Ringgold’s Stokes played with the greats
Submitted photo
Tim Stokes is shown during his playing days at Canisius.
submitted photo
Tim Stokes is shown during high school when he starred for the Ringgold Rams.
If Ringgold graduate Tim Stokes owned an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be generously adorned with stickers depicting his many ports of call. That’s because the game of basketball has taken him far away from home many a time.
He has played with and against such luminaries as Campy Russell who played for the University of Michigan before embarking on a seven-year NBA career; Alex English, a Hall of Famer who played primarily for the Denver Nuggets after coming off the University of South Carolina campus; Bob McAdoo, a standout for UNC and another NBA Hall of Famer; and Mike Dunleavy who also starred for the University of South Carolina, then went on to play pro basketball, mainly for the Houston Rockets. He also coached 20 seasons in the NBA and led the Los Angeles Lakers to a Western Conference title in his first year as their head coach (1990-91). Stokes even played high school hoop with a kid he called “a good basketball player — actually, a better basketball player than he was in football” in Joe Montana.
An interesting side note to Stokes is the fact that he grew up in the home which had also been a young Stan Musial’s home, a quaint house perched high on a hill on Marelda Avenue in Donora.
Stokes’ sports career began, he said, with “a basketball game I played in grade school at Castner School. Joe Lopez was the coach and we played Sixth Street School, against Art Coleman’s team, I think. I won the game with a couple of last-second shots. That was pretty memorable.”
That success encouraged him to strive for more, as did a trip his mother took him on — a short one to the Donora public library. “The first book I got was about a little Black boy with an Afro who played basketball. And everyday I would have to read to her before I went out to play. That was an inspiration to me.”
Well-rounded, Stokes also played Midget League football and youth baseball. “I did it all,” he stated.
Further, he often flashed his skills against much older boys, battling on the many playgrounds around the Valley.
“I was about 14 or 15 and these guys were 18 to their 20s,” Stokes said. “We used to travel around to Clariton, Charleroi, Monessen, Brownsville, and Uniontown and play pick-up ball, and I was good enough to play with them.”
Stokes quit basketball in junior high where he had been teamed up with such fine players as Coleman and brothers Bernie and Ulice Payne. Then, during the summer before he moved on to Ringgold High School, the Rams basketball coach, Fran LaMendola, “got involved. He took me to a tournament in Charleroi where I did pretty well.”
That led to his playing for LaMendola shortly thereafter.
“I remember the newspaper had a nickname for our basketball team, the Octopus, because we had so many arms — we passed the ball, we weren’t selfish, and we were very successful,” Stokes said. “That’s when Mel Boyd and Mike Brantley played, too.”
Ringgold took the WPIAL title with a win over General Braddock, then met up with them again in the state tournament.
“We went to the state semifinals against General Braddock. In the beginning there were jitters, but after a while we got loose and we started playing, but Braddock won the game,” Stokes said. “I felt like we didn’t put our best product on the floor. We had the same players, but we just didn’t play the game the way that we [normally] played.”
It didn’t help that Montana fouled out of the contest.
Stokes continued speaking of his high school career as a 6′-foot-3 forward.
“I scored in double figures just about every game,” Stokes said.
Such play earned him the opportunity to play in the prestigious Dapper Dan Roundball Classic.
Soon after that honor, Sonny Vaccaro, a co-founder of the Roundball Classic, got in touch with Stokes. Incidentally, Vaccaro would later gain national fame as a key member of the Nike corporation — he was, in fact, the person who got Michael Jordan to sign his first sneaker deal. Stokes said Vaccaro, “got a bunch of ballplayers together and we went through Ohio playing as an All-Star team.”
Stokes played his college ball at Robert Morris and Canisius College where, as a junior, he was the top scorer for Upper State New York.
“When I first got to Canisius, we practiced in the winter in the gym, a rec facility, and I’ll never forget, I picked up a baseball because the team was inside because of the snow,” Stokes said. “I started throwing because I used to be a pitcher, and I was pretty doggone good. An old sportswriter told me that he wanted me to go out for baseball and he would arrange as many farm club tryouts as I wanted. At the time I told him I was a basketball player.
“When I got to Canisius, the basketball program was on probation and we didn’t have any televised games.”
Still, someone saw him play, and they liked what they saw. Stokes was drafted by the NBA, selected by the old Buffalo Braves (now the Los Angeles Clippers), and, said Stokes, “In camp I played with McAdoo, Ernie DiGregorio, Adrian Dantley, Randy Smith and Bob Weiss. I made it to the last cut.”
Stokes has worked as a merchandiser for the J. C. Penney company in Washington, Pennsylvania, for a sports company where he became a regional stats manager with 50 people under him, and for about the last 25 years he’s been with the Juvenile Probation department of Harris County, Texas.
Stokes married Monessen’s Michelle Lea in 1982 and they moved to Texas where they had three sons and a daughter. Stokes, who returns to the Valley frequently, now resides in a town just outside of Houston.