De Matha’s de Place : No Less an Authority Than Wooden Says the Reigning Wizard Is Wootten

It’s like U.S. Steel running its operations out of a basement furnace, Chase Manhattan storing million-dollar investments in a mattress.

The main school building, in a middle-class neighborhood of this Washington suburb 10 miles from the White House, is 50 yards long, 3 stories high and made of brick. Ten auxiliary bungalows and small houses serve as classrooms.

A garage converted into a classroom years ago to ease overcrowding also accommodates students, who have named it Ft. Necessity. The gymnasium is modest in size and appearance.

“We are testimony that the building does not make the program,” said Father James Day, the rector and top administrator.

Actually, there may be no greater testimony.

De Matha High School has a highly regarded math department and a music program that is decorated regularly. With 840 students, each of whom must take an entrance exam and pay about $2,400 to attend without benefit of scholarship, the 41-year-old all-male Catholic institution is the largest private school in the metropolitan Washington area.

It regularly sends graduates to the Ivy League, and school administrators tell of one senior a few years back who, on a college visit to St. Bonaventure in Olean, N.Y., was greeted with a handshake and, “If you’re from De Matha, we want you.”

But most of all, it has the most famous high school basketball program in the country. That is De Matha’s signature, frustrating as it is at times for the other departments.

For 28 consecutive years, every senior who has played at De Matha has been offered a full college scholarship for basketball. Say it again and think for a minute. For 28 consecutive years, every senior who has played at De Matha has been offered a college scholarship.

Even two student managers were offered scholarships to continue in their roles in college. One, Jeff Hathaway, is now an assistant athletic director at the University of Maryland.

Adrian Dantley and Kenny Carr played here and later were reunited as teammates on the 1976 Olympic team. No other school in the country can make such a claim.

Dereck Whittenburg and Sidney Lowe were teammates here. Four years after helping the Stags to the mythical national championship, No. 4 of the 5 in school history, they started in the same backcourt for the North Carolina State team that won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. title.

Bob Ferry, general manager of the Washington Bullets, sent his two basketball-playing sons, Bobby and Danny, to play at De Matha. Bobby went on to Harvard, and Danny was the star of this season’s Duke team that went to the Final Four.

Dozens of standouts got their starts as Stags--Adrian Branch, a former Laker; Johnny Jones, Bill Russell’s backup with the Boston Celtics; James Brown, who played at Harvard and is a CBS sportscaster; Bob Whitmore, the first black basketball captain at Notre Dame; Brendan McCarthy, who went on to play football for the Denver Broncos.

There are others, too. When longtime administrators and teachers have to struggle to remember all the alumni who went on to play professional sports, that says something.

Oh, yes. This is the coaching home of Morgan Wootten, a friendly but tough 56-year-old world history teacher, a man of simple tastes and great accomplishments, a devoted family man and friend for life of many former players. A high school legend if ever there was one.

Said one basketball enthusiast of the man who has made a living out of going Stag: “People say Morgan Wootten is the best high school basketball coach in the country. I disagree. I know of no finer coach at any level--high school, college or pro. I have said it elsewhere and I’ll say it here: I stand in awe of him.”

The speaker? John Wooden.

According to legend, and most everyone has a favorite tale about the storied history of De Matha, the father of a band member was in Australia a few years back. He happened to be wearing a De Matha jacket as he sat in a restaurant, and before long was interrupted.

An Aussie asked him about the famous high school basketball team in America.

“It hurts and it helps sometimes,” said John Moylan, who began at the school as a teacher in 1956 and now is principal. “It hurts that people have only heard about De Matha basketball and they figure that this is a basketball factory. They don’t talk about the band, and they’ve won more national championships than the basketball team.

“Where it helps the most is when the spotlight from the basketball team strays. That light also can shine on other areas. ‘Wait a minute. All those players earn a scholarship and go to college?’ Some of the basketball players here were very average. But they were good enough and strong academically. That makes the difference.”

And what of the basketball program?

“That’s one of the easiest parts of the school,” Moylan said. “You roll the balls out and let the kids in the colored underwear play.”

Then he smiled. He knows it isn’t true.

Would Wootten have written a book, traveled the world, lecturing and giving clinics, and be earning a reported $200,000 a year if it were that simple? Would the Stags have been profiled in Time, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, People and Sport? Would they get invitations to an average of 15 Christmas tournaments a year and field inquiries from 15 others?

Better yet, would they have this pressure?

“(The fans’) expectation level is so high,” said Pat Jones, a first-year assistant coach at De Matha who played for the Stags from 1980-82 and later at Harvard.

“A kid in Canada followed De Matha for years and read (Wootten’s) book. He had never seen De Matha play. After one game (during a nonleague swing through the Pacific Northwest in December), he said he was almost disappointed at the effort. The expectations are so big when you get to this point.”

