Former Hoops Coach Dies
October 06, 2006 12:30 AM | General
October 6, 2006
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| George King |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Bob Lochmueller was perfectly content coaching high school basketball in Indiana when former pro teammate George King called and asked him if he was interested in becoming an assistant coach at West Virginia.
“Bob, you want to come to West Virginia and help me with the basketball team here?” King asked.
Lochmueller felt the timing wasn’t right being that it was just a few weeks before the start of another school year. “I told him I didn’t feel like I could leave those folks in that situation,” he said.
King called back a day later and said no problem. He would hold the job for his buddy for a year until the timing was better. That’s the type of man George King was. King, who carved out an outstanding 223-119 record at West Virginia University and Purdue from 1961-72 and later served as athletic director for the Boilermaker program until his retirement in 1992, died Thursday morning in Naples, Fla. He was 78.
“You can go back and talk to all of the people that were involved with George King and I don’t think you will find anyone that can say a bad thing about him,” said Buddy Quertinmont, a two-year starting guard for King in 1964 and 1965.
King has the third best winning percentage (.703) behind Fred Schaus (.798) and Lee Patton (.778) in WVU history; King’s 102-43 record included three Southern Conference titles in 1962, 1963 and 1965.
He coached possibly the best back-court duo in school annals in All-American Rod Thorn and Jim McCormick, drafted by the Cincinnati Royals in 1963. The two combined to average nearly 40 points per game.
King employed a freelance offensive system emphasizing the fast break and team play. It was an entertaining style that put points on the board at a record rate. During his first three seasons King’s teams averaged more than 83 points per game. The brilliance was in its simplicity.
“I don’t think we had more than five plays,” McCormick recalled.
On the other hand, a coaching contemporary like Jack Ramsey at St. Joseph’s may have had five variations of the same play.
“I know when I went there they really didn’t have much in the way of an offense against the zone,” Lochmueller said. “One that I had used in high school we incorporated and it worked real well for us because we had the people that could shoot outside in Thorn and McCormick.
“We relied a lot on pressing, turnovers and the fast break.”
“We had out-of-bounds plays and we had some last-second-shot type of things but everything else was freelance,” said Quertinmont. “We used to practice fast breaking off of everything you could think of including taking the ball out of bounds and foul shots. George loved to fast break.”
“Freelance is what he called it,” Rod Thorn, president of the New Jersey Nets, said. “It would be more like the passing game used today.”
It was a style King preferred playing in the pros. The small college scoring champion at Morris Harvey in Charleston transformed himself into one of pro basketball’s top playmakers in the mid-1950s while starring for the Syracuse Nationals. King’s last-minute free throw and steal helped the Nats claim the 1955 NBA title.
“George was one of the very outstanding point guards that could handle the ball and make the break a success. He believed in that,” Lochmueller said.
Fred Schaus was impressed enough with King to make him the first full-time basketball assistant coach in WVU history in 1959. King was in charge of scouting.
“When he scouted somebody believe me he came home with the goods,” Quertinmont said. “I can remember him telling me about a point guard from Davidson named Barry Teague. George said, ‘Buddy he’s going to take four dribbles to the right and he’s going to cross over and drive left on you.’ Believe me, it wasn’t three dribbles and it wasn’t five -- it was four. That’s how detailed he could be after watching them.
“He was sharp and he had you ready to play.”
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| Former West Virginia coach George King, pictured with All-American guard Rod Thorn (44) and Jim McCormick.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
By any reasonable standard King’s record at WVU was one to envy. But King had the misfortune of following the remarkable Schaus, a legend of a figure in the Mountain State who had lifted the Mountaineer program to the very pinnacle of college basketball in 1959. Replacing Fred Schaus at West Virginia in 1960 was about like replacing Billy Donovan or Tubby Smith today. It's impossible.
“George had a very difficult pair of shoes to step into,” admitted Eddie Barrett, the school’s sports information director at the time. “There was no way he could win because Fred Schaus was a dominating, charismatic leader. (Schaus) was captain or head coach of every team he was ever involved with.”
There was also the matter of style. Schaus was large in every sense of the word. Not only was he a towering and imposing man, but he also demanded perfection from his players. A mistake often drew a scowl and a stern lecture. With the exception of perhaps Hot Rod Hundley, all of Schaus's players had a healthy fear of him.
