A look back at the memorable state championship team

By Mike Tierney

For the AJC

The 1986 film "Hoosiers" movingly depicted the state title season of a rustic Indiana boys high school team in the mid-1950s. Georgia, though hardly a comparable basketball hotbed, had its own rural dribble-mad town then that regarded championships as a civic prerogative.

The Perry Panthers were the last teens standing at nine state tournaments during the 20-year period ending in 1966. The passing years have allowed hoops historians to distinguish each winner but the narrative of one edition separates itself from the pack.

The 1955-56 Panthers triumphed with:

• A 5-foot-10 marksman who gained fame in another arena;

• A crafty, if bizarre, stratagem that delivered them from catastrophic defeat in their first of six playoff games;

• A masterful motivational ploy by the coach at halftime of the finale.

By then, the locals had grown to expect titles. They didn't even throw the Panthers a parade in ‘56, with formal plaudits limited largely to a Kiwanis Club appearance.

Perry -- some 100 miles south of Atlanta, subtitled the Crossroads of Georgia -- turned ghost town for road games. Businesses would close and caravans of cars would snake along to some backwoods tinderbox gym or to bustling Macon or Atlanta, leaving behind three cops with only themselves to police.

The coach, Eric Staples, was on the backside of a career that would accrue 924 victories. The school board was compelled to name Staples principal, though he was not burdened with many duties, to dissuade other systems from hiring him away, according to "Pride of the Panthers," a book on the basketball empire written by ex-star Billy Powell, from which some material for this article was drawn.

Known as Fessor, short for professor, Staples tapped into a city-wide passion for basketball -- myriad rims hung from poles and trees all over town -- by developing a feeder system whose pipeline extended to early grammar school.

So intent was Staples to preserve school gym time for the boys that, upon his hiring in 1933, he and school officials killed off the girls program. It lay dormant for a quarter-century. Athletes were not siphoned off to football because there was no team until ‘55.

A few months before the inaugural kickoff, a young Perry team had overachieved by reaching the final four in Georgia's Class B, the third smallest of four divisions based on school enrollment. The returnees, all but one starter, set the bar at pole-vault height. The school's trophy case already was bulging, Staples having won it all three times.

"He just got the maximum out of us," Ed Beckham, a reliable reserve on the 1955-56 squad, says now. "We weren't the most talented."

"We didn't have a real outstanding player," starting guard Jimmy Beatty remembers. "We had an outstanding team."

Staples' imagination knew no bounds. In practice, he once simulated defending a 7-foot foe by placing a Panther on an 18-inch stool and instructing others to swat at the ball before it could be held aloft. To emphasize boxing out, he put lids over the rims and allowed players to pursue the rebound only after a shot ball hit the floor.

To get Powell acclimated to in-your-face defense in the early '50s, he tapped a 125-pound ninth-grader forward to leech onto him during practice. Powell's fusebox blew.

"He picked me up and threw me into the third row," recalls the freshman, Sam Nunn, whose career arc took him from top scorer and all-state selection on the ‘56 Panthers to four-term U.S. senator and clarion caller regarding the global threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

By the ‘55-56 season, Nunn was a senior co-captain as the Panthers sailed through the season unbeaten, felling four Atlanta schools and eight from Class AA, the uppermost classification. Other belt-notches included wins over Fort Valley, a rivalry of such fervor that the state sports authority once halted their series because of fighting, and Class C overlord Vienna.

The Panthers nearly went kaput against Cuthbert in their postseason opener, rescued by a buzzer-beating basket that extended it to overtime. Staples, a recovering cigar smoker, was chewing through his trademark unlit stogie, which he removed only to fling it to the ground when engulfed by frustration.

The game spilled into a second overtime after Cuthbert missed a potential winning free throw with three seconds left. Then, a third OT, when the format, long since abandoned, switched to sudden death.

Cuthbert had been controlling the tip-offs, which in those days began each period and followed every held ball. Beatty, a district high jump champion but barely 6 feet tall, was giving away four inches.

"The boy was out-jumping me all night," Beatty recalls.

Staples ordered Beatty to concede the tip and his four teammates to cut in front of each Cuthbert counterpart for a possible steal.

"Now there was strategy that only he would come up with," Beatty says.

The tip caromed toward Nunn and his man. Each grabbed it, forcing another jump ball. Nunn directed it to teammate Virgil Peavy, who was fouled and sank the winning shot heard 'round Georgia's crossroads city.

Three games later, a non-tournament defeat to Vienna that left Nunn "bitterly disappointed" stained the perfect record but had no bearing on the playoffs. (Beatty blames the outcome on fatigue; four regulars worked full shifts before the Saturday night game.) All it ultimately meant was the Class B finalists -- Perry and Valley Point -- had a single loss between them.

His team trailing by two points at halftime in Macon, Staples diagrammed a set play to outwit the zone defense. The third pass in each sequence would be addressed to Nunn near the foul line. "In the hole of the zone," Fessor told the Panthers.

Then he said, "You've had a great year. They're better than you, so you're probably gonna lose this game. But I'm proud of you, anyway."

Staples turned and walked out, puzzled stares boring into his back.

"He just steamed us," Nunn says. "We felt like [in the second half] that we were sticking it to him."

As Beatty tells it, Nunn fumed to the team, "Coach doesn't know what he's talking about. Let's show him."

Perry won 81-52. Nunn's one-handed push shot from the hole in the zone produced six baskets in a row and 27 points all told.

Nunn eventually learned that Staples' locker room put-down was a gambit intended to incite the Panthers. "Almost a psychologist," Nunn calls him.

Some 4 1/2 decades later, most of Fessor's seven-man rotation from that roster is deceased. Beatty and Beckham are retired businessmen in Perry. Nunn hobnobs with world leaders, operates the Nuclear Threat Initiative with Ted Turner and is the namesake of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, where he roomed as an undergrad with Beckham.

Hoops at Perry "had a huge effect on my life," Nunn says. "It had a lot to do with me becoming a leader."

Asked to pinpoint the lessons learned from that season, the three survivors are reduced to spouting cliches: Never give up. Heed the boss. Pay the price.

They had little choice. "When Perry lost a game in those days, the town went into mourning for a full week and didn't recover until the next game," Powell says now.

Nunn recently presented Powell's account of the season, in which mourning was minimal, and of other Perry teams in "Pride of the Panthers" to an acquaintance: The roundballer-in-chief. A letter from President Barack Obama acknowledges receipt of the book on what the author unabashedly calls "the greatest basketball dynasty in Georgia history."

Take that, "Hoosiers."