True Colors : Don Chaney and John Tracy Broke a Barrier at Houston in 1964 and Put Together an Enduring Friendship

Walking through a darkened tunnel at the Forum, Don Chaney wears a starched white shirt, a patterned silk tie and a gray suit somber enough to match the mood of the Detroit Pistons. This is a team going nowhere fast and Chaney, an assistant coach, is along for the ride.

Not far away, John Tracy is at work on a brightly lighted sound stage at Lorimar Studios. In blue jeans and tennis shoes, Tracy stands beside a camera to line up the shot he wants as director of the television series “Family Matters.”

Chaney and Tracy were once basketball teammates at the University of Houston, where they also managed to make history, at least unofficially, 29 years ago. In those days, the veteran NBA coach and the hot television sitcom director were something entirely different. Chaney was the first black recruit at Houston, and Tracy was his white roommate.

Race relations were not so well defined then, even though they clearly were a matter of black and white.

“We became so close,” said Chaney, who grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Baton Rouge, La. “It was the most amazing thing. I knew everything about him. He knew everything about me.”

Tracy, a fast-talking urban hustler from Brooklyn, looks back gratefully on a friendship that began nearly three decades ago.

“I went into that relationship not too excited about it because of fear, a lack of confidence in who I was, what other people would think,” he said. “Yet it turned out to be one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me.”

Tracy has credits on such series as “Step by Step,” “Growing Pains,” and “Uncle Buck.” The sports memorabilia collection in the den of his home in Beverly Hills includes the first trading card of his former roommate, Chaney.

But long before they were making cards of Chaney, before Tracy was making hit television series, they learned something about one another as black and white. They also learned something about themselves.

“With all the struggle that everyone has made for equality, especially our race, especially at this time, we really need for someone to know about our story,” Chaney said.

In 1960, the University of Houston became part of the Texas state university system. Located in south-central Houston along Cullen Boulevard, the university is a few blocks from predominantly black Texas Southern University, which until recently had no white students.

There were only a few black students at the University of Houston in the spring of 1964, when basketball Coach Guy V. Lewis received approval from the university to recruit the school’s first black athletes. Lewis had long wanted to recruit black basketball players; he had grown weary of seeing his Cougars beaten by teams such as Cincinnati, led by the great Oscar Robertson.

Lewis and assistant coach Harvey Pate drove to Louisiana one day in March of 1964 to sign the school’s first two black players, Chaney and Elvin Hayes. Lewis had long coveted Chaney, but Hayes was something of an afterthought. Pate dropped Lewis off in Baton Rouge to sign Chaney, then drove on to Rayville, where Hayes lived.

Things were never the same again at the University of Houston.

For Lewis, a large, uncomplicated man with the sales pitch of a car dealer, there was no question he would know how to integrate black players on the court. After all, this was where his rule was absolute.

But off the court? Well, that was a potential trouble spot. So Lewis came up with a plan. He knew what he would not do. He would not room Hayes and Chaney together.

“I had made up my mind, if we were going to integrate, we were going to integrate,” said Lewis, who retired seven years ago and now spends his time tending the 740 azaleas he has planted around his home not far from the university. “I just didn’t like the way it would have looked. I just didn’t think it would be right not to pair them up with white guys.”

Hayes wound up with Howie Lorch, the team’s manager. Tracy became Chaney’s roommate.

Lewis said he knew Tracy would be right for Chaney: “He was street-wise and he knew how to get along.”

But Tracy wasn’t so sure. He felt like a guinea pig. As usual, he turned to his father for advice.

Tracy’s father, also John, was a New York City policeman who specialized in parenting. Sometimes it involved a pep talk, sometimes a kick in the rear. The elder Tracy also was a sports enthusiast who passed along to his four children an appreciation of athletics.

Young John grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and, as an Irish youngster in a predominantly Italian neighborhood, learned to blend in.

“I always felt the prejudice of not being Italian,” he said. “If you weren’t Italian, everything that was said was a racial slur. You sort of got caught up in it. I called it this ‘lynch mob’ mentality. But I knew if my father ever heard me saying that, I would get a smack upside the head.”

