The White Shadow “The Death of Me Yet” (March 11, 1980)

TV shows had killed off regular characters before, but likely never one so beloved as Curtis Jackson, the Carver High basketball player who takes a bullet during a liquor store holdup in this episode.  Jackson’s death occurs during the celebration after a game that sends the team to the state championship, a victory to which the show had been building for the entirety of its two-year run.  The timing seems a deliberate provocation, a forceful reminder to the series’ loyal audience that life rarely permits the sweet without a dose of the bitter.  “The Death of Me Yet” is not, as one might expect, about grief per se.  The team accepts their friend’s death stoically; there’s a quick consensus that Jackson would want them to continue on to the playoffs.  It’s implied (though not overemphasized) that none of them are strangers to acts of random violence.  Appropriately, it’s Coach Reeves (Ken Howard), the middle-class outsider, who takes it hardest, spiraling into a self-pitying funk.  “I’m just a basketball coach, not a savior,” he says, and considers fleeing to a cushy Moorpark College job.   Reeves knows that he’s taken his kids to victory on the court, but only one has a chance at a scholarship, and the rest will stay behind on the mean streets that killed Curtis.  The pragmatic vice principal (Joan Pringle) who hears him out has no patience for this: you do what you can.  All the pathos in Marc Rubin’s script is saved for one scene, in which Reeves comes upon Jackson’s little brother cleaning out his locker, and it’s a heartbreaker.