Added Brown: “It’s almost like the Boston Celtics. When you go to a school like De Matha or play for a team like the Celtics, you kind of adapt to the winning ways and the tradition. That intangible almost becomes a tangible. You feel it. You almost go on to the floor with a responsibility to win.”

Wootten’s teams have upheld that responsibility for 32 years, the Stags having gone 876-122--that’s 87.8%--in that time. They were 30-3 in the season just ended. No doubt, though, they scored their biggest victory Jan. 30, 1965.

A year earlier, De Matha lost to Power Memorial Academy of New York City, coached by Jack Donohue, current head of the Canadian Olympic team, and led by a 7-foot 2-inch junior center named Lew Alcindor, now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Power was ranked No. 1 in the country with a 71-game winning streak, and De Matha was No. 2 with 24 straight victories.

De Matha prepared for its unique opponent with a unique strategy. To offset Alcindor’s size advantage, Moylan, an avid tennis player, suggested that Wootten use rackets in practice to get the Stags used to the shooting arc they would need to score. Everyone took turns against center Sid Catlett and the artificial extension.

On game day, about 12,500 fans crammed Cole Field House at nearby University of Maryland to watch on a snowy afternoon. Wootten recalls tickets being scalped outside for $75. And that was in 1965.

“My starting five walked out to their positions, in front of that huge capacity crowd and the longest press table any of us had ever seen, not to mention the newspaper photographers and television cameras lining each end of the court. We were only a few miles up the road along Route 1 from De Matha, but the real difference was immeasurable.

“I looked at the first few rows behind me and found Kathy, my wife, only days away from the birth of our first child. It could have happened any time, even that night, and I had an ambulance standing by just in case. We exchanged glances, then I looked around and up the aisles of that huge college field house and heard the ear-splitting noise as the referees moved to center court with the ball for the opening jump. Suddenly the thought struck me: ‘What’s a kid from Silver Spring who used to coach at an orphanage doing in a spot like this?’ But the thought was only fleeting. The game was about to start. It was time to go to work.” --Morgan Wootten, in “From Orphans to Champions”

The preparation paid off. De Matha led at halftime, 23-22, and the message in Wootten’s brief pep talk was clear. He told the team it had a half to play--and a lifetime to remember it. The second half was just as successful.

Final score: De Matha 46, Power Memorial 43. Alcindor, who scored 35 points against De Matha the year before, was held to 16 by Whitmore and Catlett, each 6-8, in his only high school defeat.

Wrote Abdul-Jabbar in his 1983 autobiography, “Giant Steps:” “Sitting in the locker room, unwilling to take off my uniform and admit that the game was over, I was a little dazed. . . .”

Three days later, Kathy Wootten had her baby.

When Morgan Wootten wrote his autobiography in 1979--longtime friend Red Auerbach wrote the foreword and said: “He’s also a good poker player, but he smokes lousy cigars”--he titled it, “From Orphans to Champions.” That is his story.

He was 19 in March, 1951, attending Montgomery Junior College near his home in Silver Spring, Md., planning to become a lawyer and keeping his fingers crossed that his Navy reserve unit would not be called into active duty in the 9-month-old Korean War. An uncle called, looking for someone to coach baseball to the orphans at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys. Wootten decided that his friend, Tommy Clark, would be perfect.

Clark and Wootten drove together to meet Sister Batilde, the mother superior of the orphanage, and Clark, less than enthusiastic about the job from the start, pulled a quick switch.

“Hey, Sister,” Clark said, nodding toward Wootten. “He’s a candidate, too.”

“All I know is I need a baseball coach,” she said.

Clark turned it on and gave the sales pitch for Wootten, who didn’t care much for the position, either. All of the sudden, though, the job was his--$75 a month to supervise practice every day, including weekends, and study hall for the seventh and eighth graders every night.

Wootten learned to like it and developed real affection for the boys. After a tough first year, he got the team organized. That was never more obvious than when he started sending the kids around the neighborhood in fund-raising efforts.

“Now remember,” he’d tell them, “when they answer that door, make sure you tell them you’re from the St. Joseph’s orphanage , and we’re trying to scrape up enough money to help you kids play ball.”

The team collected enough money to buy nice uniforms, new equipment and a pickup truck to use in collecting papers in future fund-raisers.

After two years, Wootten left St. Joseph’s to work at St. John’s High School, then located in downtown Washington but now part of the suburbs to the north.

Finally, in 1956, after graduating from the University of Maryland, he went to De Matha, then only 10 years old and a doormat in most sports. For $3,200 a year, he coached football and basketball, was an assistant with the baseball team, served as athletic director, taught five classes of world history each day and called out the numbers at bingo every Tuesday night.

