Mad Hoops

By Bud Withers

Before Phil Knight's largess became a central part of the landscape of college athletics, the University of Oregon was a struggling entity, living hand-to-mouth financially. When one of its coaches departed, it usually hired from within -- in other words, on the cheap. But in 1971, it departed from custom, went east and invested in Dick Harter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lawrence (Bud) Withers
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578772851

Book preview

Praise for Mad Hoops

Growing up a college basketball fan as a teenager back east in the ’70s, I’d heard about Dick Harter’s Kamikaze Kids, like Ronnie Lee, Stu Jackson and Greg Ballard, but we never got to see them on TV. Bud Withers tells the great story of an entertaining and winning era of Ducks basketball, floor burns and all.

– Fran Fraschilla, ESPN analyst

"This was my first book during COVID quarantine, but it’s a great read anytime. Dick Harter was winning big at Penn when I first got into college basketball, but the rest of his career was a mystery to me. Mad Hoops brings it all to life."

– Joe Lunardi, ESPN bracketologist,

St. Joseph’s basketball broadcaster

"Beyond the Kamikaze Kids' floor burns, Oregon basketball in the 1970s was well-hidden to many of us outside the Pac-8 footprint, overshadowed by the UCLA dynasty. Bud Withers’ Mad Hoops entertainingly shines a Klieg light on the antics of the Ducks’ hard-driving, hard-living, cheerleading-tripping coach, Dick Harter."

– John Akers, editor, Basketball Times

Bud Withers has penned a colorful, insightful book on the wild and wacky flight of the Oregon Ducks' basketball program under the late Dick Harter. The Kamikaze Kids ride again in all their glory.

– Dick Weiss, author, retired

New York Daily News sports columnist

Wonderful insight, by one of the sport’s greatest chroniclers, into a college basketball program that did what most only dreamed about in the early 1970s – challenge the powerhouse that was John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. This is worth a read by anyone with the same kind of passion that Bud has had for basketball and sports journalism.

– Frank Burlison, national grassroots scout,

director of Burlison on Basketball

MAD HOOPS

Bud Withers

© 2020 Bud Withers

ePub Edition

ISBN: 978-0-578-77285-1

Also available in trade paperback and Kindle format

Cover Design: Factory Town  www.Factory.Town

Design based on original photography by Bruce Roberts; University Archives photographs (UA Ref 3), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon

Back cover design based on photography by Oregon Athletic Communications

Layout & Pre-press: Lighthouse24

www.madhoopsthebook.com

Twitter: @bud_withers

Contents

Praise for Mad Hoops

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

1.   Penn

2.   The Matchmaker

3.   The Launch

4.   How High the Moon (and the baskets at Bohler Gym)?

5.   The Cowboy

6.   The Gift of Harry Miller

7.   The Savior

8.   Eddie Haskell

9.   The Accidental Shooter

10. Reinforcements

11. UCLA’s Lost Weekend (and other Bruin subtitles)

12. Trippin’ in Corvallis

Photo section

13. The Season From Hell

14. The Disaffected

15. Late Night with Dick Harter

16. That School Up North

17. The Beginning of the End

18. Exit Stage Left

19. The (Nittany) Lion in Winter

20. Dick Harter’s Redemption Tour

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Foreword

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of Monday, February 7, 1977, I slid into a seat several rows behind the press level at McArthur Court, the creaking basketball arena on the University of Oregon campus. Down a few rows, and maybe a dozen seats to the left, sat Barney Holland.

We were there to watch UO men’s basketball practice, an act defined by its own rules and its own particular trepidations.

This was Dick Harter’s classroom, and the head coach of the Ducks conducted practice in the manner of a wild-eyed military drill instructor—natural, since he’d been a Marine. Practice was closed to the public, but Harter allowed media members to watch—that seems quaintly charitable in today’s world of paranoid coaches—so long as they sat on the second level, ostensibly beyond the consciousness of his players.

Some guests were permitted as well, and Barney Holland was one of those. He was the basketball coach at North Eugene High School, and considered one of the astute minds on the bench in the state of Oregon. One of his players was Danny Ainge, who had led the Highlanders to the 1976 state Class AAA championship, and within a month of this Oregon practice, he would do it again. Ainge was 6-foot-4, slender, quick, fast, intuitive, an excellent shooter and a phenomenal three-sport athlete.

