Damon West heard the stories about James Gamble from his father.

“My father has always loved coach Gamble,” West said, his father a longtime sports journalist. “I was too young for his coaching days, but his name was legendary when spoken from my father’s lips.”

West was a quarterback at Thomas Jefferson High School a few years after Gamble initially retired from Port Arthur ISD rival Lincoln High in 1988. (Gamble came back to coach one more season, 1998-99.) Now a legal assistant at Provost Umphrey Law Firm in Beaumont, West told his dad about putting together a care package for the four-time state champion basketball coach.

Gamble and his wife of 56 years, Margaret — like so many families in Port Arthur —lost everything in their home to Tropical Storm Harvey late last month. A lawyer at the firm, former Lincoln player James Payne, told West about the Gambles’ loss and asked West to find some articles of clothing for them.

A noted speaker, West traveled the country to visit different major college football programs, so he solicited a number of schools where he spoke to help those in need. He coordinated supply trucks sent by the programs, as the law office became a receiving and distribution site.

“Provost Umphrey has always shown compassion with the community and its clients, but this disaster really revealed to me a dedication to servant leadership on a different, higher level,” West said. “Each day, I see people who lost everything come through this office and resupply on food, water, clothing, cleaning supplies, toiletries and all the other items that make a human life. Trucks and vans full of supplies leave this office and head out into the community where people are hurting.”

One of the universities that sent clothes was Kansas.

Of all the great college recruits James Gamble mentored, he never sent one to the Jayhawks, a program with three NCAA championships and six runner-up finishes.

“My father recounted a story about coach Gamble at a track meet in college when Wilt Chamberlain high-jumped for Kansas,” said West, who was a quarterback at North Texas. “He thought it would be a nice ‘life coming full circle’ moment if Provost Umphrey could give coach Gamble some Kansas gear.”

The story told but not written
Gamble, 82, was in the middle of writing an autobiography when he lost some notes in the flood that crested in Port Arthur on Aug. 30.

“The book covers a lot of things from my childhood all the way through the championships and things like that,” said Gamble, a Los Angeles native who’s lived in Port Arthur since 1961. “Right now, I don’t even have a title for the book.”

Gamble said he’s written six chapters of a planned 10- to 12-chapter book that he had planned to publish by December. The book will cover his life as a youngster in the Watts neighborhood of L.A., through his days as a basketball and track athlete at what is now Prairie View A&M University and his later career in which he won 641 games at Lincoln between 1963 and 1988. He came out of retirement after 11 years and led Lincoln to a 29-6 record and state runner-up finish.

“Coach Gamble’s book is something I will devour, as I love reading anything written by people who won on a different level than everyone else,” West said. “Coach is definitely in that rare class of winners.”

The Kansas wear West secured for Gamble triggered detailed memories of that 1957 track meet with Chamberlain. Surprisingly, Gamble hasn’t planned to write about that meet in his book.

He was a senior long jumper at Prairie View when he met the future Hall of Fame center for the Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Lakers, who was high-jumping for the Jayhawks.

A month earlier in Kansas City, Missouri, Chamberlain, then a sophomore, led Kansas to the NCAA basketball final, where they lost to North Carolina 54-53 in triple overtime.

“You expect to meet the big-name guys that are actually out there participating, but I never expected to meet Wilt Chamberlain because I had no idea that he was also a track athlete,” Gamble said. “When we got there, it just happened we were warming up. The long jump area and the pit were basically in the same area. I looked over there and I saw these guys warming up, and I said, ‘That looks like Wilt Chamberlain.’

“I walked over there and got a little closer, you know what I mean, and I didn’t mean to stare but I was getting me a good look. I realized, that is Wilt Chamberlain. I went over and spoke to him, said: ‘Hey Wilt, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘Hey, little man, what’s going on?’”

The two struck up a conversation, Chamberlain inquiring where Prairie View was located and what Gamble’s best jump was. Gamble said “something like” 25 feet, 2 inches at the Prairie View Relays to set a meet record.

When Gamble asked about Chamberlain’s best in the high jump, the “Big Dipper” said: “Man, you don’t want to know.”

Rain pelted the Drake track field, Gamble recalled, causing damage to the unpaved runway. Gamble jumped 21-9 on his first attempt. Carroll Hamilton of Hanover (Indiana) College jumped 23-9 ½, according to Drake Relays records.

After hesitating to continue, a meet director reminded Gamble that he wasn’t sent all the way to Des Moines not to compete. Gamble agreed and continued. Hitting the board on his next attempt, Gamble improved his jump to 24-4.

