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StumbleuponTom Archdeacon: Humanitarian helps the heart and soles of 230,000
Related: Hunter delivers for the less fortunate
Sunday, June 22, 2008
INDIANAPOLIS — The past five months, Ron Hunter and his wife, Amy, have felt like they've been living in a familiar nursery rhyme. The one about the old woman who lived in a shoe.
Technically, they weren't inside a basketball sneaker or a laced-up work boot, but they were surrounded by them.
"As of a couple days ago people were still dropping shoes off in front of our house," Hunter, the Chaminade-Julienne and Miami University grad who's now the head basketball coach at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis) said with a smile as he sat in his office. "My wife probably got a little tired of it. We'd become a shoe warehouse."
There were times he'd wake up in the morning and find boxes of shoes at the end of his driveway or sacks of shoes on the porch.
At the IUPUI gym, people dropped off shoes before and after his games. There's been an avalanche of calls, e-mails and letters — from across the country and especially Dayton — from people who wanted to donate to the cause.
In five months, Hunter collected some 230,000 pairs of shoes. And unlike the nursery rhyme woman ("she had so many children she didn't know what to do"), Hunter has a plan that's as ambitious as it is full of sole.
A week ago, after putting on a golf tournament to raise money for a transcontinental flight to ship the shoes, Hunter sent them all to Africa.
Next month, along with his wife, their 19-year-old daughter Jasmine, a Miami University student, their 14-year-old son, R.J., the IUPUI assistant coaches, six of the Jaguars' players, a doctor, a dentist and some other health professionals, Hunter will spend two weeks in Nigeria and Cameroon handing out the shoes, mostly to kids.
It's part of his involvement with Samaritan's Feet, a Christian-based nonprofit group from Charlotte, N.C., that was founded five years ago by Emmanuel "Manny" Ohonme, who was given his first pair of shoes by a Wisconsin couple when he was 9 and eventually became a standout athlete at the University of North Dakota, a success in the software technology business and an ordained minister.
Ohonme founded Samaritan's Feet on the premise there are 300 million children in the world without shoes, many in poor areas where lack of footwear makes them susceptible to many diseases.
In line with the organization's motto, "Give a shoe, give a life," Ohonme wanted to provide 10 million shoes in 10 years. When a member of his organization called Hunter last November and asked if he would get involved, he couldn't have tapped into a better person.
The IUPUI coach has shown he's a guy who takes a seed and — often with dramatic flair — ends up with a harvest.
Taking over at IUPUI 14 years ago, Hunter helped turn the former NAIA program into a successful NCAA Division I program that made it to the NCAA tournament in 2003.
Hunter made headlines back then when he celebrated the bid — which came when IUPUI toppled Valparaiso in the Mid-Continent Conference tournament's championship game — by diving onto the floor at midcourt and pounding his hands and feet in pure joy.
Barefoot in the gym
And yet, the more he's involved himself in this venture, the more he thinks it will be more meaningful than anything he's done previously through basketball: "I think there's no NCAA tournament, no winning a championship of our league, that would amount to what I could do by letting our players — and my own children — get involved in this first hand."
Initially, Hunter agreed to coach a late January game against Oakland University wearing no shoes. And because Dr. Martin Luther King is one of his heroes, he said he would try to raise 40,000 pairs of shoes in connection with this being the 40th anniversary of King's death.
And yet it was Amy — the Urbana girl Hunter met while they were Miami University students, the person who has been his rudder ever since — who got him to pull it off correctly.
"Up until two hours before the game, I planned to coach with my socks on," Hunter said. "That's when Amy said, 'You know those kids don't have socks.' That's all I needed to hear."
And with that, he slipped off his size-13, black dress shoes — and his fancy dark socks — and went out and coached barefoot.
Likes a challenge
There was a time when Hunter didn't embrace such change and challenge. In fact he ran from it.
He and his brother Rodney grew up on Becker Drive in West Dayton, raised by their mother, Janice Cunningham, who worked two jobs and gave them some strict guidelines.
"When the street lights came on we had to come in," Hunter said. "When I started to get into some trouble, she told me I was going to Catholic school.
"I didn't want to go. I'd be the only kid in the neighborhood going there. I wanted to end up at Roth High with all my buddies, so I rebelled. Before sixth grade I ran away and stayed with my grandmother a few days. I just didn't understand."
With that, he started laughing: "It turns out it was the best thing. The discipline, the direction I got at Resurrection and then at Chaminade really helped me. It prepared me for college."
At Miami, he teamed with fellow Daytonian Ron Harper and the Redskins went to three NCAA tournaments.
Hunter then became an assistant coach — six years at Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then a year back at his alma mater — before IUPUI offered him the job in 1993.
He's had only three losing seasons since, but nothing Hunter's done has gotten the kind of publicity that he has achieved with his barefoot coaching.
ABC World News and ESPN will cover the trip to Africa. In the past month he's been back to Dayton twice. He was a rousing hit as Chaminade-Julienne's commencement speaker at the Schuster Center.
And although he's not a product of Dayton Public Schools, he was back here recently helping raise money for scholarships at a DPS golf outing. Keith Byars and Harper were there, too.
"Ron and I have been best friends since we were 16," he said. "I was there for every one of his NBA championships and when we have had big games, he was there.
"The only problem was when we played at Michigan. He was playing for the Bulls then and he came and sat right behind our bench. We had a chance for an upset — we'd gotten it to four points — and then Ron yells at the official. The ref thought it was me and gave me a technical.
"I've never let Ron live that down. And no, he can't sit on our bench anymore."
Only the beginning
Yet, as misguided basketball ventures go, nothing tops Hunter's only other trip to Africa some five years ago.
He was recruiting a Nigerian player. The parents, who spoke no English, were said to want to meet him personally so he flew to Lagos by himself.
"I was naive and didn't realize what I was getting into," Hunter said. "Everything that could go bad did. Every major scam seemed to happen. I had $20,000 stolen off my credit card. Guys there made it especially tough, even to get the kid's transcript."
He never did get the player and when he got home, he vowed he'd never go back.
And when this latest shoe project began, he had no intentions of making an African trip. Then again, he had no idea how generous people would be.
He said Converse donated 15,000 pairs of shoes and Nine West gave 10,000. Wal-Mart donated many as well and he got 75,000 more from the Department of Homeland Security.
"Since 9/11, they confiscated all these shoes brought into the country illegally," Hunter explained. "They donated them and we've already sent them to Africa.
"When we go, there's going to be no basketball. It'll be a lot of mission work. This isn't about 230,000 pairs of shoes, it's 230,000 children being impacted. Just like we have cars and bicycles, for them shoes are a means of transportation, a way to better health.
"Doctors and dentists will check the kids and we're personally going to wash the feet of the children and put the shoes on them. We're going to let them know this isn't from Samaritan's Feet or Coach Ron Hunter from IUPUI, it's a gift from God."
Hunter — who already has approached the NCAA and NBA — hopes next year every college and pro coach gets involved. He's talked to NASCAR about doing a walk with drivers and he said the people at Indianapolis Motor Speedway have agreed to support an event on Carburetion Day before the Indy 500.
"Whether I'm coaching or not, I'm gonna be involved in this the rest of my life," Hunter said. "Whenever you get an opportunity in life to make a difference, you have to do it. So I'm going to help these kids from now on."
And that makes the familiar fairy tale so much better in real life.
Unlike the old woman, when it comes to kids, Ron Hunter knows exactly what to do.
