March 8, 1972 was the night all hell broke loose. The
Missouri State Class L (Large) boys’ high school basketball tournament played
two quarterfinal games that fateful evening on opposite sides of the state. In
the immediate aftermath of both, racial strife exploded into violence on a
stage intended to showcase a simple game between mere teenagers.
The stakes were high. The winners would, in 48 hours, play in the state final four tournament in Columbia, MO, a state title to the last team standing. The losers, two very good teams, would see their seasons end in sudden and dramatic disappointment. St. Louis’ Kiel Auditorium saw St. Louis Northwest High
School play Kirkwood High School and the campus fieldhouse at St. Louis’ Kiel Auditorium saw St. Louis Northwest High
School play Kirkwood High School and the campus fieldhouse at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville hosted the Kansas City Central High School vs. Raytown South High School matchup.
At each venue the schedule featured one suburban predominantly white school vs one inner-city black team, all cheered on by standing room only crowds, equally represented along racial lines. The assigned four officials for the two games were all four white. The combined 1972 season records entering play for the four were a gaudy 113 wins and 11 losses. The four head coaches, two white and two black, would combine over their careers to win 3,368 games and log 182 years of total head coaching experience - Mt. Rushmore type numbers.
The coaches - Jack Bush at Kansas City Central, Denver Miller of Kirkwood, Bud Lathrop at Raytown South and Jody Bailey of Northwest - were as star-studded as their team’s records. It was truly a fraternal gathering of coaching giants. For all four, coaching was a life-long calling. Each, with no hesitation, had answered the siren's song. Each was known as a tenacious taskmaster with a huge and gregarious personality that often overshadowed the talent of their players. I asked Coach Bush, the only survivor of the quartet, if he is a member of the hall of fame? “Which one,” he responds, without a hint of boastfulness. “I am in I know three, maybe four. You will have to ask my wife. She would know.”
With head coaching careers that ran the range of 43-55 years, basketball fans in the state of Missouri had never since seen, and possibly never will again see, such an iconic group brought together for one night of fierce competition. The four head coaches, two white and two black, would combine over their careers to win 3,368 games and log 182 years of total head coaching experience - Mt. Rushmore type numbers.
The changes both in basketball and society that had taken place during the careers of the four are truly head-spinning. From Denver Miller’s first year on the Kirkwood bench, 1932, to Raytown South’s Bud Lathrop’s retirement in 2006 - 74 years - the game of basketball had evolved 180 degrees from the sport’s Jurassic Era of the 1930s and 40s. Major rule changes, racial integration, the development of superior athletes, a faster style of play (often above the rim), the exploding popularity of the game and the resulting pressure to win it hatched; even the size, the weight and the shape of the ball itself, all radically changed. The game the four had learned first as players and then as young coaches in poorly lit and tiny Great Depression era band box gyms was by 1972 unrecognizable.
Coaches that have long careers are a lot like rivers. A young river flows fast and runs deep, cutting through whatever stands in its way. As a river ages it tends to take a path of least resistance, meandering, more comfortable with a new, less resistant approach. The banks recede, becoming shallower, branching off to improve flow and to cover more area. These four legendary coaches had one common thread that bound them together in their successful and long careers - all had evolved and adapted with the changing times and thus, continued to win. For all four, it was a necessary choice to stay current. But, change for a man with deep set convictions and beliefs is hard, as Lathrop would learn. The Raytown South coach was the only one of the four that did not depart his school on good terms and totally of his own free will.
Despite their successes on the state’s hardwoods, when these four legendary coaches were asked over the years by reporters what they remember most about their decades of toil, each had the same knee-jerk response: "The losses." Northwest’s Jody Bailey once said, “after all these years, I'm just happy that it's still big news when we lose." Pride is a must to remain on top. Challenge complements pride, achievement harmonizes with it.
All four are offspring of an era that history has canonized as the “Greatest Generation.” Today, its members are almost all gone. A young 18-year-old sailor stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the definitive day of infamy for their time, is now an old man approaching his 95th birthday. They endured an upbringing in the throes of the Great Depression and then stared down the great evil of the Axis powers in World War II. When faced with imminent peril; all layers of their complex society pulled together as one. In doing so, this “Greatest Generation,” saved the world.
Just as surely as The St. Louis Cardinals will pack Busch Stadium for a summer weekend series with the hated Chicago Cubs, each of the four coaches would be courted over the years for jobs on a bigger stage; and just as sure as one’s taste buds will salivate to the succulent aroma of a melt in your mouth T-Bone steak from the KC Stockyards, each coach would decline all offers graciously. Each had found the perfect coaching fit and had the wisdom to embrace it.
Bud Lathrop Raytown South High School
A former player told me, “I have seen him smile, but I have never heard him laugh.” Enjoying one’s job is not the same as being happy. Bud Lathrop was animated, adamant and antagonistic, and as a few would claim at the end, antiquated, but never was he accused of being dispassionate. To revert to 1972 lingo, Lathrop never sold wolf tickets. With Bud, a shot between the eyes was always preferable to a tap on the shoulder. “Bud just cared so darn much, maybe sometimes too much,” his widow Gay states.
Bud Lathrop at Raytown South High School, in 1972, was the hot young coach whose name would be thrown into the mix by the media anytime a good coaching job in the state would open. At a young age of 35, he had already won two state titles. He was recognized as smart and driven. He would coach the last 45 years of his 48-year career at Raytown South.
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| Bud Lathrop |
Lathrop began his coaching career in 1958 with two seasons in Mound City, MO, followed by one season in Fulton, MO. In 1961, he returned to his fast-growing hometown of Raytown to start the program at newly created and built Raytown South High School. In 1964, for the first time, the Cardinals fielded a varsity team. Lathrop was the first and only head boys’ basketball coach the school employed until his retirement in 2006. His Cardinals won an incredible 35 conference titles and four state championships. Lathrop won 955 games in his coaching career, still, the most wins of any boys’ basketball coach in the state. During his near half century of service at the suburban school, Lathrop saw the make up of the student body transformed from all white to mostly black. To his credit, Lathrop made a seamless cultural transition. His first two state titlists, 1970 and 1972, employed an all-white lineup, his last, in 1990, one with a majority black roster.
His widowed wife Gay recalls her husband’s ability to work with a variety of athletes. “He treated them all as individuals. Bud could be very vocal and very demanding, but his players knew his passion was for them to grow as men. He's proud. He's the one who was always in charge. That was always very important to him. Bud’s critics were those who didn’t know him (well), didn’t understand his tough appearance. But you never heard his players be critical of him, especially after they graduated and became men. Over the years, I can’t tell you the number of former players who would stop by, sometimes for advice, sometimes just to catch up, but it is a lot. They loved him as a coach and then as a man. That was very important (to him), how his players felt about him, everybody else, didn’t matter, but, his players, they were his life’s work.”
