Doyel: Indy lost an all-time great in George McGinnis, who was pretty good at sports too
Gregg Doyel
INDIANAPOLIS – George McGinnis was the biggest, strongest, toughest sweetheart you ever saw.
Now, for those who saw him play only for the Washington High football team, or for IU basketball, or for the Indiana Pacers, you saw something else. You saw someone ferocious, someone so powerfully explosive that legendary Dallas Cowboys scout Gil Brandt once visited him in Bloomington, trying to talk him into entering the NFL draft. People who know say McGinnis would’ve been a dominant defensive end in the NFL, same as he was at Washington High.
McGinnis was LeBron James before LeBron James, 6-8 and 240 pounds of physical marvel, outrunning everyone down the court and then dunking on whatever poor sap was waiting at the other end. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017, a just reward for a player who led the Pacers to two ABA titles and was MVP in 1974-75, when he led the league in scoring at 29.8 points per game and added 14.3 rebounds and 6.2 assists. Before that, in his one season at IU, he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds in 1970-71. Before that, in 1969, he was named IndyStar Mr. Basketball at Washington.
And after all of that? The most remarkable thing ever:
George McGinnis was still quiet. Still humble. He had a soft voice, gentle smile and sad eyes. They are eyes that saw too much, starting with the death of his father when he was 18, when Burnie McGinnis fell 60 feet to his death from a scaffold near the top of the Eli Lilly building.
They are eyes that see no more. George McGinnis, right up there with the most remarkable athletes in Indianapolis history, died early Thursday morning due to complications from cardiac arrest, according to the Pacers. He was 73.
George McGinnis:Indiana basketball legend dies at 73:
George McGinnis: Super-hero athlete, humble man
George McGinnis didn’t brag about himself, and didn’t like it when others bragged on him. And if someone exaggerated any of McGinnis’ athletic exploits? Oh, big George didn’t like that one bit.
I remember sitting in his living room in his home on the northside. This was before the bad news started coming in waves, when Lynda was still alive, when his mother was still alive, when Slick was still alive. George was well acquainted with sorrow — his dad’s death in July 1969 — but this was before sorrow hopped on his back and decided not to leave.
This was June 2017, shortly after McGinnis had learned about his induction into the Naismith Hall of Fame, and we were talking about football. Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty tried to recruit McGinnis in 1967, but Washington football coach Bob Springer was telling Daugherty he was wasting his time. The young man wanted to focus on basketball.
Too bad, Daugherty told Springer. McGinnis could be as good as Bubba Smith.
Daugherty would know — Smith played for him at Michigan State. And in 1967, a few months before Daugherty tried to replace him with McGinnis, Bubba Smith was taken No. 1 overall in the 1967 NFL draft by the Baltimore Colts.
Doyel in 2017: Wait – NBA Hall of Famer George McGinnis was better at football?!?
Doyel in September: Induction to IU Hall "icing on the cake" for George McGinnis
The stories about McGinnis, the athlete, are as outlandish as he was. He really did post 53 points and 30 rebounds in the 1969 Indiana-Kentucky All-Star Game. He really did get asked to leave the childhood pickup basketball games at Military Park because he was too good. He really did walk down the street to Lockefield Gardens, to play with the older kids, only to be told no.
He really did throw rocks at them until they said yes.
But could he really throw a football 80 yards? That’s what one of his teammates at Washington High, Tony Burchett, told me in 2017. Burchett also said McGinnis was so big, he wore a thigh pad on his biceps, but here's the whopper he told: Springer, the Washington coach, had installed a gadget play — a receiver pass, thrown by high school All-American receiver George McGinnis — after learning McGinnis could throw it 80 yards.
“What did he say?” McGinnis asked me, when I told him about Burchett’s recollection. “Eighty? Tony’s a great guy. I’m surprised he didn’t say 100. But no, I could only throw it about 60 or 65 yards.”
What did he say? Only 65 yards?
McGinnis' final years: 'I don’t need pity party'
Never saw George McGinnis without a smile. Now, I didn’t see him at the hardest times, but then, none of his final 4½ years was all that great. Lynda, his wife of 43 years, died of cancer in March 2019. His mom, Willie, died six months later at 92. His ABA coach and lifelong friend, Slick Leonard, died in 2021.
But if you were to catch McGinnis in person or on the phone, he was always sounding happy, gently asking about you. He never got too big for his britches, as Willie might’ve said, marrying his high school sweetheart, Lynda, and staying close friends with high school and IU teammate Steve Downing and Pacers teammate Bob Netolicky.
Before the back pain got to be too much, McGinnis was a regular at outdoor party scenes like the Pacers’ opening night in 2014, where he showed up on Georgia Street to sign autographs for fans and indulged one stranger who told him, obtusely, that he’d grown up idolizing Julius Erving and therefore had become fairly fond of 76ers teammate George McGinnis too.
But then, I’m prone to blurt stupid stuff.
And George McGinnis was prone to make me feel just fine about it.
McGinnis was honest about his injured back, honest without seeking sympathy, just saying how it was. For years he’d give an update whenever asked, the back pain going from manageable to bad to a place where he couldn’t stand up straight anymore. McGinnis had surgery to alleviate the pain, and the first time Slick Leonard saw McGinnis after the procedure, saw him standing up straight, Slick broke into tears.
Within a few years the back pain had returned, and then Lynda was gone. Then his mother, then Slick.
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George, hunched over again, wouldn’t complain. The last time we spoke, less than three months ago, he’d just learned been inducted into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame. I was congratulating him, but I was asking him about the last few years. About the back, and Lynda, and … well, all of that.
“I’ve been blessed, you know,” he told me. “I’ve had a really good life, very fortunate, so when people look at me: ‘Oh no Georgie, are you OK?’ Yeah, yeah, I’m OK. There are people who are much worse off than I am. I don’t need a pity party and I don’t pity myself. I’ve never done that.
“I just get up and go every day.”
Few did it better.
Few were better athletes, either.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.