ST. PETERSBURG — A banner stood beside the casket. In the photograph, Bill Teal is young and in profile, a basketball in his hands, wearing a Team Florida jersey. Across the top, in letters that run the width of the banner, it says Gibbs High School.
More than 100 people came to New Pleasant Grove Baptist Church on Sept. 12 to bury the man that teenager became.
Teal, whose talent made him the most recruited high school basketball player in Pinellas County and whose crimes and second chances made him one of St. Petersburg’s most disputed figures, died Aug. 28 at his home in St. Petersburg. He was 53.
They came in hats and suits and Sunday dresses. The choir sang “Ain’t It Sweet,” which the Teals sing at every family funeral. People stood and swayed. They waved their arms. They danced. The Amens came faster than anyone could count them. The casket was open at the front of the sanctuary.
Nobody was there to relitigate anything.
Arian Odom grew up on the same street. They were 14 or 15 when they started going over to Child’s Park to play 21 against grown men. Odom does not remember Teal losing.
“He was just blessed with the talent of playing basketball,” Odom said. “He was more talented than anyone else, but that kind of stuff never flattered him. He never got a big head. Maybe because it was just so natural to him.”
Teal was never a blatantly troublesome kid, Odom said. He made bad choices, and he made them alone.
“He battled his own issues, but he was always respectful of his teammates,” Odom said.
He sat in the center pews Sept. 12, with the family. Almost everyone around him, in an older crowd, was tied to Gibbs somehow. The man who would give the eulogy graduated from there.
‘When we played at Gibbs, it was showtime’
To understand the room, you have to understand the name on that banner.
Gibbs won state titles in 1951 and 1966 in the Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association, which governed Black high schools before integration. The Gladiators then became the first all-Black school to join the all-white Florida High School Athletic Association and won that association’s championship in 1967, their first season as a member, and again in 1969. On Dec. 30, 1966, Gibbs played all-white Clearwater in front of nearly 7,500 people at the Bayfront Center, said then to be the largest crowd for a high school game in state history. Gibbs won by four.
Basketball at Gibbs was never only basketball. The program bound neighborhoods and families, parents and children and grandchildren keeping the same seats in a gym filled even on ordinary weeknights.
“The team played to sold-out crowds every night,” Minson Rubin, a 1963 graduate who was then president of the school’s alumni association, told the St. Petersburg Times in 2011.
Then it stopped. The Gladiators had not won a state title since 1969.
The 1991 team, led by three nationally coveted Division I prospects, was supposed to be the one to end the drought. The best of them was a 6-foot-5 point guard who played for Fred Dyles, who coached those championship teams.
“He was like the high school version of Magic Johnson,” said Pat Lawrence, who played alongside Teal and went on to the University of Miami. “When we played at Gibbs, it was showtime.”
Larry Murphy played against Teal at Dixie Hollins when Teal was a sophomore. Murphy graduated in 1989 and now coaches Gibbs.
“Bill was special,” Murphy said. “He could pretty much do anything on a court.”
Dan Wright, who played for Dyles at Gibbs and retired in 2011 as the winningest boys basketball coach in Pinellas County history, called Teal a future NBA prospect in 1991, and one of the best players he had seen in the county in 25 years.
On Dec. 20, 1990, Gibbs drew Oak Hill Academy in the second round of the Great Florida Shootout in Kissimmee. The Virginia boarding school was ranked No. 1 in the country and had won 50 straight. It won by 16.
Somewhere in the middle of that, Teal took the ball on a fast break, rose as if to finish, and slipped a pass between his own legs to Dwight Brown, who dunked it with two hands. The men who were there still describe it the same way.
The place erupted.
“He always put you in a position where you had no other choice but to score,” Lawrence said.
The defense was the part outsiders missed. Gibbs did not have to press. Teal would pick up a ball handler and stay there, and Lawrence lost count of the times an opponent got whistled for a five-second violation with nobody else nearby.
Lawrence went to Miami, Brown to Seton Hall. Teal was supposed to go to Arkansas. Teal was a first-team Class 3A all-state selection recruited by more than 20 schools. Odom, who watched all of it from the same starting lineup, will tell you Teal was better than anyone on the Michigan team that became the Fab Five a few months later.
Gibbs had reached the state semifinals in 1989 and 1990. The Gladiators spent the 1991 season at or near No. 1 in the state and lost three games. The last of them ended it. Naples played a triangle-and-two in the regionals that chased Teal and Brown wherever they went and dared the rest of Gibbs to beat them. It worked. The best team in Florida was out in its first playoff game.
“We had so much talent and we all just felt like we were going to win a state title,” Lawrence said in 2011. “It was hard to get over. I was still heartbroken even when I was playing at Miami.”
Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas team, the one Teal had committed to, won the national championship in 1994, the season he would have been a junior.
‘Things kind of spiraled after that’
Odom thinks Teal took the loss harder than anyone.
“He just wasn’t the same,” Odom said. “Things kind of spiraled after that.”