Terry Griggs played for Lathrop at South, graduating in 1996. Upon hearing of the coach’s 2018 passing, the former point guard gave an emotional testament to the impact on his life by the long-time coach. “He was a father to me when things were falling apart for me at home. He is the reason I made it through high school. He was a special man and I loved him dearly.” Several months before Lathrop’s death, Griggs brought his own children to meet the man that had been so instrumental in their father’s life. “He treated them like they were his own. That is just the kind of man he was.”
Today, get a group of local KC high school coaches, both present and past, together and raise the question of who is/was the area’s most ornery coach ever, and then throw in a question about “tough.” Without dissent Lathrop’s name will fly from every set of lips in the room. They will also acknowledge that no one today would be allowed by school administrators the free reign to discipline like Lathrop did in his early days at Raytown South. So, ask the group how would some of the today’s most feared coaches stack up to Bud? Please, they would say in mocking harmony. In the lingo of a horse race, a favorite Lathrop past time: Bud would leave big bad Bob Knight standing at the gate. Bob Huggins and his constant bellowing would fail to win, place or show and an irritated head shaking Coach K would be shrugged off the main track and relegated to a morning claiming race. When it came to “my way or the highway” draconian dictatorship coaching, the triple crown winner for 45 years was stabled at Raytown South High.
Bobby Hall was the point guard who led Lathrop’s 1972 team to the state championship. He recalls vividly that playing for Lathrop was not easy. “He motived a lot of the time by challenging you and he was not subtle in the way he did it. He just never let up. Sometimes it could wear on you, break you down. But, anyone who played for Coach never will be called an underachiever. He had a way of getting the absolute best from every player.”
The love-hate relationship, which Hall describes, between player and coach is a complex one. Hall says it took time to accept the demanding style of his old coach. Or, I ask, did you just finally accept the fact that he could be a real asshole? Hall laughed. “I had too much respect in me to ever think that way.”
A coach must enforce the suppression of individuality for the sake of the team. The submissive role of the player is to sacrifice, to enable each teammate to flourish through the collective success of the group as a whole. Coach Lathrop, in his prime, was not about winning, but about maximizing production through maximizing effort. “When I played for Coach Lathrop,” Hall states, “most of the time I did not enjoy the experience, but I will never regret it.”
Lathrop was viewed by the local basketball community as a larger than life figure, pacing up and down the sidelines like a caged animal, everyone in the gym knowing exactly his view of the game at hand. You hear about guys who are willing to die on the basketball court, Bud Lathrop really would have died on the basketball court. He had a gift for transferring his passion for the game to his players. And the Cardinals won the same way year after year. The Bud Lathrop way. South would out guard you, out board you and out prepare you. Lathrop’s teams were fundamental, never flashy. They played a tough and intimidating brand of basketball - old-fashioned basketball - and for 45 years there was always Lathrop, the hometown kid made good, stalking the sideline like a man possessed.
“He was respected by the people who really mattered to him,” says his oldest of two sons and former player, Lance. His players for sure, but also his relationship with his fellow coaches and their professional opinion of him also mattered. “He and Coach Bush at Central were two of the most competitive people you will ever see,” says Lance. “They had some real emotional battles over the years. But the respect they had for each other was genuine. A few months before dad died, and he was not in good shape by then, there was a dedication to him at the school and Coach Bush came. He was 93 years old, the effort he made to come see Dad one last time says all you need to know about the respect the two had for each other.”
In 1990, in his 32nd year of coaching and the age of 53, Lathrop went on a wild rollercoaster ride of a season. His team was loaded with talent, arguably the most in the history of the storied program, highlighted by two 6’9” “Twin Towers,” Chris Lindley and Jevon Crudup. Lindley had signed to play at the University of Kansas and Crudup was headed to the University of Missouri. In January, with the Cardinals blowing away the opposition and ranked as high as fifth in the nation’s top 25 polls, tragedy struck. A simple decision to involve himself with mischievous behavior in a local railroad yard resulted in Lindley’s right foot being crushed under the weight of a railroad car’s wheels. The injury was so severe the young star’s foot had to be amputated. In an instant, his basketball career, and Lindley at the time thought his life, were cruelly snuffed out.
Mrs. Lathrop says the day of the accident was her birthday. “We had been out to eat and had come home. We were asleep when we got a phone call at 1:00 am. At first, we thought the kids had been in a car hit by a train. When we got to the hospital we found out it had been kids just doing something dumb. We sat there and the talk was back and forth with the family and the doctors about how to treat Chris. His family did not want to accept it but finally they agreed the only option was a career ending amputation. It was just horrible.”
Coach Lathrop had the team over to his house the next day. He told the assembled players they needed to dedicate the remainder of the season to their fallen teammate. Jevon Crudup told the shocked group of teen boys to man up. “You guys just keep doing what you been doing. I will pick up Chris and still do mine. We will be fine.”
Crudup went on to a star-studded collegiate career in Columbia, MO. The University of Kansas honored Lindley’s scholarship, but the basketball stardom he felt destined for in Lawrence, KS was over before it began. Bud Lathrop was crushed. He spent every minute that first month, when not in the gym with his team, in Lindley’s hospital room.
The Cardinals were so deep and talented that even with the loss of one of the best two players in Kansas City, they rolled through the season undefeated, blasting St. Louis DeSmet Jesuit 66-47 in the state title game. The Cardinals finished the season with a mark of 31-0. Associates said that spring there was little joy in Lathrop’s life. Even an undefeated state championship season couldn’t shake the normally hyper-competitive coachs’ malaise. Friends and family thought at age 52 he might retire. Instead, his motivation to coach came back and he stayed for 16 more championship years.
Lindley, with his new prosthetic leg, was in the team’s postseason championship picture. He went on to earn a degree from the University of Kansas. Lindley built a good career as a salesman of prosthetic medical devices. At age 40, Chris Lindley died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
Lathrop also had a warm side few saw. A favorite local story was the night late in his career when the PA system in the Bud Lathrop gymnasium malfunctioned just as the pre-game national anthem was set to play. The officials had beckoned the teams onto the floor for the game-starting jump ball when Lathrop walked up to the scorer’s table and grabbed the courtside microphone. He began to sing the national anthem, a cappella. Soon, every fan in the gym joined in. Lathrop’s spontaneous move and the reaction of the crowd was so genuine, those who saw it will never forget it. One witness said, “it gave me chills back then and it still does to this day."
A local reporter once described Lathrop as a combination of John Wayne, John Wooden and John Kennedy all rolled into one heroic package. Another local media member was with Lathrop one early school day morning when the coach drove over to a student’s house to transport the young man to a before school dentist appointment. The student was not even one of Lathrop’s players, just a kid who needed a ride to the dentist.
It was well known within Raytown basketball circles that Cardinal players were safer on the game floor than in the halftime locker room or the practice gym. In private with his players, the irascible Lathrop was at his antagonistic and profane best, his scoldings peeling paint off the locker room wall, if needed. Ironically, in the end, the practice gym would be the backdrop for setting in motion the actions that would lead to an inglorious end to Lathrop’s glorious Raytown South career, a divorce that left raw and hurt feelings all around.
