Austin Carr Is Doing Quite Well in the Business World

Austin Carr is again hard at work in the Hoosier state, only these days his time is spent behind a desk, not on a basketball court.

Carr, whose career scoring records at Notre Dame have stood for 15 years, is president of Packaging Unlimited, an Indianapolis company that does contract packaging and shipping.

During the week, he lives in a northside apartment, and he plans to bring his wife, Sharon, and their two children to Indianapolis this summer from Cleveland, where he played nine years in the NBA.

“I think I’m getting here at the right time,” the 38-year-old Carr says of his start in business in Indianapolis. “People have been very receptive, socially and business-wise.”

Many people, of course, want to reminisce about his basketball days, he said.

“Oh, yeah,” he answers willingly. “I’ll never forget those days. But many athletes come away with nothing but memories.”

The 6-foot-3 Carr, who goes back to Cleveland on weekends to be with his family, scored 2,560 points in his Notre Dame career, an average of 34.6 points a game. He is the only Irish player ever to score 50 or more points in a game, and he did that nine times--topped by an NCAA tourney-record 61 points in 1971.

Carr, the nation’s player of the year as a senior, was the first one taken in the 1971 NBA draft and led the Cavaliers in scoring in each of his first three seasons. He averaged 15 points a game for his career.

But his degree from Notre Dame assured him of a chance for success after basketball, he said.

“My parents always preached, ‘You won’t be able to do this forever. You have to get an education,”’ he recalled in an interview this week with the Indianapolis Star. “Notre Dame reiterated that . . . After about my third year in the league (NBA), when I got injured, I realized what my mom and dad said was true.”

Between that time and his retirement in 1981, Carr was in and out of an auto dealership and a beer distributorship in the Cleveland area. He was planning to enter the petroleum transporting business when he met Indianapolis businessman Henry M. Childrey.

One thing led to another, and four months ago, Carr took over management of Packaging Unlimited, a subsidiary of Childrey Enterprises.

The firm does contract work “anywhere from shipping baby cribs to shipping 500-pound generators to India,” Carr said.