He sustained an injury during the game at the University of Mississippi — which brought cheers from the crowd. He says returning to the court after half time couldn't have taken more than 15 seconds, but it felt like a lifetime: "It's like the comedian Dick Gregory said, 'Yeah, I spent four years in Mississippi one night.'"
Games like these took a tremendous emotional toll. Wallace says if he hadn't given himself time to heal, there would have been terrible consequences.
"I would have committed suicide," he says, "like Henry Harris, the second black athlete who played in the SEC, who ran and jumped off a building a few years later. Like Nat Northington, who was the first athlete, period, who just left after about a year or so. But there's no question about it — if you don't think you have to heal after getting beat up, you don't know the basics."
Wallace didn't really have the support of his teammates. Those games, those experiences he survived on his own.
After graduation he went up north — he needed a break, he said. Law school and work with the Justice Department followed before he settled in Washington, D.C.
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Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C. Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean hide caption
itoggle caption Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean
Perry Wallace now teaches corporate and environmental law at American University in Washington, D.C.
Lisa Nipp/The Tennessean
But his storied season with Vanderbilt and the SEC? Glance around his office and you'd never know it. Wallace doesn't display a single memento from that time — no trophies, framed jerseys or even newspaper clippings.
Maraniss says "it's not the formula story that you might expect" but there is one moment in Wallace's story that he admits has that Hollywood feel.
"In Perry's last game, which was against Mississippi State in Nashville, his last basket of his college career is a slam dunk, which was illegal at the time," Maraniss explains. "It was a game that Perry dedicated to his mother, who had just passed away about a year earlier. And Perry saved the best for last, in many ways, in this game."
"Yeah, that's what I wanted," Wallace adds: "To make a statement. And I had made a promise to my mother, and I kept it best that last game. So I scored — what was it? — 28 points and 27 rebounds. Nobody's ever heard of that. And the pice de la resistance was the dunk at the end. ... The illegal dunk. And that basically said, well, these segregation laws were illegal laws. They were the law, but they weren't just. And so this is what I think of all those unjust, illegal rules. There it is. Slam dunk."
Read an excerpt of Strong Inside