Lathrop was the youngest of the four coaches of the games of March 8, 1972 and the final to leave the profession. His last four years were full of controversy, the respect and appreciation between the coach and his bosses diminishing steadily each year. Anyone with a good eye would have seen the storm forming on the horizon. In 2002, Lathrop was suspended for one week for using corporal punishment -paddling his players in practice - for such negative transactions as missing a free throw. A visiting newspaper reporter witnessed the paddling and wrote about it in a local newspaper. Lathrop was defensive when the administration demanded he halt the corporal punishment and made no apologies for a “reinforcement” tactic he had used since he began his tenure at South. Lathrop claimed his players had never complained about the “swats.” Lathrop explained to the community that the paddle was a teaching technique to ensure “discipline” and not meant to cause physical pain.
Around the time of Lathrop’s first suspension, his assistant coach, Jevon Crudup, also ran afoul of the school administration. Crudup was the star player on South’s 1990 state championship team. After four outstanding years as a player for Coach Norm Stewart at the University of Missouri, Crudup returned to his hometown to assist his former high school coach. Crudup had been labeled by many as Lathrop’s heir apparent, when – and if - Lathrop ever retired. Crudup was fired after a player’s parent brought to the school’s principal an audio tape recording, made in secret, of a profanity laced tirade Crudup had launched after a game at his junior varsity team. Crudup sued the school district on the grounds his dismissal was race related. A jury awarded him $300,000. The days of Bud Lathrop doing it his way were numbered.
Still, Lathrop continued to win. His 2005 team went to the state final four. However, the image of a nearly 70-year-old white coach using a paddle on a team of all black players as a way to maintain “discipline” is not an image any urban public school in the 21st century wants to be associated with. The coach survived “Paddlegate” but he was not unscathed by the incident. His refusal to change his ways was a sign of the hubris that would lead in a few years to a nasty separation of a coach and a school he had dedicated his life to.
In 2005, Lathrop again drew the ire of the Raytown South school administrators and another one-week suspension for the salty and sometimes profane language he would use with his players. By 2006, Bud had had enough. Although his teams were still consistently ranked in the state’s top 10, the veteran coach felt disrespected and unappreciated in a school that once had revered him. Emotionally worn out by what he viewed as micro-management by the front office of the school’s long-time flagship and most respected program, Lathrop abruptly and unexpectedly resigned. He refused to endure what he felt was coming; the indignity of overseeing the decay of the dynasty he had over 40 years single handedly built at South. He was 69 years old and his teams were still ultra-successful on the gym scoreboard. But it was a different world. Obstinate to the bitter end, it was a sad departure for the proud and principled coach. His final Raytown South team checked out with a record of 23-4. Bud Lathrop is one coach who can truly say he left a program in stronger shape than when he found it.
Lathrop’s players, from the crew cut all white teams he began with at South in 1961 to the hip-hop all black teams he coached at the end in 2006, will testify there is no question Lathrop cared for his players. He sent over 200 to college on a basketball scholarship, a rate of almost four for each graduating class over his 46-year Raytown South career. In his last 44 years, Lathrop never had a losing team. Scared of the coach-maybe. Losing-never. When the end was near and his teams were now all black, Lathrop never changed. He still walked the hallways of South High looking people in the eyes, smiling and teasing with easy assurance, just like had done since 1961, bombastic to the bitter end.
“When you go out in life, whether you are on the police force or a fireman, you probably are going to have to be part of a team. If you play as a team, you’ve got a chance,” Lathrop said, in 2014, when asked what he felt was the most important lesson he left with his players. “You have to do what you feel and the players will feel that way, too. It’s doing the little things, having the courage to do them and don’t worry about what (the) fans might think.”
Lathrop’s widow, Gay, has meticulous scrapbooks she religiously kept during her husband’s career. Between her and her son, they are walking archives of the history of Bud Lathrop and the Raytown South Cardinals basketball program. “Bud just loved it,” she remembered. “He loved all parts of being a coach. He was so invested in his players and not just the players on a current team, but all those boys who graduated. It just kept him so energized, so young. I used to tell people I was married to Peter Pan.”
For 58-year-old son Lance, Raytown South basketball is the only childhood memory he has of his dad. “He was so successful with winning teams year after year, but that is not why he was so respected. Basketball people knew him as a straight up guy. He put on no pretenses. He had rules and he had expectations and you lived up to them. No exceptions on his team.”
The pressure on a coach’s son can be heavy. When you are Bud Lathrop’s son it can become unbearable. Intense is the dynamics of a father/son combined coach/player relationship . The drama is played out in public with a scoreboard to moderate and judicate all conflict. “In 1977,” Lance remembers, “we were expected to have a great team. Everybody around here had us written in as state champs before the season even started. We opened in a tournament and Oak Park beat us. People around here acted like the world had ended. I shot 3 for 16 that night and I told Dad I was done.”
When your coach is also your dad, you lose to conflict of interest two of the support systems you have as a player – your coach and your dad. Dad had a lot heaped upon when his son had a bad game. Lance quit the team, turned in his uniform. “It was not worth it, or so I thought,” he says today. “After two days I came back. We went on to win the state championship.”
Gay remembers the double whammy years of her late husband filling the dual roles of coach’s wife and player’s mother. “The two days of Lance quitting the team were pretty tense around our house. But it all worked out well and they won the state championship. My younger son, Brad, was five years behind Lance. Brad was not a real good player, but he loved to play. He was never a starter and some games might not play at all. With Bud, the best kids played. Didn’t matter if you were the kid’s dad, you were a coach first. I remember only one time my role as a parent conflicted with my role as Bud’s wife. One game we were winning really big and everyone had been in the game accept Brad, he just sat on the end of the bench. To be honest, I think Bud forgot about him. I remember saying to myself, ‘get my kid in the game.’ Finally, he put Brad in. Of course, I never said anything to Bud about it. He was the coach.”
“His kids thrived under him,” Lance remembers. “He had (building) principals for 40 years that left him alone, knew what he was doing was working and let him do what he felt was best. The last six years (of his tenure), a new principal came in and it was not a good relationship.”
The rift was set in stone, according to Lance, when the new principal told Lathrop he worried too much about winning. “Oh my,” says the younger Lathrop. “That was the ultimate insult to Dad. It is like telling George Washington it doesn’t matter who wins the Revolutionary war with England, ‘let’s just all be nice and get along.’ After that, Dad had no respect for the man. He was done. At the end, people say he stayed too long, that he lost the players. But that is not true. The administrators at the end, when the going got tough, they lost their guts. The kids never abandoned Dad, but in the end, the school did.”
