LIVE with Joe Barry Carroll: Part 2

Joe Barry Carroll joined Alan Karpick for a recent interview on ‘Gold and Black LIVE’. A 1980 a graduate of Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, Carroll was first team All-American in 1980 and led Purdue to its most rec appearance Final Four. He was also a overall first pick of the 1980 NBA Draft (Golden State Warriors) and played in the league for NBA and played for 11 years.

Carroll, who now lives in Atlanta is an artist, author and financial advisor. His paintings have been on display at Purdue’s Black Cultural Center and at the greater Lafayette Museum of Art and in other locations around the country. Carroll had much to say on a variety of topics including his new book “My View from Seven Feet.”

Here is an edited excerpt of the "LIVE' interview.

To read Part 1 of our excerpted interview: click here.

GoldandBlack.com: You did play basketball at Purdue, and that was a great experience for you, correct?

Carroll: I tell people that. I don’t separate it out. Historically, there’s been a taint on the intellectual side for basketball players and entertainers or whatever. I’m a jock. I embrace my legacy, I was a jock, I’m still a jock and I’m an artist and I’m a businessman and entrepreneur, philanthropist and all of that stuff too. It’s all an “and” for me. I’m not trying to replace that because whatever that was, I’m fine with it. It’s included.

GoldandBlack.com: You made a lot of very close friends here. Talk about (former Purdue basketball standout guard and sports agent who passed away in 2015) Eugene Parker’s legacy and his effect on your life.

Carroll: He’s largely why I came to Purdue. He was my host when I came to visit. We started talking all those years ago, and even after he graduated we were always in touch with each other. While both of us were out of sports, he had relocated part time to Atlanta. He still had a home in Fort Wayne. We’d get together whenever he was in town and walk together a lot.

In a term of about six months, we went from that type of relationship to saying goodbye to him at the ICU in Atlanta. It’s just tough. I think about him all the time. I bring him up (whenever I can) because it keeps him present for me.

GoldandBlack.com: What did you learn from him about how to grow as a person?

Carroll: I don’t know. We were each other’s safe space in a certain way because we had certain resources financially, with education. We got to a certain place where we had seen the world in a certain way, so we were contemporaries. That’s part of what our walks in the parks were about. That was the time when we’d get out there and we’d dream because you have to find a contemporary to dream with because if someone is not your peer, so to speak, they won’t understand what you’re talking about.

He was wildly creative. He created a business out of nothing, sold it, and bought it back, created it again, and built on that. He’s always been impressive as an entrepreneur and a businessman.

He was big family man. He was impressive. I did all of the low down stuff. I did all the smoking cigars and drinking bourbon. He was right there with me but he didn’t participate in any of that stuff. He was good.

Eugene was fierce though. He could get an ego. We were walking one time and I said something that he took exception to. I noticed he was upset with me and I was like, “So if I wasn’t seven feet 300 pounds right now you’d probably take a patch out of my ass, right?” We walked a couple steps and he was like “Probably.” That’s the guy he was, but we never had any cross words, never went away from each other. There was never a time out. Whenever we worked through, we took it all the way down the road.

GoldandBlack.com: Take me through what you recall about lessons learned from Caoch Lee Rose.

Carroll: He’s a process guy. You can’t expect things to just show up. You have to participate in the process and with him, it was work,

Even now, a lot of preparation that I do for meetings or research, I think a lot about him. He was good. I wish he had been the coach earlier in my career (Carroll played just his junior and senior years with Rose) because it’s always in my imagination of what would have been if I would have spent four years with him instead of the two because I learned a lot.

For some reason, I was thinking naively that perhaps if I didn’t stand up and pound my chest that people would give me a pass. What I realized was that the expectation was going to be there regardless to however arrogant or non arrogant I would be. I needed to go ahead and embrace it. Coach came in and would say “Look, we’re going to bring the ball to you, and you need to be prepared to do something with it.” He gave me the stage to do it and he supported that. He’s been great and we’ve moved from me being his pupil, because he’s a teacher, to being friends, and then I actually worked for him. He was a client. Now a few years ago, we agreed to publish “Coach Lee Rose on Family and Basketball” which will come out shortly. I’m really excited about it.

