This column is chiefly about Donkey Ball games, but it was inspired by a story of a similar fund-raiser which I found in the newly added digitized Alto Heralds of the 1980’s. More about that later.
Except for a brief mention in 1939 with no details, the first report of a donkey ball game came in 1948 and there I found a surprise. Yes, there was a Donkey Ball game, co-sponsored by the Lions Club and the Boy Scouts, but it was not Donkey Basketball. It was Donkey Baseball, and it was played on the football field.
To quote the first story the donkeys …. know more about the game than the players. When the ball is hit, the donkeys start after it whether the rider is ready or not”
The Lions Club members played against the Boy Scouts and it took nine Boy Scouts only an hour to defeat 42 Lions Club members. Outstanding players for the Lions were Willie Holcomb, Arthur Brooks, (Rev) Ferd Dawson and Ralph Rozelle. Although the Scouts won, they didn’t get mentioned by name.
There were no injuries and the only damage to the field was two 10-inch furrows made by the dragging feet of Pierce Moore who was too tall for his donkey.
The 1948 game made enough money to help send the Boy Scouts to camp, so the next year the VFW followed up with another game featuring the Vets against the Scouts. The Scouts won again.
By the 1950’s the games had moved to the gym and Donkey Basketball became the go-to source for financing the Junior-Senior Prom. From the 1960 game some of the names you may recognize were Juniors: Travis “Bulldog” Smith, Harrison “Hawkeye” Black, Steve “Mushin’ Mac” McCarty and Gerald “Wee Willie” West. They were playing against Seniors: Carlton “Cowboy” Jones; Ronnie “Blackeye” Hendrick, Jerry “Deadeye” Felder and Gale “Speedy” Baugh.
Although the Donkey games continued on into the 1980’s the story that first attracted my attention was the Quarterback Club Fund-raiser in 1981. The headline read ALTO QB CLUB TO HOST COWBOYS with a subhead Tony Dorsett Plays Basketball Too. The Dallas Cowboys had formed a basketball team called the Hoopsters and spent their off-season going around helping small towns raise money for school projects. Imagine the excitement for Alto youngsters getting to see their heroes – not only Dorsett but Tony Hill, Too-Tall Jones and Drew Pearson.
The team that played against the Hoopsters was made up of coaches from Alto and Rusk, former Alto high-school players, and at least one preacher, Rev Bill Jenkins. I am sure Steve McClendon, Mike Wallace, Willie Brown and Larry Jenkins never forgot that event.
I wasn’t able to find many individual pictures from the donkey basketball games I remember, but if you follow this link to the Stella Hill Library Flickr archive, you can see a full page from the 1973 yearbook describing that year’s game.
Evidently donkey basketball survived the years, or at least had a revival. I found these photos on Facebook of a game in Alto in 2021.
