Orange County Prep Review : Knight, Sunny Hills’ Boop to Team Up

Here’s the scoop: Boop likes to hoop.

Boop likes to hoop so much that he’s even going back to Indiana University to help teach it alongside Bobby Knight at the Hoosiers’ upcoming summer basketball clinics.

Indiana is in Bloomington, in the heart of an area that many consider to be Mecca for amateur basketball, and a coaching stint there should be an invaluable experience for Robert Lyndon Boop, 25, assistant basketball coach at Sunny Hills High School.

Though Boop was named after Indiana’s Bobby Knight, he is known to the world as Lyn Boop because, understandably, he didn’t want to go through life being called Bobby Boop.

Just how an Orange County basketball coach came to be named after one of basketball’s most successful--and controversial--coaches is simple.

Boop’s family lived next door to Knight in the Midwest and Boop’s father was impressed enough with Knight to name one of his three sons after him.

The Boops and the Knights lived on Vine Street in Orrville, Ohio, a rural community of about 7,000 located about an hour’s drive south of Cleveland. In such a small town, high school sports are pervasive and prep players such as Knight, who starred at Orrville High School in the late 1950s, are revered.

By the time Boop was born in 1960, Knight already had gone on to play at Ohio State, where he was the sixth man on the Buckeyes’ NCAA championship team, playing on a squad that included future pro stars John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Larry Siegfried.

Said Boop: “My dad was the town dentist and he was sort of a surrogate father to Knight. Bobby’s own dad was deaf and communicating with him was sometimes frustrating, so he’d come by our house to talk things over with my father (Don Boop).

“Plus, one time Bobby got kicked off the high school team after getting into a fight with the coach, so my dad helped patch things over there, too.”

According to the Boop family, the irascible Knight portrayed in the press, the one seen throwing furniture onto the court or yanking players off it, is not the one that the Boop family grew up with.

“You always hear about those things,” Boop’s older brother, Les, said, “but you never hear about what a great guy he is to go fishing with or the charities he’s helped, like all the money he’s helped raise for Landon Turner, or getting the Boston Celtics to draft Turner because he always wanted to play in the pros.”

(Turner was the center on Indiana’s 1981 NCAA championship team who was later paralyzed in a car accident.)

Les Boop, a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton who lives in Fullerton with Lyn, nonetheless has a story that helps illustrate Knight’s sharper edge when his dander is up.

Said Les, who is also Knight’s godson: “We were driving from Orrville to West Point once when Bobby was head coach at Army and we got stopped for speeding at some little town just past the Pennsylvania-New York border.

“Bobby got in a fight with this trooper over whether he was speeding or not and before you knew it he was in jail.

“He just used his one phone call and an hour later we were out of there. Bobby phoned the Pentagon , woke up some general, I guess, and got us out.”

For Lyn Boop, an aspiring basketball coach who led the Sunny Hills junior varsity team to a second-place finish in the Freeway League last season and who is now an assistant to Steve White on the Lancers’ varsity team, the friendship with Knight has proven to be invaluable to his own career.

For instance, when Boop first applied for the Sunny Hills job last year Knight cronies such as Texas Coach Bob Weltlich, Evansville Coach Jimmy Crews and former Ohio State Coach Fred Taylor all called Sunny Hills athletic director Ralph Trigsted to vouch for Boop’s reputation.

Most college coaches, much less high school varsity coaches, would be hard pressed to conjure up those kinds of character references.

Then there was the time two years ago when Boop was Knight’s guest at the NCAA championships in Lexington, Ky., where Knight’s hotel room proved to be a veritable wing of the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Said Boop: “I walked into his room and there was Bobby, Pete Newell, Hank Iba and Red Auerbach--smoking a stogie--all talking basketball.”

“Bobby hates smoke, but I think Red’s about the only guy in the world he’s not going to say anything to. When Red left Bobby opened the windows in there fast.”

Although Boop reveres the Indiana coach--the very backboard that Knight once practiced on as a youth is now in the Boop family’s driveway back in Orrville--Boop knows that just being acquainted with a famous coach will not ensure his own success.

An offhand comment by Boop during a recent interview in the Sunny Hills gym, however, should tell you all you’d want to know about Boop’s own dedication to the sport.

“Les and I were in here the other night playing full-court, one-on-one,” Boop said, “when the security people threw us out at about 2 a.m.”

Bobby Knight would be proud.

Prep Notes

Los Angeles Rams quarterback coach Dick Coury will be the guest speaker at a pregame kickoff dinner for the 27th Orange County All-Star football game on Thursday at the Santa Ana Elks Club. A no-host social hour begins at 6 p.m. with dinner at 7:30. Tickets are $12 and will be available at the door. . . . Orange Coast College women’s basketball Coach Larry Sunderman will host the Eagle Basketball Camp on June 23-July 1 in Estancia High’s gymnasium. Sessions will run from 12:30 to 3 p.m. daily; the camp is open to boys entering the third to 10th grades and girls entering the third to 12th grades. Cost of the camp is $80 for seven days of instruction. For further information, contact Trudy Nuzum at 754-5300. . . . The eighth Servite Summer Basketball Tournament is scheduled for July 18-20. The tournament field has been expanded to 16 teams and includes two-time Southern Section 5-A champion Mater Dei and county powers Capistrano Valley, Santa Ana and Ocean View. Corvallis, Ore., the runner-up in the Oregon state championship, is also entered. Mater Dei will play Corvallis in the first round. . . . Former Huntington Beach basketball star Rico Thompson has been named the varsity basketball coach at San Marcos High of the CIF San Diego Section. . . . Karl Gaytan, who resigned after two unsuccessful seasons as Ocean View’s varsity football coach, has accepted a similar position at Edison High in Fresno.