Lathrop was pugnacious, for sure, perhaps mean, quick-tempered at best. But, “Bud just loved his kids,” Mrs. Lathrop repeats. “For two years, before he got too sick, he coached a team at a small Christian school. They did really well. He was 80 years old but still related so well to the kids. He was still fiery, he never lost that.”
The Lathrops met in their hometown of Raytown. “I was a freshman in high school when Bud was a senior,” Mrs. Lathrop says. “He says he never noticed me, but I sure did him. It was the first year that Raytown made it to the state tournament, 1954, and Bud was the star player. He went to William Jewell College and when I was a junior (in high school) I had a role in the high school play and Bud came to see the play with another girl for his date. Bud liked to tell the story that he told a friend that night, ‘I am going to marry that girl,’ meaning me. I still see him everywhere in this house. I miss him terrible. He was a great man.”
Despite his son’s understandable lingering bitterness to the acrimonious separation of the Hall of Fame coach and the school he devoted a huge portion of his life to, perhaps Lathrop did stay too long. In some areas of his professional life he was flexible and open minded, in others, not so much so. When it came to his methods, he could stubbornly refuse to adjust to the changing times. He expected the school administration to adjust to him and his time-tested ways and it just does not work that way. Bud Lathrop came up in the good old days when coaches were never confused with ministers. The idea wasn't to save all of them, just the ones who wanted to be saved. Lathrop’s method was to eliminate the weak and then motivate the survivors and with the pragmatic coach, a 38-inch vertical didn’t hurt your chances for basketball salvation.
A coach in the 1960’s was not a social worker. If he cared about a player, he would never let up. If he quit pushing, then a player should be concerned because it meant he no longer cared. The loyalty went unsaid – but, to both player and coach, it was palpable. That was the stoic way men were conditioned in Bud Lathrop’s time, and Bud was a product of his time.
“In the early years,” his wife says, “the kids did not need Bud in the ways they did later. Most kids had a strong two parent family, when we first started. Over the years that changed, dads were just not in many of Bud’s players lives. It was a big change (from the 1960’s). He became more of a father figure (in the later years). I could always tell from his tone when he was on the phone with a mother or a grandmother. He could really woo them. The moms and the grandmothers loved him and would back up the rules he set down. That was really true in the later years when his teams had all black boys. And that was a huge help in molding his players behaviors and attitudes, having that support at home.”
In the spring of 2018, when it was obvious that kidney failure and heart disease were about to get the best of the old coach, his former players raised money to cast a bust of Lathrop. It is now on display in the lobby of the school’s Bud Lathrop Gymnasium, located on Bud Lathrop Drive. Two hundred-fifty admirers came to a summer dedication unveiling ceremony to honor the man and his career. Lathrop had vowed, after the bitter split from the school back in 2006, that he would never again set foot in Raytown South High School. It was good for everyone that Lathrop had softened his “never going back” stance. Now, Lathrop could hear one more time the round of cheers in the building he had labored so hard and so long in. Always the combatant, the fencer had finally now, on his day of honor, laid down his foil. He allowed the waves of praise heaped upon him to penetrate his armor in a way friends and family had never seen. It went unsaid, but all there knew it would be the last public chance to tell the dying coach what he meant to them, how he had impacted their lives. Years of emotion that day finally flowed free.
The frail Lathrop stood and took to the microphone to address the crowd. He spoke from the heart. "Life goes by so fast. Seems like only yesterday I was 30. I'm telling you this: Have fun. Go do the things you'd like to do. Because life is so short. When you're younger, you don't realize it. But most of the time I was doing the thing that I liked."
His son remembers how touched the entire family was with the outpouring of appreciation and love shown that day. “I thought we would have a good crowd, and we did, but the emotion that poured out that day just had such an effect on Dad. He was really happy that day.”
It was the game icing free throw of a hard-fought game; a last win for Bud Lathrop. After the unveiling, one former player related the important role his old coach had continued to play in his life. “I don’t call Coach to talk. I call to listen.”
Bud Lathrop died in October 2018, at the age 82.
Jody Bailey Northwest High School
He was, Jody Bailey once said of himself, a shy and quiet child. Athletics, as it has many young black men, gave him a way to articulate his ambition, a longing for success that burned inside him like a roaring furnace.
Bailey began his high school coaching career in 1942 under the restraints of Jim Crow. He was a 1933 graduate of St. Louis Vashon High School. Fifty years later, when he retired in 1983, he left as an area coaching legend. Over a 42 year coaching career, Bailey compiled an overall record of 824 wins and 198 losses.
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| Jody Bailey |
Bailey served as the head coach of three St. Louis Public High League programs: Vashon, O’Fallon Tech and Northwest. A standout athlete himself at Vashon in the 1930’s, Bailey began his coaching career at his alma mater, leading the Vashon Wolverines to the Missouri Negro Interscholastic Athletic Association state championship in the years of 1944, 1947, 1948 and 1949.
One of his star players on three of his state winning teams at Vashon was Elson Howard who would go on to a distinguished major league baseball career with the New York Yankees. In 1948, upon graduating from Vashon, Howard had college football scholarship offers from Big 10 members Illinois, Michigan, and Michigan State. He declined the gridiron’s allure of a desegregated life to follow his baseball dreams and inked a $500 a month contract with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League.
Howard would be a trailblazer in the desegregation of major league baseball. The mild-mannered Howard was in many ways a personality clone of his coach at Vashon, Jody Bailey. The coach commented over the years the pride he felt for the major role his protégé played in bringing about equality in baseball, the national past time. Black baseball players of the post-war integration of the sport greased the wheels of acceptance by the majority of white fans. It was a major and symbolic advancement in the struggle for civil rights.
In 1950, while in the Negro League, Howard roomed with future Hall of Famer Ernie Banks. Howard was the first black to play for the Yankees, finally making their opening day’s roster in 1955. In 1963, he was the runaway choice for the American League’s Most Valuable Player, the first black player to earn the honor. Howard was recognized for his high baseball IQ and his ability as a catcher to handle young pitchers.
In the middle of the 1967 season, Howard was traded to the Boston Red Sox. In his last appearance as a Bo Sox, in the 5th game of the World Series and facing his hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, Howard drove in the two winning runs with a clutch late game pinch hit single.
After his retirement in 1968, Howard became a coach with the Yankees, the first black to hold a coaching position in Major League baseball. Many thought he would become the first black manager when the Yankees had an opening in 1978. Volatile Yankee owner George Steinbrenner changed managers as often as he did his socks. The owner reportedly said he would have hired Howard as skipper for the Bronx Boomers, but he did not want to be the first owner to fire a black manager. In 1979, Howard developed a rare heart condition and his health declined rapidly. He died in 1980 at the age of 51. Famous New York Times columnist Red Smith wrote, "The Yankees' organization lost more class on the weekend than George Steinbrenner could buy in 10 years.”
In the 1960’s, at McKinley High, Bailey mentored future University of Kanas All-American and Boston Celtic All-Pro Jo Jo White.
