Nine basketball games in fewer than four days. Pool play followed by medal rounds. Players from all over the country competing at a high level.
An Amateur Athletic Union tournament? An event organized by ESPN?
Nope. It was the National Senior Games, which brought 12,000 athletes in 18 sports to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for two weeks in May.
Ten of those athletes, mostly from the Golden Triangle, brought home Mississippi’s first men’s basketball medal, winning bronze in Division I of the 50+ age group. That’s noteworthy because Mississippi is not a medal factory; Magnolia State athletes ranked 32nd, bringing home 48 medals, including 14 gold, while host Florida finished with 1,159 and second-place California totaled 442.
Tyrone Hardy, who played at Lee High School in Columbus, was the driving force — or “general manager” or “mastermind,” depending on who you ask — behind the Magnolia Flyers.
“I was just staying in shape at the Y, and Tyrone approached me one day in the Y four or five years ago,” remembers Sammie Lee Jr., a 1976 Caldwell High School graduate and a close friend of Hardy’s. “He saw Tupelo go to the games in Birmingham (site of the 2017 Games) on the news.”
And if Tupelo could do it, Columbus could do it.
“It started slow because we were older and hadn’t played in a while,” Lee said. “You want to be competitive, and going to the Y wasn’t competitive.”
It turned out the Senior Games were even more competitive than any of them expected.
“The Columbus team, the Magnolia Flyers, and then there’s a team in tupelo called the Crypto Ballers,” Hardy explained. “We know each other pretty well. We travel the same round, go to the same tournaments. Both teams went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, back in 2019.
“We thought we were good enough to get a medal, but we found out when you get to the nationals there are still a bunch of old men that love playing basketball.”
“Tyrone Hardy was the mastermind who put it all together,” said Dr. Chad Altmyer of Columbus, who brought quite a sports pedigree to the Magnolia Flyers. A basketball player at Mississippi College who also played baseball, Altmeyer is a member of that school’s athletics hall of fame and was an academic All-American. The longtime AAU coach has three sons enjoying athletic success: One played basketball at Mississippi College, another plays football at Ole Miss, and a third plays basketball at Heritage Academy.
“A team from Tupelo competed in years past and a team from Columbus, but they never made it to the medal round,” Altmyer continued. “(Tyrone) was instrumental in putting the two teams together. It was a very competitive team.”
But count Altmyer among those who didn’t expect the Senior Games to be as competitive as they turned out to be.
“They told me we had a chance when they added myself and Robert Woodard, two ex-college players, but I had no idea what we’d be up against,” Altmyer said. “I was very surprised at the level of talent that was there.”
Woodard graduated Houlka high School as the state’s all-time leading scorer with more than 4,000 points, and he was then-Mississippi State coach Richard Williams’ first recruit in 1986.
But Hardy had an even more practical reason for getting Tupelo players involved with the Flyers: The Tupelo team had access to a gym.
“The city of Columbus and Lowndes County did not want us in their facilities,” Hardy said. “We could use a place here to help get us to the next level.”
The desire to have a local gym to practice in is strong enough that Hardy kept coming back to it.
“We do have one player who belongs to a local church, so we could use their gym twice a month,” he said. “For whatever reason, the city of Columbus and Lowndes County didn’t want us to use their gyms, or if they did they were going to charge us $200 an hour.
“A lot of the other teams, those guys practice two or three times a week, and we don’t even have anywhere to practice. For us to go to Fort Lauderdale and accomplish what we accomplished is tremendous.”
“The guys from Tupelo play a lot, and you can tell,” said James Gunter, a 1980 graduate of Caledonia High School. “When we played in the championship round of the playoffs, you could tell the guys we were playing against played just about every day.”
The guys they were playing against in the championship round were from Arkansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia. In fact, the Flyers have something of a nemesis in the Arkansas Big Dogs, Hardy said.
“They’re really good, and they won gold in our age division and in the 55 age group as well,” Hardy said.
Games are 15-minute halves with a running clock except for the final two minutes. One quirk is that when a foul is called before the last two minutes, a team gets the ball back after shooting free throws.
“When the guys know that, they just let you shoot,” said Gunter, who retired after three decades on the Mississippi Highway Patrol and as an Army reservist. Fort Lauderdale marked his first trip to the National Senior Games. He goes way back with Lee and Hardy.
“I’ve been a referee for 18 years, and I refereed his son’s games,” Gunter said. “We used to play against each other back in the day. My daughter and son played. We have a full court in my yard, and Sammie would come out and play with us.”
The old-school ties don’t stop there. Hardy played basketball with James Pattman, a 1975 Lee graduate, back in the 70s, and Alfred Walker Jr. is another Lee alum, Class of 1979. Pattman now lives in Roswell, Georgia, and Walker lives in Cypress, Texas, but they remain tied to the other Lee guys through basketball. In fact, Walker, Hardy said, “never misses a tournament.”
“Just building a relationship with the guys on the team was awesome,” Gunter said. “I knew Sammie, Tyrone and I played against Don (Hinds) years ago, and I knew the guys from Starkville.”
But while playing with old friends is satisfying for all of the players, meeting new people is a big reason they enjoy the National Senior Games.
“I’ve developed friendships the past four years,” Hardy said. “I met a gentleman in Albuquerque who is 95 years old who played at West Virginia State, played with the first black man to be drafted in the NBA. He competed in golf in the 90+ division.
I was fortunate to meet a gentleman in Albuquerque who had four gold medals.”
“It surprised me that they had 75-plus-year-old men playing, and they had more teams than we had,” Gunter said. “I was just amazed.”
“We met so many different guys, from Milwaukee, North Carolina, Illinois, and you talk to them about what they do, how they stay in shape,” Lee said. “You come back home with a lot of ideas.”
But the positive feelings didn’t just come from other athletes, they also came from the people staffing the two-week-long event.
“I’ve played a lot of sports at the highest level, coached AAU at the highest level, but this was a really good, “feel-good” event that had good competition as well,” said Altmyer, who, turning 50 last August, was eligible for the first time this year.
“They treated us like athletes,” Lee said. “At all the events, a lot of medical stuff they expose you to to keep you healthy. The event was set up around health and wellness.”
That hits home with many older Americans, but especially with Lee, who had knee surgery in 2019 and shoulder surgery in 2021.
“It encourages you to stay healthy,” he added. “This guy is 60 years old, and he’s still playing. We’re going to treat him like he’s Kobe Bryant and get him back out there. And that motivates you.”
“What I thought was awesome was the sportsmanship and the respect among all the athletes,” said Altmyer, an orthopedist who has been practicing medicine in Columbus for more than 20 years. “It was about health and well-being as well as competition.”
“Our foundation is family first, then health and wellness, and then we’ve got that competitive spirit,” Lee said. “And everybody likes basketball.”
The Mississippi players like it enough to want to go back next year. The Senior Games are held every two years, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused the 2021 event to be postponed for a year, and the 2023 games will be in Pittsburgh.
Hardy is optimistic that the Magnolia Flyers will send more than one team to Pennsylvania, hoping to enter teams in three age groups and possibly get a women’s team in as well.
“The people who participate all realize how blessed and fortunate we are at this age, and we don’t take it for granted,” he said. “The networking and the socializing are just as good as the actual competition.”
Anyone 50 or over interested in playing basketball with the Magnolia Flyers is urged to contact Tyrone Hardy at 662-425-3628 or Sammie Lee Jr. at 662-352-9259.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 40 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.