Category: College basketball

I have a deep affinity for college basketball and football venues. It’s no secret to Vicki, our daughters (trust me, they have childhood memories of trips to college campuses to prove it), or anyone who knows me very well. For me, it’s as if the place the game is played is as interesting as the game itself.

So imagine my excitement when I had the opportunity to visit the holy grail of all college basketball venues: Historic Hinkle Fieldhouse on the campus of Butler University on the north outskirts of Indianapolis. We had flown to Indy the night before, and were on our way to Valparaiso on Memorial Day weekend to meet our two-week-old grandson, Aksel, celebrate daughter Greta’s 34th birthday, and her 2-year-old daughter Ida’s birthday the following week.

“How about we visit Butler University on our way to Valparaiso?” I asked Vicki, before our trip. These questions are usually met with a rolling-of-the-eyes look. But because she was already familiar with the Butler gym –the two of us in March had watched several NCAA Tournament games played at Indianapolis-area arenas, including Hinkle – she was game.

I called the athletics department at Butler and asked if we could get a peek at the fieldhouse. I explained I was a recently retired Seattle Times journalist, and that it was a dream of mine to visit this most hallowed hardwood in basketball-crazed Indiana. An athletics representative named Kelsey said “sure, I’ll give you a tour.”

Kelsey and a security guard named Martin met us at the front entrance to the brick building, which is marked by a statue of the arena’s namesake, Tony Hinkle, a longtime coach and athletic director at Butler. We walked through the narrow concourse that surrounds the arena, gazing at the historic photos and trophies along the way. Then Martin unlocked the door that led us to the fieldhouse floor.

There she was, in all her glory, as I had imagined it. The arching steel roof trusses, and the windows at each of the end of the fieldhouse that prompted former Butler star guard Shelvin Mack to say there’s nothing like a Saturday afternoon game at Butler “with the sun coming in and everyone singing the Butler fight song.”

Hinkle Fieldhouse, which opened in 1927, is a gem. I could smell history in the air.

For more than 40 years, Hinkle was the stage for Indiana’s high-school basketball state tournament. In 1954, in a game that would define basketball in Indiana, tiny Milan High school (enrollment 161) beat Muncie Central for the state championship, which proved to be the inspiration for the iconic 1986 movie “Hoosiers.” In that era, all schools big and small competed in the same tournament. To put this game in perspective, this would be the state-of-Washington equivalent of La Conner High School beating Seattle’s Garfield High for the state title.

As I walked onto the floor of the old barn, which reminded me of the University of Washington’s original Hec Edmundson Pavilion built in the same era, I also imagined what this place felt like during Butler’s banner 2009-2010 season. That was the year the Bulldogs sprang onto the national stage under coach Brad Stevens, who would leave Butler a couple years later to become the head coach of the Boston Celtics and was just promoted to the team’s GM position. Mack and teammate Gordon Hayward led the little school from Indianapolis all the way to the national championship game against Duke in nearby Lucas Oil Stadium. Hayward missed a half-court shot at the buzzer that would have given Butler its first title.

Thanks to its Final Four run, Butler’s days of toiling in obscurity are in the rear-view mirror. The small, private university with an enrollment of just over 5,000 is big time now. The Bulldogs compete in the basketball-strong Big East Conference against the likes Georgetown, Xavier, Connecticut, Marquette, DePaul, Providence, Creighton and Villanova, which Martin the security guard said is Butler’s biggest rival.

But after visiting this most sacred cathedral of basketball, I can say this about Hinkle Fieldhouse: It has no rival.

Oregon State basketball’s glory years, under the late, great – and chain-smoking – Ralph Miller

These are heady times for Oregon State fans. The Beavers, picked in preseason to finish last in the Pac-12, won their first-ever conference tournament on Saturday night, thereby earning a rare appearance in the NCAA Tournament this week against Tennessee.

Forgive them if they’re acting like they haven’t been there before. They actually have. It’s just been awhile since OSU has been relevant. I’m dating myself here, but I remember a time when an Oregon State team in the NCAA Tournament was a familiar rite of spring. Unless you followed the old Pac-10 in the late 1970s and 1980s, it’s almost hard to imagine today the school from Corvallis was a national power. But it was real.

Coached by the masterful Ralph Miller, “The Orange Express,” as they were called then, rolled through the Pac-10 for a chunk of the 1980s virtually unchecked. And that included dominating UCLA, which wasn’t that far removed from the dynasty teams in the 1970s under legendary coach John Wooden.

OSU won the conference title easily four of five seasons between 1980 and 1984, never losing more than three league games. The Beavers went to the postseason 10 of the last 11 seasons under Miller. The 1981-82 team went all the way to the NCAA Elite Eight before falling to Patrick Ewing and the Georgetown Hoyas.

The 1980-81 team, which finished 17-1 in the Pac-10 and 26-2 overall, was particularly menacing, and one of the better college basketball teams I’ve ever seen. The Beavers were ranked No. 1 in the nation eight weeks that season, defeated UCLA twice, mauled rival Oregon three times by a combined 54 points and beat St. John’s in New York City.

The Beavers didn’t just beat teams. They destroyed them.

