Perseverance pays off
By Van Jensen
J Alumni News staff
Darren Ivy always figured he would write a book; he just didn't know it would come about so soon.
Only a year after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a degree in journalism in 2000, Ivy began work on a series of stories at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
For years, Democrat-Gazette sports editor Jeff Krupshaw had planned a series of stories on black athletes before segregation in Arkansas. The project served as part of the paper's coverage of Black History Month in February.
Krupshaw had four or five of his writers start on the series, but the stories always fell through.
"People never persevered," Krupshaw said.
In Ivy, Krupshaw saw a determined individual who would have a chance to finally get the ball rolling on the series.
The challenge of writing the series was to find information about the athletes.
Ivy encountered problems tracking down historical documents, he said. Most of the records from black high schools had been lost, and newspaper coverage of black sporting events was sporadic.
Ivy said he found two good sources, 80- and 91-year-old former athletes, who helped him get in touch with several other former athletes he likely wouldn't have found otherwise. "It was something they hadn't had anybody break through," said Ivy, a Columbus native. "I expanded it beyond their expectations. There were so many great athletes."
What began as a handful of stories turned into 20, then 50 and kept increasing. Twenty five of the stories ran in the newspaper.
"Once he broke down a couple of walls, it snowballed," Krupshaw said. "It was a tremendous effort."
Soon, Krupshaw and Ivy realized they had too many stories to run in the newspaper, and once the Democrat-Gazette's promotions department got wind of the project, the paper began planning for a book, compiling the 70-plus stories.
"I just found more and more people," Ivy said.
Once Ivy and Krupshaw decided to put a book together the two increased their already heavy workload. Ivy took some time away from his normal duties at the paper while Krupshaw edited all of Ivy's stories.
In March of 2002, Wehco Publishing released Ivy's book, Untold Stories: Black Sports Heroes Before Integration.
Untold Stories is divided into three chapters: one covering the legends of the 1920s through 1940s, one over the athletes who eventually made it to the NBA and the last on athletes who went on to have NFL careers.
Even though Ivy had plenty of experience doing research from college - he wrote a 90-page honors thesis on genealogy - he said he didn't expect to have a published book so early in his writing career.
"If you had told me when I was in college that two years later I would have a hardback, I wouldn't have thought it would be true," Ivy said.
Ivy said his favorite story was about Jim "Bad News" Barnes, who played basketball for the University of Texas-El Paso. Barnes stood 6 feet 7 inches tall in seventh grade, and bounced from school to school. He often had to play barefoot, because his family couldn't get him big enough shoes.
Krupshaw said the amazing thing about Ivy's efforts was that 99 percent of the information in the book had never been compiled before.
"The bottom line is he did a great job," Krupshaw said. "Not many could've done it."
Ivy said as soon as he started the project, he knew he would find interesting stories.
"I had a feeling," Ivy said. "I had a feeling the stories were out there."