GoldandBlack.com: Talk about that process, because it’s challenging because of aging and health and all of those things,

Carroll: There’s a lot going on. Coach is struggling with some things right now, but he rises to the occasion and he’s hilarious. We’ve spent the last three years working on this memoir. A benefit I had is that I’m a writer, and we’re both Southern, grew up kind of poor with complicated family dynamics and sports was really prominent. We’re both sensitive about a lot of stuff, easily offended. He’s this phenomenal cat that I’ve gotten whole other layers. It’s like our relationship keeps building on itself. A few years ago, he wanted to do a memoir.

I wanted to make it more than he went to the Final Four, he went to the Big Ten, whatever he did athletically. I went into a lot of detail with him about why he did what he did which is sometimes fun for him, but sometimes he gets frustrated with me. I’ll be like “Why coach?” Because he just assumes I’ll just know it. And he’ll say something like “Well hell Joe I just crossed the road because I wanted to be on the other side! What part of that do you not understand? I thought you were brighter than that!”

GoldandBlack.com: He and his wife, Eleanor, have a long time love affair. How much is that going to play into that story you think?

Carroll: It’s fundamental. I’m not sure how interested people are in just the basketball part. This book reads like a novel, because they do have a real love story that they talk about. It’s all true. The dates, the times, what they felt, because he wrote it down and I talked to her and we did the interview.

One of the things that comes out of this which is a really beautiful thing, is he says that it (their love) was never in jeopardy. For them, whatever happened, whenever it happened, they always knew that any solution to that problem never included them being separate. It always meant how are we going to work this out and how are we going to fix this? They are like any human beings, there’s family tragedy, there’s issues, they are raising two boys, they’re grandparents and everything. So there’s always some issue. But I thought that was enlightening or reflective or touching; saying whatever comes along, it does not involve us not being who we are to each other.

GoldandBlack.com: What do you take 40 years after making it to the Final Four?

Carroll: I’m very grateful. The older I get, there are things you realize. When you’re in the middle of things, you aren’t able to appreciate it as deeply. You’re grateful and appreciative but you have no idea how huge that is because I know they talk about the Elite Eight or Sweet Sixteen, it doesn’t happen until you get to the Final Four. You haven’t done anything.

GoldandBlack.com: Where you close then and are you close now to your former teammates?

I read something where you had said they had never seen it that close. I don’t know how close players are anyway. I think they come together for the game and the victory, and that’s what you’re really seeing when you’re seeing the camaraderie with players is that they all have this common purpose.

It’s uncommon for them to be close, although I did become close to Eugene, and Roosevelt (Barnes) and I are close. We just talked a couple of days ago.

I see Keith (Edmondson), because he played in the NBA, as well as I’ll see him at the dinosaur’s convention (laughing), the old players convention and stuff like that.

Arnette (Hallman) and I have only communicated once on the phone in 40 years. We’re adults, so we all grew up as they say. We’re cool with each other. When we see each other, everything is fine. I don’t know that very many of us have very intimate relationships. It’s being real.

I’d like to say we’re family, we take pictures together, we go on trips together. We really don’t. It’s kind of like for most people who work together, when they’re at IBM or Apple or wherever they might work. It comes, and they find a thing that they do together, and then perhaps they move on to something else. There’s not a problem with that, it’s just what life does.

Life is a little more complicated than extending childhood relationships to some distant place 40 years later. I’m about to get social security next year.

It’s so much fun being back on camera because they have this schedule for me for the three or four days I’m here. It makes me feel so relevant. I work in a cave at home, so there are days when I don’t leave the place. So when I come out and see the world and know that people actually remember who I am, I’m just so touched.

GoldandBlack.com: Do you watch a lot of Purdue basketball from home and did you watch them almost get to the Final Four?

Carroll: I did. I saw that young man shooting that ball. Carsen Edwards was pretty good. Looks like he’s doing some good work in Boston now.

GoldandBlack.com: You got to the Final Four and they were so close. Did you feel for them just being an inch away?

Carroll: I did. I was pulling for them. I was hopeful that this was going to be the year, but it didn’t happen. When we went, we were not the best. The team in 1978, that was the team that everybody expected to be in the Final Four, not us. When Sports Illustrated said it was a surprise party in Indianapolis when we went. It was a surprise party. I think you have to go a couple of times (to appreciate and understand it) because it’s so overwhelming, even back then. The media, the band, the cameras from all over the world, it’s a blur to me. I cannot remember the game. If you put that film on right now, it would probably be brand new to me.

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