Dick Harter and Basketball Heaven

R.I.P. Dick Harter, a good coach and a good man, who died at age 81 on Monday of cancer. The first head coach of the expansion NBA Charlotte Hornets, Harter was also an assistant with the Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, New York Knicks, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics, and Philadelphia 76ers.

But it was in college where Harter first made his mark. His teams at Rider, Penn (his alma mater), Oregon, and Penn State were known for their tenacious man-to-man defense. His final two teams at Penn, in 1969-70 and 1970-71, went undefeated in the Ivy League and the Big Five and lost just once in 52 regular-season games. The latter team advanced to the NCAA tournament regional final, losing to a Villanova team that later had its victories forfeited by the NCAA. In 1977, his Oregon team ended UCLA’s 98-game home winning streak.

Harter once told me, “My idea of heaven would be coaching in a league where every team must play zone against you and you’re allowed to play man-to-man.”

I asked him what hell was.

“Hell would be where they play that man-to-man, get in your face, play you like crazed rats, and jump all over you, and you’ve got to work like crazy just to get the ball from one place to another.”

Don Casey, Harter’s Philadelphia counterpart whose Temple teams were known for his impenetrable zone defenses, told me in the same conversation that his own idea of heaven were “the discussions Dick and I had when we were both coaching in the Philadelphia area. The minds were stimulated. And I would still play Mr. Harter’s team up in heaven.”

Unwilted by Time: Chamberlain Scores 100

Fifty years ago today in Hershey, Penn., Wilt Chamberlain poured in 36 field goals (on 63 shots!) and 28 free throws (against four misses) for a total of 100 points in 48 minutes in the Philadelphia Warriors’ 169-147 victory over the New York Knicks. The game was not televised and no tape is extant. In fact, the performance was seen by just the 4,124 fans in attendance at the Hershey Sports Arena (although many more later claimed to have been eyewitnesses).

Former New York Giants GM Ernie Accorsi grew up in Hershey. During a conversation several years ago, I asked him if he happened to be in the crowd for Wilt’s big game.

“No, I was a junior at Wake Forest [at the time],” Accorsi said. “I had been to the ACC tournament semifinal that night at Raleigh and was driving back to Winston-Salem with my fraternity brothers. We were listening to rock music on the car radio, and they broke in with the news. When I heard Hershey, I figured there was a fire or explosion at the chocolate factory. Why else would Hershey command such national news?”

What did he think when he learned the reason for the news bulletin?

“My first thought then was, well... I missed it. My second thought was of my father, who went to all those games. And he was the all-time leave-early-to-beat-the-traffic guy, which was ridiculous. In Hershey, Pennsylvania!

“When I got back to the dorm, I called my parents. My mother answered the phone and immediately asked, ‘What happened?’

“I said, ‘I just want to know: Did he stay?’ And for once, he did. I had this vision that he walked out when Wilt scored his 90th point to beat the crowd.”

What about all the people who later professed to have been in the stands?

“A lot more people than were present for the game claim to have been there,” he said. “Oh, 25,000 did [claim that]. They played a couple of games [in the Hershey Sports Arena] every year, and they would draw 4,000. Very rarely did they draw 4,000 in Philadelphia. They did for the Celtics, maybe, but otherwise drew 3,800 or 4,000. The [Warriors] trained in Hershey, so they would play games there. I even saw NBA double-headers there. The NBA wasn’t what it is today.” 

Indeed the NBA today celebrates a player for recording a double-double. That is, at least 10 points and 10 rebounds in a single game. In the 1961-62 season, Chamberlain averaged over 50 points and 25 rebounds per game. Even better, that same year, Oscar Robertson of the Cincinnati Royals became the only player in NBA history to average a triple-double (30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 11.4 assists) for a season.

Not Mean Enough

Happy belated birthday to Roger Staubach, born 70 years ago Sunday. The updated Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial in Sunday’s Super Bowl was a reminder that Staubach, the Heisman trophy winner in 1963 and the Super Bowl MVP in 1972, was the original choice for the role in that 1979 Coke commercial.

“Somebody asked me about that and said that I turned it down,” Staubach told me, “but that’s not the case. I would have loved to do it. Some creative guy must have evaluated the concept and said, ‘Hey, we need a mean guy. It would be better to have Joe Greene than Staubach because Staubach’s a nice guy.’ 

“It probably made more sense, gave a more cuddly feeling to it, to have this big old tough football player give his jersey to this little boy. It turned out, I guess, it was the right decision, but I would have loved to do it.”

The Innocents Aboard

Just before I administered a spelling test to the second grade, one enterprising little boy told me that because he had trouble remembering how to spell two of the words, he helpfully wrote both of them on the inside of his privacy folder (which stands upright on his desk to prevent peeking by other students during the test). How’s that for self help?

Later that day, one of his classmates wasted so much time during a reading comprehension exercise that I told her to put it in her backpack and finish it as homework. She tried to hand it back to me, saying, “My mom told me that I can’t be taking school work home.”

The Tedium Is the Message

With the Super Bowl just one week away, already the tedious conversations have started about what is sure to be another round of witless shilling before, during, and after the game. Spare me from those who breathlessly anticipate, and then evaluate—with a straight face, no less—the crass commercial messages.

The Super Bowl ads are why the TV remote was invented. If I'm not leaving the room while the game pauses for advertisers to use flatulent monkeys or unbelievably dim-witted males to sell more weak beer, then I'm changing the channel or just hitting the mute button. I take a small pleasure in refusing to be either a part of the live (or should that be comatose?) audience for the smarmy scripts or a participant afterward in the dull discussions of them. If only there were a way for Nielsen to measure the number of viewers indifferent to the small fortune paid for the time between live action on the field.

In the 1967 film “Bedazzled,” Peter Cook, as the devil, laments that he has not done anything really evil since he introduced advertising into the world. And the Super Bowl commercials dramatize how banal that evil is.