He was part of a gang that stole cars for joy rides. He saw guys he knew shot and killed in front of him. He learned never to show his emotions because that was taken for weakness.

But athletics were Tracy’s strength. He played baseball and basketball at Most Holy Trinity High in Brooklyn and received scholarship inquiries from such Eastern schools as Seton Hall, St. John’s, Villanova, Fordham, Manhattan College and Rider.

A coach at another high school had passed Tracy’s name on to Lewis at Houston, however, and that was where Tracy enrolled in 1963, after a recruiting visit during which Lewis picked him up at Hobby Airport in a big, red, four-door Pontiac.

“I got off the plane and expected to see horses hitched up to the rail,” he said.

And only a year later, there was Lewis, asking him to room with a black teammate he didn’t even know.

As usual, father knew best. The senior Tracy advised his son to treat his black roommate like anybody else.

“He said, ‘If this guy was Jewish or Polish and he played his music too loud and you didn’t get along, you wouldn’t say you wanted out because he was Jewish or Polish,’ ” Tracy said.

“But my father would always preface things like that with, ‘If you’re up to the challenge.’ He had that little gift that he always was able to make you better than you would have been.”

At the same time, there were similar discussions going on in the Chaney household in Baton Rouge. Gladys Chaney was left to rear her family of two boys and two girls after her husband deserted them when Don was in first grade. Gladys worked two jobs, as a secretary at Southern University and as a clerk at Baton Rouge General Hospital. She also took in laundry.

In her mind, there was no way her son was going to miss a chance to make history by breaking the color barrier in Houston.

“I just felt so strongly that it was not only the right thing to do, but it was the only thing to do,” said Gladys Chaney, who has lived in Torrance since 1965. “I think Don was really brave. He had never left home, he had never traveled. I remember telling him that this would make him a better man. I thought it would be the best experience he ever had.”

Chaney said he certainly needed the convincing, because he didn’t feel very confident entering a totally different world.

“My mother believed in someone stepping up to take the initiative, of being the pioneer,” Chaney said. “She said, ‘You have an opportunity to help your people.’ She gave me the whole speech. She said I had a chance to make a name for myself and that other blacks would follow me. I grew up listening to my mother anyway, so I followed her request.”

But Chaney had assumed he would be rooming with Hayes, which would have somewhat eased the anxiety of being in a Southern, white university after years of fear and mistrust of white society.

One night when he was 12, Chaney said, he was was walking home, dribbling a basketball, after having played all day. When he noticed a car following him, he dribbled faster. The car followed closer. Then the car pulled in front of him and a policeman got out, grabbed Chaney, threw him against the car and put a gun to his head.

“He said, ‘Where you been? Where you coming from? What did you do?’ ” Chaney said. “He called me nigger. It scared the hell out of me. Tears came to my eyes. I had absolutely no speech. I was trembling. He got back into his car and sped off.

” . . . I think the message was to reinforce the fact that black people shouldn’t be on the street that late at night . . . and the fright aspect--he basically wanted to get a reaction out of me, and he did.”

In a typical room at Baldwin House, the athletic dorm at Houston, there were two single beds, a night table in between, two desks, a sink and a bathroom that was shared with two others in another room. One afternoon when Tracy walked in, he saw an open suitcase on the other bed and clothes in the other closet.

Tracy checked out the clothes in Chaney’s closet and saw a very long sleeve attached to a very big sport coat.

“It looked more like a topcoat,” he said. “I said, ‘This is going to be a big person.’ ”

Lewis and Pate knocked and came in, followed by Chaney, who was expecting to see Hayes. But if Chaney was nervous, so was Tracy.

“I just hoped I didn’t say something stupid,” Tracy said.

Chaney was nearly dumbstruck with anxiety.

“What was scary about it--when you grow up in Baton Rouge, you develop an anger toward whites to the degree where you associate the white person as the enemy,” he said.

“And all of a sudden, I was rooming with the enemy. That was very hard. I would come in when he wasn’t there to see if he was going through my things. There was no trust at all. It was almost as if an alien had come down.”