The next year, they asked him to work full-time.

The turnaround at De Matha was similar to the orphanage’s. The school’s reputation in the late ‘50s was as a blue-collar institution, a far cry from today’s atmosphere. Its athletic department was a consistent loser.

In Wootten’s first year, the football team easily exceeded expectations by going .500, and the basketball team won its division title.

In his second season, De Matha failed to win 20 games in basketball. It hasn’t happened since.

The Wootten mystique is not in the championships, nor the respect his name brings throughout the country, nor the fact that Wooden and Auerbach and Dean Smith are among his close friends. It comes, strangely, from outside of basketball. Saying he is more than a coach to his teams may sound corny, but it is also true.

“When I first went to De Matha, I was young and excited,” said Whittenburg, now an assistant coach at Cal State Long Beach. “You heard so much about what a great coach he is. But the thing that dawns on you is how concerned he is about things other than basketball. The first meeting when I went there, nobody talked about basketball. It was mainly academics.”

Much of Wootten’s success stems from motivation. Head games, actually. If one of his superstars isn’t playing up to standard, Wootten will razz him in front of the whole team at halftime. He called James Brown “Jamie,” for example, insinuating girlish play.

But an underdog team gets different treatment.

Take the 1969 game against perennial power Long Island (N.Y.) Lutheran. Led by Billy Chamberlain, who later played at North Carolina, Lutheran, playing at home, had a 6-point lead with 30 seconds left in the game. Wootten called a timeout, took his team to the end of the bench and didn’t say a thing for about the first half-minute. Then he looked at his players with the most convincing expression.

“We’ve got them right where we want them,” Wootten told his team. “We have these guys lulled to sleep. They think they’re going to win the game.”

Who didn’t?

De Matha didn’t. And De Matha won.

The school was well into its scholarship run by then. On the other hand, it was only the start of things. To be at De Matha during the recruiting period now, well, it pretty much has to be seen to be believed.

“It’s generally a coaches’ clinic,” Moylan said. “You’re likely to come down any day during recruiting time and find a half dozen top-20 coaches around here.”

Said Wootten: “You name a coach, he’s seen us practice.”

A Sunday in March, 1969. De Matha, having beaten Ernie DiGregorio and St. Thomas More of Massachusetts in the semifinals of the Knights of Columbus tournament at Catholic University, is playing McKinley Tech of Washington for the title.

McKinley has already beaten the Stags and their All-American, Brown, by 15 points earlier in the season, and Brown is sitting out the rematch after collapsing on the bench from exhaustion in the semifinals. Friends of Wootten, imagining the massacre that awaits De Matha, have refused to go to the game.

With four minutes to play, Wootten settles his head into his hands.

“Dear God,” he says quietly, “please let Lefty take the Maryland job.”

The feeling is that if Charles (Lefty) Driesell doesn’t leave Davidson College in North Carolina for the University of Maryland, Wootten, close by and already prominent, will be offered the job. Just considering having to make such a decision--coaching in the college ranks at his alma mater or staying at his beloved De Matha--is tearing at Wootten. He hopes Driesell will make the decision for him.

That’s exactly how it happened. Driesell went to College Park and Wootten stayed, and, despite many more offers--he declines to say how many--he has never been tempted again.

Much of it has to do with not wanting to tear up his Maryland roots. He also no longer thinks he is the “college type” coach in the Division I world of today.

“God works in strange ways,” said Wootten, who has seen 13 of his former players go on to the National Basketball Assn. “That was the one time I honestly don’t know what I would have done. Every other situation, I’ve known exactly what I would do--stay at De Matha.”

Friends say, though, that Wootten’s interest could have been piqued again when Driesell was forced to resign from Maryland in October, 1986. This time, the only time his name was mentioned was by outsiders. The Terrapins never came calling and selected another highly regarded local high school coach, Bob Wade of Baltimore Dunbar.

“Morgan was very hurt that Maryland didn’t even make an official inquiry about him,” Brown said.

Today, Wootten shrugs it off. It’s not as if he would have jumped at the opportunity, but couldn’t Maryland officials at least have talked to him about the opening?

“It’s after the fact now,” Wootten said. “But the only time I’ve been sincerely interested in Maryland was in 1969.”

So here he will stay, teaching world history and making lifetime friends in the same building, coaching basketball in the same cramped gym that belies the program’s prestige, and fielding calls from throughout the country in his unpretentious office a few feet from the court. Much of his world--family and friends, teaching and coaching--is nearby.

“It’s nice to be wanted,” Wootten said.

Then he paused for a moment.

“But I’m wanted here.”

No wonder. On that Sunday in March, 19 years ago, De Matha, massive underdog against McKinley Tech, won by 22.