Over his long career Bailey coached many outstanding players in addition to Howard and White. Any short list of the best talents to pass through the St. Louis Public League has to include Stanley Woods, Ron Williams, Vince Smith, Hercle Ivy, Reuben Shelton and Robert Ursery, all who played Division I basketball after learning the game from the soft-spoken Bailey.
Stanley Woods is today not as well-known as many of Bailey’s other stars, but he is legendary amongst the true longtime followers of basketball in the St. Louis Public High League. More than 50 years since he played his last game for a school that no longer exists, the legend of Stanley Woods still blows through the forgotten and neglected city playgrounds around North St. Louis. And it lurks still at PHL gatherings where the mention of his name will make the eyes of fans old enough to remember light up like men who once saw the same UFO.
The rail thin 6’7”, 175 pounder played for Bailey at O’Fallon Tech, graduating in 1966. Some will argue profusely that he is the most exciting and entertaining player the PHL ever produced. Woods had the rim-rocking vertical jump of Julius Erving, the wingspan of Connie Hawkins and the physique and shooting range of George Gervin. Think of it; the Doc, the Hawk and the Ice Man - all wrapped into one nondescript appearing and soft-spoken teenager. His flair and athleticism brought the huge crowds that followed the PHL in the mid 1960’s to their feet. Coach Bailey said that when Woods played, “he packed the fans to the rafters.”
Woods was a perfect eccentric fit for the non-conformity era of the 60’s. He would often warmup for a game in his stocking feet with his Converse canvas sneakers setting on the team bench. No one knew why, it was just his way, said Coach Bailey. For a coach who derided any attention-grabbing individual behavior, Bailey made an exception for Woods, an acknowledgement from the wise coach that Stanley marched to his own beat and to temper his unorthodox ways would be to harness his talent, like a seatbelt for Superman. When heroism was needed, Woods would retire to his phone booth, change into his superhero cape and, now unharnessed, slay all who would oppose him on the basketball court. All who saw him agree, Stanley Woods was abundantly talented.
There is, however, a very fine line between style and distraction. The slender and bespectacled Woods didn’t have a threatening bone in his body and never crossed that line. He had no basketball enemies. Even the fiercest competitors in the PHL respected Woods to the point of a head shaking admiration of what he could do with a basketball in his enormous hands. When on the court, Woods did whatever his team and Coach Bailey needed at that time; and more importantly, he did it with style.
George Simmons coached in the PHL for 40 plus years. He is one of the top elder statesman of the city athletic scene. He was a high school classmate of Woods at Gateway Tech. “He was a big tall kid, but man was he skinny,” Simmons reminisces. He tells me that all the stories I am hearing are true. “Best there was. He just was a different kind of guy. See him around school, you never thought of him as a star. But man, could he jump. He was ahead of his time. Best dang player in the city.”
One long time PHL fan offered, when asked about Woods, “he was a great talent but don’t know what happened to him after he left town. Didn’t last long at KU. I know he came back here, which was probably a mistake. He had a lot of street in him. Seems like I heard a long time ago he was dead. Could be. Not many guys left now who saw him play or would even know his name. Too bad. The man could do it.”
Strange as it may seem today, St. Louis high schools at the time held two graduations, one in January and one in June. It was common for high school basketball players to graduate at the end of the first semester of the school year, normally in late January, and not be eligible for the post season playoffs. Future Boston Celtic Jo Jo White graduated in January and thus missed the regionals for Bailey’s 1964’s team at McKinley. Woods was on the same educational track at O’Fallon Tech, his last game to be played at the end of January, 1966. Two other starters for O’Fallon Tech would also graduate that mid-season.
Woods had accepted a scholarship from the University of Kansas and would join the Jayhawk squad at mid-term, his roommate would be White. But first was a showdown with Vashon. Both teams were undefeated and tied for the PHL top spot. Having graduated from high school the day before, Woods put on a farewell show for the packed Tech gymnasium, entertaining the Saturday afternoon matinee gathering with 36 points. Immediately after the game, Woods was rushed to the airport and whisked away on a late-night flight to Lawrence, KS and the world of Division I college basketball. His stay at the University of Kansas was short lived.
In 1969, a Stanley Woods, age 20, was arrested in St. Louis for shooting a 19-year-old man in the back. The two had been in conflict over a girl. The shooter’s occupation was listed as a student at Forest Park Community College. Is this Stanley Woods the former high school basketball star? The documentation is insufficient to know. In 1970, Stanley Woods, the basketball player, resurfaced in St. Louis at the city’s teacher’s college, Harris-Stowe, and for a short tenure was a member of its basketball team. The trail then grows cold, all attempts in finding a documented summation of his life since 1970 futile.
Woods has faded into obscurity, his legacy to remain in the shadows, his story passing mostly today by word of mouth. As the years have passed, Woods attained amongst PHL aficionados an almost mythical stature, a ghostly presence cloaked in anonymity. What Woods left behind were the memories of those who saw him in his short career. His play was pure, clean and powerful. Woods was respected across neighborhood boundaries. But he squandered the gift. And yet, those who saw him play knew he was one of the best to ever come out of the St. Louis Public High League. Maybe, when all is said and done, the best.
With little fanfare or recognition, Jody Bailey’s Vashon teams dominated the segregated era. Much of the colorful play of segregated black high school basketball in the state of Missouri received scant coverage in the white newspapers of the day. The general public paid little heed to the talent in the segregated ILL-MO Interscholastic League (MNAA), conference for the all-black schools of eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois. The state’s black high schools’ athletic programs were organized and run by the Missouri Negro Athletic Association (MNAA). In the 1940’s, Nashville, TN held a national tournament for each state’s black champions. Bailey and his Vashon Wolverines finished third in the nation in both 1947 and 1948.
Wendell “Blinkey” Hill and James “Sausage” Martin, along with Howard, were some of the stars who made Vashon a Depression and pre-World War II era mini-dynasty. Brothers Earl and Robert Beeks spearheaded the 1944 and 1945 Vashon championship teams. “Jody was as good as they came,” said Earl Beeks. “He knew the game and his players would jump through hoops for him.”
How would the Vashon teams of the era have fared against all-white Beaumont and Cleveland, two St. Louis Public High teams who won multiple “white only” state titles in the 1940’s? Due to the toxic fumes of racial intolerance swirling all around St. Louis culture of the day, we will never know. After the 1949 season, the St. Louis black newspaper, the Argus, asked Vashon star Earl Beeks the hotly debated topic of the day, “could you have beaten the white schools?” He answered the hypothetical question the only way he could, “who knows.” Sadly, that is the answer for all time. “We would have liked the chance,” Beeks said. “But we never got it. We had a lot of big boys back then and we think we could have done well.”
The early years of Bailey’s coaching successes were played out behind a drawn curtain to history, but it was lifting and the inevitable desegregation of America’s schoolboy athletics was coming. White fans of the area would witness soon the coaching talent of Jody Bailey. When opportunity did finally come, Bailey had his teams ready.
