ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702040103
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
SOURCE: Associated Press
MEMO: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.
HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL college coaches top the new inductees into the basketball shrine.
Princeton's Pete Carril and Texas-El Paso's Don Haskins, two of college basketball's most likable and successful coaches, were among seven people elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame on Monday.
Scoring ace Alex English, power forward Bailey Howell, women's stars Denise Curry and Joan Crawford, and longtime Spain coach Antonio Diaz-Miguel also were elected and will be inducted Sept.29.
Carril, 67, used a pressing defense and a patient spread offense to amass a 525-273 record over the past 29 years and transform Princeton into the most feared underdog in the NCAA Tournament.
He retired from the college ranks last spring after his team upset defending champion UCLA, then lost to Mississippi State. Before last year, the Tigers had lost four times in the first round to the No.1 seed, but only by a combined total of 15 points.
``I never thought about anything like this when I started coaching,'' said Carril, who retired from Princeton a year ago and became an assistant with the NBA's Sacramento Kings. ``Especially, in the Ivy League. I don't know if I can feel any better than I do. I'm overwhelmed. I'm on another planet,'' he said.
Haskins, 66, has quietly kept winning since his five black starters beat Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky stars for the 1966 NCAA championship. He ranks among the top five active college coaches with a 687-322 record and seven conference titles during 36 years in El Paso.
``I'm shocked. I never thought that this would happen to me. I'd never felt that I'd done enough,'' he said. ``But if I said I wasn't hoping, I'd be lying. This is even bigger to me than the national [championship]. You start out playing basketball as a little kid. All of a sudden, you're where I am now, and it doesn't seem possible. It didn't seem very long ago.''
Haskins, who played for Henry Iba, another Hall of Famer, at what was then Oklahoma A&M, had to overcome a slow start in the game.
``It seemed like yesterday that I was playing basketball outside,'' he said. ``My dad built me a small hoop. It was the hardest game I ever played. I was cut from my seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade teams.''
After setting career scoring records at Dreher High School in Columbia, S.C., and at the University of South Carolina, English became the NBA's most prolific scorer in the 1980s. During his 15-year professional career, mostly with the Denver Nuggets, English scored 25,617 points. He was the first player in the NBA to score 2,000 points in eight straight seasons and still ranks among the league's top-10 career scoring leaders.
Curry, UCLA's leading women's scorer, was selected the French player of the 1980s during an eight-year pro career in Europe. Crawford was an AAU star for Nashville (Tenn.) Business College in the 1950s and 1960s.
``I've been hoping,'' said Crawford, who works in a library at Northwestern. ``But women's basketball doesn't get the recognition it should and when I played it got hardly any recognition. We seldom even got a mention in the newspapers.''
Among the nominees who failed to gain election were coaches John Thompson of Georgetown, Jerry Tarkanian of UNLV and Fresno State, Tex Winter of Kansas State and the Chicago Bulls, Jim Phelan of Mount St. Mary's, and Alex Hannum, who won NBA titles with St. Louis and Philadelphia and an ABA crown with Oakland.
Also considered were players Gus Johnson, Jamaal Wilkes, Sidney Moncrief, Bobby Jones, Arnie Risen, Dennis Johnson, Jo Jo White and Ubiratan Pereira Maciel of Brazil.
Lee Williams, who helped create the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1962 and was its executive director for 19 years, was proposed as a contributor.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB