Jenkins traveled interesting path from Advance to 'Glory Road'

He's 82 years old now, but Thornton Jenkins' mind is still sharp. The Advance native, former University of Missouri all-conference basketball player and longtime basketball referee recalls dates and scores faster than a Google computer search.

Take the night of March 19, 1966. Jenkins remembers it well. It was his 23rd wedding anniversary.

Thanks to "Glory Road," movie-goers and younger generations also know something about that evening. Texas Western coach Don Haskins decided to start five black players against the all-white Kentucky Wildcats in the 1966 NCAA basketball championship game. Texas Western (now University of Texas at El Paso) won the contest 72-65.

Jenkins knows a little something about that as well. He should. He was one of two referees in College Park, Md., the night the Miners' lineup made history.

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Jenkins' life has been like that: a mix of the personal and the historic; family and professional life always overlapping, intruding or bumping into one other.

In 1945, the 21-year-old Jenkins was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. Trained as a navigator on B-29 airplanes, he was in Topeka, Kan., preparing to depart for Okinawa when word came down that the Japanese had surrendered -- World War II was over.

V-J Day, Aug. 15th, 1945, was the second bit of terrific news Jenkins received in less than 24 hours. Just the night before, his wife, Mickie, gave birth to the couple's only child, daughter Spring, in Cape Girardeau. Jenkins had to wait another two months before he could get leave to see his family.

"On V-J Day, all I could do was talk to them by phone," Jenkins recalled. "I got the word through a telegram that she had been born."

Jenkins was born in Advance in November 1923. He acquired a love of all sports at a young age, but became especially fond of the game of basketball.

"It's about all I ever did," Jenkins recalled. "There was a vacant field right next to our house, and the owner let us put up couple of basketball goals. We made a little dirt court. We used to play out there until you couldn't see the goal [due to darkness]. We played baseball in the summer of course, but we played basketball every day we could."

A child of the Depression era 1930s, Jenkins saw the Works Progress Administration build a new gymnasium in Advance. A civil aviation worker assigned to the Stoddard County community helped bring tennis courts to the town. Jenkins became so adept at the game he won the singles conference championship three times in high school.

It was during this period that his father took a job with the post office.

"That's when Roosevelt was elected, and the Democrats got all the plush jobs," Jenkins said with a smile.

By the time he was a senior in high school, Jenkins stood 6 feet, 2 inches and weighed about 190 pounds. He was the tallest player and the starting center for the Advance Hornets. His high school coaches included Harold Kiehne and Grover Crites, both from Jackson. Those two men had played their high school basketball for Wilbur "Sparky" Stalcup, who later coached Jenkins at the University of Missouri. Stalcup played at Maryville Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State) under legendary coach Henry "Hank" Iba.

Jenkins is proud of this lineage.

"Every coach I ever had was a direct derivative of Henry Iba, except [Missouri coach] George Edwards," Jenkins said.

The Iba influence meant a focus on defense.

"Our high school coach used to tell us if we could hold a team to 20 points, we could luck in enough baskets to win the game," Jenkins said.

In 1941, he led Advance to a third-place finish in the state basketball tournament in Springfield.

Before qualifying for state play, Advance played Lutesville in the regional tournament finals. Mickie, his girlfriend at the time, was a Lutesville cheerleader, but she decided to sit that one out.

"She was neutral when we played in the finals," Jenkins said. "She sat with her parents."

Advance won the game 24-16.

During the state tournament in Springfield, an assistant coach at Missouri took notice of the Advance player.

"He came up to my room in the hotel and visited with me about coming to the University of Missouri," Jenkins said, recalling an incident that marked both the beginning and the end of the recruiting process. "That was the only contact I had with the university."

But it worked.

By the fall of 1941, Jenkins was a freshman on the Columbia campus. In the days before the scholarship-athlete, he found himself trying out for the basketball team along with about 100 other players.

"They just cut each day," Jenkins remembered. "Of course, the freshman coach knew the ones he had talked to. There was about six or seven of us that ended being the nucleus of the team."

Freshmen didn't play varsity sports then. The only chance the players had to perform in front of a crowd was in scrimmages against the varsity. They played the varsity twice that year, once at the beginning of the season, again at the end. Each time, the freshman team came out on top.

"We beat the hell out of them," Jenkins said. "It was embarrassing to them but they didn't have much incentive either."

In his sophomore season, Jenkins developed into an all-Big 6 player under coach George Edwards. But his basketball career had to be put on hold. It was 1943 and the middle of World War II.