All of those attributes made Ainge coveted desperately by Harter and Oregon, which could give Ainge something nobody else could—the chance to play college basketball within seven miles of where he grew up.

Practice proceeded, and though the Ducks were having a successful season at 14-6 behind All-American forward Greg Ballard, the usual sense of foreboding gripped me. I attended only a couple of Oregon practices a season, not enough to get comfortable, and I always felt vulnerable to the day when a foul-tempered Harter might call me out for being the Oregon State beat writer for the Eugene Register-Guard, or for coughing, or for not sitting straight enough.

On the west side of McArthur Court, a small group emerged from an entryway onto the second deck. It made its way south and continued to the east side.

One of the visitors was Mike Brundage, a quarterback at Oregon in the mid-‘60s, and at this time an assistant athletic director at the UO. He was accompanied by a couple of key figures from the fledgling Seattle Seahawks—head coach Jack Patera and general manager John Thompson.

It seems the Seahawks were canvassing possible sites for preseason training camps, and one campus under consideration was Oregon. Brundage was acting as tour guide, and now the group came upon Holland, who had been a classmate of Patera at Oregon in the early 1950s.

The men chatted briefly, voices low. But not low enough.

Skrrrreeek! Harter blew his whistle. Hey, you guys! he barked, boring in on the offenders. This isn’t a clinic we’re running down here! You want to talk, go out in the hallway!

At some level, this might have resonated with Harter’s players, a message that practice was so vital that he would rout some interlopers engaged in quiet conversation. But he was doing this to Barney Holland, who might help deliver Danny Ainge, a transformational player who could summarily reverse what seemed to be a downturn in Oregon recruiting.

I knew right then: Dick Harter was crazy.

I contend the Harter era was the most controversial in the history of Pac-12 basketball. That might strike you as presumptuous.

It isn’t. In seven seasons under Dick Harter, the Kamikaze Kids were all of these: Endearing. Frustrating. Likable. Paradoxical. Hot. Cold. Ambitious. Dispiriting. Industrious. Overachieving. Underachieving.

And always: Captivating. It’s doubtful that any program in conference history—including John Wooden’s dynasty at UCLA—ever elicited more polar reaction up and down the West Coast. If you loved the Ducks, you were willing to sleep outside Mac Court in a tent before it became fashionable to do that. If you hated them, you wanted NCAA enforcers to set up a satellite office in Eugene and hand down the death penalty.

One way or another, the Ducks got a rise out of everybody. They made a living diving for loose balls. They battered big men, happy to trade a foul for a foul. On occasion, they crossed the lines of fair play.

Harter’s 1975-76 team, with a pair of NBA first-round draft choices, committed 832 fouls, a school record that stands nearly a half-century later. The year before he got there, Oregon committed 494. Think about that.

In one rough game at Washington, Harter sent in off the bench Geoff Nelson, a 6-10 center. Ken Stringer, Harter’s first signee at Oregon, recalls of Nelson, People used to think Geoff was the dirtiest player on earth. Well, he wasn’t. He had no skills whatsoever.

Nelson played four minutes in that game and fouled out just before halftime, scoring two points. Harter fairly glowed afterward, saying, Geoff has never been as ready to play. The way he came through was half the story of the night.

No surprise, then, that several of the league’s coaches put the Ducks on blast. UCLA’s Wooden had the gravitas to let loose and did. The thin skin of Gene Bartow replaced him, and Bartow won a forever place in Oregon hearts by calling its fans deranged idiots.

Marv Harshman of Washington grumbled and groused. Ralph Miller of Oregon State, building his own stronghold, didn’t much like Oregon’s ways, but he seemed to know that any broadsides from 45 miles away would be counterproductive.

Howie Dallmar coached Stanford, and he wasn’t keen on the Ducks, either. But the feeling was mutual. Dallmar had coached Harter at the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’50s, and Harter, asked once what he had learned from Dallmar, is said to have replied, To do everything just the opposite.

It was a feverish, frenetic time. In the years immediately preceding Harter’s arrival in 1971, Oregon had been the scene of some of the nation’s most active anti-Vietnam War protests. There were actions against the ROTC program on campus; a sit-in at the administration building; tear gas launched at demonstrators by the National Guard; a bomb explosion at Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, an office/classroom building.

The ’70s would be more traditional at Oregon, exemplified no better than by the pomp (and lack of) that accompanied the football program. As the decade began, the school had scrubbed the marching band in favor of a small rock group at Autzen Stadium. Soon after, wiser heads thought better of the optics and replaced those bass-guitar riffs with a reborn marching band.

