College Basketball : Lewis’ Retirement at Houston Is End of an Era

Guy Lewis, the basketball coach at the University of Houston for the last 30 years, has announced his retirement at the end of the season, an occasion that will mark the passing of an era.

Lewis never did make a big name for himself on the national level. He was not mentioned in the same breath with John Wooden or Adolph Rupp. He has been known, in fact, as the Guy who can’t win the big one. He has had the Cougars in the Final Four five times and in the championship game twice, and he’s never gone home with the NCAA title.

When he gets past Southwest Conference play and into the tournament every year, Lewis comes off as something of a hick with a chip on his shoulder as big as Texas. He doesn’t trust any sportswriter who doesn’t drink his whiskey neat and talk with the same slippery, long drawn-out drawl that Lewis learned growing up in Arp, Tex.

Guy Lewis started playing basketball in Arp, a town about as big as its name. Basketball wasn’t as big in most places in the early ‘40s as it is now, but in Texas--where there are three sports, football, spring football and football recruiting--it was known as roundball or thump-thump.

Lewis played on the first University of Houston basketball team in 1946. After a military stint, he joined the coaching staff and became head coach in 1956.

At that time, in the South, black players played at the black schools. There was no mixing on the court. Lewis really shook some people when he signed Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney in the mid-’60s.

He won a lot of basketball games, but he also got stuck with a reputation for recruiting “street” players and then just pumping up the ball, not coaching. It was a long time before the Cougars’ style of play gained recognition.

Lewis also got stuck with a school that was not welcome in the Southwest Conference. Houston was not voted in until 1971, and couldn’t get football and basketball games scheduled within the conference until 1976. Could it be coincidence that, by then, most of the other schools were starting to use black players?

Elvin Hayes, now an assistant athletic director at Houston, said: “When I first heard (about Lewis’ retirement), I really wanted to cry. Guy meant so much to me in my development as a player and a person. He put his job on the line when he stepped forward to integrate basketball in the South.”

Hayes played in Lewis’ most famous game, the “Game of the Century” at the Astrodome on Jan. 20, 1968. It was the first nationally televised regular-season game and matched Hayes against Lew Alcindor (now, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) of UCLA. Lewis won that big one, 71-69.

The NCAA strikes again in its never-ending quest to keep college athletics above suspicion.

When Jake Young, a big offensive lineman from Midland, Tex., was at Texas Tech being recruited for the football team, he was taken to a basketball game where he bought a program and was surprised to find that the number stamped in his program was one of the numbers drawn for a half-court shot contest at halftime.

Young, who gave up basketball a year ago to concentrate on football, sank a free throw, winning a $25 savings bond and qualifying for the big shot from half court--which he also swished, winning $1,500 from a local bank.

The NCAA said that he couldn’t keep either amount. The NCAA judged that the money would be a recruiting inducement.

We’ll see whether the disappointment of not collecting the prize money works against Tech after Young has made his visits to Texas, Texas A&M;, TCU and Nebraska.

Joe Hornaday, sports information director at Tech, said that even if someone doubted the way Young was chosen for the contest, no one could argue about his making an extraordinary shot. “We’ve been having the half-court shot contest for seven years, and no one has ever won anything by making it,” Hornaday said.

Young said that he had made those long shots before in practice, but never in a game or when there was anything on the line.

Footnote: Young’s high school football coach, Jack Tayrien, was signed this week to join Tech’s staff as the secondary coach.

Nobody cares what happens in Cleveland, and that’s the problem facing Cleveland State University Coach Kevin Mackey. But the man has something to say, so let’s give him the floor for a couple of seconds:

“I deal with a paradox on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “We’re Page 1 news, but we wind up buried inside. We must be Cleveland’s best-kept secret. . . . We beat DePaul, 90-75, in the (Rosemont, Ill.) Horizon last week, and some people figure the Blue Demons had an off night. I think we had a better overall game that night. And I believe winning builds credibility. We’re no flash in the pan.”

The Vikings are 15-2, average 94.4 points a game, and dominate the Association of Mid-Continent Universities.

OK, that’s more than enough time for Cleveland.

Basketball Notes When Tito Horford, the 7-1 center from the Dominican Republic who has been choosing a college for the last two years, appeared at a news conference Tuesday, announcing that he would be playing for Miami next season, he said: “I chose Miami because I like the climate and it’s close to home. I chose it because the people, they’re friendly. They’re not looking forward to just seeing me play basketball. They care about me.” Coach Bill Foster then said that Horford would be granting no more interviews the rest of the year. . . . Louisville Coach Denny Crum was of the same opinion as many coaches around the country on the subject of Horford, who couldn’t go to Houston because of recruiting violations and who was kicked off the team at LSU. Most didn’t say it, but when Crum was asked why he wasn’t pursuing Horford, he said, “Never. No way. We don’t need those kinds of problems. We don’t even consider transfers.” . . . At 29, John (Shanghai) Matthews is the oldest player at a four-year NCAA college. After being laid off from his job in a Pittsburgh steel mill, Matthews has become a star player for Gannon University, a Division II school in Erie, Pa. He was offered a scholarship at Nevada Las Vegas but the NCAA would not waive its rule against Division I athletes starting their college careers past the age of 25. Gannon Coach Tom Chapman said, “He has a remarkable work ethic, the kind you get when you work in the steel mills for eight years on the graveyard shift.”