THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502220558
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ED MILLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CLEVELAND LENGTH: Long : 323 lines
John McLendon won his first coaching title while still an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, in 1936.
Not yet 21, he guided Lawrence Memorial High School to the Kansas-Missouri Athletic Conference championship, a feat so impressive for one so young that McLendon's academic adviser - who had gotten him the job - was bursting with pride.
``I remember what he told me,'' McLendon said. ``He said, `You stay in basketball. You have a good idea of what the game is all about.' ''
It was high praise, because McLendon's adviser had a pretty good feel for the game himself. His name was James Naismith.
Looking for a new game to interest a class full of students who were bored with the winter routine of gymnastics and calisthenics, Naismith in December 1891 hung two peach baskets in a YMCA gym in Springfield, Mass., and invented ``basket ball.''
More than four decades later, Naismith was on the faculty at Kansas. McLendon was in his first group of majors in a new discipline: physical education.
McLendon went on to coach at North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University, and in 1946 was one of the four founders of the CIAA tournament. The 50th edition of the tournament will be held today through Saturday in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Now 79, McLendon is the only remaining basketball coach to have learned the game from its inventor. He's perhaps the only person alive with a basketball bloodline pure enough to deliver a lecture like the one he gave a couple weeks ago, titled ``Basketball Then and Now, 1891-1995.''
McLendon has met them all, from Dr. Naismith to Dr. J., his 60-year career bridging the chasm between Naismith's peach baskets and Shaquille O'Neal's rap albums.
``He is probably as respected a basketball analyst and historian as anyone walking the face of the Earth,'' said basketball commentator Billy Packer. ``Here's a guy that they ought to just sit down and videotape and put it in the bank.
``He was a man way ahead of his time. He was a student of the game way before television and the swapping of tapes.''
McLendon's teams were running the fast break before there was such a thing as a Boston Celtic, and were using a version of the four corners when Dean Smith was in grade school.
He won 523 games in a 25-year college coaching career, but because the black colleges where he coached were excluded from both the NCAA and the NAIA for much of his career, it was decades before he was recognized as one of the game's innovators.
``We call him the father of black basketball,'' said Clarence ``Bighouse'' Gaines, who won 827 games in 47 seasons at Winston-Salem State.
It's a title McLendon wears with pride, and humility.
``The thing about Mac,'' says LeRoy T. Walker, who was an assistant under McLendon and is now president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, ``is that he is unaffected by his greatness.''
Following the example of his mentor, who taught well into his 70s, McLendon still heads to work each day at Cleveland State University, where he's an assistant to the athletic director and a professor in the physical education department.
``The youngest 80-year-old man I know,'' Gaines says.
Driving through the salt-streaked streets of downtown Cleveland, a red stocking cap on his head, McLendon does seem 20 years younger than his 79 years, 10 months - especially when talking about his latest passion: a sports history course he teaches at Cleveland State.
The course, developed by McLendon, focuses on the role of African-Americans in the nation's sports history, and is part of the university's black studies program.
``The reason I like to teach it,'' McLendon says, ``is because I lived most of it.''
McLendon's father, a railroad mail clerk, told him at a young age to ``fight discrimination when I could, and be on the right side of the battle.''
McLendon's Hall of Fame citation is proof that he took his father's words to heart. McLendon is cited as the ``acknowledged leader'' of a movement to eliminate the color line that kept black colleges out of the NAIA and NCAA tournaments until the 1950s.
``He was a big part of it,'' Gaines said. ``He just kept the pressure, kept the pressure.''
McLendon was aware of discrimination while growing up in Kansas City - it was impossible not to be, with Jim Crow still reigning supreme. He was educated in segregated schools and did not have a white teacher until he went to the University of Kansas in 1932, as one of 60 black students on a campus of 4,000.
Many of McLendon's early college experiences were not good. That first white teacher, it turns out, made a racial remark about 15 minutes into the first class. McLendon walked out and did not return.
When McLendon attempted to try out for the Kansas basketball team, legendary coach Forrest ``Phog'' Allen refused to his acknowledge his presence. The university's sports teams were for whites only.
``There were a lot of things going on that I didn't care for,'' McLendon says.
But he was determined to be at Kansas, near Naismith.
McLendon fell in love with basketball in junior high, when he saw an indoor court for the first time.
``There was a man out on the floor making shots, and I just didn't believe it could be done,'' McLendon says. ``We had had an old goal down at Dunbar Elementary, but I don't think I ever shot anything at it other than a sock full of rags.''
Not many of the rags found the mark, either. McLendon was hardly a natural, and the fact is, had he been allowed to try out at Kansas, he probably couldn't have made the team.
McLendon remembers being cut from just about every team he'd tried out for, from junior high on up. In neighborhood games he was picked late, if at all. A junior high coach suggested he take up gymnastics, and McLendon did.
``I never developed any basketball skills,'' he says, ``Only mental ones.''
Those were the skills he was dying to use, as a coach.
And who better to teach them than the game's inventor? McLendon and his father reasoned.
