King Gaskins
By Marvin Pave
Catholic Memorial’s great season looked ruined. After a time out, Billy Raynor brought the ball down, fed to Gaskins on the left sideline and he took three steps towards the corner, turned, and arched a perfect swish.
Coach Ronnie Perry ran down the sideline and fell flat on his back. Fans ran all over the court. Gaskins was hugged by everybody. — Boston Globe, March 23, 1969
Days before his undefeated team’s state championship game against Springfield Commerce, Catholic Memorial freshman guard King Gaskins was hurting.
A broken finger on his right hand, his shooting hand, required a protective cast and the pain prevented him from getting enough arc on his shot.
Until he had to.
Memorial, which had a 28–0 record prior to the state championship game, trailed, 52–51, with 11 seconds to play.
“Coming out of the time out,” recalled Raynor, a junior and a Globe All-Scholastic that season, “the idea was for Bobby Kelley to get the ball to myself or Fran Costello for the shot, but their defense focused on us, and I was able to pass the ball to King.
“He had the courage, the nerve, and the confidence to take the shot and the rest is history. It was the beginning of ‘The King.’”
Perry said Gaskins was “deadly” from 15–17 feet and “had the poise to come through. In all my years of coaching, that was the greatest clutch shot I ever saw.”
After the pulsating victory, Gaskins told the Globe that no matter how much his hand hurt, “I wasn’t going to ease off on that shot. I thought it was going off to the right when I let it go, but it wasn’t.”
The Globe’s Peter Gammons summed it up in his game story: “His 22-foot jump shot last night may never be equaled for cool brilliance…his hand was taped, and he complained of it hurting, but not when it meant the greatest season any team has ever had in Eastern Massachusetts.”
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At the corner of Pacific Avenue and Elm Street, on the side of the Union Grove Music Building in Santa Cruz, California, a mural honoring King Gaskins is displayed.
A vibrant rainbow appears over a smiling Gaskins, who has his arms around four young people. Below them is a lush, green valley.
Santa Cruz was Gaskins’ final stop on his life’s journey. There, he was a beloved drug and alcohol counselor with the city’s Youth Services department. He also worked with students at the Youth Experiencing Success School.
Gaskins died at age 40 in 1994. He was on a camping trip with his students and drowned while swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
In addition to the mural, which was painted in 1995 and subsequently refurbished, a memorial bench was dedicated at the basketball courts in Jade Street Park near his home.
He had moved to California in the early 1980s.
When the mural was rededicated in 2014, Raynor flew to California to honor his former teammate.
“He had started a new life,” said Raynor, who was two years ahead of Gaskins at Catholic Memorial. Both grew up at around the Mission Hill housing project in the Roxbury section of Boston.
“There were two courts, at opposite ends of the project,” Raynor recalled. “The better players were at one end and the rest at the other. Frankly, King wasn’t all that good as a pre-teen. But one summer, when he was 13 or 14, he came to our court and had improved dramatically. He was a good shooter, but there are a lot of great shooters. His ability to get past a defender and his quickness separated him from most other players and took him to the next level.”
It was a rarity for freshmen to play on the varsity during that era.
“I remember in the fall of ’68, I was in the cafeteria at Catholic Memorial when school was opening and kids would go to the gym when it was open,” Perry recalled. “I left to go upstairs, and Fran Costello came over to me and said `Mr. Perry, have you seen this kid, King Gaskins? He’s in the gym and he’s really good.’ That was just a hint of what was to happen over the next four years.”
Perry, who posted a 292–34 record and won two state titles as CM’s head coach from 1958–72, said Gaskins was tireless on the court.
“He was as effective at the end of a game as he was at the beginning, and he had that God-given quickness. And he had such a nice soft delivery and perfect follow through that made him a great shooter.”
After that triumph over previously unbeaten Commerce, Catholic Memorial, an all-boys’ school in West Roxbury, continued its 55-game winning streak that was halted by Boston English.
Gaskins, one of 11 children, became a team captain. He scored a school record 55 points against Holyoke Catholic. He also broke the state career scoring record with 2,368 points. He was selected to four high school All-American teams.
And he was one of the most highly recruited players in Massachusetts high school basketball history.
“His last game was one of his greatest.” recalled Perry.
It pitted Gaskins against Lexington High and its superstar, Ronnie Lee, in the state Division 1 final at Boston College’s Roberts Center. Lexington, a deeper team, prevailed, 76–69. Lee, a METCO student, scored 31 points. Gaskins tallied a game-high 43.
“He had run around and over and through at least five different people assigned to guard him,” the Globe’s Leigh Montville wrote of Gaskins’ gallant effort. “He had wound up with a towel covering his eyes as he choked emotions and received a runners-up trophy.
“But these two kids, these two gifted black kids who had dribbled into predominately white worlds and succeeded, had been this show.”