“When Fred would take you out of the game he’d grab you and tell you exactly what you did wrong,” recalled McCormick.
King had a different approach, rarely losing his cool.
“In the three years I played for him I don’t think he yelled at me once,” McCormick said.
“Even in practice he wouldn’t show you up,” Quertinmont said. “He would wait and get you off to the side and then talk to you and tell you what you were doing wrong and what he expected of you.”
“He may not have yelled at you,” added Thorn, “but you knew when he was mad at you.”
Lochmueller says that was King’s way of operating. Their roles were reversed: instead of the coach being the strict disciplinarian and the assistant coach smoothing things over, Lochmueller served the role of enforcer.
“That was kind of the role we played,” Lochmueller said.
But King could get tough when he had to. He had problems with one particular player and he eventually gave him a choice – either he left the team under the guise of having an injury or he was getting the boot.
“The player chose to take the easy way out,” Lochmueller recalled.
Some fans and sports columnists mistook King’s smooth, easy-going demeanor as a lack of passion and intensity. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
King took all of the losses hard, especially in 1965 when his team posted the school’s first losing campaign in 21 years. King felt the pressure.
“Some of the young people that were there that were outstanding high school players just didn’t develop or get to the point where they were going to be outstanding college players,” Lochmueller said.
Barrett saw the pressure building first-hand and had to referee a dispute that developed between King and the late sports editor/WVU historian Tony Constantine, who wrote that he wasn’t a fan of King’s use of the zone defense.
“George finally told Tony that he wasn’t going to talk to him anymore and from that point George’s name never appeared in Tony’s columns,” Barrett said. “When George got the job at Purdue he said to me, ‘I’m not going to make some of the same mistakes I made here.’”
Following an 11-point win over George Washington to begin February, West Virginia lost six straight to drop to 10-14 and essentially assure a losing season. Even a miraculous run through the Southern Conference tournament couldn’t bring the Mountaineers’ record above .500.
At one point well-known local sports editor Mickey Furfari tried to explain a string of puzzling losses: “Neither GW nor Richmond won on its own merits. West Virginia simply succeeded in beating itself.
“Bonehead basketball, that’s what it was,” Furfari wrote. “Yet some of these same players pulling the boo-boos have come up with outstanding, first-class performances on occasion in the past. That’s what makes this so sad to see.”
Later, Furfari issued a bold challenge to the team.
“I wrote that I would dance on the courthouse square if West Virginia somehow won the Southern Conference tournament,” Furfari laughed.
The likelihood of that happening was remote considering Lefty Driesell’s No. 6-rated Davidson Wildcats had breezed through the Southern Conference and entered the tournament a prohibitive favorite. Armed with a telegram of encouragement from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a Davidson graduate, and relying on All-American center Fred Hetzel, Driesell was simply clearing out room in the trophy case and getting ready for the NCAA tournament.
But in one of the most stunning upsets in school history, West Virginia outlasted the Wildcats, 74-72 in the tournament semifinals in front of nearly 12,000 at the Charlotte Coliseum. It was George King at his very best, coaxing his underdog team to play unselfishly and without inhibition.
“I can remember Bob Camp going back into the dressing room and saying, ‘Where is Furfari?’ Where is he?’ Believe me, we did not let Mickey live that down,” Quertinmont chuckled.
In fact the team went down to the newspaper and demanded Mickey hold up his end of the bargain. “After a couple of shots of booze, I did it,” Furfari laughed.
“He stood up to his word,” Quertinmont said.
Somewhere in all the commotion was an amused George King, his team vindicated despite its losing record.
A few weeks later he took the Purdue job.
“I think there was some relief on his part to leave West Virginia because he knew that no matter what he did he couldn’t fill the large shoes that Fred Schaus left,” said Barrett.
In other words, it was simply time to move on. King departed Morgantown on a positive note, leaving behind the school’s first integrated freshman basketball team that featured the remarkable Ron “Fritz” Williams.
“He didn’t leave the cupboard bare when he left,” Lochmueller said.
According to Lochmueller, King also didn’t leave with any ill will toward the University he served with distinction for seven years.
George King was too classy a man for that.
