LYNN — Those who were there insist the 1979-80 Lynn Classical state championship team was the greatest collection of high school basketball talent the city has ever seen.
Pancho Bingham, Meryl Brown, Sandy McGee, Stu Primus, and Tony Thurman were the stars — and they will be honored at the Lynn Museum on June 11.
Primus went on to play at Boston College, Bingham at Boston University, Thurman played football at BC, McGee played football at the University of Kansas, and Brown played basketball at Framingham State University.
Primus said he has never seen another team — definitely not in Lynn — that achieved what the Classical five did, including four 1,000-point scorers and 1,000 rebounds all on the same team. Primus also said he was the only player out of Classical to be drafted into the NBA.
Prior to winning the state championship in basketball, Classical won the Super Bowl in football in the fall.
Primus said that, while they were on the road to becoming state champions, a man came up to him after a game and told him that he flew from Texas just to watch them play, which Primus said was a “surreal feeling” and felt kind of weird at first.
In addition to fans flying in from Texas, Primus said their games were packed to the brim. He said people used to come to the junior varsity games before his varsity team played just to make sure they had a seat and could get into the gym before the game sold out.
With all of these accomplishments being more than 40 years ago, Primus said he believed the ball was dropped because this was a “golden opportunity for the city of Lynn to celebrate the achievements that we had and the individuals who went to college and had such a positive light for the city of Lynn.
“The back part of that could have been a mentorship or ambassadorship to help kids and bridge the past with the future.”
The American busing crisis was raging during the time this renowned team was playing, and Primus said there wasn’t a lot of freedom for Black people.
“There weren’t a lot of things that we could get into, because things were so limited,” Primus said.
During the time the historic basketball team was playing, Primus said you could see the joy in people’s faces when they knew there was a game and “nothing else mattered.”
The idea to hold a celebration for this group materialized via talks among Doneeca Thurston, director of the Lynn Museum; Nicole McClain, founder of North Shore Juneteenth Association; and the public engagement coordinator at the Lynn Museum, Sue Walker.
Primus is currently featured in the museum’s Untold Stories: A History of Black People in Lynn exhibition, where some of his jackets from high school and college are on display. His feature in the exhibition led to a discussion of the team’s accomplishments and its lack of acknowledgement throughout the city.
“Out of my conversations with Nicole and Stu,” Thurston said, “we came up with this idea to do an event around the team and the victory that they had, because as far as Stu is concerned, nobody else has duplicated that effort since it happened. In talking with him, he feels like it’s been a missed opportunity to really inspire our younger athletes to achieve that level of greatness and to really just have the team kind of share their wisdom.”
All five players will be in attendance for this event, where they will host a panel to discuss their days on the basketball team and what they’ve been up to since.
“So many of them are still involved in athletics,” Thurston said. “So we’re really looking forward to having them.”
The event is open to the public and will require tickets, of which Thurston said the Lynn Museum is still figuring out the pricing.
Primus encourages young athletes to come and hopes that he can share his story with them to inspire them to do great things.
For more information, visit lynnmuseum.org.
Allysha Dunnigan can be reached at [email protected].
