JACK RAMSAY : In Addition to Being the Coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, He Has a Doctorate in Education and Likes to Compete in Triathlons

The sun had yet to break through the usual patches of fog at Manhattan Beach one recent morning, which was reason enough for all but the most dedicated runners and surfers to stay inside.

But there on the boardwalk was Jack Ramsay, a slim, balding and surprisingly fit 60-year-old, briskly cutting through the morning stillness. Eyes fixed straight ahead, Ramsay was running reasonably fast--a 7-minute 30-second pace for four miles--and apparently with little discomfort.

In no time, it seemed, the run was over, but Ramsay was far from finished. He discarded his shirt and shoes and disappeared into the chilly Pacific. When he emerged from the waves a few minutes later, he had turned crimson. Surfers, who wear wet suits to avoid that condition, looked at him curiously.

As Ramsay, dripping and shivering, walked back to the car, he turned and smiled broadly, for the first time that morning.

“You know what the great thing is?” Ramsay asked. “For all the discomfort or pain you might feel sometimes when exercising, it always feels great after you’re all finished. You’ve accomplished something. I feel great right now.”

Ramsay is almost constantly striving for feelings of accomplishment. He often pushes himself to the brink of exhaustion and exhilaration at the same time.

You can see it not only in his quest for physical fitness but also in his approach to his job as coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, who trail the Lakers, 3-0, going into today’s fourth game of the NBA Western Conference semifinal playoff series. It is an extremely difficult situation for the Trail Blazers, but that just makes Ramsay work harder and enjoy the challenge more.

It seems as if Ramsay has been around forever, crouched on one knee in front of the bench in clashing plaids and checks. Actually, Ramsay has coached for only 28 years--the last 18 in the NBA--and lately he has toned down his wardrobe.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is Ramsay’s ability to produce winning teams, sometimes with marginal talent. Since winning 76% of his games in 11 seasons at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Ramsay has compiled an NBA record of 745-649 and ranks second only to Red Auerbach in victories. Auerbach won 938 games with the Boston Celtics.

Ramsay has a .534 winning percentage but has won only one NBA title, with the 1976-77 Trail Blazers. His influence, though, can be felt throughout the NBA and, to a lesser extent, in college and high school basketball.

At one point two years ago, 25% of the head coaches in the NBA were disciples of Ramsay. That group included Paul Westhead, Jack McKinney and Jim Lynam, all of whom Ramsay coached at St. Joseph’s, and Billy Cunningham and Kevin Loughery, who played for him during Ramsay’s tenure with three NBA teams.

Tactically, Ramsay’s zone press, which he developed at St. Joseph’s in the mid-’50s, has been a standard for college teams and has been refined to a zone trap in the pros. Many teams have employed his “continuous motion” offense and copied his conditioning principles.

More than that, though, Ramsay has a stature among his peers that has been reinforced over the years. He may not be the basketball god he once was considered when Portland won the NBA title, but no one questions Ramsay’s expertise, except maybe Ramsay himself.

“I’m not looking for credit,” he said. “A coach’s job is to somehow have his team win. You do that any way that works. If the team doesn’t win, you’re not doing your job. The players should get the credit. In the NBA, coaches are more dependent on the players they have. Great coaches have great players.

“The ultimate satisfaction is to win the whole thing. (But) my barometer is, if I feel that I’ve done as well with the players I have, I can be satisfied. Not the total satisfaction, but enough.”

There was little emotion in Ramsay’s voice. He enunciates words slowly and precisely, almost clinically, but his distinctive face gives away his intensity. Ramsay’s bushy eyebrows rise with each point he is trying to make, and the wrinkles on his forehead are more pronounced because there’s no hair to cover them.

It is clear, just by the gleam in Ramsay’s eyes when he’s talking, that all he needs to be happy in his working life are 12 players--preferably tall, talented and willing to play within a team concept.

“Jack will always be a coach,” said Dave Twardzik, who played on Portland’s championship team. “He eats, sleeps and drinks basketball.”

