The inimitable Howie Evans leaves unparalleled legacy

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Howie Evans was a proverbial giant. Even though standing just 5-10, he was a towering sports and cultural icon. To me, he was a sage, mentor, coach, role model, father figure, and tough, nurturing uncle.   

He was my mother Elaine’s oldest brother, and died last Thursday morning at 91 at the Longleaf Neuro-Medical Treatment Center in Wilson, N.C., where he was a resident since 2018,, dauntlessly surviving the collective symptoms of dementia.

The sports editor emeritus of this publication, Evans was raised in the South Bronx, growing into a multi-sport athlete at Morris High School. From Morris, he focused on basketball at HBCU Maryland State College in the mid-1950s, which became the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 1970. He returned to his alma mater as the head basketball coach from 1985 to 1987.

Evans’ list of firsts, Hall of Fame inductions, and honors and awards in education, sports, journalism, and activism are all too lengthy to note on this page. Working for the then-New York City Board of Education for more than 20 years, he was a charter member of its Chancellor’s Task Force on Academics and Athletics. He was a co-founder of the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, as well as inductee, growing it with New York basketball luminaries like Bob Williams, Tom Konchalski, and Mel Davis. As a broadcaster for the New York Jets, he was the first Black journalist to be a member of an NFL franchise’s traveling press corps.

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Evans was also the first African American to own a major professional sports franchise in partnership, co-owning and serving as president of the Garden State Colonials of the Eastern Professional Basketball League. However, those achievements merely illustrate what he did, not who he was.

Evans began his journalism career in earnest in the mid-1960s and was the sports editor for the New York Amsterdam News for nearly 50 years. In conjunction with being a basketball coach, his writing and broadcasting became vessels for him to change the world. His imprint is everlasting. He was analogous to an ancient scribe — a griot who recorded and interpreted history while simultaneously producing it.

His unwavering mission to have the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame committee elect some of his close friends — Black pioneers such as Bob Douglas, founder of the New York Renaissance, and ingenious coach John B. McLendon Jr., recognized as the first Black coach in any sport at a predominantly white university (Cleveland State, 1966), is emblematic of his lifelong commitment to the social tenets of opportunity, merit, justice, and equality.

His friendship with tennis great Arthur Ashe had its connective tissue in their shared fight for the end of apartheid in South Africa. He vigorously advocated for women to be hired in positions predominated by men in numerous industries. And he led by example.

“In 2006, I approached Howie about becoming the paper’s WNBA correspondent. He said he’d give me a chance because he wanted a woman to cover women’s sports,” said current AmNews sports writer Lois Elfman. “After the New York Liberty season, he allowed me to delve into any sport I wanted to cover. His belief in my writing has allowed me a now-19-year journey.”

Take a moment to process that Evans was a founder of AAU basketball, today estimated to be a $15 billion-plus behemoth. Back in 1974, coaching the AAU Riverside Hawks along with Ernie Lorch, he took a group of 17- and 18-year-olds on a historic trip to the former Soviet Union. It was the first-ever collection of high school players from the United States to play in the USSR.

“Howie taught me to be proud of who I was and let me know that I could do whatever I put my mind to as a young Black man growing up in the South Bronx,” said former University of Pennsylvania star Anthony “Tony” Price, a member of the aforementioned squad who would visit Evans during his final years of life at Longleaf. “He put me on my first airplane ride and took me to Russia as a 17-year-old in high school. He taught me to dream big.”

NBA and college players born on the African continent are commonplace today. Not in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Evans was a vanguard in starting that migration when he recruited cousins Dud Tongal and Ed Bona from Sudan to Fordham University, where he was an assistant coach under College Basketball Hall of Fame head coach Tom Penders, having joined Penders’ staff in 1978.

Evans often expressed pride in Fordham alumni he knew when they were young students during his time at the Rose Hill campus who, decades later, ascended to the pinnacle of their professions, such as broadcasters Mike Breen and Micheal Kay, and communications executive Joe Favorito.

“Those are our guys,” he would reflexively gush when seeing them while covering a Knicks or Yankees game, or at some other event.

Some of his most noted and consequential work was with the awe-inspiring Hank Carter and the Wheelchair Charities, the Citywide Boys and Girls Basketball League, and Kelsey Stevens at the Dunlevy Milbank Center of the Children’s Aid.

Howie’s long association with powerful local politicians, including Charles Rangel, David Dinkins and Percy Sutton, enabled him to ensure that necessary resources were allocated to vital youth programs. His discussions with AmNews publisher emeritus, Wilbert A. Tatum, were masterclasses in various subjects, their brilliance and Black excellence on full display for everyone in the newsroom to absorb.

I cherish the countless hours of oral history Evans imparted to me; my favorites his personal experiences — his affection for Joe Namath and the other New York Jets, and the raucously fun plane and bus rides they would have in a bygone era when players trusted reporters to keep their indiscretions secret. Reporters would abide by the honor code— Howie as senior editor, and Bryant Gumbel as managing editor, side by side, running Black Sport Magazine in the early ’70s.

Evans’ profound relationships with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown, comrades in the Black power and empowerment movements. Being monitored by federal agencies for his civil rights and social justice activism.  

His contentious battles with sportswriter Peter Vecsey as opposing coaches at the Pro Rucker. Recalling his many conversations with the great Holcombe Rucker in Rucker’s kitchen. Hanging out with Wilt Chamberlain at the Big Dipper’s sprawling California house, one of the most mythological bachelor pads in the annals of celebrity cribs.     

The authoritative certainty with which he would assert that playground legend Joe Hammond, whom he spoke of like a son, was one of the greatest to ever live in a classic “what could have been” tale. Attending Negro Leagues games at Yankee Stadium with my grandfather and witnessing the remarkable Satchel Paige in his prime work his magic on the mound.

He reminded me a time or two about how when I was a little kid, running around Wagner Center in East Harlem — where he was the director — with my siblings and cousins. He pointed out a troubled kid from the neighborhood several years older with lightning hands and feet like a ballet dancer, whom he predicted would someday be a world boxing champion. And damn if Hector Macho Camacho didn’t become just that.

But nothing in Evans’ life surpassed his joy in the achievements of his kids, those of us who are family and the innumerable he claimed as his own. His twin daughters Renee and Collete traveling the world. His son Joe forging his own career. My older brother, David Harris, and older sister, Juanne Harris, earning undergraduate college degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth, respectively. Me covering sports with him around the country. His players, students, writers, and interns. He celebrated us more than his own massive attainments.

That was the essence of the imperfectly perfect man who had just one non-negotiable demand: that we pay it forward.

We gotcha, Unc! Rest in Power!