the Durham Herald-Sun. When they were young, those who were a part of the Pony Express could outrun almost anything. Anything except the larger limits of their time and, now, time itself. McLaurin knows of five players, at least, who’ve died. Those who remain are all in their 70s. McLaurin feels an urgency now to keep their story alive.

“Because I love where I grew up. I love Hillside High School. And I love my coach, and my teammates,” he said, and soon he’d gone back in time in his mind to the day he visited Hillside decades after he’d left, only to see part of his history strewn about the debris.

‘Tired of consideration’

McLaurin went off to an all-Black business college, clung to his basketball dreams for a while and then entered the workforce. He moved to California in 1978 and has only come back to North Carolina for visits. He eventually wrote two books about the Pony Express — the first deliberately included no paragraphs, to give the reader the breathless sensation of what it was like to try to keep up with Hillside — and consulted ESPN on its Outside the Lines short in the early 2000s.

In the years since, his mission has become to seek recognition. He has spent years lobbying the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame to induct the 1965-66 Hillside Hornets, but the organization’s rules prohibit entire teams from being enshrined. Given that, McLaurin has instead argued that Easterling, the Hornets’ innovative coach, be inducted. The wait continues, if it’ll ever end.

“I’m still fighting,” McLaurin said.

Easterling died in 1980, at 73. He died eight years after his state-mandated retirement and the news of his death ran on the front page The Durham Morning Herald, just beneath a story of the death of John Lennon. In Durham, Easterling had long become a beloved figure, a pillar in the Black community and an advocate for its young people. He was “a giant of a man,” went a letter to the paper after his death, and was to Hillside “like John Wooden was to UCLA, Dean Smith to North Carolina, or Bear Bryant to Alabama.” Easterling’s nickname was also Bear.

During a career that spanned 40 years, he coached Hillside’s boys basketball team for 17 years and once led its girls team to 96 victories in 100 games. He’d been an assistant football coach, too, but Easterling made his greatest contributions on another court. His Hillside tennis teams were always among the state’s best.

The greatest athlete he coached, or at least the one who became the most accomplished, was John Lucas Jr., who went onto basketball stardom at Maryland and in the NBA, but who was also every bit as much of a tennis phenom. A young Lucas, 12 years old, served as ball boy for the Pony Express, years before he became a Hillside standout, himself.

“Everything I am in athletics I owe to coach Easterling,” Lucas said at the time of Easterling’s death, according to the Morning Herald, and the paper praised Easterling’s contributions to the city in an editorial with the headline, “Coach Carl Easterling produced champions.”

The passage of more than 40 years, though, has dulled the memory of his contributions. There’s no mention of Easterling inside the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, or of the Pony Express. McLaurin spent years making his case with Don Fish, the Hall’s former executive director, but leadership has changed twice in recent years, from Fish to Jeff Elliott and from Elliott to Trip Durham, who has been in the role now for five months.

Durham during a brief interview this week emphasized that it’s among his priorities to streamline the nomination process, and he expressed admiration at the recitation of some of Easterling’s accomplishments. For whatever reason, be it leadership changes or a cumbersome induction process, McLaurin has the sense that his pleas often fell on deaf ears.

“I still think we should be in the (North Carolina Sports) Hall of Fame,” he said, noting that the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame has inducted entire teams. When McLaurin contacted the state’s sports hall of fame over the years, he said, “they’d always say, ‘Well, we’re considering it.’

“I’d say I’m tired of consideration.”

Keeping the past alive

Hillside moved to a new building in the mid-1990s and, even there, there’s not much to commemorate the legacy of the Pony Express. There’s a plaque. Some photographs. A banner. That’s about it.

“We don’t even house a lot of historical artifacts, and stories in our trophy cases,” Ovester Grays, the school’s girls basketball coach and athletic director, said recently. “All of that stuff got lost, and we don’t know what happened.”

It became lost when the school moved. The old building came down and, with it, so did a lot of the tangible mementos that connected Hillside and its alums to the past. It was the kind of thing McLaurin feared and perhaps anticipated, that the loss of place would lead to the loss of memory — that in a way it’d lead to an erasure. Grays, who has worked at the school since 1997, is familiar with the story of the Pony Express and over the years has met some of the players and become acquainted with their individual experiences.

“But I don’t think that the current generation, of the 2000s, is as aware as they should be,” he said.

To remedy that, he is trying to raise $25,000 for a digital hall of fame, a virtual wall of honor that Hillside would build to commemorate its past. There’s no shortage of moments that could be worthy of the honor. Hillside is among only a few remaining North Carolina schools whose history began as an all-Black school in the days of segregation. The original Hillside, which predates even the building McLaurin and his classmates attended, opened in 1922 as the largest all-Black school in Durham. For decades the students who passed through its doors sought refuge, and hope.

In time, a coach and a basketball team became testaments to the possibilities, but also the limitations. The Pony Express never had a chance to play against the likes of Maravich, nor of Brad Evans’ Durham High; McLaurin and his classmates of the mid-60s “never played on the playground with white kids, never went to school with them.”

“And so we never got a chance to know what the other side was like,” he said.

On a late-winter Thursday night, decades after the Hillside glory years that were perhaps not so glorious, given all they entailed, the 2023 Hornets traveled to Millbrook High of Raleigh for a second-round state playoff game. It’d been a long time since the mid-1960s. A couple of older Hillside alums, guys who graduated in the mid-70s, sat a few rows behind the Hillside bench, cheering on the Hornets. They knew of the school’s history, knew of Lucas and Easterling and the ‘66 team that scored all those points. To the players on the court below it was ancient, everything that happened 57 years ago. These Hornets fell behind early and it was never all that close.

Across the country, meanwhile, McLaurin sometimes wondered how things might have been different if only he and his teammates had come along in a different time.

Maybe they would have earned more opportunities. Maybe Goat Bullock would not have been lost. Maybe Easterling would have been remembered more. All McLaurin could do now was try to keep the past alive.