Ramsay’s zest for basketball may be easy to figure out, but the man himself is complex. He is, without question, the only NBA coach who has a doctorate in education, who has been associated with such notables as journalist David Halberstam and former counter-culture figure Jack Scott, and who enters and completes a couple of grueling triathlons (swimming-cycling-running) each summer.

“Jack could be successful in numerous fields,” McKinney said. “The man is very intelligent. But since he chose basketball as his occupation, it consumes him. I don’t think there’s another coach in the league that looks at the game the way Jack does.”

The following excerpt from Ramsay’s 1978 book, “The Coach’s Art,” clearly shows that he thinks on a different, higher level than most coaches:

What is this game that runs through my mind? It is a ballet, a graceful sweep and flow of patterned movement, counterpointed by daring and imaginative flights of solitary brilliance. It is a dance which begins with opposition contesting every move. But in the exhilaration of a great performance, the opposition vanishes. The dancer does as he pleases. The game is unified action up and down the floor. . . . It is the solidarity of a single unifying purpose, the will to overcome adversity, the determination never to give in. It is winning; it is winning; it is winning.

Some have suggested that Ramsay is too intelligent to be a basketball coach. They have wondered why he chose something so frivolous for his life’s work when he could be researching a cure for cancer, or creating literature.

But anyone close to Ramsay knows that he wouldn’t be happy doing anything other than coaching basketball.

Ramsay can’t remember exactly when he first realized that he wanted to become a coach, but it probably was the first time he stepped into a gymnasium in Connecticut, more than 50 years ago. Ramsay’s voice softens almost to a whisper when he recalls his introduction to the sport that has dominated his life.

“The father of one of the kids I palled around with was the headmaster of a private school,” Ramsay said. “We could get into the gym on a Saturday afternoon. That was unheard of. My God, the gym to ourselves! That’s what really started me. I found I had some skill at it, so I put a basket on my barn at home so I could play whenever I wanted.”

When Ramsay moved to Philadelphia after his parents separated, he found the gyms there were the same as those in Connecticut. But basketball was the sport in Philadelphia and Ramsay caught the fever.

A tall, skinny and scrappy guard, Ramsay began college at St. Joseph’s in 1942. He was a pre-med major with every intention of becoming a doctor. But after his freshman year, Ramsay, only 17, left school to serve in the Navy in World War II. He volunteered for an underwater demolition team that trained in Oceanside for a proposed invasion of Japan.

Ramsay’s leadership qualities were evident even then. At 19, he was made an officer and was the head of his team of frogmen. One of the perks of being in charge was that Ramsay could occasionally take a break to play basketball.

Extensive training, however, was as far as Ramsay’s career as a frogman went. The war ended before his team could get into it. Ramsay was disappointed.

“We took off and headed (for Japan), but they dropped the bomb so that was it,” Ramsay said. “We were disappointed because we had trained for it. The emotional climate of the country was different then. You wanted to defend. It seems strange now, but I wanted the action.”

Instead, Ramsay had to settle for action on the basketball court, where his style was always combative. By that time, though, Ramsay had dropped his plans for medicine, having decided to make a career of basketball, as either a player or coach. He majored in education so that he could eventually earn a teaching credential.

“You could take any courses you wanted as a basketball player,” Ramsay said. “But as a pre-med major, you had to take all the labs, which made me late for practice, which was all right with the coach. But if you did that, you weren’t going to play much. That made up my mind.”

Ramsay captained the 1948-49 St. Joseph’s team and earned an education degree. He was an adequate player, making up for a lack of natural talent with hustle and intelligence.

After college, Ramsay coached for three seasons at St. James High School in Chester, Pa., took graduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania and played on weekends for the Sunbury Mercuries of the old Eastern League.

Somehow, Ramsay even found time to spend with his wife, Jean, whom he married in 1949. Ramsay juggled so many jobs not only because he loved basketball but also because he needed the money.

Each member of the Sunbury Mercuries was guaranteed $40 a game and a percentage of the gate, which usually amounted to $15 or $20. One oft-told story about Ramsay concerns the time he got a concussion while diving on the floor for a loose ball and didn’t break out of the fog until after the game. The story goes that Ramsay’s first words after coming around were: “You get my money?”