I witnessed one of those beatdowns on a rainy February evening in Corvallis in ’81 as a fledgling sportswriter for The News-Review in Roseburg, Oregon. I didn’t cover a lot of Beaver games in those days. After all, it was more than a two-hour drive to Corvallis. But this one caught my attention. The opponent was Washington, a school I had followed closely growing up in the Skagit Valley. Adding further interest to the game was Marv Harshman’s Huskies, that hated team from the north, had taken the unbeaten and No. 1-ranked Beavers to overtime in Seattle one month earlier, before succumbing 97-91.

It was my first visit to venerable Gill Coliseum, and one I will never forget. It seemed every one of the 10,059 fans in the building that night were on their feet when the mighty Beavers confidently took the floor as the pep band, swaying back and forth, blared the school’s fight song, “Hail to Old OSU.” I still get goosebumps just thinking about it.

The details are a little hazy 40 years later, but I recall the Beavers jumped on UW early with a smothering defense. Steve Johnson, OSU’s 6-10 All-American center, also had a monster game backing down UW’s Kenny Lyles and Dan Caldwell for easy buckets. Johnson would set an NCAA record that season for field-goal percentage (.746% that stood until 2017)

I’m sure there were a lot of “Holy jumpin’ up and down Martha” exclamations on the radio that night, OSU play-by-play man Darrell Aune’s signature call when the Beavs did something great. The Beavers dismantled the Huskies that night, 89-63. And it wasn’t even that close.

After the game, in a scene that in retrospect seems unfathomable, the nattily-dressed Miller sat cross-legged in a chair and fielded questions while puffing on a tiparillo cigar. You would never see a coach today smoking during a press conference. But Miller was a well-known chain smoker, who puffed often during practice, in his office, and on the team bus. His smoking habit would catch up with him at the end. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 82 from congestive heart failure and complications from emphysema.

Believe me, I’m not blowing smoke when I tell you the 1980-81 team would blow away the current Beaver outfit that’s headed for the Big Dance. They sliced and diced opponents with precision passing, an art that was perfected in practice when Miller insisted the team use a deflated basketball that couldn’t be bounced. Miller never would have tolerated today’s game of one-on-one dribbling.

The Beavers had all the pieces for a Final Four run. While Johnson hailed from San Bernardino, California, most of the talented nucleus was home-grown: Sharp-shooting, all-Pac-10 guards Mark Radford (Grant High of Portland) and Ray Blume (Parkrose of Portland) and forwards Rob Holbrook (Parkrose), Jeff Stoutt (Lake Oswego) and Charlie Sitton, a promising freshman out of McMinnville. Reserve guard Lester Conner, out of Oakland, California, was a premier defender, and would become an All-American the following season.

The season, however, would end with a thud in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The Beavers were upset by No. 8 seed Kansas State on a last-second shot by future NBA star Rolando Blackman. The buzzer-beating basket would be immortalized the following week on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

The Beavers would go on to have many more successful seasons under Miller. He would recruit and coach many more great players, including A.C. Green, another local product out of Benson Tech in Portland who would later play many seasons in the NBA. And of course, perhaps his greatest player, future Seattle SuperSonic legend Gary Payton.

Once Miller retired in 1989, handing over the reins to longtime assistant Jimmy Anderson, the Beavers never came close to the success they enjoyed under the crusty old coach from Chanute, Kansas. Miller definitely left his mark. He was a two-time national coach of the year (1981 and 1982), and in 1988, just before his final season, was elected into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. The Beavers play today on what is known as “Ralph Miller Court.”

While Miller wouldn’t always approve of the shot selection these modern-day Beavers are taking, I’m sure he’s proud of the job current coach Wayne Tinkle has done.

Looking down on all this, he’s probably smiling – and, of course, smoking.

Ralph Miller’s record in his 19 seasons at Oregon State

The meteoric rise and fall of Bob Bender, Washington’s once promising, young college basketball coach.

With apologies to soccer star David Beckham, no one could bend it like Bob Bender.

He had it all. Good looks. Infectious personality. Energetic recruiter. A son of a successful high-school basketball coach. A standout player at Indiana and Duke, two of college basketball’s blueblood programs. A coaching disciple of legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Arriving at the University of Washington in 1993 as its 17th basketball coach, Bender had his work cut out for him. The program he inherited from Lynn Nance was in disarray.

But Bender had big plans. He had every intention of building the Huskies into “the Duke of the West.”

When his Husky team advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1998, coming within a buzzer-beater putback by UConn’s “Rip” Hamilton from moving to the Elite Eight, UW was looking a lot like Coach K’s teams from Durham, North Carolina. Bender’s star was soaring as high as Microsoft stock. Texas and other suitors lined up to lure him away. But four years later he was out the door, caught in the spin cycle of a “what-have-you-have-done-for-me-lately” culture that is not only indicative of our society today, but is especially true of college and professional sports.

I caught up with Bender in early January to talk about the current woes of UW’s basketball program. He expressed empathy for the “down cycle” Mike Hopkins is currently going through, recognizing how difficult it is to sustain a winning program in today’s era of one-and-done players and the increasingly popular transfer portal. He cited North Carolina and Kentucky’s recent struggles as examples that even the best college programs go through tough times. He certainly experienced a dropoff at Washington. It would cost him dearly.