Jenkins signed up for the Army Air Corps. His first overseas assignment would have been that trip to Okinawa in August of 1945. When the war came to an end, Jenkins found himself in Tucson, Ariz., biding his time and waiting to be discharged. After leaving the service in December of that year, he returned to Columbia with wife and child.

The war did nothing to diminish his abilities on the basketball court. Playing his final two years for coach Sparky Stalcup, Jenkins received all-Big 7 honors (Colorado was added to the league in 1947).

He also played some football and baseball at Mizzou while becoming the first person in the history of the university to simultaneously receive his bachelor's and master's degrees in education. He had to get permission from the dean to do it, and that took some persuading. His first answer was no.

"I said, 'Why?' He said, 'It's never been done before,'" Jenkins said.

Eventually, the dean relented and Jenkins graduated with both degrees in August of 1948.

He played two seasons for the Denver Chevrolets in the National Industrial Basketball League, earning all-star status in 1950. But Jenkins gave up his basketball career to return to Missouri.

He began working at his father-in-law's car dealership in Lutesville.

Right around that time, Central basketball coach Lou Muegge made an offer to Jenkins and Ben Bidewell, a member of Southeast's 1943 national championship basketball team, to referee all of the Tigers games.

"They were the largest school in the area, and they paid more than any other school in the area," Jenkins said. "Most of those small schools, you only got $10 to $12. Muegge paid us $25."

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For the next two decades, Jenkins had a whistle around his neck. In 1953, he started working as a college basketball referee.

One year, he said he worked more than 160 games between high school and college games.

"Sometimes, I'd be gone six nights a week," Jenkins said.

He and his family moved back to Columbia in 1955, and he later served as an assistant basketball coach at Mizzou for a few seasons. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the program was suggesting to Stalcup that he hire a young Norm Stewart as freshman coach.

But even while he helped coach the Tigers, he continued his work as a basketball official, working games of conference rivals. He'll never forget the night he worked a Kansas game and 7-1 Wilt Chamberlain stood at the free throw line.

"The first time he was at the free throw line in a game that I officiated, I turned around and started to hand him the ball. I hit him right in the [groin area]," Jenkins said. "The next time I made sure it was way up there."

Jenkins' biggest moment as a referee came in 1966, when he was selected to work the NCAA Final Four. He worked two games of the tournament: the Kentucky-Duke semifinal and the championship game between the Wildcats and Texas Western.

Walking over to the Kentucky bench to get the team captains for a pre-game meeting, Jenkins introduced himself to the Wildcats legendary coach.

"He stood up, he stuck out his hand and said, 'I'm Adolph Rupp.'" Jenkins recalled. "I said, 'You know what, coach? There aren't too many people in the country that don't know who you are.'"

Jenkins' focus that night was on basketball -- not on history.

He didn't give any thought to the racial angle that's become the focus of so much debate and discussion over the years and the centerpiece of the movie "Glory Road."

"No one even thought about the black-white situation," Jenkins said. "It never even entered our mind. It was just the Final Four. That was it."

Jenkins didn't have much time to ponder the game or its implications. The next morning, he was on a plane to Colorado as part of a whirlwind two weeks that was typical of Jenkins' life at the time.

"I worked the national junior college championship game, the NCAA Texas Western-Kentucky game, then flew to Denver the next morning for the national AAU tournament," Jenkins said. "It started Sunday and last through Saturday. Worked there all week and worked that championship game. That all happened within about two weeks."

Jenkins worked another Final Four in 1968 but did not referee the championship game. He hung up his whistle in 1971.

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He retired from the University of Missouri as director of physical plant operations a decade later and has worked in real estate ever since. In fact, he was planning to go to real estate school in late January to renew his license.

"I still do referrals but I'm not active listing and selling," he said.

Jenkins still lives in Columbia, a place he's called home for the past 51 years. He doesn't see many basketball games in person any more, preferring to watch them from the comfort of his living room.

As for "Glory Road," Jenkins thought highly of the movie and particularly Josh Lucas' performance in the role of Haskins.

"I thought he did a terrific job," Jenkins said.

The movie has put the spotlight on one of those milestone moments in the history of college athletics. It's only fitting Jenkins played a role. The longtime referee and former basketball star is an integral part of the state's sports history.

It's also worth remembering that Jenkins personal trip down "Glory Road" began in Southeast Missouri.