After the Naples game he stopped going to school. By the end of April he had 24 unexcused absences, Dyles said at the time, in a district where the 10th meant automatic failure.
Arkansas was already gone. Teal had not met the NCAA’s test requirements and could not play at a major college, so he was looking at San Jacinto Junior College in Texas instead. He canceled two visits, once for the senior prom, once by not getting on the plane.
“You always wondered why he did some of the things he did, but he was always kind of an enigma,” Odom said. “He never really let a lot of people in. That’s why part of his story is so incomplete.”
What Lawrence did not know was anything else.
“We would drop him off and never really knew what he did from midnight until he came to school,” he said.
On May 1, 1991, two months after the season ended, Teal was arrested in Palmetto with another man. He was 18.
Manatee County authorities charged him with kidnapping and two counts of sexual battery with a deadly weapon. Police said two men put a pistol to a 31-year-old woman’s head and led her into the woods. She was not identified at the time, because of the nature of the crime, and is not identified here.
Odom had played ball with him at Child’s Park about seven hours before it happened. He left around 9:30 p.m. and figured Teal was going home to sleep.
Dyles compared it to Len Bias, dead of a cocaine overdose five years earlier. It was like a death, the coach said. They had lost an outstanding mind and an outstanding talent.
That morning, the San Jacinto coach had put Teal’s scholarship papers in the mail.
Six months later, out on bail, he was charged with the strong-armed robbery of a 16-year-old girl in St. Petersburg. She was a minor and was not named either.
Prosecutors dropped the sexual battery charges, court records show. The kidnapping count alone carried up to life. Teal pleaded to it and was sentenced on Dec. 4, 1992, to six years. In the robbery case, a judge adjudicated him guilty the same year and placed him on community control — house arrest, in everyday terms — followed by probation.
He entered the state prison system that Dec. 30. He was 20. The piece of paper from the robbery case would cost him more than the six years did.
Another chance
Then came the part the city never settled.
In the summer of 1995, St. Petersburg Junior College offered Teal a full basketball scholarship while he was still in a cell. The St. Petersburg Times published the details, and when he walked out of Madison Correctional Institution that August, the television cameras were waiting. His release came days before voters weighed a tax that would have sent $33 million to the college.
Critics asked why a public school was betting public money on a man who had pleaded guilty to kidnapping a woman. College officials pointed to his attitude and to support they said they had from law enforcement and corrections officials.
Voters rejected the tax.
On Sept. 5, Teal failed a urine test and told his probation officer he had smoked marijuana at a Labor Day cookout. The scholarship was gone by November. On Dec. 11, five days after his 23rd birthday, Circuit Judge Raymond Gross sentenced him to 2 1/2 years. Teal asked to stay out and finish school. Gross said the sentence was what the law required and that he took no pleasure in it.
He was in the Pinellas County Jail 11 days.
In court that month, Teal had changed his story — he said he lied about the cookout, that he had smoked the marijuana before he left Madison. Gross said evidence might make a difference. His attorney, Robert Pope, came back with some, along with Teal’s first report card from SPJC: a B in Basic Writing, C’s in Basic Reading, Personal Wellness and Developmental Math. He had taken the math final the day before he went in.
On Dec. 26, Gross vacated the prison sentence and put him back on two years of community control followed by two years of probation. State corrections records carry him as in custody until Feb. 2, 1996, when the vacated sentence was closed out.
“This is it,” the judge told him.
Outside the courtroom, Annie Teal stood with tears in her eyes and said she would keep her son on track.
“I’m going to ride him like Roy Rogers rode Trigger,” she said.
Teal had a part-time job lined up doing inventory and office work for a nonprofit that ran sports clinics for children. He said it might let him pay the restitution he owed his victims. He said he hoped to try out for the SPJC team, but that his first priority was keeping his freedom and his second was finishing college.
Seven months later, over eight days — July 25, July 31 and twice on Aug. 1 — he sold cocaine four times.
He faced no more than 30 years under the plea, the Orlando Sentinel reported at the time. On Feb. 28, 1997, a Pinellas County judge sentenced him as a habitual felony offender, a designation that doubles what the law otherwise allows. Selling cocaine in Florida is a second-degree felony carrying up to 15 years. He got 22 1/2 years on each of three sale counts and 2 years, 9 months on the fourth, all to run together and consecutive to five and a half years for violating the community control he was serving on the robbery. That robbery sentence was reduced to 33 months in 2001.
Prosecutors had cut him no slack.
“He was really thumbing his nose at the whole system,” Assistant State Attorney Richard Ripplinger told the Orlando Sentinel a month before the sentencing. “For 10 years, he’s been getting away with that same, stale routine about him being a basketball player who can make something out of himself.”
He was 24. He entered prison on March 6, 1997.
He kept filing. The argument was a real one — another appeals court had already accepted it.
To be sentenced as a habitual offender in Florida, a defendant’s prior convictions have to come in sequence, each one sentenced before the next offense. The state used two priors against Teal: the 1991 kidnapping and the 1992 robbery.
