Todd Leary’s road back: From IU to prison to feeding the homeless

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Indy Star on 04/06/2017 by Zak Keefer

Todd Leary knows the highs and lows. He was an Indiana All-Star and played in a Final Four game for Bob Knight. He spent time in prison for theft. And now he runs a thriving AAU basketball program called the Indiana Faith.

The Chili Feed.

His car trickles down the alley, and suddenly the city’s invisible community is right before your eyes.

“Look at all this,” Todd Leary instructs. “Bet you haven’t seen all this before.”

He’s right. Look at these tents, dozens and dozens of them, tucked away along the banks of the White River. Look at the group huddled by a fire burning in a trash bin. We’re a stone’s throw from the $720 million football palace the Indianapolis Colts call home, yet a world removed: Most around the city don’t have a clue this place even exists. That’s how the homeless like it, Leary explains. They prefer the privacy.

He’s right. Look at these tents, dozens and dozens of them, tucked away along the banks of the White River. Look at the group huddled by a fire burning in a trash bin. We’re a stone’s throw from the $720 million football palace the Indianapolis Colts call home, yet a world removed: Most around the city don’t have a clue this place even exists. That’s how the homeless like it, Leary explains. They prefer the privacy.

There’s a makeshift memorial, the name “James ‘Tiny’ Jones” scribbled on a sheet of cardboard. Leary’s seen it before. He knows what happened to Tiny Jones.

“He froze to death.”

The car stops. Leary jumps out. Strolls up to the group. Makes small talk. He tells them about the free food his son’s AAU basketball team is serving by the downtown library that afternoon, warm chili dogs on a cold spring day. Free hats and gloves, too. All are welcome. He hops back in his car a few moments later, mindful that it’s a long shot he’ll see any of them by the library that afternoon. Worth a try, he says.

In so many ways this is what lifted him up – this team, this service, this second chance Todd Leary never knew he needed until that night he showed up at Assembly Hall ready to call a basketball game on the radio and instead left in the back of a police car.

If the worst of basketball buried him, the best of basketball brought him back. The residue of playing at a big-time college program lingered in Leary for years – he was all ego and entitlement, a state champ at Lawrence North, the guy who played next to Damon Bailey and Calbert Cheaney at Indiana and hit all those threes against Duke in the Final Four. Eventually the fame faded and the dried up perks, and all anyone wanted from him was a juicy Bob Knight story. Leary grew to resent that.

He got cocky. He broke the law. He got caught.

“I played basketball at IU,” he remembers asking himself in the darkest of moments. “Why am I in prison?”

To understand that answer, Leary had to see something he never had before. It’s why he’s here, driving into homeless communities on a Sunday afternoon, offering a warm meal or a warm hat or a long conversation to those who need it. This is the Indiana Faith program at work. How many AAU basketball squads hold bible study after every practice? How many host food drives for the city’s homeless?

It opens the players’ eyes. Sometimes, opens a parent’s, too.

The Arrest.

He remembers the arrest, the humiliation, the irony. Of course he does. A former IU basketball player does not forget being tossed into a police car at Assembly Hall an hour before a big game.

That building had become like a second home for Leary. He’d gone from IU player to IU radio analyst. He’d brought one of his three sons to the game that night in February 2010. It was a big one. IU-Purdue is always a big one.

He never saw tipoff. Instead he spent the night in the Monroe County Jail.

He remembers prison, all 365 days of it. To this day, he still wears two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks everywhere he goes. They don’t give you extra underwear and socks in prison.

He remembers getting out, and everyone being polite, telling him, “if there’s anything I can do to help…” and how hollow those words really were. What he needed was a job, a second chance. But no one was hiring a convicted felon, and who could blame them? His applications tumbled to the bottom of every pile.

“Couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s,” Leary says.

He remembers the first time he met Craig Roeder, the man who opened his eyes and gave him that second chance. Even after he got out, Leary was that coach on the sidelines of his son’s AAU games, screaming, scolding, caring too damn much. When he asked Craig if his grandson wanted to join their team, Craig suggested lunch. Lunch lasted three hours. Craig told Todd about faith. Something stuck.

