Poplar Bluff’s first professional basketball player honored with fellow cagers

Basketball in Poplar Bluff must have been pretty good during the winter of 1937.

That was the year the Wheatley Tigers won the city’s first state championship in the sport while the Mules advanced to the MSHSAA state playoffs for the first time in five years. The Senior High cagers were coached by E.T. “Pete” Peters, led by captain Perry Donnelly and featured 6-foot-7 senior Don Martin.

After the war, he became Poplar Bluff’s first professional basketball player.

Before there was the NBA, there was the BAA — the Basketball Association of America — which the current league considers its origin. Martin played for the St. Louis Bombers and Baltimore Bullets, appearing in 137 career games over three season. He helped the Bombers reach the playoffs twice and scored 410 career points.

With the travel and a growing family at home, Martin went back to teaching and coaching.

Martin played at Central Missouri State, where Peters went to school, earning all-conference honors twice. His teammate was another future Mules coach, John Gibbs.

Peters is the reason why the Mules are not still the Yellow Jackets as they were when he arrived in the early 1920s to coach football and basketball. He was among the first three people inducted into the Poplar Bluff Sports Hall of Fame when it was formed in 1981. Gibbs was in the fifth class of the Hall of Fame in 1985.

The 1937 Tigers, who won the Missouri State Negro Interscholastic Athletic Association title, were added to the Sports Hall of Fame in 1994, while Donnelly was honored in 1998.

Martin joined them Thursday night, nearly 74 years after he made his professional debut and 23 years after his death. Joining him in the 34th induction class was Craig Caringer, Brent Little and Ashley Williams.

“When my father spoke of his childhood in Poplar Bluff his recollections were mostly of hunting, fishing, eating, and being more than a handful for his mother. He spent his childhood days growing up fishing and exploring on the Black River. It always sounded to me like his youth was an endless Huckleberry Finn summer,” wrote Martin’s son Steven in an essay read Thursday night at the banquet.

“When the mother of a friend of his expressed concern for the boys’ safety, spending so much time on the river, his mother replied simply, ‘He’s too ornery to drown.’”

As a shy teenager, his son conveyed, Martin was uncomfortable with the attention he received due to his height, but success on the basketball court changed that. Now, when asked how tall he was, Martin would quip, “5-foot-19.”

Martin fouled out in the state quarterfinals and the Mules lost 33-30 to Joplin, which went on to finish fourth. He had scored double digits in a 38-36 win over Beaumont to help the Mules advance, but Martin was more of Poplar Bluff’s defensive weapon.

After the winter of 1937, the Mules didn’t make the playoffs again until 1950 and didn’t win a playoff game until ’59 when Gibbs coached the team. They beat a young Bill Bradley and Crystal City in overtime, but Bradley and the Hornets won the following year in the rematch and Poplar Bluff went another 18 years before advancing in the state playoffs.

Caringer was on the 1982 Mules team that played SLUH in the quarterfinals at the St. Louis Checkerdome, where Martin played 35 years earlier with the Bombers, while Little played on the 2002 Mules team that ended a nine-year playoff drought before losing to eventual state runner-up DeSmet by three points. That same night, Williams helped the girls basketball team advance. They went on to finish third in state, two years after playing for the state championship when Williams scored all 10 points in overtime of the semifinal.

Williams, Little, Caringer and Martin are now together on the wall of the Sports Hall of Fame.