Here comes a cornerstone trio for the Saginaw High School basketball fan base:
- Bud Butler, Class of ’57, who has not missed an event ever since without a real, real, real good reason.
- Marshall Thomas, Class of ’66, who coached the Trojans to the 1996 state crown among his highlights from more than a half-century as an educator, coach, counselor and more at his alma mater.
- Alexis Thomas, Class of ’93 and coach’s daughter, who often serves as the designated driver for her elders on the tournament trail.
Alexis was a record-setting 200 and 400 sprinter during her time as a Lady Trojan, but she will avoid speed traps along M-46 when she transports Mr. Butler and her father 40 miles west to Alma High on Tuesday, March 21, for Saginaw High’s state quarterfinal matchup against the Cadillac High Vikings.
The fellows are as free as birds to go their own way once they get inside the gym.
“I like to go sit with the fans,” Alexis explains. “I’m a huge cheerleader.”
This began as far back as first grade, spending after-school hours with her father at the big school with the big gym. She desired tennies that were the same as the players wore, and sometimes she felt sorry for them when the coach seemed more strict than he was at home with mom (Yvonne) and her two younger sisters.
“I was the athlete,” she notes. “I would ride with my dad on the team bus. The players were my brothers.”
Later in life, Marshall Thomas in a role reversal became her biggest fan as a regular attendee when she served on the Board of Education.
The car rides become longer as SHS moves deeper into the tourney, but the chatter is light and so are the laughs, with Willie Butler always attired neatly to the nines in the same way as he maintains his locally legendary home and lawn at Seventh and Janes with his bride, Dorothy.
Bud’s sports were football and track, and he has served as a founding board member for the 20-year-old Saginaw County Sports Hall of Fame. One of his recent volunteer tasks was to find a photo of the 1942 Trojans, the first of Saginaw High’s six state championship basketball squads.
“Because that’s my alma mater,” is his simple explanation for his loyalty. “That’s the way I am.”
He was at the start of his Steering Gear career, now Nexteer, when Ernie Thompson and the Trojans won their second state crown in 1962, but he compares this year’s team to his friend’s ’96 champs.
“They play hard and they are deep in talent,” Bud Butler says. “They had some tough times during the season, but they have learned to play together.”
Darlean Carpenter’s three children with her husband, Robert, finished their Trojan years back during the era when Coach Thomas was at helm, but she remains a leader in the Saginaw High PTA, to the point where she still has a cell phone hotline to current Coach Julian Taylor.
She admits she sometimes will join the SHS fan contingent in questioning the referees, and that “the women can be even more vicious than the men” in this regard.
Still, the top outburst in her memory wasn’t directed at the officials.
“Our guys just couldn’t seem to get anything right,” she recalls, “and before I knew it, I was standing up: ‘Coach, put ME in the game.'”
Ralph Martin, now a state fire marshal after his career with the city, has been a lifelong Saginaw High supporter even though his family sent him to SS. Peter & Paul’s, now Nouvel Catholic. St. Pete’s was runner-up in the 1978 state finals and was No. 1-ranked in 1979 when they were knocked off in a regionals stunner by Laker High, representing Elkton, Pigeon and Bayport along the Huron shore.
Ralph followed the Trojans last week to their regional championship games in Caro, arriving early with a friend for front row seats. Then he heard a voice over his shoulder: “Aren’t you Ralph Martin? The player we heard all about in our scrimmages before we played you guys?” Next the gentleman was calling one of his former Laker (not L.A.) teammates with “guess who I’m sitting with” and so forth.
Basketball remains universal as Saginaw High travels to new venues in Carrollton, Caro and now Alma.
“On one hand, (the encounter) brought out bad memories, because we should have won that game, but at the same time it was quite flattering,” says Martin, who was good enough to extend his career to the hardcourt at Olivet College. “This guy and his friends were not rooting for us or against us. They had come out because they wanted to see some good basketball.”
Saginaw High always will carry that reputation, across the region and across the state.
Alexis Thomas sums up: “To be a Trojan is something very special, and we cannot always articulate what that entails. It’s the whole experience.”