``I was going to go to school where basketball was invented,'' McLendon said.
That was Springfield, where the McLendons assumed Naismith still was. After doing some research, however, they learned that the Great Man was much, much closer.
``He was 40 miles from my front door,'' McLendon says.
It was a coincidence that McLendon came to call ``providential placement.''
Another piece of providential placement was that although Naismith was well past retirement age, school officials, in deference to his stature, allowed him to continue teaching.
At Kansas, McLendon found Naismith to be an educated, gentle man who ``abhorred discrimination of any kind.'' He was so kind that one semester he was gently rebuked by the administration for giving everyone in his course an A, McLendon said.
Naismith's classes were often simply freewheeling discussions of whatever was on the student's minds, McLendon recalls. The doctor was a great believer in sport for the fun and exercise of it, and for many years after inventing basketball, he didn't think coaching should be allowed.
Naismith had come around to the idea of coaching by the 1930s, however, and one day, without knowing it, McLendon thinks, Naismith planted the seed that convinced his young student that the fast break and pressure defense was the ``ultimate'' game of basketball.
``We were watching some children play basketball and he told me to watch the children and tell him what I saw,'' McLendon said.
``Everywhere the ball went, they went. He said that was the way the game was supposed to be played. When you have possession of the ball, that's where the offense begins. When your opponent has possession, that's where the defense begins.''
Rules at the time - there was still a center jump after each basket - didn't permit that kind of play. But McLendon filed away what Naismith had said.
Meanwhile, things were getting better at the Kansas, in large part because of McLendon's initiative. Before he was through at the university, McLendon integrated both the spring dance and the student government. He also landed a job coaching a high school team, thanks to Naismith.
The inventor pulled some strings and sent McLendon to Lawrence Memorial, which was an integrated school - except on its playing fields. The school, like many that supposedly were ``integrated,'' had separate teams for blacks and whites.
McLendon was an assistant coach on the black team, which played other black teams from integrated schools in eastern Kansas and western Missouri.
During McLendon's senior year, the head coach became ill and McLendon took over. With Naismith allowing him to schedule his classes around practices and games, McLendon led Lawrence to the Kansas-Missouri Athletic Conference Championship.
Naismith urged McLendon to continue his education and helped him get into the University of Iowa. McLendon completed his master's degree in a year and was eager to start his coaching career. Black schools were the only ones open to him, so McLendon took a job as an assistant at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham in 1937.
McLendon was appointed head coach for the 1940-41 season, and the team won its first CIAA championship. McLendon, in fact, won eight CIAA titles between 1941 and 1952.
``He was so far ahead of most of us,'' Gaines said. ``We were playing basketball with football players. His teams were better-conditioned, better-coached.''
McLendon's teams ran and pressed so relentlessly that opposing coaches tried to slow them down by tightening the nets so the ball would get stuck in them. McLendon learned to bring a pair of scissors on the road.
``Most of the teams played the slow, bring-it-down-the-court style,'' said Aubrey Stanley, who played for McLendon from 1943-47 and was captain of the first CIAA tournament championship team in 1946. ``With him it was get the ball to the center, hit the wing man and go. We were always looking for the two-on-one, three-on-one.''
And usually finding it. North Carolina College was named Associated Negro Press champion in 1941, but McLendon began wondering how his team would fare in the larger world of white college basketball.
In 1942, attempting to find out, McLendon arranged the first integrated game played in Washington, D.C., beating Brooklyn College, 37-34.
Closer to home, it was necessary to move more slowly, and cautiously, as a game played two years later in Durham showed.
It was 1944, and North Carolina College had its usual strong team. So, too, did the Duke University Medical School team.
The boys from Duke were feeling so good about their team, in fact, that they commissioned an article in the local paper declaring themselves state champions.
McLendon's trainer, Vivian Henderson, who later would become the president of Clark University, read the article and called Duke's coach. There's one team you haven't played, Henderson said.
The Duke team took the challenge, with a couple conditions: No one was to be told about the game, and no spectators would be allowed.
``They came over rather covertly,'' McLendon said. ``They asked to have the game on a Sunday, at 11 a.m., when everyone would be in church.''
Henderson naturally was excited and had a hard time keeping a secret. When the game started, on the North Carolina College campus, as McLendon remembers: ``All the crowd was outside on boxes and ladders, looking in the windows.''
North Carolina College won the game ``rather easily,'' and the boys from Duke wanted a rematch. Only this time they demanded that some of the North Carolina College players come on their team, and some of the Duke players go over on the other side. The teams played that way for an hour, with neither getting an upper hand.
``They were a bunch of nice guys,'' McLendon said. ``That was the way it was with most of the guys at that time. It was never us (blacks) and them (whites). It was just us and some of them.''
The belief that most people in athletics wanted to do the right thing sustained McLendon in his efforts to get black colleges included in college basketball's two postseason tournaments, the NAIA - then known as the NAIB, for National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball - and the NCAA.
In 1949 McLendon founded the National Basketball Committee, to lobby for integration.
