Bailey, keeping his famous cool, said, "I just want to know why. I don't care what you think." Getting nowhere, Bailey returned to his family, but, unsatisfied with the exchange, he approached the woman again. "One of these days if you do something like that, someone might have a gun. So just feel lucky this is just a drink." He dumped the Orange Julius on the woman's head.

"I hear the comments," says Bailey of life in a mixed marriage. "I hear the black women say, 'There's another one gone.' I've been treated well in Utah, but it's a colorless thing when you're a celebrity. I've talked to people who are in racially mixed marriages in Utah. Some of them e-mail me — and they're not welcomed."

It was a tough sell from the start for the Baileys. She was white, he was black. She was Mormon, he was Baptist. She was 19, he was 28.

Sindi Southwick, 6 feet tall, was a basketball player at Utah Valley State College when they met in 1989. She had recently had a marriage annulled after six months. Bailey was separated from his wife and would soon be divorced. Sindi, like one of her brothers, was working at Bailey's basketball camps. They dated casually for the next couple of years, then exclusively for a couple of years before they married in 1994.

Their backgrounds couldn't have been more different. Sindi didn't even know a single black person when she was growing up in Richfield, Utah, where her family owned a farm that raised hay, corn and beef. The only girl in a loving family of four children, she was a boot-and-Wrangler-wearing cowgirl and tomboy. She chased cattle on a horse and participated in track, basketball, softball and volleyball. (She still holds the school high jump record of 5-foot-4.)

She was used to climbing on a horse in the wee hours to drive cattle up to the summer range. Sindi's family was staunch Mormon — all three of her brothers served church missions, and her father, John, a rancher and the high school basketball coach, was the local bishop.

Bailey grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., one of five kids. His father, Carl, was crushed by a brick wall on a construction site when Thurl was a baby and slipped into a coma. He recovered, but the family went on welfare. His mother, Retha, scrubbed floors for a dollar an hour and worked the graveyard shift at a hospital. The marriage was a stormy one. When Thurl took Sindi to his childhood home, he showed her a bullet hole in the wall. "That's where my mom tried to shoot at my dad." The Bailey children themselves called police to their home for domestic disturbances, with Carl being hauled off in handcuffs.