Haskins' teams lived up to his nickname
Posted: Monday, September 08, 2008 10:12 AM
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Coaches
If you’re in sports, you’re lucky to have a nickname, let alone a cool one. Yet Don Haskins, the legendary ex-UTEP college basketball coach who died Sunday at the age of 78, had two: “the Bear,” and “the John Wayne of college basketball.”
OK, so “Bear” was much more common. Even my mom knew who “the Bear” was. That gruff scowling guy on the sidelines whose teams seemingly won the WAC every season was hard to miss.
(It helped that we lived in Wyoming, where Haskins’ Miners always seemed to have the edge on the Cowboys, even when the Pokes had Fennis and Leckner in the Dome of Doom. It all sounds like an Indiana Jones movie…)
Even when Wyoming finally had a team that was more highly touted, UTEP still held home court in 1988, beating the No. 5-ranked Pokes, 68-62, in El Paso. I had a Wyoming scrapbook of game clippings that season (when you’re 10 and a Wyoming player is on the cover of SI, you make sure you document everything), and couldn’t believe UW couldn’t pull out a much-needed road win.
Turns out BYU won the regular-season title that year anyway. UTEP, after winning a share or the outright title the five previous years, finished fourth, but still made the NCAA tournament. The Miners usually did, playing in the Big Dance from 1984-1990. That’s consistency any school can envy.
Haskins’ final trip to the NCAAs was 1992, when UTEP stunned top-seeded Kansas in the second round. The Miners had won three NCAA tourney games from ’84-’90. Now, using a slow-down, four-corners type offense, they’d just beaten the Midwest region’s top seed.
Leave it to the Bear. Of course, that wasn’t his finest NCAA tournament moment.
The 1966 championship has been covered form every angle imaginable. Thousands of articles, plenty of retrospectives, books and interviews. Hollywood took its shot two years ago with the movie “Glory Road.”
Others can provide better perspective where that Texas Western victory (it changed to UTEP a year later) ranks in the annuls of racial history. (The bottom line: it was crucial.)
The other amazing thing about Haskins? He never left UTEP.
He was only 36 when he won that title. He toyed with the idea of the ABA at one time, but never left. He prowled the UTEP sideline for 38 years, longer than all but six coaches at one school. He was the WAC’s lowest paid coach, but stayed in El Paso because he loved the town and didn’t want to leave the program he built. (Click here for excellent Haskins coverage from the El Paso Times.)
That kind of longevity still happens (Jim Boeheim will spend his entire career at Syracuse), but it’s a rare thing. And it’s something of a marvel. Just like the Bear.