In the late 1950’s, Missouri public schools were forced by federal law to integrate and the Missouri State High School Activities Association had no choice but to follow suit. Beginning in 1956, the state tournament was now open to all schools, regardless of race. Bailey and his 1963 Vashon team became the first all-black PHL team to win a regional title. In 1968, now at St. Louis’ O’Fallon Tech, Bailey guided the Hornets to a state title, the first of many all-black PHL teams to win top state honors. To show its appreciation for Bailey’s team’s historic accomplishment, in the spring of 1968 and two months after hoisting the state championship trophy, the St. Louis Public School Board voted to drop the athletic programs at O’Fallon Tech. Bailey moved to Northwest High School as the Blue Devils head coach.
Bailey immediately led the Blue Devils to a regional title. He stayed at Northwest until 1983, when he retired at age 68. For years, well into his 80’s, he helped run the Jody Bailey League, a weekly off-season training opportunity that attracted the area’s top talent, both white and black, from throughout the St. Louis area to the inner-city gymnasium of Vashon High School. His namesake Saturday morning league was widely praised by both whites and blacks as one of the few programs that brought white and black St. Louis area basketball players together in an environment that fostered both basketball skills and racial understanding.
Former players remember Bailey as a dignified and morally upright man. What made him extraordinary were his ordinary values. As a player, he worked hard to earn a college scholarship and as a coach he always gave something back to the game. Whether he was teaching his players in the 40’s how to navigate Jim Crow or in the 70’s turning a raw kid named Hercle, who could not even make the JV team as a freshman, into the best high school player in the whole city of St. Louis, he was an impacting force on his player’s future lives. Bailey’s life work stands as a testament in a noble profession in which too often people are derailed by burnout or spoiled by the excesses of success.
Reuben Shelton was a standout player at Northwest under Bailey and graduated in 1973. He played college basketball at the University of Kansas. However, what Shelton did after he hung up his sneakers is what Bailey was most proud of. The 6’6” Shelton became a well-respected St. Louis attorney. Shelton remembers his coach as a man of God and an adult who kept his priorities in order. There were times, he recalls, when the Coach would call off practice and sit on the gym bleachers and talk with his team about life. Bailey said he learned as a child to look at the world through a different lens. He told his players right now is the only moment you can control. If you are constantly dwelling on the past or worried about the future, life is passing you by.
Bailey was most proud when one his protégées, like the cerebral Shelton, forged a stable work history as a responsible family man than he was of his 800+ wins and six state championships. Successful former players like Shelton is what the coach said upon his retirement was his reward and the purpose for God placing him on this earth.
“I can’t say enough about the influence Coach Bailey had on me,” Shelton says. “My dad worked two full time jobs and was not home a lot. Coach became like a second father to me,” Shelton recalled Bailey possessed the ability to show both his soft and hard sides. Shelton says the coach was beloved by his players but at the same time the players had to know who was boss, and on the 1972 Northwest Blue Devils, Jody Bailey was unquestionably the boss.
“I stayed in contact with him (Bailey) through the years, but especially at the end,” says Shelton. “He was pretty feeble at the end. He never married so he (had) no immediate family left. He went into an assisted living center in his 90’s, but he was not a happy man. He had a (invalid) sister he had moved in with him and he took care of her until she died. That is just the kind of man he was. Then he got sick and there was no family there for him. It was very sad to see a man I respected so much so helpless and unhappy.”
Bailey had always lived a life void of ostentatious trimmings and through parsimonious ways built a nice financial retirement nest egg. At 90 years of age, a relative became his power of attorney holding legal guardianship. Coach Bailey felt she was absconding with his estate. A very public family spat was the result. “I tried to do what I could to help him legally,” says Shelton. “A fine man like him deserved dignity at the end of his life. It was heartbreaking. A man who had done so much for so many deserved better.”
Hercle Ivy was the leader of Bailey’s 1972 Blue Devils. He remembers the dedication the Coach gave to the youth of the area. “He was a single man, never married,” Ivy says. “His whole life was basketball. His kids were his players. He went so much farther than just coaching us. He was not a big man or a man who would try to physically intimate you. But he had everyone’s respect. He was Northwest basketball. It was how he lived his life and how he coached us. He shared many of his life’s experiences with us going back to the days of segregation (by law). He demanded discipline, both in basketball and in life. No showboating and no trash talking. If you did, you would not play. He would often bring in former players of his to talk with his team, to give us positive role models to follow. When I moved back to St. Louis, he often would have me come back and talk to the players. He was just a good man. I don’t know anyone from back then, white or black, (who) didn’t admire him. I stayed in touch with him all the way until he died. To me, he was a hero and I owe him so much.”
Bailey never failed, when complimented on his life’s work to defer any credit and humbly give the credit to God. He felt blessed, he said, to have been given the opportunity to help people, he stated late in his life. Bailey’s message was always a simple one; respect your parents and respect God. One former player said the coach was a man so full of morality that it, “rubbed off” on all who encountered him. Those who visited with him in his last years say he had, undeniably, physically declined but, his mind stayed keen. His recall of past glories and his up to date knowledge of the status of former players and coaching associates stayed razor sharp.
In 1989, Bailey was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. Upon the time of his enshrinement, one of his former stars at O’Fallon Tech, Ron Williams, praised his coach, “He was the kind of person that kept things simple. He was a basketball traditionalist and fundamentalist. He was a great mentor who was very insightful. You always learned something when you were around him.” Another coach said, "He could beat you 40 points without demoralizing you, and I can’t say that about anyone else I ever coached against."
When Bailey hung up his whistle, he was well respected across area racial lines as a gentleman of the game. He coached in a most difficult era, against barriers that black coaches today cannot begin to comprehend. Bailey endured a stacked deck with steadfast conviction; always maintaining control. He stressed to his players to keep their eye on the prize – use basketball for an education, to better one’s place in life. To Bailey, bitterness was a spendthrift's luxury - just wasted emotion. He was a man who evoked courage and integrity and the many other good, human qualities he brought regardless of the circumstances of his surroundings.
At his wake, a eulogy by a friend gave the old coach a simple compliment on the impact he had on so many lives, one a humble Jody Bailey would appreciate. “He was simply a basketball coach and a teacher, a very good one.”
Coach Jody Bailey passed away in 2009 at the age of 94.
Jack Bush Kansas City Central High School
Retired Kansas City Central Hall of Fame basketball coach Jack Bush has railed against racial injustice his entire life. For nearly a century he has always been consistent, exhibiting his displeasure with a comment here or a refusal to shuffle there, at a time being “uppity” could get a black man lynched. Bush never has compromised his pride or dignity as a man by passively accepting unfair behavior.
Like Jody Bailey, his counterpart at St. Louis Northwest High School, Bush also began his coaching career under the cloud of Jim Crow. He graduated from all-black Kansas City Lincoln High School in 1944. He then attended and graduated in 1949 with his Bachelor of Science degree from the all-black Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO. He is a member of Lincoln University’s Hall of Fame. In college, Bush was a record setter in track and field, throwing the javelin. Bush was also a member of the football team from 1946-1948. He never played college basketball.
