In the days since Prince’s death last week, it seems like most of the world has a story about him. I thought I had one, too.
Back in the early 1970s my ninth grade boys basketball team, the Ramsey All-Stars, played Bryant Junior High whose roster included a really small kid with a big Afro. After Prince became famous, I thought the little guy was him. This made a nice memory for a long time because not only did my Ramsey team defeat our south Minneapolis rivals, but we played against a future music legend.
Uh, oh.
A couple of days ago I called one of the Ramsey players I coached. He let the air out of my balloon pronto, telling me Prince was a few years younger than my bunch and the mysterious little guy we played back in the day wasn’t Prince Rogers Nelson.
So I turned to my friend Al Nuness, the former Gophers basketball captain who has true Prince stories in his “memory bank.” Nuness took a job as a physical education teacher and basketball coach at Central High School in 1971. At the time Prince was at Bryant, the junior high school located near Central. Prince was drawn to basketball and so was his brother Duane and Prince’s best friend Paul Mitchell.
It didn’t take Nuness long to meet up with the threesome who regularly rode their bikes over to Central. “These guys would sneak into the Central gym, and they would bring their dog with them,” Nuness told Sports Headliners. “My office had a window that looked right into the gym. I would see these kids and I heard this dog barking. I’d chase these guys out of the gym at least three days a week. I have no idea how they got (in) there. …They were good kids.”
Prince eventually played on the Central sophomore team but never the varsity. “He was a good player,” Nuness remembered. “He loved basketball. He was quick, (but) he was small. Prince was 5-6 in his high heel shoes. He was probably 5-2 in his stocking feet.”
At Central it was evident music, not hoops, was Prince’s future. Nuness and others saw he was a natural. “This kid could not read music. He played everything by ear. He could play five instruments. He was the music guy in school.”
Prince was even part of a band while at Central. “They were playing for adult parties back when they were in high school,” Nuness said.
When Nuness became a sales and community affairs executive for the startup Timberwolves franchise in the late 1980s, he called Prince’s office. Nuness wanted to make sure the basketball-loving Prince had the opportunity to purchase prime seats to watch Minneapolis’ new NBA franchise.
The person who answered the telephone at Prince’s office didn’t know Nuness and said he didn’t believe his boss was interested in tickets. “I said, ‘Will you tell Prince coach Nuness called?’
“The guy called me back five minutes later and said, ‘Hey, I am really sorry. I didn’t know. Yes, Prince wants to talk to you. Yes, he wants season tickets.’
“The guy was very apologetic.”
There was another time Nuness learned the famous entertainer hadn’t forgotten about the coach who many years before had chased him out of the gym. Kelly Smith, a young lady who was a friend of the Nuness family, was a Prince fanatic and formed a Prince fan club in Chicago. Smith called Nuness because she remembered his Central connection to Prince. Nuness responded by sending her an old Central yearbook that included Prince—but that wasn’t the end of hearing from Smith.
“She just went crazy (after receiving the yearbook), and so she calls me back and she says, ‘I need something.’
“I said, ‘What do you need now, Kelly?’ She says, ‘Can you get a picture of Prince in front of his house?’
“I said, ‘What? Prince doesn’t give pictures out. He doesn’t do stuff like that.’
“She said, ‘Oh, but I know you can get it for me.’
“I called his brother Duane. I said, ‘Duane, I need you to get me a picture of Prince in front of his house.’
“He said, ‘Coach, you want me to do what (then)’?
“I said, ‘Duane, this is coach Nuness. You tell Prince that coach Nuness wants a picture of him in front of his house.’ This is when he lived on Lake Riley in Chanhassen and had that purple house.
“He said, ‘All right, coach.’
“A week later I got a picture in the mail—Prince sitting on top of his car in front of his house. I sent it to Kelly.
“I said, ‘Kelly, don’t ask me for anything else.’ ”