Guest TigerBlog From Gary Walters

As TigerBlog has always said, the floor here is open to anyone who wants to take advantage of it.

Today, the floor belongs to none other than Ford Family Director of Athletics Emeritus Gary Walters, whose long career at Princeton includes time as a player on the 1965 men's basketball NCAA Final Four team and an assistant coach under Pete Carril and a 20-year tenure as the AD. Walters also went to Reading High School in Pennsylvania, where he was a player for and student of Carril's as well.

Gary shares his thoughts today on a subject that will be of interest of any Princeton basketball fan, or Princeton Athletics fan for that matter:

Having grown up in blue collar Reading, Pa., where I attended Reading High School, it was my good fortune to play basketball for Coach Pete Carril - who also doubled as my senior year “Problems of American Democracy” teacher, a subject often referred to as Civics. Coach Carril was as fine a teacher in the classroom, absent the expletives, as he was on the basketball court. As a high school student-athlete, I could not have had a better mentor.

 
As a 10th and 11th grader, I was aware that ‘the Coach’ had been a very good player at Bethlehem HS and subsequently Lafayette College, where he had played for Coach Willem Van Breda Kolff (aka, VBK) in his senior year. He became a very close friend and protege of VBK, who himself became an admirer of Carril’s coaching.

Coach Carril was named the head coach at Reading HS in 1958. He coached at Reading for eight years and established his coaching bona fides by dominating the Central Penn Conference, employing a suffocating defense and an offense highlighted by backdoor action.

His achievements didn’t go unnoticed. In the spring of 1966 Lehigh, a college then known for its wrestling excellence and basketball irrelevance, hired Coach Carril to turn the basketball program around. And turn it around he did. The year before he assumed the reins, Lehigh was 4-17. In Carril’s first year, he led the Engineers to an 11-12 record, punctuating the season with a monumental upset of Rutgers, one of the best teams in the East. He was now on the national radar screen identifying the best young college coaches.

During the 1966-67 season, Princeton and Lehigh basketball were operating on parallel tracks. Led by VBK in my senior season, we achieved a 25-3 record, won the Ivy League, and finished ranked 5th in the nation, having lost in OT to UNC in the Eastern Regional — a team we had previously beaten in Chapel Hill.

When we returned to Princeton, very disappointed by our loss to UNC, I had to focus my attention on completing my senior thesis. However, in mid-April I received a call from Coach Carril asking me if I would like to become his Freshman/Assistant Coach upon graduating. Needless to say I was honored and accepted the job immediately. On the same call, he subsequently asked if I would be willing to play some pick-up basketball with his Lehigh players. I readily agreed and suggested that he invite Chris Thomforde ’69 too. Coach jumped at that idea and as fate would have it, our trip to Lehigh would soon play a major role in Coach Carril’s future.

Coach drove Chris and me up to Bethlehem and then back the next day to Princeton. The shared time we had in the car enabled Chris and the Coach to exchange thoughts, opinions and stories, thus enabling them to bond. We all had a great experience that would subsequently prove to be important.

Approximately a week or two later, the players on the team were asked to assemble at Dillon Gym for an important meeting. Much to our surprise and disappointment, Coach VBK told us he had accepted Jack Kent Cooke’s offer to coach the Los Angeles Lakers. As a soon to be graduated senior, I felt badly for the returning players, all of whom were recruited by VBK. Having said that, however, I still had some skin in the game.

Not surprisingly, VBK and I shared the same thought about who his successor should be - Coach Carril of course. But we had to overcome a major obstacle: VBK and Director of Athletics, Ken Fairman ‘34, had a very strained relationship. Notwithstanding the fact that Coach Carril had impeccable coaching bona fides, Mr. Fairman didn’t want another basketball coach with VBK’s temperament, compounded by the fact that Carril was a VBK protege.

A day or two after the VBK-to-the-Lakers announcement, I received a call from Mr. Fairman, who asked me to come to his office to discuss the coaching acumen and character of Carril. Understanding that Mr. Fairman’s potential anti-VBK bias could extend to Carril, his protégé, I made one of the smartest decisions ever in my life: I recommended that Fairman include Chris Thomforde, in the meeting. Chris was the center on the team, was a very smart player, had an impeccable reputation on campus and had spent substantial personal time with Carril on our visit to Lehigh. I could give testimony to Carril’s coaching, and Chris could share his evaluation of Carril’s character. Fortunately, Mr. Fairman took my advice and invited Chris.

As is said, the rest is history. Chris and I were able to convince Mr. Fairman that Coach Carril would be the perfect successor to VBK. And 29 years and 514 wins later at Princeton, Coach Carril was enshrined in both the National Collegiate Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And irony of ironies, I transitioned from being his point guard and assistant coach to becoming his boss for two years when I was appointed as Athletic Director at Princeton in 1994.

I’ll conclude with this saying from Walt Whitman, which is relevant to Coach Carril’s distinguished teaching and coaching career:

“I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breadth than
my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it
to destroy the teacher.”

“Education Through Athletics”