“I don’t remember saying that, but it’s probably true of the way I am,” Ramsay said, smiling. “I learned fast that coaches didn’t make lot of money.”

If Ramsay had wanted wealth, he would’ve pursued the medical degree. When Ramsay landed the head coaching job at St. Joseph’s a few years later, he was financially secure and happy in his work.

There was no reason not to be happy. Ramsay had the job he had always wanted and was able to test his basketball theories against some of the best teams on the East Coast. St. Joseph’s had an enrollment of only 1,800 students and Ramsay’s teams, he recalls, were primarily made up of “scrappy and small white players from the local Catholic high schools.”

Still, those teams had considerable success against the larger schools. In 11 seasons at St. Joe’s, Ramsay had a 234-72 record and made a postseason tournament 10 times. At least partly responsible was Ramsay’s innovation, the zone press. It was copied by many other East Coast teams but it was never quite duplicated because the other teams didn’t have Ramsay to run it, or the players who would sacrifice as much as his would.

Ramsay would accept nothing less than total commitment.

“When I was recruited by Jack, it was an incredible scenario now that I look back at it,” Westhead said.

“I made one official visit to St. Joe’s and Jack takes me back to this dark and musty old office that was a mess. It wasn’t impressive or big-time at all. He gives me that look of his and says very slowly and precisely, ‘Why . . . do . . . you . . . want . . . to . . . play . . . at . . . St. Joseph’s?’

“I forget how I responded but I was sort of shocked. We had a 15-minute talk and then he said he’d be in touch. He called a couple weeks later and says, ‘We have scholarship for you at St. Joseph’s.’

“Ramsay wanted guys with total commitment to excellence. He wasn’t going to beg for players. He wanted you to want to come to St. Joe’s.”

Such was Ramsay’s personality that he could be extremely demanding yet have players thoroughly enjoying playing for him.

“Anyone who really enjoyed basketball loved to play for Jack,” Twardzik said.

McKinney, who played for Ramsay in high school and college and coached with him at Portland, says Ramsay’s motivation is more unspoken than anything else.

“It’s hard to define,” McKinney said. “But it was there . We all wanted to do it for him as well as ourselves. As long as I’ve known him, he has never given a Knute Rockne speech. He didn’t have to.”

If players enjoyed playing for Ramsay at St. Joseph’s, he enjoyed coaching them even more. Ramsay said that he had an almost ideal situation at St. Joseph’s and for that reason turned down several coaching offers from larger schools with bigger budgets.

“They may have been bigger schools, but they didn’t play basketball as well as St. Joe’s,” Ramsay said. “During that time, I would’ve rather won the Big Five (a round robin conducted by the Philadelphia schools, Pennsylvania, Villanova, LaSalle, Temple and St. Joseph’s) than the NCAA championship.”

But after the 1960-61 season, Ramsay almost gave up coaching completely. St. Joe’s had posted a 25-5 record and had upset Wake Forest in the Eastern regional final to advance to the Final Four. The Hawks lost to eventual champion Ohio State, led by Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek, in the semifinals.

Ramsay was mostly satisfied with the season, but he was confused by the play of his team at various stages of the season. He couldn’t understand why his team would lose seemingly comfortable leads and couldn’t play consistently well.

Said Lynam: “Once, Jack said at halftime that he couldn’t understand why we played so badly. I couldn’t, either.”

A few months after the season was over, an investigation by the New York district attorney’s office turned up evidence that three St. Joe’s players--seniors Jack Egan, Vince Kempton and Frank Majewski--had shaved points in at least three games.

McKinney was the assistant coach of that team, Westhead the other senior player and Lynam the starting point guard. The point-shaving scandal profoundly affected them all, but it hit Ramsay even harder. Ramsay thought that he had failed as a leader, and it took coercion from a priest at the school to make him return as coach.

“Here was a guy who could never accept anything less than a full effort and all of a sudden he learned that three of his players had done this,” McKinney said. “He was crushed. We were all worried that he’d give it up. I remember being in the office one day and Jack said, ‘If I can’t teach these young men better, I should give it up.’ I’d walk in sometimes and he’d be at his desk, crying.

