True believer

 (This appeared yesterday in my old newspaper home, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. If you haven't already, or are one of those who think local journalism is a part of the dead past, please subscribe. Because it damn well shouldn't be a part of the dead past, and woe to us if it ever becomes so.)

So the news comes down now that Rich Coffey has passed, and here come names upon names. A man makes a certain mark on a place, and in your mind the floodgates open.

Damon Bailey and Evric Gray and Jimmy Carruth. These are the names.

Jay Edwards and Lloyd “Sweet Pea” Daniels and Brook Steppe and Torgeir Bryn.

Mo McHone, and Gerald Oliver, and Kent Davison, and Rich Huff. The Fort Wayne Fury; the Fort Wayne Freedom; the CBA; the National Indoor Football Association.

Rich Coffey was around for all those names, and for all those entities. He saw their rise, and he saw their demise.  If he was a man whose eyes were sometimes bigger than his stomach in terms of vision vs. reality, it never stopped him from thinking this city could fulfill that vision.

It drove him, and the Fury’s owners, to bet professional basketball could work in a place where high school and college buckets owned the stage. And though indoor football never really caught on here through two, three, four incarnations, it didn’t stop Coffey from introducing it.

The man believed, in other words. Whatever else you want to say about the man, he believed.

And even if things didn’t always work out, it was a hell of a ride.

 The Fury, whom Coffey ran from its inception in 1991 until Isiah Thomas killed the CBA in 2001, was fun and entertaining. And, as the CBA tended to be, charmingly eccentric.

There was G.O. (Oliver) and Memor’awl Magic, and Steppe carrying on conversations with the fans while he was actually playing. The mascot fell while rappelling from the ceiling once. The team hired Rick Barry as coach, and later fired him; another head coach (McHone) was fired the day after the head of a plastic golf club (swung by the aforementioned mascot) snapped off and nailed him in the place no male wants to get nailed.

And the Freedom?

It was football on speed dial, and those fans who showed up loved it.  There were never enough of them, though, and both the team and league were critically undercapitalized, and eventually Coffey sold.

By then, his best moment already had happened. It came the day Thomas pulled the plug on the CBA, and, in his office, Coffey spoke from the heart in a way he perhaps never had before.

“You find out, when you do this long enough, there’s a kind of CBA culture out there,” he said, in between some extremely choice words for Isiah. “People tend to stick around for some reason.

“I’ve had other opportunities. We all have. But we really love this.”

Could never say otherwise.