Cry Havoc from the Bench
Why do basketball coaches behave the way Jack Ramsay of St. Joseph's is behaving on the opposite page? Why don't they act decorously, like those junior-executive types, the football coaches, who walk up and down the sidelines wearing snap-brim fedoras and carrying clipboards? Or like baseball managers, who mostly sit quietly in the dugout, flashing signals to their players but displaying no trace of inner turbulence? Are basketball coaches less gentlemanly fellows than their colleagues in other sports? Of course not. The trouble with basketball coaches is that they have better seats for their games than football coaches or baseball managers do. They are just too close to keep quiet. Johnny Keane wigwags signals from the dugout, and Vince Lombardi sends in subs with messages from the sidelines because their players could not hear them if they hollered bloody murder. Basketball coaches, however, can easily yell at their players—and, unfortunately, at officials, too—when they want to switch tactics or just give encouragement. But it's all part of the color of the game, as shown on the following pages.
adolph Rupp has mellowed. No longer is he the ear-blistering terror of referees, the artful inciter of partisan Kentucky boos and cheers—well, not in the old Baronial manner, anyway. But he can still rise for a mellow bellow when he is unhappy about a call.
joe Lapchick of St. John's I (left) loses 20 pounds every season. "My guts are up in my neck every game." he says. "When it starts I feel as if I'm going to black out." Once he did just that. At Wake Forest, Bones Mc-Kinney (below) confesses. "I'm just a cheerleader at heart." Bones throws towels, tears off tie and jacket, screams and does jigs. "Sometimes I hate myself for those antics," he says.
when Ralph Miller was at Wichita in the Missouri Valley Conference last year, he could ring a buzzer when he wanted to argue with the referee. At Iowa in the Big Ten now, all he can do is charge up and down the sidelines. One sure thing: he won't be sitting on the bench.
FIVE PHOTOS