The first day was very awkward. So were the second day and the third and the fourth. It was no better the rest of the first week and on into the second. Tracy was anxiety-ridden, worrying about whether Chaney was using his toothbrush and put off because Chaney would talk only in one-word sentences.

Tracy was sure it wasn’t going to work out. He called his father in Brooklyn and asked what he should do. Talk to him, Tracy was told. But he couldn’t bring himself to take the first step in a conversation about emotions. After all, in Tracy’s old neighborhood, anyone who had feelings was a sissy.

But one night as they lay in their beds with the lights out, the glow from the street lights filtering through the blinds, Chaney listening to his radio turned down low, Tracy knew this was the time.

“Now that I’m a television director, I know it created a feel,” Tracy said. “He was listening to (singer) Nancy Wilson. This was my chance. I could say anything I wanted and not look at him. If he called me a name and said he didn’t give a darn, I could pull the covers over my head and then dodge him the next 10 months.”

Tracy reminded Chaney that they were sharing the same room, living in close company. They were sharing the same problems. They both knew they were uncomfortable. Maybe they should tell Lewis it wasn’t working out. Tracy said he could hear Chaney breathing and his own heart beating.

Tracy said it seemed like hours before Chaney answered.

“He said, ‘You know this is awkward for me, but I need you to understand something,’ ” Tracy said. “ ‘Never in my life have I ever been allowed to speak to white people without getting permission.’

“That just stunned me.”

Chaney began explaining what it was like to grow up black in Baton Rouge. Tracy told Chaney about growing up as an Irish-Catholic in an Italian-Catholic neighborhood, about how he had never sat in school with someone who wasn’t Catholic until he got to Houston. They began sharing other stories. They began to know each other. They began a friendship.

The lights-out talks became a nightly forum. Sometimes they would talk for five minutes, sometimes for an hour. Eventually, Chaney stopped thinking that Tracy was getting paid to room with him. And Tracy stopped using Chaney’s toothpaste, as he had been doing because he was convinced that was what made Chaney jump higher.

But if they were beginning to see one another as equals at Baldwin House, they were nowhere close to that at Jeppesen Field House. Hayes and Chaney were freshman sensations and it became clear to Tracy that playing time was going to be in short supply very soon.

“Once I saw Don play as a freshman, I knew I was never going to play,” Tracy said.

And once Chaney joined the varsity for the 1965-66 season, Tracy barely moved from the bench. He got into only eight games all year, for a total of eight minutes, and scored four points.

But Tracy still practiced hard and felt no animosity toward his roommate. In fact, they became closer. They went to a Ray Charles concert at the Sam Houston Coliseum. One night, Tracy accompanied Chaney to a basketball game at Texas Southern, where Grambling had come to play, featuring a player named Willis Reed. Tracy was the only white in the gymnasium.

Chaney and Tracy went to the movies together, ate together, studied together and even walked out of the miniature golf course together when the owner wouldn’t let Chaney play because he was black. Rooming with Chaney certainly was not dull. Chaney received death threats in the mail and was taunted by other athletes in the dorm.

Eventually, Tracy graduated, left the team, got married and moved back to Brooklyn to begin his entertainment career, and Chaney moved on and up in basketball. But they stayed in touch, even though it was something of a loose arrangement.

“He is like a brother to me,” Chaney said. “My brother knows how I feel about him. I don’t have to call him every day.”

When Chaney was drafted by the Boston Celtics, Tracy called to congratulate him on being chosen by an Irish team. When the Celtics came to New York, Tracy was there at Madison Square Garden to watch him play. They called and wrote letters over the years at important times, such as when the Houston Rockets fired Chaney as head coach last season.

“I told him he always had a friend,” Tracy said.

And so it goes, this odd-couple friendship, which is what Chaney calls his 29-year relationship with Tracy.

“Two different people, two different backgrounds, two different races, two different colors, two different upbringings, two different sides of the world coming together,” Chaney said. “It’s sort of nice to know that this happened. And you know the best part of it? It’s a true story.”