Former NBA draft pick defends the ‘underdog’
College hoops star leads the Stillwater HRC
By KRIS JANISCH
kjanisch@pressenter.com
OAK PARK HEIGHTS- For anyone who has attended a Human Rights Commission meeting, Chairman Tony Carr usually comes across as a kind, soft-spoken gentleman. But that contrasts sharply with his past as a scoring guard who was drafted by the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.
“I’d shoot a jump shot in someone’s face and leave my finger up there and kind of point at them like, ‘You can’t guard me,’” said the Beloit, Wis., native, who played with Minnesota Timberwolves assistant coach Randy Whitman on an Olympic qualifying team. “That’s the kind of player I was.”
A two-time all-state player in Wisconsin, Carr was recruited by several Big Ten schools, but ended up taking the small college route. He was a three-time All-American at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he still holds numerous school scoring records.
“What’s meant to be will be,” Carr said, alluding to possible missed opportunities to play Division I basketball. “My philosophy was: You still have to lace ‘em up between the lines.”
Carr’s hoops career was cut short when he left the Bucks’ training camp for a shot to play with the Washington Bullets (now the Wizards) in 1982.
“I was young and stupid,” Carr said of leaving the Bucks training camp.
The Bucks- which refused to release his player rights- were trying to convert the 6-foot-3-inch Carr into a point guard. “I could have adapted to be a point guard,” Carr said, recalling his power dunks being chastised by then Bucks Head Coach Don Nelson. “But I wanted to score.”
Still sporting a soft spot on the underside of his forearm from years of dunking the basketball, Carr said his game would have fit better in today’s NBA, where fancy passes and dunking are par for the course.
“I was about 15 years too early,” he said, adding that pro basketball in the 1980s was a much more fundamental game. So instead of traveling around the country playing at arenas in front of thousands of fans, Carr went back to school.
“I went through a total personality change,” Carr said, recalling friends who disappeared when his playing days were done. “It was a reality check…I realized that I was a product of the public.”
Always one to stick up for “the underdog,” Carr, 44, began working with handicapped people as part of Merrick, Inc., a company in Vadnais Heights that provides training for handicapped adults.
In 1991, he started a transportation unit at Merrick, which grew from three vehicles to 46, delivering 600 rides per day under Carr’s watch. After 18 years at Merrick, he decided to start his own special needs transportation company in 2004, fittingly dubbed Allstar Transportation.
Allstar Transportation provides rides for handicapped and elderly people with 21 wheelchair accessible vans serving the seven-county Twin Cities metro area. Carr said he maintains his competitive spirit in the business world just as he did on the basketball court.
“The worst thing somebody can tell me is that I can’t do something,” he said. That attitude stems from his parents, both of whom grew up in the South during segregation and taught Carr about Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination.
So it may seem odd that Carr has a large collection of racially offensive memorabilia. When asked about his fascination with things like an “Old Mammy’s Chawklets” package or a “NiggerHair Smoking Tobacco” tin, Carr replies simply: “It’s history.”
A large display case in his home features some of the more than 500 pieces Carr has collected- serving as a reminder of the hatred his parents were forced to endure.
“They made it better for me,” Carr said of his parents. “If they could go through (racism) everyday…” Both parents died in the past three years, leaving Carr wishing he knew more of the struggles they went through.
One story his father told before his passing was why he had a permanent knot on his head. Carr only recently found out it was from a police officer who caught his father returning home from a movie after curfew.
A “product of integration,” Carr uses his experiences as one of the only African- American students in his high school to relate to the problems brought before the Human Rights Commission.
“With that comes struggles- comes knowledge,” Carr said. “When someone’s not comfortable with a situation, I feel it.”
Now with a “soul mate” and three children ages 3 and younger- “the two-year- old has already got the follow-through”- Carr doesn’t play basketball as much as he used to, but can still get up and down the court with the best of them.
“I can still catch it like this,” Carr said as he pantomimed catching a basketball and turning his body away from the basket. “And throw it down like this.”
Reprinted from the Stillwater Gazette, Thursday, March 3, 2005