About the time the band returned, football went south. The respectable, entertaining teams of Jerry Frei gave way to 2-9 seasons and apathy through most of the ’70s. For the sports fan in Eugene, there would have been little else happening without Oregon basketball. The Portland Trail Blazers were born into six straight losing seasons before winning the NBA championship in 1977.

Into the breach stepped a 40-year-old University of Pennsylvania grad with a Philly accent so thick you could almost slice it with a meat cleaver. He would recruit nationwide, he would seek solid kids, and on the floor, Oregon would not be outworked. To say Dick Harter was hard-driving is to say Jeff Bezos is well-to-do.

What ensued was, in the parlance of the times, a happening.

Headquarters for the madness was a quirky, beloved arena, that, nearing the end of the 20th century, was the second-oldest campus gym in the country. With its pitched balconies above the floor, McArthur Court was often compared to famed old Boston Garden—except the Oregon facility actually opened a year earlier, in 1927. In fact, there was some poetry in the fact that Mac Court—the Pit, as it would come to be known—hosted its first game just 13 days after the opening of Philadelphia’s storied Palestra, where Harter had done some of his best work.

The Pit was an ivy-festooned structure across the street from a graveyard. Pervading it was the scent of popcorn, and somehow, a certain buoyancy, as if the place knew it was worthy of its reputation. It seated about 9,100—officially 10,500 after a 1975 renovation prompted by Harter’s success—but there were persistent murmurs that both figures were inflated, which only served to add to the mystique of the building.

Venture up a couple of flights of stairs and take the correct turn to the top, and you’d find pockets of little, opera-house-style seats. Far below, in the basement, were cramped locker rooms that visitors found overheated, and showers that they complained dispensed nothing but cold water.

Basketball heaven, in other words.

In Eugene, it was full-on, off-the-charts mania. A couple of years into Harter’s tenure, the Ducks began selling out. Oregon tickets were finding their way into divorce settlements. But it wasn’t enough just to see the games. McArthur Court would be filled at least half an hour before tipoff. You had to be there for warmups, to experience the rush of seeing the team run determinedly onto the floor and hear the pep band strike up Mighty Oregon.

With Harter, anything seemed possible, and not always in a good way. In a four-season stretch covering seven games, Harter’s teams went 4-3 against UCLA. Away from the floor, he did some jaw-droppingly ill-considered things that served to pour kerosene on the fire of the Harter-haters.

I think of the Ducks of that era as running hot—pleasing their adoring fans; making the Joe Romania Chevrolet scoreboard bounce up and down ominously on its chains at mid-court; figuratively (and sometimes literally) getting in the face of every other program in the conference; but perpetually only a breath away from some firestorm that would underscore the gulf between supporters and detractors.

Pondering that running-hot metaphor, a Duck guard of the early Harter years, Paul Halupa, said, We were in the red of the tachometer a lot.

Without Oregon, the Pac-8 was a relatively sleepy story line surrounding UCLA and its domination of college basketball. But the Ducks affected everything—coaches, players, media, fans. And, oh yes, officials. Over coffee decades later, Frank Bosone, a longtime official with Final Four experience, told me two years before his death in 2019, As many places as I’ve been, people would ask me, ‘What’s the toughest place to work?’ I said, ‘Oregon, first, second and third.’ There was no comparison.

An Oregon game, especially at Mac Court, carried a little more implication, a little more suspense, a little more juice. And sometimes that extended beyond the final horn.

For context, Bosone told a story on Mel Ross, who was then one of the league’s veteran officials. Ross was slightly on the portly side, had a round face, and tended to insinuate himself into a game. In his other life, he was an administrator at Cerritos College in southern California.

Ross was working a game at Oregon one night with Steve Wilson. In those days, officials parked behind Mac Court, which meant they had to exit through departing crowds onto University Street. And officials typically didn’t shower at the arena because, so spare were the amenities in the old barn, that would have put them in a shower with players.

Which meant officials leaving were timed up with the fans leaving the arena.

On this night, Wilson was driving his sports car with Ross riding shotgun. The crowd streaming along University Street blocked their exit, so Ross—perhaps channeling an official’s instincts—jumped out to spread his arms and block the pedestrians walking south.