“The guy from Hanover, he had been passing [on attempts] all along, so he asked if he could take a practice jump,” Gambles said. “The meet director said, ‘If all the other competitors agree, you can take the jump.’ All the competitors agreed but me. He got mad, but I said, ‘Hey.’

“Anyway, the guy’s jump was a disaster, and I wound up winning. The guy got mad like he wanted to fight and I ran over to where Wilt was high-jumping, [saying] ‘How you doing, Wilt?’ And I think Wilt also won the high jump.”

Chamberlain, who grew to be 7-1, actually tied Don Stewart of SMU for the win with a jump of 6-6 ¼.

Gamble does touch on his track and field history in his autobiography. He was an All-American at L.A.’s David Starr Jordan High School and was offered by UCLA to compete in track.

But his first love has always been basketball.

“I asked them if I could do both,” Gamble said. “They said, well, we can look into that. Then I realized, I wasn’t going to be able to do both. I loved basketball, but I guess my track and field exceeded my basketball potential.”

After a year at East Los Angeles Junior College, Gamble went on to Prairie View and became a two-time All-Southwestern Athletic Conference basketball player and All-American track athlete.

“I wasn’t pitiful in basketball,” Gamble said.

Looking for more notes
Gamble, who along with his wife is staying with Sharon Davis of Beaumont, said he’s going to “dig around” for more notes to finish his book, and he’s also soliciting help from the public.

“There might be somebody in Port Arthur that kept a scrapbook of the ‘70s and ‘80s, so I might be able to luck up on that material,” he said.

Among the requested notes, Gamble is looking for results of games and reports on Lincoln’s entrance into the University Interscholastic League in 1967, when the Prairie View Interscholastic League, the governing body for all-black high schools, and the University of Texas-based UIL merged.

“We were starting to play our best basketball at the time we entered the UIL,” Gamble said. “The first one [team] we entered the UIL with could possibly have been the best team we ever had, and we didn’t even make the playoffs. In fact, we didn’t win our zone. We had bad luck. We came up with the flu and lost a ballgame we shouldn’t have. Then, we got into a fight with Thomas Jefferson and lost a game we should’ve won.

“The team that won our zone was Port Neches [Groves]. And the team that won our other zone was Charlton-Pollard [now merged into Beaumont Central]. We had beaten Charlton-Pollard in a couple of warm-up games by 20 points. … We lost two games to Jefferson.”

The notes weren’t all that Gamble lost in Harvey’s wrath. The flood reached to the rooftop of his home in the Vista Village section of Port Arthur, and he and his wife lost everything in it.

He had a hallway decorated with countless plaques and framed photos of his championship teams from Lincoln.

“I had three vehicles, I had a 2008 Honda Ridgeline truck, had a 2005 [Toyota] Camry XLE and I had a 1992 Lexus 400. Everything was in great shape and all of that, but it’s gone. But I’m still here. My wife is still here. My neighbors are still here, and most of the people in the city.”

Workers from Jefferson County Drainage District 7 rescued the Gambles with their dump trucks by the time the water reached his waist. Gamble is on the DD7 board of directors.
“We spent the night at the DD7 office,” he said. “It was flooding in there, and we had to sleep in a truck. Six of us slept in a truck, so the next morning, the drainage district came with their boat and took us to the control center, which sits up on a hill. We spent the night over there.”

The Gambles then spent two days with fellow board member Tim Champagne and his wife Donna of Nederland and another day with their niece, whose residence was not flooded, before Davis took them in.

James Gamble is not seeking any sympathy or further help in his recovery from the storm.
“It’s real, real difficult right now, but it’s real difficult for everybody,” he said. “I’ve learned a long time ago, through participating in sports and coaching and everything going on, you have to take the bitter with the sweet. Not everything’s going to go your way, but you have to dig in and fight back and try to change things. A lot of people are thinking about running, but there are floods, earthquakes, tornados and things like that everywhere. This flood we had here was the Lord’s work, and all I’m doing is saying, ‘Lord, have mercy.’ When things are going good, I’m thanking the Lord for all the friends that I have and for all the people reaching out across the country and nation to assist us in building back.”

Gamble’s son, James Jr. wants him and Margaret to move to San Antonio, where Jr. lives. But Gamble is passing on that offer, preferring to rebuild his home in Port Arthur.

“We’ve been blessed through a terrible ordeal. I hope everybody in this city [is] able to put their homes together and stay in it and able to make Port Arthur grow.”
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To help James Gamble with notes to complete his book, call him at 543-3163.
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I.C. Murrell: 549-8541. Twitter: @ICMurrellPANews