“It was different than the Tulane scandal. None of our players ever received money in shoe boxes. The program was very straight.”

Said Ramsay: “It brought a lot of things into perspective. I thought, for these guys to have done that, their perspective of basketball and mine had to be a lot different. I just assumed that everybody did anything they could to win.

“Maybe my view was too narrow back then. (Egan) was married and had twin boys and his wife lived at home in western Pennsylvania because he couldn’t afford to move her. He got a job as a bartender but I told him it wouldn’t look right for a player to do that. So, he gave it up. . . . I don’t think I was sensitive enough to the players.”

Ramsay returned the next season, however, more determined than ever. After that, St. Joe’s averaged 22 victories a season. In 1965-66, the Hawks had just completed a 24-5 season when Ramsay was forced to give up coaching.

A problem in his right eye, perhaps the result of stress and worry, left Ramsay partially blind. Doctors warned him that continued stress could result in the same condition in his left eye.

For several months, Ramsay tried to adapt to life with one functional eye and wondered what to do with himself. He seriously contemplated continuing at St. Joseph’s, threat of blindness or no.

Instead, though, he accepted a job as general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. Ramsay knew he wasn’t qualified for the job, but there was less stress than in coaching and it allowed him to stay close to basketball. In Ramsay’s first year, 1966-67, the 76ers won the NBA title, largely because of Wilt Chamberlain’s dominance.

A year later, after Coach Alex Hannum had resigned, partly because of his difficulties with Chamberlain, Ramsay and owner Irv Kosloff searched for a coach.

“Some (coaches) didn’t want any part of Wilt and others didn’t want to come unless Wilt was there,” Ramsay said.

Eventually, Chamberlain strongly suggested that he could become player-coach and Ramsay his assistant. Ramsay seriously considered it.

“My right eye had cleared up and I could see fine, and I thought Wilt might try harder if he was the coach,” Ramsay said.

As it turned out, though, Chamberlain demanded a trade to the Lakers--it was granted--and Ramsay became the coach. It was supposed to be only a temporary arrangement, but Ramsay somehow managed to win 55 games with a team that had Darrall Imhoff at center, along with Billy Cunningham, Hal Greer and Chet Walker.

But after four reasonably successful years with the 76ers--his only losing season was his last--Ramsay left the club because he needed a legitimate center to be successful, among other reasons.

“I didn’t like the team my last season in Philly,” said Ramsay, who had only himself to blame, since he he was the GM, too, for three years. “I didn’t like the way the players were reacting. There were cliques developing. People pointing fingers.”

Ramsay resurfaced in Buffalo, where he struggled through a 21-win season his first year before completely changing the team to suit his style. His teams had winning records the next three seasons, but neither Ramsay nor the Braves’ management liked the situation.

So, Ramsay went searching for the ideal situation. He accepted the job in Portland, hoping that he’d find it there. He did. Ramsay had Bill Walton at center, and added as role players Twardzik, Maurice Lucas, Lionel Hollins, Johnny Davis and Herm Gilliam.

The result was an NBA championship and the prospect of another the next season. The Trail Blazers were 50-10 in 1977-78 when Walton suffered the first of his many foot injuries and compromised his beliefs by taking pain-killing drugs. Portland’s budding dynasty crumbled in 1978 when a bitter Walton demanded a trade and got it. Ramsay shuffled players around trying to find a way to recapture the magic.

“That period was a great source of satisfaction and a lot of fun,” Ramsay said of the championship season. “We knew that every time we walked on the court, we could win. I had no reason to doubt that it wouldn’t keep going. But we had a lot of injuries the next year and then some players started questioning whether they were being handled properly, both medically and on the court.”

In the years since, Ramsay hasn’t been able to duplicate that season and a half, but the challenge of trying to achieve that success again keeps him going.