Pretty soon, the crowd pushes into Mel, said Bosone. He turned around and popped a guy.

Now Ross and Wilson were back at the New Oregon motel on Franklin Boulevard, winding down with a couple of beers, when the phone rang. It was an assistant athletic director at Oregon.

Mel, we got a report you struck a spectator leaving the ball game, the caller said. I just wanted to ask you about it.

Fuck him, Ross replied. Fuck you. Fuck Oregon.

Ross slammed the phone down.

Just another night around the Kamikaze Kids.

It was at about the time Dick Harter took over at Oregon that its governor, the iconic Tom McCall, became renowned for his stance on limiting the availability of his state’s immense beauty to outsiders. It was tongue-in-cheek (wasn’t it?) when signs sprang up at Oregon borders: Thanks for visiting. Now go home. The campaign reflected a certain rugged individualism therein, maybe even a little clannishness about Oregonians.

That instinct evaporated, however, when it came to the fans of Harter’s Kamikaze Kids. He, after all, was a rank outsider, all of whose roots were developed three time zones east.

His recruiting focus was no less far-flung. Harter’s recruits were from Pennsylvania and Michigan and Illinois—sometimes, it seemed, to the exclusion of prospects close to home.

To the fans, it was all OK, because they were fans of Oregon no matter what; or because those people appreciated hard work; or perhaps because they became happily ensnared in a snowball rolling downhill. They reveled in the naysaying.

I’ve wondered: What would the Harter era have been like with Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook, with the public panting for any possible morsel of Oregon basketball? Alternatively, what would a Harter era have been like in 2019?

I don’t know that what went on is possible today, says Halupa. I don’t think it is, the whole of it.

In that era, in the days when Dick Harter rode herd, the news was mostly left to newspapers. Radio and television were there, sure, but they were mostly along for the ride, not disposed to enterprise or analysis.

The newspapers chronicled a program that was beyond provocative. It turned a medium-sized city on its ear, it stoked an absolutely roaring rivalry with Oregon State, and it shook West Coast basketball to attention.

The devil’s advocate in me argues that maybe the mania was really more muted than it seemed so long ago. Maybe the love was showered more grudgingly. Maybe the hatred was mere distaste. Maybe the fever that sizzled around the Oregon program, conquest and controversy, wasn’t really so remarkable. Maybe it’s just that we were young, too young to have it in perspective.

I don’t think so.

—1—

Penn

DICK HARTER’S LIFE, with all its various paradoxes and contradictions, began on October 14, 1930, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He was a second son born to Ella Glatfelter Harter and Charles A. Harter, nine years younger than his brother John.

Charles Harter taught science from 1918 to 1958 at The Hill School in Pottstown, a respected prep school whose alumni include Lamar Hunt, James Michener, Oliver Stone, William Proxmire and Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric. An enclave whose students would include Dick Harter was founded in 1851 and maintains a dress code today—coats and ties for the boys—and bills itself as the first family boarding school in the nation, where faculty members lived with their students.

A 1954 Hill News feature story on Charles Harter revealed him to be a man of many pursuits. Mr. Harter has an unusual philosophy about hobbies, in that he feels that since he is always working with boys, he ought to have as many different interests as possible, the writer explained. He has learned to fly, raised hunting falcons, collected stamps and coins, fished for tarpons, raised bees… and formed a sizeable tropical-fish collection. He currently is interested in work in the greenhouse, where he grows snapdragons and carnations.

Philadelphia would be the nexus of much of Dick Harter’s life, but there was also a prominent satellite in northern Vermont. In the 1920s, his parents purchased Songadeewin, a girls camp on Vermont’s Lake Willoughby. They were hands-on operators of the camp, and their elder son took it over in the 1970s after their deaths. Even as he coached Oregon a continent away, Dick Harter spent a good chunk of his summers at Songadeewin, and was eventually moved to build on property adjoining the camp. To this day, his widow Mari spends summers there.

Mari recalls her husband as having had the charmed childhood of all-time. But Jim Harter, recalling his father over lunch north of New York City, says, By and large, he was a critical person, as a personality. He had like a tough background growing up, where he maybe had a father who was very critical of him, who maybe favored his brother a little more than him. He would say that sometimes.

At Hill, between falcons and philatelics, Charles Harter also coached football, and it was in sports where his younger son prospered. Dick Harter captained the basketball team, played first and third base and co-captained in baseball and developed a keen interest in football.

