Peabody Magnet High School has won 10 state boys basketball championships, but the one that set the bar for all the rest was the first, in 1979. It wasn’t the first great basketball team at Peabody, but it was the first, after four straight near misses, to win the school’s Class 3A state title.
That ’79 team’s legacy has resurfaced of late with accolades going to three members of the team.
Paul Thompson, the star of the team who went on to basketball acclaim at Tulane and the NBA, as well as 16 professional seasons overseas, was inducted a few weeks ago into the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame.
Bruising Napoleon “Nap” Johnson, at 6-foot-9, the original War Horse among the ’79 Warhorses, was inducted last month into the Grambling Legends Sports Hall of Fame, joining a lineup of hoops legends at Grambling like Willis Reed, Aaron James and Larry Wright. He was recognized in the Rapides Parish Journal at the time for that honor.
Marcus Brown, a reserve on the ’79 team who had a good jumper, could play defense and was the president of the student body, is the chairman of the host committee for the 2025 Super Bowl to be played in the Superdome. Getting that honor, it helped that he is the executive vice president and general counsel of Entergy Corporation, a founding partner of the Super Bowl LIX host committee.
He is at the right, and Thompson on the left, in the photo above, taken at an Allstate Sugar Bowl function in New Orleans.
It seems the ’79 Warhorses are celebrating again as they did when they beat two-time defending champion Redemptorist for the title before a sellout crowd of nearly 9,000 at the Rapides Coliseum. Redemptorist, coached by Rick Huckabay, entered the game with a 70-game winning streak and boasted a lineup that included future LSU stars Howard Carter and Derrick Taylor. Peabody, coached by quiet Ernest Bowman and assisted by current coach Charles Smith (bound for Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement this fall), had in the previous four seasons been halted in either the semifinals or finals.
Peabody won that 1979 state title game, 55-53, and Coach Smith said that was the “prototype” team that he tried to model his teams after once he took over as head coach in 1985. A key reason for that is the team combined good academics with good athletics.
Thompson, who has been with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office for 25 years, has been shot at a few times in 18 years with the unit’s SWAT team. He knows the value of teamwork, and he said the ’79 team, unlike some of the previous stellar teams at Peabody, was as tight-knit as a coach could want.
Johnson, an entrepreneur whose latest business venture is running a life insurance business, credited the Warhorses’ success to the many hours of work and sweat and “testosterone” at countless practices at the old second-floor gymnasium. That was under the command of two math teachers, Bowman and Smith, who demanded structure and order and discipline at practice. The rigors involved made game time seem like a walk in the park.
“The uniqueness to that team,” said Brown, “is we were part of the first magnet school class. We had a very disciplined group of players who had to have a high academic background to get into school. So we not only had really talented players but also really good students. These guys did a lot of different things after school in the community, with work and with their lives.
“Do you have the discipline to do things even when you don’t feel like it?” he asked. “These are the kind of lessons we got then that have helped so many of us since. We were a high-profile team and there was a way we were required to interact with others, the way we presented ourselves and the respect we were to show for people, and the parents were very involved in this, too.”
Brown said his career success, which started — after Southern University Law School — as the first Black attorney in a New Orleans law firm, was molded by things he learned as part of that championship team at Peabody.
“You learn you can be valuable and not be a star,” he said. “Understanding your role is really important, and it really resonates later in life.”
Brown’s teamwork extends to being part of a power couple since he married Nannette Jolivette of Lafayette, now the chief federal judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana. She previously served as New Orleans’ city attorney.
As the Super Bowl’s host committee chair, Brown leads a group responsible for planning, executing and hosting the NFL Championship game following this season. That’ll give New Orleans 11 notches as a Super Bowl host, which ties the record with Miami. He’s hoping some of the lessons from ’79 help guide him as he tries to make the Super Bowl “a world-class event and a memorable experience for the city … so that we can have another opportunity to host another Super Bowl.”
Maybe, like Peabody’s ’79 state championship team, it can be the “prototype” for future Super Bowl championship committees.