HAVING A TEAM:

Butch van Breda Kolff, 84, Fiery Coach, Dies (FRANK LITSKY, 8/24/07, NY Times)

Van Breda Kolff used to say that except for a chosen few, coaching basketball was a vagabond profession, and he was a prime example. He held 13 head-coaching jobs and for one season, when he was 61, he coached a high school team.

“I’ve had some good jobs that I’ve left, or they fired me,” he once said. “At the time, I thought it was the right thing for me to do. Whether it turned out right later, who cares?”

He coached Bill Bradley as a collegian and Wilt Chamberlain as a professional and never seemed fully satisfied with either player. When Bradley played for him at Princeton, he said, “Bill is not hungry.” He felt the same way about Chamberlain, who played for him with the Los Angeles Lakers.

In the final minutes of the seventh and deciding game of the National Basketball Association’s 1969 championship playoffs, Chamberlain benched himself during the fourth quarter with what van Breda Kolff considered a minor knee injury. When Chamberlain asked to return to the game, van Breda Kolff refused, and the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics by 2 points.

“We played better when he was out,” van Breda Kolff said. “I have no regrets because in my mind at the time I thought it was the right thing to do. The only regret I’ll have would be if I don’t have a team.”

Shortly after, van Breda Kolff resigned, but as usual he soon had another team.

His greatest legacy was probably another coach, This Coach Stalks Overdogs (Paul A. Witteman, 3/19/1990, TIME)

Carril grew up as a no-car-garage guy in a $21-a-month apartment hard by Quinn's Coal Yard in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. His father, an immigrant from Castile, Spain, spent long days, weeks and years shoveling coal into an open-hearth furnace run by Bethlehem Steel. What Pete remembers most clearly about this Depression-era environment was the ethnic bonding prevalent among the Spanish, Polish and Italian inhabitants. "We always had food to eat," he says. "Families stuck together." The absence of material possessions was an advantage, Carril believes. "It made us innovative, creative," he says. Sometimes there were no ball fields and few balls, which led Carril and his contemporaries to improvise games. One involved dodging thrown rubber balls in a narrow culvert. It was not for the slow of foot.

More organized sports pointed the direction away from the furnaces. Too puny for his first love, football, Carril discovered hoops in the seventh grade. "It was the game I could play," he says. And how. Pete was a dervish guard at Liberty High School, leading the team to consecutive 24-3 records. That earned him a place at nearby Lafayette College, where a raffish free spirit named Willem van Breda Kolff came to coach and inherited Pete, then in his senior year. "I had my preconceived notions," says van Breda Kolff of his sawed-off, would-be star. "He threw up some weird shots." But van Breda Kolff, a former player in the National Basketball Association, recognized talent. "Pete was very, very quick," he says. And deceptive. Years later, when Princeton graduate Bill Bradley was a young player with the New York Knickerbockers, he came to Carril for mano-a-mano pointers. Carril, who had not coached Bradley in college, was then in his late 30s; Bradley was in his prime. "He was not bad at making you think he was going to take the shot, when what he was really going to do was drive past you," says Bradley. "I was a player," says Pete.

Too small for the pros by maybe 4 in. in van Breda Kolff's opinion, Carril embarked on a career as a high school government teacher and basketball coach. He won early and often. In 1966 he applied for the coaching job at Lehigh and got it by default. One year later, as van Breda Kolff was completing a five- year-long coaching tour de force at Princeton, he recommended Carril to succeed him. The incumbent thought his protege would be a hard sell. "Pete is not in Princeton's image," says van Breda Kolff. "He is not gray flannels and herringbone suits."

So much for the importance of image. But Carril actually did try, taking up orange-and-black bow ties at one point. That is Armond Hill's first memory of him, when Hill was a senior at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. (Carrilism: Always recruit at schools whose names begin with Bishop or Monsignor.) "I saw this short guy with a bow tie and a big cigar lying down in the bleachers," Hill recalls. "After the game he came down and told me everything I did wrong and that he could make me a better player. It was that, more than the mystique of Princeton. I wanted to play for this guy." So he did, becoming the last great player Carril molded and then sent on to the N.B.A. Today Hill is surely the only alumnus of the N.B.A. who is a curator of an art museum.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2007 9:51 AM