Sports were slowly opening up, with Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color line in 1947 the most prominent example.
Blacks had played on integrated college basketball teams as early as the 1920s, but for most, black colleges provided their only opportunity. And those colleges were shut out of the NCAA and the NAIB.
McLendon's National Basketball Committee metamorphosed into the National Athletic Steering Committee, with Harry Jefferson of Virginia State as its first president.
The NCAA said it was willing to work with the new committee, but when McLendon approached the NCAA, he was given the brush-off. NCAA officials said they had no ``championship apparatus'' to include the black schools.
McLendon, in a 1987 book on the integration movement, wrote that he was told that ``fans may not accept or appreciate the kind of game you play'' and ``your coaches may not be competent enough.''
McLendon knew that was ridiculous. He had scouted the NAIB tournament in Kansas City for years, and had also scouted NCAA teams.
``For years I had teams that could have won in Kansas City, but they wouldn't let me in,'' he said.
With the NCAA unreceptive, the steering committee turned its attention to the NAIB, which seemed to have a more sympathetic leader, Al Duer.
In 1951, Central State of Ohio - a black school whose athletic director, Mack Greene, was also a leader in integration movement - applied for NAIA membership. After two years of haggling, the association, by then called the NAIA, created an at-large district for black schools.
On March 10, 1953, Tennessee State became the first black college to play in a national championship tournament. Ironically, Tennessee State had beaten McLendon's North Carolina College team to get to the tournament.
Tennessee State bowed out of the tournament in the third round.
The following year, McLendon became head coach at Tennessee State, and the team - based on its performance in the national tournament - was invited to the NAIA's Christmas Tournament in Kansas City.
Chuck Taylor, the Converse shoe salesman, told McLendon he should accept the invitation, but only if Tennessee State was allowed to stay in the same hotel and eat in the same restaurants as the tournament's other teams. Otherwise, McLendon's team would be at a psychological disadvantage, Taylor said.
McLendon insisted, and for the duration of the tournament at least, Jim Crow took a back seat in downtown Kansas City.
Although some schools from the South continued to raise occasional protests, black colleges became an accepted part of the NAIA tournament.
The NCAA, taking notice, tried to take some of the steam away from its rival organization by organizing its own ``college division'' tournament in Evansville, Ind., in 1956, and opening it to black schools.
McLendon, however, felt he owed his loyalty to the NAIA. In 1957 his Tennessee State team returned to Kansas City and won the NAIA tournament - the first black college to do so. With future NBA players Dick Barnett and John Barnhill leading the way, Tennessee State won titles again in '58 and '59, forever quelling any doubts about the competency of black teams, or coaches.
McLendon went on to become the first black coach of a professional team, the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League. Later, he became the first black coach to take a team overseas, the first to author a book on basketball, the first to win an international championship, the first to become head coach at an integrated school (Cleveland State) and the first to coach in the old American Basketball Association.
McLendon went to work for Converse in 1970 and traveled the world for 20 years, lecturing and giving clinics. With his Hall of Fame induction in 1978 and in dozens of honors since then, only belatedly has he become recognized for what he was, and is: not just an outstanding black coach, but one of the finest coaches the game has ever known. He was designated as such by Packer, who during the centennial of basketball in 1991 named him one of the top 10 coaches of all time.
``He was a big ambassador for us during the centennial,'' said Wayne Patterson, a research specialist at the Basketball Hall of Fame. ``He was always a tough guy for us over the years, because of where he coached, there wasn't an awful lot written about him. But I've never heard anybody dispute any of his stories.''
McLendon continues to be an ambassador for basketball. He'll be courtside at the CIAA tournament, as he is every year, politely accepting the greetings of a week's worth of well-wishers, eager to get a word or two with one of the men who started it all.
``I think basketball owes him a great debt,'' said Stanley, the former North Carolina College player. ``I don't think they can ever repay him for what he gave to the game.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
ANTHONY ONCHAK
As always, "the father of black basketball," 79-year-old John
McLendon, will be courtside this week at the CIAA tournament.
In 1891, James Naismith hung two peach baskets, and a game was born.
In 1946, a student of his helped midwife a tournament.
ANTHONY ONCHAK
This 1967 World Intercontinental Cup championship team was among the
world-class squads coached by John McLendon.
JOHN McLENDON WAS THE FIRST BLACK COACH TO: Coach in a regularly
scheduled integrated basketball game in North Carolina (North
Carolina College vs. Camp LeJeune Marines, 1949).
Win a national championship (National Association of
Intercollegiate Athletics, in 1957 with Tennessee State).
Author a book on basketball (Fast Break Basketball, Fine points
and Fundamentals, in 1965).
Win an international championship (with U.S. team in World Cup
tournament, 1965).
Become a head coach in a professional basketball league
(Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League in 1961).
Become head coach at an integrated school (Cleveland State,
1965).
Become a head coach in the American Basketball Association
(Denver Nuggets in 1969).
Be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
(in 1978).
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BLACK HISTORY BASKETBALL by CNB