He and Stu Inman, the Trail Blazers’ general manager, have reshaped the team several times. Before this season, though, they almost totally changed it. Portland traded forward Calvin Natt, point guard Fat Lever, center Wayne Cooper and their first-round draft pick to Denver for Kiki Vandeweghe in a move that immediately drew criticism.

Then, when Ramsay drafted promising but untested center Sam Bowie over sensational guard Michael Jordan, fans questioned Ramsay’s judgment even more. Ramsay had a strong defense for both moves, saying that the Trail Blazers needed an outside scoring threat and a legitimate center more than they needed a guard.

Midway through the season, when the Trail Blazers were well under .500, Ramsay was booed in the city that had revered him. There was even speculation that Ramsay, who has two years left on a $300,000-a-year contract, would be fired.

But Portland was one of the league’s hottest teams in the final quarter of the regular season and finished over .500.

“Jack seemed more wound up than usual this year,” McKinney said. “I’d talk to him on the phone and he’d be frustrated. I just kept telling him it would come around and to watch out when walking the streets.”

Long ago, Ramsay developed a habit of taking long, reflective walks through darkened city streets, which he still does on occasion.

Ramsay often jokes about the time he strolled through the dangerous neighborhood near Chicago Stadium wanting to get mugged so he could fight back. A rather large man approached him, and instead of attacking Ramsay, asked him for a light.

Asked about his masochistic walks, Ramsay smiled and said: “Just trying to relieve stress.”

Ramsay almost never talks when he runs. On this particular morning, when his Trail Blazers were to meet the Lakers in Game 2 of their playoff series, Ramsay had nothing to say anyway.

So when Ramsay’s running companion tried to make small talk, all he got in return was a series of grunts and one-word replies. But on his walk to the ocean after the run, Ramsay spoke at an accelerated rate about why, at 60, he trains daily for the triathlon.

“The reason I don’t talk when I run is because that’s not what I’m running for,” said Ramsay, not apologetic at all. “I do a lot of exercising for solitude, but mostly because I like it. It makes you feel good and it does relieve tension from the job. I feel alive and healthy.”

Ramsay’s own physical fitness is as important to him as his team’s. When the Trail Blazers are at home, Ramsay awakens at 6 each morning at his home on Lake Oswego and spends the next few hours running, bicycling or swimming in the lake--or doing a combination of the three.

Twardzik said: “On the road, Jack always makes sure the team stays at hotels with swimming pools and close to running areas, if possible.”

It is consistent with Ramsay’s personality that he didn’t just dabble in triathlon competition. He plunged into it, as he does almost everything else.

“I used to swim and bike a lot,” Ramsay said. “The last few years, I really became interested in the triathlon. What I like about it is that you have to be diverse and it’s not easy. It’s a challenge. The training is very hard, but anyone can do it.”

Ramsay’s first triathlon three summers ago is the one he cherishes the most. He swam 1.2 miles in 46 minutes, rode a bike 22 miles in 1 hour 20 minutes, and ran nine miles in 1:24. He looked exhausted but felt great. Now, Ramsay participates in two triathlons a summer and continues to improve his times.

When Ramsay first trained seriously, it caused worry among his family, friends and colleagues that he was pushing himself beyond his limitations. But, as Trail Blazer assistant coach Morris (Bucky) Buckwalter has said, “You can’t make Jack quit.”

Ramsay won’t say when he is likely to retire. He will be 62 when his contract expires in 1987.

“I only go year to year,” Ramsay said. “I’m 60 now. S-i-x-t-y! I don’t feel that old. I feel better than I did 30 years ago.

“I’m not ready to quit. I still enjoy coaching and I think I do it well. Besides, what else would I do?”

‘The ultimate satisfaction is to win the whole thing. (But) my barometer is, if I feel that I’ve done as well with the players I have, I can be satisfied. Not the total satisfaction, but enough.’

‘I do a lot of exercising for solitude, but mostly because I like it. It makes you feel good and it does relieve tension from the job. I feel alive and healthy.’

‘I’m 60 now. S-i-x-t-y! I don’t feel that old. I feel better than I did 30 years ago. . . . I’m not ready to quit. I still enjoy coaching and I think I do it well. Besides, what else would I do? ‘