by Evin Demirel Somewhere above, Diane Johnson smiled. Her son, Joe Johnson, had always been one of the best in the world at hitting game-winning shots but had never before made one for a pro basketball championship. In early September, though, Johnson capped the greatest season of his professional career by sinking…
by Evin Demirel On a Friday morning, a group of men and women sit on chairs in a physical therapy room at the VA Medical Center in Fayetteville. Each veteran faces forward, resting their socked feet on rectangular purple and blue mats. At the front of a class, a 72-year-old man with shaggy white…
by Evin Demirel If you peer hard enough into the smoldering wreckage of Saturday’s 51-10 annihilation at the hands of Auburn, you will see the faint outline of a bright spot. That faint outline is in the shape of Treylon Burks’ enormous hands. And, for at least one series during that other forgettable disaster, he had…
by Evin Demirel As the University of Arkansas publicizes it, Thomas J. Johnson became its first black basketball player in 1967 when he joined the freshman team. But that official record skips over the fact another African American, Louis Perry Bryant, walked on to the program two years before. The Fayetteville native’s story as a…
In the Marianna home of 82-year-old James Banks lies a large part of the town’s athletic heritage. Trophies, plaques, yearbooks, clippings and more form a makeshift museum where alumni of the former Moten High take tours during reunions. There, at the all-black school, Banks starred as a running back. he then went to Wiley…