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Gaskins’ high school playing days weren’t quite over.
He was a star at the inaugural Boston Shootout at Boston University’s Case Gymnasium that summer and part of what was dubbed the “Boston Six” comprised of Gaskins, Lee, Bobby Carrington (Archbishop Williams), Billy Collins (Don Bosco), Wilfred Morrison (Boston Tech) and Carlton Smith (Boston English).
Boston, coached by the Celtics’ Tom (Satch) Sanders, won the title, winning both of its games, with the clincher over Connecticut, 72–71.
Former University of Massachusetts Boston basketball coach and athletic director Charlie Titus told the Bay State Banner that the team “set a standard that all subsequent Shootout teams strived to exceed.”
Perry, a great multi-sport athlete at Holy Cross, left Catholic Memorial to become athletic director at his alma mater that same year.
“My son, Ronnie, Jr. would have been a freshman at CM that fall, and I felt it would be better if I moved on because of the pressures involved,” Perry, Sr. said.
Gaskins, who had a close relationship with Perry, decided to join him at Holy Cross where George Blaney had just become head coach after a stint at Dartmouth. He had narrowed his other choices down to Notre Dame and Marshall.
Early in his freshman season he poured in 30 points to pace the Crusaders to a 96–90 victory at the University of Connecticut. He wound up fourth in team scoring at 13.7 points per game and averaged 1.9 rebounds and 4.8 assists.
Former UConn graduate assistant coach Dan Doyle said Gaskins’ performance impressed head coach Dee Rowe.
“Dee thought King was one of the best freshmen he had ever seen,” said Doyle, who had scouted Holy Cross and still considers Gaskins “as quick a player as I ever saw. He had a very good shot and lightning quickness.”
But that season was Gaskins’ last for the Crusaders.
“Unfortunately, George inherited some players who were not too happy with this highly publicized freshman coming in,” said Perry. “King certainly performed well, but he could have been so much better if they were more welcoming.”
However, there were other issues.
Gaskins, who was suspended for one game by Blaney after being late for practices, also faced academic difficulties, according to Perry, and made up some courses at Mitchell Junior College in New London, Connecticut, with the intention of returning to Holy Cross.
He never did.
According to a 1982 Globe story revisiting the “Boston Six,” Gaskins encountered problems with the law after his high school heroics.
“King was one of the oldest in his family,” Carrington told the Globe, “and he had to support his other brothers and sisters.”
A couple of Gaskins’ brothers were involved in a local gang. In 1973, one was found dead with more than 100 bullets in his body.
“The facts are still unknown,” Gaskins said in the 1982 story. “He was murdered, and it was a big strain on the family. It was a critical time for all of us.
“In the projects, there are different cliques. There’s the jocks and the gangs and the lovers. I fell in with the jocks in high school, but later, some of my friends from the old neighborhoods followed me, and I got caught up in the wrong things.”
After attending Mitchell, he enrolled at Iowa Lakes Community College in Estherville, Iowa. Each time, he left school after an arrest, one of which may have been influenced by racial profiling.
He returned to Boston in 1976, but after Gaskins signed a letter of intent to play at Boston College, the school declined to enroll him.
“I think the dream was still with me until then,” Gaskins told the Globe, “but that kind of took it out of me.”
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Gaskins, however, had a way with young people and that translated into turning his life around.
He worked with the Action for Boston Community Development program as a youth counselor and in a delinquency program at Project Concern.
“He was great with the kids,” Marian Young, a co-worker, said in the 1982 story. “He was the favorite counselor. He’d be the one taking them to the courthouse and helping to straighten them out. He organized teams and tried to get them involved in constructive things.”
When funding for Project concern ran out, Gaskins made the move to California.
And he offered some advice in the 1982 story after his arrival on the West Coast.
“The environment is a crucial factor in the positive growth and development of inner-city athletes,” Gaskins said. “Unless he or she stays aware of the negativism, they’ll be zapped like a frog catching a fly.
“It’s very, very easy and unchallenging to do bad. If he or she is a true athlete, the challenge is fighting against the negative side and striving for their own personal goals. That’s the real challenge.”
Perry, who stayed in contact throughout the years with Gaskins, said he “touched so many people. If you knew King Gaskins, you had to be impressed. Coaching him was a treat for me.”
Kelley, who threw the inbounds pass to Raynor that led to Gaskins’ heroic hoop, said that “I was totally confident in him taking that shot and for a freshman to do that in the Garden was unbelievable. He had that competitive edge and the innate talent to dribble between his legs and change direction.”
Raynor, his boyhood friend, still remembers Gaskins’ bubbly personality and big smile and “his unique ability to attract people to him.
“As a project kid, he beat the odds and was able to elevate himself into one of the premier high school players in the country,” Raynor said, “and that, in and of itself, is a fantastic story.”
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