Playing for keeps in Deer Lodge

When the fluorescent lights come on early in the morning at the Montana State Prison, Shane Savage’s eyes open. He’s returned from a place deep inside his mind where he can go to get away every night, away from the reality of his convict existence. So he puts on his khaki jumpsuit and continues on to the life he has forged for himself.

Just like the thousands of mornings before, he knows what he has to do to survive a day in the belly of the beast. He’s gotten used to his job in the laundry room, where he gets 45 cents an hour for folding tans for new inmates and blues for faculty. He vents his aggression in the weight room twice a day, and lately he’s been playing mid-morning soccer in the yard. Just before noon, he helps out in his neighborhood on the high side of the compound, getting mop buckets out and swamping the floors outside the cells.

In between the lines, he understands the repetition of his life. Monitored steel toilets, body counts five times a day and the state’s three squares served in the cafeteria. He’s learned to make this his home, a house with magnetic steel doors, with 6-by-11-foot rooms and a backyard lined by spear-sharp barbed wire, which speaks to him every day, reminding him that he is a menace to society.

But if there is such a place for a prisoner to go to forget it all, if there is a rite of passage for an inmate to harvest his identity into something more than a bar-coded card in a plastic sleeve, then Shane Savage has found his in the Montana State Prison recreational basketball league.

It’s a Wednesday evening in late March, and even though he won’t be playing in tonight’s scheduled league game, he is going to the gym that has no memory, to work on his jumper. 

He is among 60 high side inmates – those considered to be the most dangerous – who must first clear the metal detector, then go through count before they are cleared to walk through the yard to the recreation facility. When the guards clear Savage, he puts his black stocking cap on and starts walking on his most savored path of the day, up the hill to the high side gym. 

***

“This is it for me. This is my church,” says 40-year-old Savage, sitting in the high side gym.

In and out of the joint since 1988, prison has gravitated him toward the game he only played as a kid, where he says he even briefly competed at Bozeman High in the early ‘80s. While other inmates find a release through shooting pool or playing an acoustic guitar that the prison provides, Savage finds his solace on the hardwood. Inside his cathedral, the power of the orange between his hands soothes him, gives him a taste of the world he once knew outside the fence.

But he has also used that power in desperate measure. In 2003, after playing a basketball game at Gallatin County Detention Center, Savage threw the ball down a hallway to distract guards, then burst through an emergency exit and scaled a barb wired fence, marking the second time in his life he had escaped from prison. Five months later, with a $ 5 million bounty on his head, police cornered him at a Denny’s in downtown Billings. High on meth at the time, Savage vehemently refused arrest and reached for a pistol in a shoulder holster, prompting officers to tazer him five times before they could fully subdue him. That landed him in Deer Lodge until 2026, and, since then, he has been one of the jail’s most devout members of the best basketball league you’ve never heard of.

“It gives you something to look forward to,” he says. “You’ll have rebounders, scorers, defensive players. Then you get it all together. Anyone can shoot and play, but it’s about getting a team to play together.”

Tonight Savage’s team is out of action. After losing their first 14 games, the club has reeled off three straight wins. He knows this is the time of the year when the world’s focus is on state championships and college brackets. What the world doesn’t know is that deep inside the jungles of Montana’s pen, players are clawing for just as much.  Savage is forgetting about the world, inside and out.

“You’re not thinking about that. All you’re thinking about is winning. That’s the only reason people play. To get the ‘W’,” he says, adding that the league is fueled by a competitive spirit.

“It gets serious here because people don’t want to lose. It’s all they have.”

***

Basketball has been played at Montana State Prison for the past 70 years, but the prison’s league was at its pinnacle in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the teams still played in the Old Prison in downtown Deer Lodge. Men’s league teams from the region were frequent visitors to play inmate squads, and by the late 1960s, The University of Montana, Carroll College and the School of Mines from Butte would send teams to play competitively against the prison’s official team, the Jaycees.

“A lot of players came because they knew that players like George Yellow Eyes and Gordy Wilkins were in there,” says Jim Blodgett, who served as the prison’s deputy warden from 1968 to 1981. Yellow Eyes is widely considered one of the best prep Indian players to ever come out of Montana, where he starred at Pine Hills Juvenile Correctional in Miles City during the 1950s.

By the time he got to Deer Lodge, he joined an ensemble of talented players on the Jaycees who made statewide names for themselves as inmates athletes, like Wilkins. Led by Yellow Eyes, prison teams during the era dominated all visiting competition, including college teams, according to Blodgett.

“They were never beaten as I recall, and if they were it was by very little,” he says.

Forty years later, the state prison has continued its loose cut tradition of basketball, although outside teams haven’t visited the prison in about five years due to escalated security concerns.

There are two leagues with five teams in both the high side and low side compounds, which segregate the high and low risk inmates. The league starts in December of each year, and, by April, each compound holds a tournament with teams seeded by their regular season record.

In May, the champions of each compound meet and play, but behind closed doors to eliminate any possible uprising between high and low convicts.

Although shirts and skins and the absence of outside teams exemplify its informal nature – the league remains very self-sufficient at its core. There are standings posted by a red shirt, who also acts as a referee and enforcer. Inmates form their own teams and run their own substitutions. The high side gym is simple, with a glossy floor and a chain link fence on one of the baselines. A massive banner hangs on the way to the gym honoring the now defunct boxing league, which was a major draw during the era of the Jaycee’s.

