Oregon State’s Ralph Miller to Call It Quits After 38 Years as a Coach

He calls himself “the last of those who came out of the golden era” of college basketball.

And who’s to challenge him.

After 38 years of major-college coaching, Ralph Miller, a man who knew the inventor of the game and remains devoted to basketball’s fundamentals, is calling it quits after this season.

“I’m positive there will be some remorse or whatever about not coaching starting next year and maybe throughout the first year,” he said. “But as I learned long ago, old coaches fade into history, to never-never land, in a hurry.

“So I feel my wife and I will thoroughly enjoy the fact that we are free.”

Miller is 69. He’ll be 70 before his Oregon State team finishes his final season, and he is undeniably relaxed as he enters the 1988-89 campaign.

“I have no doubts that I’m going to miss the active participation in coaching,” he said, his feet propped up on his desk and one of his trademark long, brown cigarettes in his hand.

“But I think I can get along beautifully without all of the other responsibilities that are a part of the game.”

The truth be known, Miller already has given up many of the non-coaching responsibilities. Jimmy Anderson, the Oregon State assistant who will succeed Miller after this season, long has been the program’s chief recruiter.

And Miller disdains the press interviews, the luncheons and other glad-handing meetings that an NCAA Division I coach must endure in the big-money atmosphere of college athletics in the 1980s.

But Miller remains, unquestionably, the players’ coach.

Asked what he will miss the most, Miller says, “just working with the kids.”

“As I’ve said forever, coaching is nothing more than teaching,” he said. “Your ability to teach usually determines whether you have a successful record or stay around a long time or whatever.”

Miller, of course, has been successful and stayed around a long time.

He is the winningest active coach in major-college basketball with a 652-362 record at Wichita State, Iowa and, for the past 18 seasons, Oregon State. He’s had only three losing seasons and was named Associated Press coach of the year in 1981 and 1982. Earlier this year, he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

His 652 victories place him seventh on the all-time list, 15 short of John Wooden in the No. 6 spot.

“I think he’s just done a remarkable job,” said Don Monson, head coach at Oregon State’s arch-rival Oregon. “The recognition he’s given to Oregon State and, I feel, the recognition he’s given the state of Oregon has just been outstanding, and it’s all deserved.”

“He’s a great teacher,” Monson said. “There’s nothing complicated. He’s stuck by what he believes. I’ve always felt the biggest thing was the way he’s emphasized defense.”

Many a talented offensive player has languished on the Oregon State bench because Miller didn’t think he could play defense. Miller loathes the dunk shot and 3-point basket and feels only slightly better about the bounce pass. But defense has always been the cornerstone of his team’s game.

“If you don’t have a good defense, you’re not really going to have a good ball club,” Miller said. “When evenly matched teams walk on the court, the winner about 99.9 percent of the time is the team that best executes its defense. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”

Miller grew up in tiny Chanute, Kan., and he attended the University of Kansas, where he was the starting quarterback in football and a three-year letterman for one of basketball’s legends, Coach Phog Allen, whom Miller still reverently calls “Dr. Allen.”

As a youngster, Miller knew James Naismith, basketball’s inventor.

“I heard him as a guest lecturer and participated as a guinea pig in some of his experiments relating to eliminating the center jump after every basket,” Miller said. “He was greatly concerned that this would make the game too strenuous.”

After college, Miller coached in high school in Wichita for three years before being named head coach. His first team was 11-19. Two years later, the Shockers were 27-4. Miller moved on to Iowa in 1965, where his greatest team was the 20-5 1975 squad. He came to Oregon State in 1971 and eventually won four Pac-10 titles. His 1981 team finished 21-2 and was ranked No. 1 in the country most of the year.

He never made it to the Final Four, but reminds people that most coaches never made it that far.

Miller is braced for a season when he, not his team, will be the focus of attention, although he insists he wishes it was otherwise.

“I would rather have been able to say I wanted to quit last spring,” he said, “then I wouldn’t have had to worry about this kind of thing, but I felt I’d like to coach one more year.”

Miller said he won’t miss the big money or the scandals that have plagued the game, including the suspension that hit his alma mater, defending national champion Kansas, this year.

“Cheating has been a part of the college scene ever since I was a student,” he said. “I do think that it’s got much worse in recent years, primarily because of the need of money, the pressures involved to develop a good team.”

Kansas probably isn’t the only big-time team that has broken the rules, he said.

“I think there were other national champions that perhaps were a little guilty,” Miller said.

After his swan song season, Miller will retreat from the high-pressure game and do what his wife, Jean, has wanted him to do for so long, retire to the couple’s home at Black Butte Ranch in the Oregon Cascades.

Until then, Miller said, he’ll continue to do what he’s done for the past 38 years.

“My approach right now is hey, another year, you’re striving for the same goals, to develop the best team you can within the framework of your personnel,” he said. “My concentration has been strictly on this.”