“It was like I was reading a book and I couldn’t wait to get to the next page,” Leary remembers.

Bob Knight used to have a nickname for Leary. Called him “The Answer Man.”

Players weren’t supposed to have the audacity to respond to the coach’s incessant rhetorical questions, questions like, “Why’d you screw up that play? Because you didn’t know what you were doing or because you didn’t care?”

Most would sit in silence and stare at the floor. Fire back at The General? No thank you. Leary was the one who chirped back. Thus, The Answer Man.

He spent five seasons in Bloomington, from 1989-’94, redshirting his sophomore year after hurting his knee. He played on two Big Ten champions and a Final Four squad. Averaged less than six points a game for his career. He was never a star, but that never mattered. He was an Indiana basketball player.

“I felt invincible,” he remembers.

Dinner tabs were picked up. He’d slip out of his summer job and spend half the day at the pool. The summer after he graduated, and with his eligibility used up, Leary says he and his fellow seniors each raked in $56,000 cash for a 19-game, 21-day barnstorming tour that filled gyms across the state. A week later he walked into Tom Martin Ford in Bloomington and bought a Mustang convertible. Paid for it in cash.

“That’s not real life,” Leary says now. “I was thinking I’d make this money all the time. Being a basketball player at a big-time school and the sense of entitlement that you think is real is really (expletive) up. You don’t know what the real world’s like. I think I contributed to that. I allowed that to happen.”

What was real life was the Indiana basketball machine. Knight wore his players down. To this day, Leary remembers the mental games. If there’s one thing the legendary coach taught him, it’s that there’s no such thing as fair.

“And, honestly, I think that helped me in prison,” Leary says. “But I don’t think he’s preparing us for prison. At least I hope not.”

His reverence for Knight’s basketball genius remains intact – “the smartest mind the game’s probably ever seen,” Leary says – but he’s grown disenchanted by Knight’s stubbornness. He hasn’t seen his former coach since the mid-2000s, when he passed Knight in a hotel hallway in Las Vegas. “You’re getting fat, Leary,” Knight told him without breaking stride.

By then Leary had become IU’s radio analyst, working alongside legendary play-by-play voice Don Fischer. (Never lacking in passion, and never a fan of silence, Leary, according to Fischer, was one of the best color analysts he’s ever worked with. Leary’s most famous call came after Indiana upset top-seeded Duke in the 2002 Sweet 16. “I love you Don! I love you Don!” he shouted on the air before standing on his chair on press row.)

As for Knight, his mantra after his 2000 firing was simple: Anyone willing to associate with IU was dead to him.

“You hear all the time about how he’d do anything for his former players,” Leary says. “Well that is the biggest crock of (expletive) I’ve ever heard in my life. If I called him up and needed something, he would not take the phone call. I’m 100 percent done (in his eyes). He’s never talked to Don Fischer since the day he left because Don Fischer didn’t quit his job.”

He continues. Holding back has never been Todd Leary’s style.

“He explained to us in multiple ways every year that it’s not about you, it’s about the team. It’s not about Todd Leary, it’s not about Damon Bailey. That’s why we don’t have the names on the back of our jerseys. It’s not supposed to be about him, right? Well, him not going back for the 1976 (40-year celebration) was the most selfish thing ever. Never has it not been 100 percent about him. That’s the lie we’re supposed to be OK with just because he wins games.”

The Crime.

Campus police were waiting for Leary that night at Assembly Hall. He’d known the cop for 20 years, ever since he was a player. He eventually pled guilty to misappropriation of escrow funds and spent a year in prison.

He was chasing a lifestyle, wanting to, in his words, “make it big.” That cockiness. That ego. He’d gone into business with a successful realtor in town, Judy Cohen, and a former Indianapolis Colt, Ken Dilger. The three opened an office park in the Castleton area.

