Scaling new heights: Idaho basketball player Julius Mims reaches legendary status at Moscow’s Corner Club

MOSCOW, Idaho – For University of Idaho basketball players, there are three boxes to check in your career: win a Big Sky Conference championship, play in the NCAA Tournament and grab Gus Johnson’s Nail.

The Vandals’ latest great leaper, senior Julius “Juice” Mims, has already checked the last one, which might be the toughest.

In the 1962-63 basketball season, Johnson was a larger-than-life personality who made a one-year stop in Moscow before embarking on an NBA career that concluded with his induction in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. One night in the Corner Club, owner Eugene “Herm” Goetz, who had the enlightened good sense to cater to University of Idaho students as well as local construction workers and farmers, and who, as a former Moscow High School football stalwart himself appreciated athletic accomplishments, goaded Johnson into trying to slap a ceiling beam.

Johnson had been thrilling Vandals fans with his game above the rim, and in dress shoes, from a standing start, he reached a spot on the beam 11 feet, 3 inches above the floor. Since then, the UI has won seven conference championships and played in the NCAA tournament four times. But the nail has only been reached twice since Goetz honored Johnson’s leap.

For two decades, it stood unchallenged, a rebuke to self-styled leapers including allegedly Bill Walton, although what he was doing in the Corner Club in the summer of 1984 is somewhat murky. In January 1986, Joey Johnson, whose College of Southern Idaho team was passing through Moscow on its way to a game at North Idaho College, took up the nail challenge. He grabbed it on his third try and bent it.

Goetz replaced it at 11-6 to reflect the new standard. A year later, after Gus Johnson died of inoperable brain cancer, flowers were hung from the nail. In 1991, highway relocation resulted in the part of the Corner Club featuring the nail being demolished. But in the current building the feat was memorialized by a cinder block painted black at 11-6 over the door, and more recently current Corner Club owner Marc Trivelpiece has installed a ceiling skylight in the bar with a sturdy nail hammered into a block of wood at 11-6.

Over the years, Vandals football players have leaped unsuccessfully at the nail, according to Trivelpiece, and as for the worst attempts “there have been some sorority girls,” he says.

“There are a lot of people who think they can and don’t come close.”

This is where Mims comes in. He transferred from NIC to Idaho a year ago, learned about the Corner Club and the nail.

“He touched it last year,” says Trivelpiece, but with a running start not flat-footed. “He was down here earlier in the year in flip flops. I told him ‘don’t do it. Coach (Alex Pribble) will be pissed at both of us.’”

For an attempt to be official, it has to be witnessed by the owner, says Trivelpiece, and on the evening of Sept. 20 Trivelpiece figured something was up when he got a text from some UI basketball players that he needed to come to the bar.

“It was kind of slow,” he says of that Friday night. “There were a couple of locals” and Mims’ teammates.

On his first attempt, Mims started too far away from the skylight. After he was repositioned by teammates, he reached the nail on his third try – somewhat in the great tradition of Gus Johnson and his dress shoes, while wearing Birkenstocks.

“His teammates were pretty excited,” Trivelpiece says. “I was more impressed with the Birkenstocks than that he actually did it.”

Mims says he wasn’t planning on tackling the feat.

“ (I was) just having a good night with my teammatesbut they wanted a show, and I pulled through for them,” he says.

“I didn’t have to pay for anything the rest of the night.

I will probably do it a handful of times. It’s pretty fun actually.”

Mims lists himself as “6-9 probably 6-10 in shoes, maybe 7-foot with the hair.”

While he is impressed with the height of the nail “it doesn’t look too far if you are swiping at it, but trying to grab it, it’s pretty high up there.”

However, he says, “that’s what I do. I jump.”

Trivelpiece posted videos of Mims’ leap, and Mims says they had received 14,000 views the next day – many eyes watching a bar challenge. But since he accomplished the feat, Mims has come to appreciate how something so simple can resonate with what a community is about.

“There is nothing like it. You are never going to find anything like that. It is pretty cool to be part of a little town’s history.”

Mims also reported that Pribble endorsed his effort.

“He was all for it, as long as I represent the program the right way.”

Trivelpiece says of Mims: “He is very personable, a very nice kid. It is hard not to like him.”

As for Mims’ feat setting off a new wave of hopeful jumpers that could lead to disruptions in Corner Club operations, Trivelpiece says “disruptions of having to open up space” under the skylight “or disruptions of my financials” having to pay for drinks the rest of the night for anyone who can reach the nail.

“It is what made the Corner Club famous,” says Trivelpiece. “We have to embrace it, right?”