INDIANAPOLIS – It was just a whim, at first. The Gavaghan family had a basketball hoop in the backyard, and people on the eastside loved to come play. Kids from nearby Scecina, mainly, but word spread and parishioners at Little Flower Catholic Church started showing up and soon it felt like everyone was coming to play, even one of the ABA-era Indiana Pacers – former Tech star Mike Price, along with his brother Jim, who was coaching IUPUI – so the kids in the Gavaghan family decided to do something different:
They’d host a 3-on-3 tournament, right there in the backyard. Charge each player a few bucks, give most of the pot to the winning team and use the rest on beer. It’s hot out there, third week of July.
Well, you know how these things can go – how these things can grow. After the family thinks on it, the tournament happens the next year, and again the next, and pretty soon nobody’s thinking about it. It’s just going to happen, even as the parents grow older and their children move out and the tournament slides from one backyard to another until it finds a permanent home here behind Bob Gavaghan’s house on the eastside of Indianapolis.
By now they’ve come up with a name for the annual tournament – Gav’s Classic, they call it – and they’re printing up T-shirts and posting a tournament bracket and drawing 70 or 80 players. That’s a lot of money for the winners. And it’s a lot of beer.
At a certain point, and nobody’s really sure why – call it another whim – but Gav’s Classic stopped spending all that money on six-packs and started to give it away. The first recipient was the Sisters of Charity. After Gav’s Classic in 1985, Bob Gavaghan took his kids to the convent and tried to hand a wad of about $300 to the first nun he could find.
“She said, ‘Hold off on that – don’t give me that.’ She was very old-school Catholic,” Bob Gavaghan says. “She took us into this room and knelt down and prayed, then accepted it. It was very, very cool.”
Since then Gav’s Classic has raised more than $140,000 for Eastside families, schools and churches, picking new recipients every year.
This has been happening for a half-century, but it won’t happen again. The 50th and final Gav’s Classic was Saturday, July 18. You know how these things can go, how these things can grow – and how these things can, finally, go. Kids grow up. So do their kids. And their kids. Interests change. People move on.
Says Bob Gavaghan: “We didn’t want it to fizzle out, and it’s really strong right now.”
Nothing lasts forever, even though you wish some things could.
Gav’s Classic ‘something you have to experience’
There’s a plumber with a cut on his nose and chip in his tooth, but he’s not calling the foul. Not at Gav’s Classic. You call your own fouls, and other players respect the call, but there’s pride in not calling every little foul. Not unless it’s nasty. Blood on your chin? Jimmy Brennan isn’t calling that foul. They’ve seen nastier out here.
There’s a firefighter with tattoos on his arm and six championships to his name, a heavily tattooed and muscled IFD first responder who tries to prepare his buddies, when they make their Gav’s Classic debut, for how physical it is. And his buddies are firefighters, for crying out loud. They run into burning houses for a living. But Gav’s Classic, the third week of every July, is a furnace of another kind.
“I tell the guys it’s different – gritty,” says firefighter Mike Bishop. “But it’s something you have to experience.”
On cue, there’s a conversation happening a few feet away, two players who have just played and lost in the first-round of this double-elimination tournament, and one of them is saying, “He was pushing the (crap) out of me every time.”
There’s a Catholic priest nearby, dressed in black with a white collar, who hears no evil.
“I’m the Administrator at Little Flower and Our Lady of Lourdes,” Father Jude Sahayam is telling me, standing in the shade of one of the portable canopies set up around the yard.
He’s not playing. Just here to watch, he says, gesturing at the crowd of 100 or more, a mixture of players and spectators.
“I’m here because I know a lot of people here,” he says.
He’s been talking to a woman wearing a Little Flower shirt, who smiles and practically shouts:
“Half the money’s going to Little Flower,” says Pattiann Gavaghan, Bob’s sister. “He left that out!”
Father Sahayam smiles.
“I didn’t want to lead with the money,” he says.
Look, it’s OK. The money is why we’re here, ultimately. What started on a whim, a celebration of basketball, has become a miracle of philanthropy and community, with half of this year’s $27,000 going to Little Flower for its 100th anniversary and the other half to a family that lives around the corner. The family is going through a run of health issues even as their house needs a new roof. It’s a lot.
“Every year, the tournament honors someone facing hardship,” says Daniel Gavaghan, Bob’s son and an annual Gav’s Classic competitor (he has finished second four times) who played for Scecina until he graduated in 2012. “Every year, the community shows up. And every year, the backyard feels like the heart of the eastside.”
You’ve got to see this backyard
Out front, as far as the eye can see, cars line a tree-lined residential road tucked between 10th and 16th street.
Out back, the concrete slab is 400 square feet of pure heaven, clear backboard and black 3-point arc from wing to wing. Someone’s painted “Gav’s Classic” in big blue block letters along one side of the court, which is surrounded by a green lawn – grass is out bounds – and scores of spectators. Two teams are playing by 2’s and 3’s, first team to 24 points … unless someone gets to 20 and is leading by four. Then it’s over.
Some of us are standing behind the basket, under one of the yard’s huge trees, watching the current 3-on-3 game featuring a mixture of electricians and IT professionals and cops – unless it’s a mixture of plumbers and insurance underwriters and firefighters – and talking about Gav’s Classic greatness.
