He’S Not Your Typical 73-Year-Old

There are a few players - OK, a lot of players - in Hoopfest who don’t have a jump shot.

Ted McFaul is the only one born before anybody had a jump shot.

We’re talking 1924. As a point of reference, just two years before that, the rules of basketball decreed traveling to be not just a turnover, but a personal foul.

Even under those conditions, of course, Michael Jordan still would never foul out of a game.

On the timeline of basketball, Ted McFaul predates the Harlem Globetrotters, the 3-second violation, Hank Luisetti’s one-hander, the center jump after each made basket and the passing of James Naismith, who invented the game - but not the call-your-own-ticky-tack foul so fundamental to the Hoopfest experience.

If Hoopfest is, as the poster claims, the granddaddy of all 3-on-3 tournaments, McFaul is the granddaddy of the granddaddy. Often as not, he has a grandchild on his lap during a game to prove it.

He is, quite simply, amazing.

He is 73 years old.

“Seventy four in July,” he corrected.

We’ll not suggest he is the go-to guy on his team, but he is the come-to guy.

On holidays and milestones in the McFaul family - and certainly Hoopfest now qualifies - the kids and grandkids come to see Ted and his wife Peacha. And no celebration is complete without a game.

“Their 40th anniversary?” said their son, Greg. “After the Mass, we went and played basketball.”

Mass may have to wait this morning. The McFauls are due at 8 a.m. at the Pizza Hut court on Riverside, in front of Wells Fargo Bank - home to Hoopfest’s over-35 coed division.

They played their way into the bracket semifinals by beating the Sedgwick Slammers on Saturday afternoon, the highlight of which had to be Ted’s sweeping hook shot from the baseline.

“Some teams just look at him as an old guy - until he throws that hook shot up,” said Greg.

Now, wait a minute.

If anything dates Ted McFaul, it’s his hook shot - simply because no one born after 1955 shoots one.

“But then they pay a little more attention to him because he’s pretty accurate with it,” Greg added.

The reactions when McFaul joins his sons - Greg, Brian, Chris and Gerry have all played with him at Hoopfest over the years - and daughter Mary on the court run the gamut.

“A little shock, I’m sure,” said Brian.

“There’s respect,” said Mary. “Maybe a little shock, but it’s a coed game anyway so nobody’s out for blood.”

“They love to see it,” said Greg, “especially the parents of the kids who are playing, because usually he’s about their age and they get a real kick out of it.”

But no one gets quite the kick out of it the McFauls do.

Indeed, when their opponent didn’t show up for their first game Saturday morning, there were enough extra McFauls around for a 3-on-3 intramural just to pass the time. There are McFauls in Hoopfest ranging from age 8 to 73.

It was basketball - and football - that first brought Ted McFaul to Spokane from his hometown of Ione in 1941.

“I played one year of basketball at Gonzaga University when Billy Frazier was the coach of both the high school and the college,” Ted recalled. “I was on the first Gonzaga team to score 100 points in a game.”

Then he joined the service, serving in the V-12 program at the University of Washington where he played football and ran track. After the war, he transferred to the University of Idaho because GU had dropped football.

With the Vandals, his teammates included Spokane city councilman Orville Barnes and Billy Williams, recently inducted into the Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame.

The McFaul kids played most of their sports in Montana - a job with Phillips Petroleum taking the family to Great Falls. Brian played football on Montana State’s NCAA Division II national champions in 1976; Mary played basketball at Eastern Montana.

But the games they most enjoyed seemed to come on Sunday afternoons after church, or during Christmas.

“On Sunday, we’d go to the gym at the church and get out and play,” Mary said. “Every Sunday. When our lives took us elsewhere, basketball just became part of our holidays and get-togethers.”

Now it’s Ted who plays on Sundays with a church group, or occasionally in a pickup game at Sta-Fit. And at Hoopfest, every year.

“I’m sure I’ve been the senior member ever since I started playing,” he said. “I love the game - and my daughter won’t let me quit.”

Oh?

“That’s what he says,” Mary protested. “The fact is, my mom isn’t crazy about him playing out here so I’m the scapegoat.”

From her lawn chair at the curb, Peacha McFaul does betray an occasional reservation through her otherwise incessant good cheer.

“I worry about him out here, playing on the hard concrete against kids half his age,” she said. “But it’s such a great event and it means so much for our kids to still be able to play with him.”

Tell people you just saw a 73-year-old man setting screens and tossing up hook shots and you’ll get the inevitable Hoopfest reply: “Is he any good?”

For a second, you might think they’re sizing him up for their Hoopfest team. Is he any good?

Hey, he’s 73. He’s sensational.