“She’s a millionaire, he’s a millionaire and I’m not a millionaire,” Leary remembers. “But I wanted to own a third of the building just like they did.”

He took out a second mortgage on his home, didn’t pay off the first mortgage, and pocketed $294,000. He wrote checks from the company’s business account to his personal account, $25,000 or so at a time. For a title company running through $4 million to $5 million a month in mortgages, Leary figured he could hide $294,000 no sweat. He was wrong.

Eight years later he doesn’t run from the crime. “It was dead wrong,” he says. “I did that stuff and I can’t hide from it.”

His mom bailed him out of jail. His accounts were frozen, his then-wife stunned. His mug shot was plastered across the local news.

It didn’t stop there. Out on bail, Leary started stealing furniture and appliances from foreclosed homes and selling them. “I didn’t have one cent, and didn’t have any way to get money,” he says. “In my mind then, I was justifying it because I wasn’t taking it from someone. The houses were empty except for the furniture.”

He got caught, again.

Arrested, again.

This time there was no bail.

He worked 12-hour days in prison and was paid 12 cents an hour.

The Team.

The lunch that stretched three hours led to another, and another, and eventually, an AAU team. The Indiana Faith were born. What started with two squads has ballooned to 34.

Craig Roeder remembers the first time he saw Leary on the sidelines. Here was Bob Knight Jr.

“I was watching a game, and man, he was just really upset, almost losing it,” Roeder recalls. “I remember telling my wife, ‘Somebody needs to tell him about Jesus.'”

So Roeder did.

At that point, not a lot of things intimidated Todd Leary, not after five years under Knight and 365 days in the Plainfield Correctional Facility, but religion did. It scared him. Confused him. Roeder made him comfortable that day. Slowly, Leary began to believe.

“I don’t think I met Craig by chance,” he says today.

Roeder and his wife, Lisa, helped Leary find his faith and find a purpose. It’s the vehicle that helped Leary turn the page on his old life. Make it big? Forget all that. He got cocky. He broke the law. He got caught.

He swallowed some pride and picked up the pieces.

“We just started talking about finding that inner peace, that inner strength,” Roeder says. “We all have some demon we battle. How do you find the strength to fight it? With Todd, and with all of us, it’s a journey, not a destination. There’s no light switch. You’re constantly learning.”

Leary’s priorities have shifted. His intensity during games has waned. He’ll still talk your ear off, but not about his glory days at IU. To him, this is about the family and the team that helped him rebuild his life.

“Where would I be without the Roeders?” he asks. “I honestly don’t even want to think about that.”

“I still think he’s a very confident person, and without that I don’t think he would’ve picked up the pieces the way he has,” says Fischer, a friend of Leary’s for 20 years. “I’m proud of him.”

The Roeders gave him that second chance. Leary started on the graveyard shift at the logistics company Roeder runs, ProTrans, loading and unloading semis from 2:30 a.m. to noon. He’s risen to the role of the Carrier Development Manager. He can’t coach his son’s AAU team anymore, not after they’ve reached the high school level. (NCAA rules prohibit convicted felons from doing so.) So he sits in the stands and keeps (moderately) quiet. He takes part in the Bible studies. He mentors the players. He helps out at the chili feeds, driving into homeless communities to spread the word.

“In four years, I think he’s only missed one time,” Roeder says. “And the time he missed, he hated it. I honestly think the first time he did it, it was one of the first times Todd really experienced the joy of giving.”

Leary isn’t chasing publicity. He doesn’t want this story written. “I haven’t accomplished anything,” he says once, twice, a handful of times.

But there is something to be said for a man who hits rock bottom, then climbs out of the hole he dug himself. He’s too busy these days to look back. He’s dishing out chili dogs to a line of hungry mouths that stretches across half a parking lot. Sometimes, he’ll recognize the owner of one of those hungry mouths from his time in prison. Sometimes they’ll recognize him.

They don’t have a clue this guy used to play basketball at Indiana. And for the first time, that’s how Todd Leary prefers it.