'Flintstones' Bell, Rison reflect as they enter MSU HOF
EAST LANSING -- During Tom Izzo’s basketball practices this season, there will be time devoted to learning the “Charlie Bell Step,” a slick piece of footwork designed to get through screens.
Over at the Michigan State football building, they like to call each other “Spartan Dawgs,” a term that originated in the mid-1980s in the dorm room of Andre Rison and Troy Woody.
Bell and Rison were inducted into the MSU Athletics Hall of Fame tonight for more tangible reasons than that, such as helping their respective programs to success not seen in decades. But they also have those unintentional branding moments, and they share another — the term “Flintstone.”
That’s the nickname given to Izzo’s core of Flint natives — Bell, Mateen Cleaves, Antonio Smith, Morris Peterson — who led MSU to its first Final Four in 20 years in 1999, with Bell, Cleaves and Peterson starring on the national championship team a year later.
It’s also a word adopted by Rison and others from Flint who played at MSU before and after that basketball run. Even as he reminisced at MSU’s Wharton Center about his playing days and the win in the 1988 Rose Bowl, Rison thought back to following those Izzo teams.
“On the national scene I had my little brothers,” said Rison, who was three years removed from a Super Bowl win with Green Bay and his fifth Pro Bowl at the time. “Holding the country hostage.”
Bell and Rison are joined in the 2015 class by Mary Kay Itnyre, who set 19 single-season or career records as a center for the MSU women’s basketball team from 1977-80; Pat Milkovich, who won wrestling national championships at 126 pounds in 1972 and 1974; Doug Weaver, an MSU football player from 1950-52 and the school’s athletic director from 1980-90; and Mike York, a two-time hockey All-American and Hobey Baker Award finalist who played for Ron Mason from 1995-99.
Tonight was the induction ceremony at Wharton, in tandem for the sixth straight year with a ceremony for current MSU athletes who are receiving jackets for their first varsity letters. The Hall of Fame class will be honored Saturday during No. 4 MSU’s football game against Air Force as well, and this weekend also honors the 100th anniversary of MSU’s Varsity “S” Club for student-athlete alums.
Rison will be on the field Saturday where he managed to get a large chunk of his 146 career catches and 2,992 yards in George Perles’ run-based offense, before he went in the first round of the 1989 draft and played 12 years in the NFL. He will do it from a new perspective — not just as a Hall of Famer but as an MSU parent.
Hunter Rison, a star junior receiver for Ann Arbor Skyline, became MSU’s first commitment for the class of 2017 over the summer.
“God gave him a lot of talent,” Rison said of his son. “It takes a lot of luck, a lot of hard work, and he’s definitely putting it in.”
Asked what it will be like to see his son play for a program that is currently ranked in the top five nationally, Rison said: “Hopefully by the end of the year it’s not top five. Hopefully it’s No. 1.”
“They’re talking about Michigan State football,” Rison said of the program’s rise to prominence under Mark Dantonio. “They’re talking about Dantonio. They’re talking about our defense. They’re talking about our first-round picks. They’re talking about our rankings. ... We’ve got something special going on. We can take a ‘three-star’ (recruit) and turn him into a first-round pick.”
Bell and Rison, by comparison, came to MSU with weighty accolades and lived up to them. Bell was Flint’s all-time leading scorer out of Southwestern Academy in 1997, and Rison recalled watching Bell work out at his alma mater, Flint Northwestern, and “I knew he was gonna be a great one.”
Bell is the program’s all-time leader with 136 starts and victories as a player (115), and he was a 2001 All-America as a senior, winning his fourth straight Big Ten title and reaching his third straight Final Four. The other “Flintstones” were gone by then, yet Bell is typically discussed after Cleaves (2011 inductee) and Peterson (2013).
“I was kind of like the glue guy,” said Bell, one of Izzo’s best rebounding guards and a clutch scorer (1,468 points) whose seven-year NBA career can be traced mostly to his role as MSU’s perimeter defensive stopper.
Bell first learned of the “Charlie Bell Step” while visiting a practice of former MSU assistant Brian Gregory when Gregory coached Dayton. Like Izzo has done since Bell departed, Gregory was teaching his players to squeeze through screens in that special Bell way.
“I didn’t even know I had a step!” Bell said at the time.
Tonight, Bell raised his voice again when he arrived for the ceremony, after spotting one of his childhood heroes: “That’s Andre Rison right there!”
Contact Joe Rexrode: jrexrode@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @joerexrode. Check out his MSU blog at freep.com/heyjoe.
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