This event is 50 years old, and one man has won 11 times. His name is Dennis Klinefelter Jr., a drywall finisher by trade. He can’t be here today, some sort of family commitment, but his son Dennis III is here, and he’s a former 12-ppg scorer at Irvington Prep who has won Gav’s Classic once himself.
“I was on Bishop’s team that year,” says Dennis III, 29. “I’ve been here 28 of my 29 years.”
What happened that one year you didn’t make it?
“My sister had a dance competition in Missouri, and we couldn’t miss it,” he says. “Dad would schedule our vacations around this.”
Well, sure. His dad won this thing 11 times. But since Dennis Jr. isn’t here, that leaves IFD’s Mike Bishop and Jimmy Brennan, the plumber, as the active leader with six Gav’s Classic titles. Brennan’s over there closer to the house, sitting under one of those temporary canopies, resting. He’s one of the older competitors here, having graduated from Scecina in 1985, where he played on the basketball team and got his name in the paper once.
“I overslept and missed a morning practice, so I didn’t start,” he says. “(The writer) called me the scrappy redheaded sub. It was the only game that year I didn’t start. Hurt my feelings.”
Brennan’s the one who played last year with the bloody face, and he’s telling me about it – “No big deal,” he says, “just cut across the nose a little bit” – and nearby, someone is chiming in:
“Improved his looks a little bit.”
We’re looking around for the wisecracker, but there must be 20 players within earshot, and nobody’s taking credit. One of those no-look insults.
It’s a good time out here, comfortable under the mid-morning sun, especially under that tree, where Bishop is eyeing the action, knowing his squad could play one of these two teams eventually. Teams are formed by blind draw, the only concession being that Bob and Daniel Gavaghan know the best players and separate them from the rest of the field, so no team gets more than one standout. Which means a six-time winner like Mike Bishop hasn’t won all those titles because he brought in ringers.
It means he is the ringer.
“I like to think so!” he says, laughing, and in all seriousness he’s 5-11 and still dunking at age 41. “We look forward to this all year. I’ve only missed three in about 23 years.”
What happened those three years?
“Family vacation,” he says, and everyone standing around is giving him the business.
“Can’t happen,” Bob Gavaghan says. “Everyone knows – third week of July.”
Mike Bishop is wincing.
“My wife scheduled those,” he says, teasingly. “If it had been up to me, we’d have gone a week later.”
Gav’s Classic gets in your blood. All heart, this event, but sometimes the heart breaks – and the basketball helps the process of putting it back together.
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Love and loss, Gav’s Classic has it all
They’re mourning Dwayne McCoy, who died a week ago at age 51. Some guys know him as a teammate or competitor in previous Gav’s Classic games. Some know him as a friend. One way or another, everyone out here knows him – “That’s the eastside,” Bob Gavaghan says – and they’re nodding somberly as they walk past his picture near the house, next to the poster of the tournament bracket and a table full of raffle items.
Dwayne McCoy
A friend to all
RIP God Bless
Tragedy, triumph – Gav’s Classic has a little of everything that life can offer. Two years ago a player suffered a broken ankle, a few games after someone else had suffered a torn Achilles’.
This year saw something similar, but utterly unique: A competitor named Joe Murphy suffered an injured ankle early in the day, but he and his blind-draw teammates – Schuyler Nehrig and Kyle Berry – had more games to play. So someone called Will Thornburg, a 2014 Bishop Chatard alum, and Thornburg hurried to this house on the eastside to join Nehrig and Berry, mid-tournament.
And they won the whole thing.
The 50th and final Gav’s Classic made all kinds of history, raising an event record $27,000. This is one of those stories that would make a fine homily at Little Flower – beauty from ashes, like in the 61st chapter of the book of Isaiah.
In the early years, funds were raised for the Chris Hutt Children Foundation. Hutt, who quarterbacked Scecina to the 1990 state championship as a senior, died while working in an Indianapolis construction zone in April 2006, killed as he was installing Slow Down signs on I-465 near Allisonville Road.
“The fundraising took off in a way we didn’t expect,” Bob Gavaghan says. “And from there, it just grew and grew.”
Money has been earmarked for local schools and churches, for near-eastside community staples like A Miracle Place, for financial support of children who recently lost a parent. The Gavaghan family was close with Brody Stephens, whose battle with leukemia 10 years ago captured the country’s attention. Daniel Gavaghan was visiting Brody in the hospital when Brody noticed his tattoos and asked if Daniel would get another one – a script of Brody’s favorite saying.
Daniel had those words – We fight, in Brody’s handwriting – tattooed onto his left wrist.
In 2016, Gav’s Classic raised more than $9,000 to send Brody and his family to Disney World, but by then Brody couldn’t travel, so the money was given to the family for expenses. Brody died in 2017.
From 2021: This would have been Brody Stephens’ first jr. high basketball game
“The Catholic Eastside is a tight community,” says Bob Gavaghan. “There are some (recipients) I might not have known personally going into it – maybe we heard something about somebody needing help – but by the time it’s over, you get to know them well.”
This is what we’re talking about Saturday as the morning sun rises warm over the eastside. Storms are in the forecast, and an indoor backup location is ready down the road at Holy Spirit Catholic Church, but the rain stays away and the games go on until the 50th and final winning team is crowned and more than $27,000 has been raised. And then the sun sets one last time on Gav’s Classic, this miracle of philanthropy and community on the eastside.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Doyel: Gav’s Classic, an eastside miracle of philanthropy and community, shuts down at age 50.
Reporting by Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