***

‘YEARS OF PAIN.’ Those are the words tattooed on Michael Daniels upper right arm, the same arm he shoots with every time he takes the floor in prison. 

Daniels grew up on the rough, south side of Great Falls, and by the time he was 16, he had been arrested 93 times. In 2001, he was netted on an armed robbery conviction after he used a laser sighted handgun to hold up a high school student outside a convenient store in Great Falls. At 17, he was sentenced to 35 years in Montana State Prison. 

He never knew public schooling. Just like George Yellow Eyes a generation before, Daniels is an Indian who grew up on basketball at Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility, but he says he first became good playing organized ball at Glenn Mills, a teenage boys juvenile school 15 minutes outside of Philadelphia, in a region where incarcerated basketball is much more relevant. 

Now 24, he stands 6 feet, has jet-black hair and weighs a burly 195 pounds. In the joint, he is simply called Daniels. 

“He’s probably one of the best, if not the best player at the prison right now. He’s what we call a shooter,” says the prison’s recreational department director, who asked not to be identified. 

Like Savage, Daniels struggles with looking at calendars, where sometimes a day can feel like a week. Daniels can never get his mind off of his family or the outside, and, despite having two cousins within the prison walls, he never sees them. “The toughest part is about thinking about being away from home,” he says quickly, then adding, “Without the game there would be nothing to get your mind off the outside, from your family. Makes the day go by, know what I mean?”

But Daniels knows the rules of prison. There is no crying. No excuses. Eight years have passed for him, and with each and every day getting longer, he turns to basketball. His team almost won the league title last year, and this year they are 14-0 and likely to get the number one seed come tournament time.

He’s learned the game so well that the department asks him to referee games on the nights he isn’t playing. So tonight, right before the two other best teams in the league take the floor, Daniels grabs a whistle and joins them. 

***

As the ball is tipped off for the weekly Wednesday night game, shoes squeak on a floor that is refinished and glossed every other year. The play is fast paced, as the inmates are going buck wild after sitting in a small cell all day. Three-point shots are rampant, creating opportunities for fast-break plays that define the run-and-gun style of prison ball. With five minutes left in the first half, the teams trade threes and are tied at 20. 

Two guards monitoring the game begin discussing a slender inmate who has already hit two threes and established himself as one of the best players on the court. His name is Ryan William West, a young white convict who is on a two-three stretch on criminal endangerment and escape charges.

While West‘s play speaks for itself, the guards are more concerned about his knee-high socks. One is white, while the other one is black. This combination worn by certain players has raised concerns all season long, and while the prison hasn’t been able to decipher the meaning, there is fear that it is a gang related symbol. Among the 1,400 inmates, officials believe there are about six gangs operating within the prison, including the Surenos, Skinheads and Lil’ Valley Locos.

The gang subplot in the game is a stark reminder that even basketball is intertwined with the culture of Deer Lodge. On any given night, there could be a murderer playing point and a rapist in the post. No Powerade for the players, perhaps because of the prison trying to control the pruno wine being made.

Right before Easter Sunday, five gallons of hooch was found on the second floor of high side. And only felons get courtside seats. While many mind their own and lift weights to music, others devote their time to watching the games, where it is common for them to roll the dice on the game. “They gamble on everything,” one guard says. 

But incarcerated basketball is also dispelling notions. The court is a melting pot of ethnicities, where bounce passes and shaking hands can shatter gang affiliations.

“It’s an opportunity for these guys to learn about the team concept and trusting people,” says prison warden Mike Mahoney. “I think there are a lot of secondary and tertiary gains associated with not just having basketball, but allowing these guys to have a league deal and the competitive piece that goes along with that.”

The game stays at a frantic pace up until the final minutes. Evidence that this is hard ball is shown when an inmate on a fast break is fouled into the chain link fence on one of the baselines. Ten seconds later, a red shirt calls a flagrant foul, and Daniels makes sure there is no friction between the teams. West goes to line and hits both free throws that seals his team’s 74-70 win and keeps them in second place at 9-6. 

***

When it’s time for the inmates to return to their cells, Daniels is one of the last to leave. Before he does, he takes one last shot, and even though it doesn’t go in, he puts his coat on, walks toward the gym exit as if he had just had a great night. He called fouls and travels for a game he loves, scouted the team he will face next week and for a moment, has forgot all about why he is in this gym in the first place.

It’s eight o’clock, and the sun is setting in the jail yard, the sky’s tangerine layer meeting the powdered sugar mountain tops of the Flint Peaks. If Daniels wants to take it in, it’ll have to be from inside his crow barred cell window. Just like Shane Savage, the reality of his earth is that while basketball puts positive spin into his life, it can never erase his filthy deeds. In Deer Lodge, there is no antiseptic to cleanse the stains he has left on his victim’s lives, or his own for that matter.

Daniels is awaiting word on his prerelease application, which he says will be coming any day now. If he got another chance, he says he would find a good job, take care of his family and find a few gyms to continue playing the game of basketball.

But if not, he will continue his 35-winter sentence, and only hope that same game can get him through his years of pain.