From Hill, it was on to the University of North Carolina, where Harter hoped to play football. But after his father had a heart attack, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. There, he was part of an Eastern Intercollegiate League [precursor to the Ivy League] basketball championship team in 1953 as a sturdy, 6-foot-1, 190-pound guard-forward under Howie Dallmar. The night the Quakers thumped Harvard, 77-49, to win that title, Harter had two points and a foul but his cameo role didn’t seem to matter. In a photograph of a happy celebration, there’s Harter in the center, last row, wearing a broad smile.

Penn went on to play in the NCAA regionals in Chicago, losing to Notre Dame before a consolation victory against DePaul to complete a 22-5 season. Harter went scoreless in those games.

It was then on to the Marine Corps, two years that doubtless shaped Harter’s worldview of basketball—the toughness, the resolve, the notion that the core could grow stronger if the most resilient in a unit helped to prop up the most vulnerable against the fury of the leaders.

Six decades later, a center he coached at Oregon, Gary Nelson, would say: The way you survived was really pulling together and helping each other out. It was the inherent trust we developed. I can remember guys—I’ve done it too—grabbing guys by the arm to finish a running drill, literally dragging him so we didn’t have to do it again.

Harter returned to coach the Penn freshmen for a season, spent a couple of years at Germantown Academy outside Philadelphia, and then was hired in 1958 as an assistant coach at Penn by Jack McCloskey. Ironically, in the early 1970s, the two would find themselves in the same state on the opposite coast, separated by only 110 miles and attempting major salvage operations, Harter at Oregon and McCloskey in the early years of the Portland Trail Blazers.

Harter was a passionate and aggressive recruiter, and with his help, McCloskey had fashioned a perennial Ivy League contender by 1960. Six years later, in 1966, he broke through with Penn’s first Ivy League championship, when something strange happened that would alter the career courses of both Harter and McCloskey.

This was an era when Ivy League basketball had a much greater profile than decades later. Television exposure would eventually separate the rest of college basketball from the Ivies, and as the sport boomed, the disparity in admission requirements became more pronounced.

Meanwhile, in ’66, just a year after Bill Bradley had led Princeton to the Final Four, the Ivy League became embroiled in a dispute with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which had mandated that all student-athletes be required to maintain a minimum grade-point average of 1.6. It seems counterintuitive that the academics-minded Ivy League would fight that legislation, but it did, arguing that such matters ought to be left to institutions.

Penn’s administration decided not to allow the Quakers to attend the NCAA tournament. A 91-year-old, Alzheimer’s-afflicted McCloskey, interviewed in 2016 by the Pennsylvania Gazette, the school’s alumni magazine, said, I forget things. But I’ll never forget that.

McCloskey said the action caused him to resign, even without a job in hand. [He was hired immediately at Wake Forest.]

Just up the road at Rider College was the obvious choice to replace McCloskey. Dick Harter had left McCloskey’s staff only a year earlier for his first college head-coaching position and coached Rider to a 16-9 record.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that what ensued before Harter departed Penn were the most golden years in the school’s considerable basketball history.

First things first, however. Harter needed an aggressive, young assistant coach, and he found the perfect guy nearby. Richard Digger Phelps, just turning 25, had played at Rider in the early ’60s and now was back on campus getting a master’s degree. One of his mentors was Tom Petroff, an assistant basketball coach who would gain greater renown as a baseball coach. He urged Harter to hire Phelps, and Harter did.

One can only imagine the persuasive powers of the two master recruiters. He turned me loose on the road recruiting, Phelps recalled from his home in South Bend, Indiana.

Phelps had a knack for which buttons to push. He had a vise-grip memory and went with the flow. He was recruiting a big man, Jim Wolf of Parma Heights, Ohio, when he realized Wolf thought he was working for Penn State.

Oh yeah, Phelps assured him breezily. We got a good football team.

Half a century later, Phelps can still recite the house numbers for recruits like future NBA forward Corky Calhoun—on New York Street, Waukegan, Illinois; and Jim Haney, on McArthur Drive, Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

Recalling Harter’s role in recruiting, Phelps says, I’d line the kids up, and he was great at making the sale in the home visit. Harter was a great recruiter.

Phelps coached the freshmen, who were ineligible then, indoctrinating them into the ways of the program. As he puts it, I would teach them defense, which was a combination of Bob Knight and Dick Harter.

The regime didn’t start