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| Jack Bush |
In the late 1990’s, his son and namesake, Jack Jr., would fill the role of head football coach at Lincoln University, his father’s alma mater. Over a long career, the younger Bush worked as a football coach at several other colleges and high schools. Now retired and living next door to his parents, Jack Jr. is the oldest and only male of five siblings. His sister, Juanita, also lives next door.
“What I am most proud of,” the elder coach states, “is that all my children and all of my grandchildren are college graduates. It is education that is important, and I think me and the wife did a good job with our kids and their educations. I grew up here in Kansas City, graduated from Lincoln High School. I was an only child and my mother was a stay at home mom. There was never a doubt I was getting an education. Back talk my mom and there was a whipping coming, “a go out and cut me a switch” old time type whipping. My dad was a fire starter with the railroad. He worked on the old steam engines that needed a fire. Working for the railroad meant his family could ride anywhere the railroad went for free, as long as we set in the colored section, and we went everywhere, me and my mom. Texas, California, all over. My friends did not have this (opportunity). It really made me realize what a big world it is and what was out there. It motivated me. Funny thing, I don’t remember my dad ever going with us, just me and mom.”
Unlike his counterpart across the state, the mild-mannered and soft-spoken Jody Bailey, Bush had a much sharper edge to him, more prone to push back when he felt unfairly treated. There have been few times anyone would have described the passionate Jack Bush as mild or soft-spoken. Early in life he was forged in adversity and tempered by the traumatic experiences of racism. Bush is a proud man, even now as his elderly age makes it hard for him to get out much, he stays engaged as much as possible with the local KC black community where he is today still held in the highest esteem.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Bush parlayed the power his high profile job gave him in the KC area to test the social boundaries in a decisive and defining time when American society was being turned upside down. Bush was not the devious type to stab a rival in the back; he would figuratively stab him in the front. Amongst the white KC educational establishment, Bush’s basketball teams, and its followers, invoked menacing images of potential trouble. Over the years, switchblades, broken-down rims, attack dogs, and street fighters were inaccurately used to describe the makeup of his Central teams. Bush did little to dispel such talk, refusing to give such non-sequitur racism any standing or wasted time. He also liked the edge of intimidation as his team’s reputation preceded them. Central’s street swag struck fear come playoff time when the white suburban teams - who refused to play Central in the regular season - had no choice but to square off with his high-flying Blue Eagles.
The riot at Maryville in 1972 was not Central’s and Coach Bush’s only brush with controversy. He waged a constant and long running war with area basketball referees. It was once debated by area refs where Bush would finish in a popularity contest among “sharks, the mumps, the income tax and himself.” The consensus was he probably would be third, edging out income tax in photo finish. In 1974, due to a fight in a regional game with Paseo, Central was not allowed to start its season the following year until January 1. For their behavior in the Paseo game, the principal of Central High suspended from school the entire varsity team of 10, except one, for 5 days. The 10th player was suspended for 10 days. In 1976 the Kansas City Officials Association, due to public criticism from Bush on the quality of their work, refused to officiate Central’s games. To end their boycott, they demanded that Bush be fired. Eventually, a shaky truce was reached between the two sides; Bush stayed in his job and the officials returned to theirs’.
Jack Junior says his dad never cared what the other coaches thought of him personally as long as they respected his work in the gym. His record took care of that.
As with his own children, Bush relished in the academic achievements of his players. Over the years, when the topic of his 1979 state championship team would arise, Bush never failed to use the opportunity to inform listeners that all 12 team members had graduated from college. The veteran coach stressed to his young men the importance of staying power and a tenacious fighting spirit. Don’t just show up and be present, he would advise; but participate, “confront your critics and those who stand in the way of your progress. Put their backs to the wall, not yours.”
After beginning his coaching career in southeast Missouri at Washington High in Caruthersville, MO; in 1949 Bush moved back to his hometown of Kansas City, MO. He took over the team at R.T. Coles Vocational School. He later took the top position of the Kansas City Manual High School program. He had coaching success at every stop.
Bush moved to Central High School in 1968, where he stayed for 33 years. Overall, Bush-led teams won 799 games. He guided the Central Blue Eagles to twelve final four appearances and the 1979 state championship. He retired in 2002, claiming his 1972 team that battled Raytown South in the quarterfinal round at Maryville, was the best team he ever coached. He continued to teach physical education classes at Central well into his 80’s.
Ed Benton was a 6’6” star on the 1972 Eagles. “Playing for legendary Coach Jack Bush was a life changer,” says Benton. “We called him Uncle Jack and we loved the guy. We played so hard for him, always wanted to have him satisfied with your effort.”
To wear the basketball jersey of the Central Eagles in 1972 was the greatest honor a black kid from the KC inner city could earn. When you walked through the school hallways or the neighborhood streets, adorning a stylish Eagle team jacket, you were a local god. You had earned respect. Even the dealers left you alone – “no, not him,” the street drug kings would say, “he is an Eagle, he has got a future.”
Bush is still an active and enthusiastic supporter of the Central Eagles. Last winter, the old floor at Central’s gym was torn up and a new one laid down in its place. The school board voted to rename the court Jack Bush Court. A ceremony before a home game was held to christen the new hardwood, with the legendary Coach Bush in attendance for a celebration of a loyal man, a recognition of his unbending courage, and sentimental, full memories of a long life approaching a well lived end. Bush was touched, “over the moon.” “My, oh my,” the coach remembers, “That was a great night, to see so many people all come together who had been so important in my life.”
Jack Bush is a man with a will to survive. He has stamina. Early in life, he simply would not allow racism to knock him down. Bush is passionate in his belief that as a society we should never forget the degrading barriers and disadvantages those of color endured to compete with whites on a court that was never really level. All his life he has outfought, outsmarted and outwitted his many critics. His contemporaries never viewed him as a brilliant coach, but instead, one of persistence. He would outwait you before he would outcoach you, one rival observed. Persistence trumped flair. It was the way his no nonsense mother raised her only child, he says.
Don’t call Bush a “legend”. His son tells me his dad hates the word. After you've been around for so long, Bush, Sr. tells me, everyone speaks of you with reverence in low tones. “Legend makes me think of death,” Bush relates. “Most of my friends are dead. Some of my players are dead. I am, you know, an old man."
True, but, my what those tired old eyes have seen.
Denver Miller Kirkwood High School
In 1972, Denver Miller was in his 40th year of coaching high school basketball. He spent his workdays in his mathematics classroom and his evenings teaching young men about basketball and life in the gymnasium that, in 1972, was named in his honor. After 43 seasons of coaching, all at Kirkwood High School, he retired in 1977. Miller’s final record tallied 790 Pioneer wins. His teams qualified for five Missouri State Final Four appearances. At one time, Miller was the winningest high school basketball coach in the nation. But, he never won a state championship. The Pioneers took second an excruciating four times. It became a personal albatross to the glib and popular Miller, a quest so burdensome on Miller’s coaching legacy as to make Arthur’s search for the Holy Grail akin to an Easter egg hunt.