After taking the Huskies to back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths, Bender’s last three teams never came close to reaching the postseason. But help was on the way. He had secured Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson in his final recruiting class. He never got to coach them. Instead, the two future NBA stars would become the springboard for the program’s early turnaround under his successor, Lorenzo Romar. This must have been hard for Bender to watch.

According to a well-placed source, after Bender’s last game – a 86-64 loss to Oregon in the first round of the 2002 Pac-10 Tournament in which UW had jumped out to an early lead, Bender thought he was done. His wife, Alice, was seen outside the locker room crying. But when the team returned to Seattle, UW Athletic Director Barbara Hedges led Bender to believe he would be back. He held end-of-season meetings with his players with that in mind.

Ten days after the season, according to this source, Hedges reversed course and fired Bender.

For years, Bender never spoke to reporters about his ouster at UW, though I’m told they tried. He would only talk about how he enjoyed his new life as an NBA assistant coach, which he did for 15 years until his retirement two years ago. Perhaps his talking about his exit would be interpreted as sour grapes.

For whatever reason – perhaps time has at least partially healed some wounds – he graciously talked to me. After making several calls to cell phones that were either disconnected or wrong numbers, on my final attempt I reached a number that belonged to Alice. She handed the phone to Bob. He talked, at first reluctantly, then opened up as we went along.

We didn’t address his firing specifically, but he said his final team, which finished 5-13 in conference play and 11-18 overall, “fought hard, but we just didn’t get the job done.”

At the end of Bender’s tenure at UW, he didn’t have much to fight with.

When Ray Giacoletti left in 1997 to take the head coaching job at North Dakota State, Bender not only lost his trusted, top assistant coach, but also his best recruiter. Giacoletti was largely responsible for landing Todd MacCulloch, a raw, 7-foot center from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who would become an All-American, lead the nation in field-goal percentage for three seasons and finish as one of the top scorers in school history.

And he had help. The UW coaching staff spanned the globe for the other starters on the 1998 Sweet 16 team, arguably one of the most talented groups in school history:

Patrick Femmerling, a 7-foot-1 rim protector (Dusseldorf, Germany); shooting guards Deon Luton (Del City, Oklahoma) and Donald Watts (Lake Washington High, Kirkland), son of former Sonic great Slick Watts; and point guard Jan Wooten (Elizabeth, New Jersey). Bench depth included freshman forward Thalo Green (Salem, Oregon) and point guard Dan Dickau (Prairie High, Vancouver, Washington), who would later become an All-American player at Gonzaga. That team very easily could have featured Watts and future NBA star Jason Terry in the same backcourt. Both were UW verbal commits in the same class. But in a signing day surprise, Terry, who starred at Seattle’s Franklin High School, cast his lot with Lute Olson and Arizona.

Two seasons later, the bulk of that group that lost to UConn at the buzzer in the Sweet 16 had graduated, and the talent drain was underway.

Dickau transferred to Gonzaga, an alarming trend that would later see promising point guard Senque Carey leave for New Mexico and guard Erroll Knight for Gonzaga. Bender’s final three teams were, for the most part, not very athletic and undersized –unless you count 6-11, 300-pound center David Dixon, who arrived from a Texas junior college overweight and out of shape. Dixon could not play for very long stretches at a time. When he was out of the game, he was often seen on the sidelines riding an exercise bike.

Bender thought he was poised for a turnaround with Robinson and Roy on board for the 2002-2003 season. But three consecutive losing seasons at most Power Five schools today will get you fired, and that was even true back then. Looking back on it years later, Bender says he left the program in much better shape than when he arrived.

“We rebuilt the program and left a foundation for Lorenzo, and now going forward,” he told me. “It should always be in a position to have success.”

Of course we know now fans and athletic directors have a short memory when it comes to success. The Husky basketball program, just two years removed from an NCAA Tournament berth, is struggling mightily in Hopkins’ fourth season there, his team on track to one of the worst win-loss records in school history. Now fans are calling for Hopkins’ head.

The UW’s Sweet 16 run is just one of many fond memories Bender had at Washington. He and Alice started their family in Seattle, made good friends there. They spent a month last summer at Sun Valley Resort in Idaho, reconnecting with some of those friends they hadn’t seen since they left the Emerald City nearly two decades ago.

Time has moved on. People have moved on. Bender said the only person he’d recognize in the UW athletic department now would be current AD Jen Cohen, who was just beginning her climb up the ranks back then. “She was awesome,” he said.

People I talked to inside and outside the UW also liked Bender. It remains a mystery to me how this shooting star in the college basketball coaching ranks fell prematurely to earth, never to coach a college game again.

In my wide-ranging interview with him, he talked about his recollection of his first team at UW, the gut-wrenching, Sweet 16 loss to UConn, and his time in the NBA, among other topics, in my story for The Seattle Times in January. Here’s the link:

https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/uw-husky-basketball/former-uw-mens-basketball-coach-bob-bender-reflects-on-up-and-down-husky-career/

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