A mythical figure: Jim Wells remembered for good looks, charisma -- and athletic skill

Everybody who met him has a Jim Wells story. Actually, they have dozens of them. In many, he's called "Wellsy." In others, it's "Scooter," because he had very good speed back in the day. In still others, it's "Booter," a nickname whose origin no one seems to know. "Maybe he got that one because he had a good booty," Wells' wife of 44 years, Debbie, said Monday. "He looked good running the bases." Wells, a Medina County Sports Hall of Fame and Medina City Schools Hall of Fame inductee, died Friday at the age of 80 after battling leukemia. No services are planned, but Debbie said a celebration of life will be held this summer. Plans also are in the works to start a scholarship fund in his name at Medina High. Current Medina boys basketball coach and physical education teacher Chris Hassinger did his student teaching under Wells in 1994 and quickly learned about the athletic prowess of his mentor, who starred in football, basketball and baseball for the Bees before graduating in 1959. Hassinger and Wells, who taught at Medina for 26 years, were in the far corner of the high school gymnasium one day when Wells, football in hand, calmly said, "Watch this." Wells proceeded to throw the football right through the basketball hoop at the other end of the court and walked away without saying a word, leaving Hassinger speechless for one of the few times in his life. "He was Michael Jordan to me after that," Hassinger said. "I had goose bumps. He just had an aura about him. He reeked of confidence and he was a great athlete. He almost was like an imaginary character because he was so good at everything and such a good-looking man, but he was a great mentor. "I loved listening to his old sports stories because I knew how good he was. To be able to learn from and be around a guy like that was really special to me." To Brian Stadnik, a 1983 Medina grad whose parents, Daniel and Michele, had Debbie and Jim Wells over for Thanksgiving dinner for 44 straight years, Wells was almost a mythical figure. Except the man who played football and baseball at Ball State University and minor league ball in the Milwaukee Braves organization was very real. "He was amazing," Stadnik said. "Jim Wells was my first hero. When I started playing Little League baseball and peewee football, I wanted to be Jim Wells. He was larger than life to a kid growing up in Medina. He was like Burt Reynolds and the Marlboro Man." Stadnik went on to talk about Wells' white Pontiac Trans Am and mustache — "I've got thousands of stories," he said with a laugh, "except a lot of them can't be printed in the newspaper'' — but his favorite memories center around the lifetime friendship his father and Wells maintained. "Best friends doesn't even do it justice," Stadnik said. "Without question, they were brothers. I personally don't have a memory in my life without Jim in it. Every big moment in my life — my high school graduation, my college graduation, my wedding — Jim and Debbie were there for all of it. "My mom and dad have boxes and boxes of pictures of my dad growing up, and Jim is in every one of them. Jim was my family. He was like an uncle to me, but he was actually more than that. He was like a second dad." An outstanding shortstop, Wells threw right-handed and hit left-handed. In golf, he played right-handed until he got on the green, then putted left-handed. A quarterback in high school, he threw a football and shot a basketball — very well — with his right hand. "He's probably the best athlete I ever played anything with," said John Hoover, who taught with Wells at Medina. "I don't care what game it was, he knew how to do it. If they would have had 3-point shooting back when he was in high school, he would have been that guard. He was fantastic." Like Hassinger, Hoover remembers playing 4-on-4, full-court basketball at Garfield Elementary. Hassinger provided the youthful energy and hustle, Hoover did the dirty work inside and Wells made shots. A fourth player, usually not very good because it was the only way other players on hand would let Hassinger put together that team, basically played defense and stayed out of the way on offense. "I used to pull him aside and say, 'Are you going to shoot the ball or not?'" Hoover said. "He'd make me get on the block, but I was never a back-to-the-basket guy. I said, 'Fine, I'll go down there, but just find your spot because you're getting the ball right back.' When he let it go, eight out of 10 times it went in." When Hoover began teaching at Medina in 1972, it was Wells who showed him around town. Sort of. "We hit it off right away because we were both baseball guys," Hoover said. "He had this Trans Am and said, 'Come on, I'll show you the city.' We went and tooled around the square, but we were basically just looking at the girls. "One year he went on spring break, and when he came back I asked him how it went. He said, 'I think I met the one.'" Debbie Wells, a Wisconsin native, did indeed meet her future husband while on spring break in Sarasota, Fla. They didn't have any children, but Jim Wells touched thousands of lives through teaching, coaching, golfing, softball and the like. "Every time we'd go out to eat, people would come up and say, 'Hey, Booter, how you doing?'" former Medina football coach Jim Dobney said. "No matter where we went, there were people who knew him." Dobney has fond memories of what became known as "The Reality Room." It was basically a lunch table where he, Wells, Hoover, longtime Medina coach John Carrick and several others solved all the world's problems. "There's a whole lot of fantasy going on in the world, but at that table we dealt in reality," Dobney said. "It was a way to discuss things without them being shaded by public opinion. There wasn't a problem we couldn't solve." "We'd sit there at lunchtime and we had all the answers," Hoover said. "Really, we didn't have any of them, but we sure thought we did." The true beauty of Wells, though, was that he got along with everyone — as long as there was a mutual respect. "There wasn't a person he met that he didn't treat with respect," Dobney said. "He built relationships. Now, if he didn't get along with you because you didn't treat him with respect, that relationship didn't last. "But he got along with most people. He just knew how to do that. He built a lifetime of relationships. When you get down to it, that's really what life is all about." Contact Rick Noland at (330) 721-4046 or rnoland@medina-gazette.com. Follow him @RickNoland on Twitter.