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| Denver Miller |
In 1934, Miller received a B.S. in Education from the University of Missouri-Columbia where he had earned All-American honors as a member of the Tiger’s basketball team. In 1934, the nation was smack in the middle of the Great Depression when Miller landed the job at Kirkwood. He was 22 years old. It was a time, even in the affluent suburbs like Kirkwood, of outdoor plumbing, real ice for the “ice box,” and kerosene lamps. Miller remembered expectations for entertainment in his early coaching days were bridled. “We went to a radio like a party,” he once deadpanned. In 1936, Miller married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Shirley Dempsey. They stayed married for the next 53 years.
On the bench during a game in 1972, no matter the score or the consequences of the outcome, Miler appeared to be in constant agony; his bald head glistened with sweat, his febrile mannerisms magnified by his puffy, red face in perpetual contortion of every degree of torment known to human suffering. In a packed and loud gymnasium, unable to communicate with his players on the floor, he would be forced to contort and gesticulate. Imitations of his demonstrative non-verbal style became a favorite pastime for his players. Yet, anyone who knew the man in the twilight of his career is steadfast that Miller loved coaching right to the end.
Those who wore the blood red jersey for Kirkwood High under Miller’s tutelage describe him as stern, but also a “twinkle-in-the-eye kind of guy.” He could chew out a player with the gusto and salty language of a Paris Island drill sergeant, yet in and around the hallways of KHS he was a beloved figure, a “hell of a guy,” no fancy pretense, but a man who was surprisingly respected by a generation of fearless baby boomers hot-wired to question authority. Miller, late in his career, had managed to consolidate the manners of a church usher with that drill sergeant rage. For him, the combination found a confluence and worked.
Bill Moulder was a high scoring guard on the 1972 and 1973 Kirkwood teams. Both teams took second place in the state tournament. He remembers the battle of wills he had with the head strong coach. “I was very confident in myself,” Moulder says today with a smile. “It was a big part of my game and coach used that. He knew when to reel me in and knew when to let go of the leash.”
Moulder says coming so close to winning the championship that so evaded his coach weighs on him even today, not for himself, but for Miller. After the runner-up near miss in 1972, Moulder was a senior star on the 1973 Pioneer squad that also took second in the state, again by four points, falling to St. Louis DeSmet. It was the coach’s own personal white whale, an obsessive goal that was so close but never achieved.
“I had two chances to get him (Miller) the state title and we were the better team both years (1972 and 1973),” Moulder says. It weighs on all of us from back then because we know how much it meant to him. But it just was not meant to be, I guess. I know some have said never winning the big game is what coach is remembered for. But those people don’t know the effects he had on us; it goes way deeper than that.”
According to Drew Rogers, a senior star on the 1972 Kirkwood team, Miller was more than just a coach. “Mr. Miller was a teacher, yes. But he was also an architect and an analyst. He could adjust to the times.”
Rogers, over the years, gained a steady respect for the veteran coach. In 1972, at a time that several young and flashy coaches were taking control of the St. Louis high school basketball landscape, Miller was the antithetical throwback to the dinosaur ages. There was nothing stylish about the old-school Miller. Rogers, after a break out sophomore season was approached by his father about transferring to a school with a coach, unlike Miller, more in tune with the image of the times. Miller was loud and he was profane with players and officials. “Dad saw him as a bellicose, overwhelmed and under qualified old man,” Rogers remembers.
The possibility of a family move became very real when Mr. Rogers began looking at houses in the nearby Lindbergh district. The son balked for a simple reason, “I wanted to play with my friends,” Rogers told his dad. To the father’s credit, he admitted to his son years after that moving would have been a huge mistake. With the clarity of hindsight tempered by the years, he now respected what the coach had done for his son. “Dad said a move would have been the biggest mistake he could have made regarding my hoops future and my development as a man.”
Rogers, to this day, never refers to Miller as Coach, but always Mr. Miller. “He would always tell us he was a math teacher (first),” Rogers explains. Coaching basketball, Miller always claimed, was something he did on the side to make a little extra money. His training had been as a math teacher, his basketball expertise was something he had picked up trial and error over the years.
While maybe lacking curb appeal, Miller had Rogers respect. “He was equal parts Picasso and Einstein, plus a little junk yard dog. I was lucky to have played for him.”
Miller played and began coaching at a time when the rules of basketball called for a jump ball at center court after every made field goal. The changes he had seen in the game by 1972 were massive. His success he owed to his ability to adjust with the changing times. Miller, with his mathematician background, viewed the sport as one big unsolved math equation, with the constant variable being the players that changed each season.
Rogers recalls, “My senior year, we were run, run, and run some more. We had the athletes and the depth to wear people down and Mr. Miller used it to make us a tough team to beat. My younger brother played for him through his junior year when he (Miller) retired. The last couple of years the talent of the players was different. He took a fast break team to the state championship game two years in a row (1972 and 1973). A couple years later (1977), with a team not as athletic as ours, Coach adjusted. It was (now) “walk” the ball up the floor, 4 corners spread offense and little pressure on defense. He took that group all the way to the state quarterfinals and only a half court last second shot kept them from going to the final four, again.”
Miller retired at age 65, reluctantly. “I have no choice,” he said at the time. “I am 65 years old. Next winter will be strange. Its ok. I have had a great career, but I want to be remembered as a math teacher. I have had 10 times the effect on the kids in my math classes than I have with basketball players.”
Denver Miller spent his retirement years as a daily fixture at Kirkwood’s Greenbrier Country Club, an avid and competitive golfer who every day held court over the 19th hole, playing cards, telling stories and enjoying his hard-earned esteemed status in the Kirkwood community.
He was asked often during his later years about his personal coaching albatross - not winning a state title - after making the final four five times. To be honest, Miller would during reflective moods acknowledge, yes, it did bother him. Like the four-time losing Super Bowl Buffalo Bills football coach and fellow St. Louis native, Marv Levy, Miller will be most remembered for never winning the “last” game, opposed to his lifetime masterpiece of his work on the Kirkwood hardwood. It was a dull ache to his pride that he would take to the grave. This glowing omission from his resume was even noted in his obituary. Ironically and seldom mentioned, Mr. Miller managed the 1961 Kirkwood Pioneer baseball team to a state title.
When he retired, he was the winningest high school coach in the nation. Self-deprecating to the end, Miller downplayed the significance. “I have coached a long time,” he said, “and I probably also have the record for most losses. Let’s just say I am the best algebra teacher that coached basketball at the same school for 43 years. It would be safe to say I am the only one.”
Denver Miller passed away in 1988 at the age of 78.