The robbery was the weak one. He had been adjudicated guilty of it and placed on community control — supervision, not prison. A judge did send him to prison for 30 months in 1995 for violating it, then took the sentence back two weeks later. Real prison time came only in February 1997, on the same day he was sentenced as a habitual offender for the cocaine. If community control was not a sentence, the two priors did not come in sequence and the designation could not stand.
The Florida Supreme Court took the case in 2004 and answered it on Oct. 5, 2006. In a brief unanimous opinion, it held that community control is a sentence. Teal lost.
He was 33, with 12 years left, and the rule that put them there carries his name. Teal v. State is what Florida prosecutors cite when the seek a habitual offender sentence against someone whose only prior punishment was supervision.
When the courts were done, he went to the governor. In 2015, from prison, Teal asked his friends on Facebook to write the state Board of Executive Clemency in Tallahassee. He told them to say his situation was unfair, that his early release would do some good, and that he was a nice person. He signed it: Free Bill Teal.
He served three more years.
Teal’s final act
He came out on Dec. 21, 2018, at 46. He had spent about 24 1/2 years in state prison, nearly all of it between the ages of 20 and 46.
Odom was among the first people he came to see.
Teal got his barber’s license and worked mobile, going to people where they were. He posted his exam score on Facebook when it came back, a 93. He posted the cuts he finished around the neighborhood, and let people know he could cut kids hair, too.
He had gotten more religious, Odom said. Odom watched him and wanted to look out for him, and what he saw was a man doing the right things.
Odom kept telling him to go speak, that he had a story worth standing up in front of people and telling. Teal never would.
In March 2021, with nine months of probation still to run, he posted on Facebook. He wrote it in his own punctuation.
“Regardless of what i go through in life i will always be a better person on the other side of it,” he wrote. “People places and situations can’t deter me from reaching a destination upon which I’ve already arrived.”
He finished probation that December.
On Feb. 1, 2022, 11 days before Pat Lawrence screened a documentary about him at the Historic Manhattan Casino, Teal posted again from outside the building. He described the journey as one from prospect to convicted felon to more than two decades in prison. He said he was a free man for the first time in 25-plus years, and called it nothing short of a miracle. He wrote that he finally had the chance to tell the story of the evolution of a true Gladiator.
He had four years and seven months left.
He posted from the beach. He posted from parties.
His last post was Sept. 2, 2023.
The new Gibbs gym went up about 20 years ago and now carries Fred Dyles’ name. Above the bleachers are murals of the athletes Gibbs claims: Shaun King, Winky Wright, Glen Edwards, Trayvon Bromell, others. Teal is not on the wall. Murphy, who works in the building every day, cannot recall a photograph or a jersey of his anywhere in it.
He turned up there a few times after he got out. Murphy said he never became a regular. When Gibbs finally won it again in 2024, 55 years after the last one, Teal was not in Lakeland for the championship game.
Anthony Lawrence Sr., Pat’s brother, played at Lakewood, Alabama and Miami and has coached Lakewood for more than a decade. He has a theory about why people on the south side still bring up a point guard who never played a college minute.
“It’s always a case of what could have been,” he said.
His niece, Kenitha Mercer, was at the house where Teal lived at the end. She watched paramedics work on him for more than an hour.
“We got you, Bill,” she said. “The whole village has got you.”
O.C. Crittenton, a close friend, spoke during reflections.
“After the basketball stopped bouncing, we kept bouncing,” Crittenton said. “He was such a good friend.”
The woman in the woods was not mentioned that day. Neither was the 16-year-old girl, or the cocaine, or the 22 1/2 years. The room chose which Bill Teal to bury, the way rooms do.
The Rev. L. Don Middleton gave the eulogy. He preached on the parable of the sheep and the goats, in which a shepherd divides the crowd, and he turned it on the room. Before anyone sorted Bill Teal, Middleton said, they ought to look at what goats were holding them back.
“Bill has already settled everything with the Lord,” Middleton said.
Teal was born Dec. 6, 1972, in St. Petersburg. He was preceded in death by his parents, John and Annie Teal; two brothers, John and Verdell Teal; and a sister, Kathy Teal.
Survivors include his daughter, Honesty Hill; three brothers, Daniel, David and Martin Teal; two sisters, Cynthia Teal-Isaac and Maria Williams; and an uncle, Henry Teal.
Odom’s phone started buzzing before dawn on Aug. 28. It was about 5:30 a.m.
“I was just shocked, in total disbelief,” he said. “I was just numb for days after that.”
He went to the wake Sept. 11. He went to the funeral the next day, the only starter from the 1991 team in the church.
Then everyone drove to Child’s Park for the repast, to the building beside the courts where a 14-year-old Bill Teal used to beat grown men at 21 and never once bragged about it.
Bob Putnam is an editor with the Tampa Bay Beacons. He can be reached at bputnam@TBNweekly.com.