RALPH MILLER’S FINAL SEASON : College Game Won’t Be the Same

Ralph Miller takes a seat at center court as his Oregon State basketball team starts practice.

A manager has put out an ashtray and a cup of coffee for him. He lights a long brown cigarette and quietly watches as his assistant coaches put the players through drills.

Miller looks bored.

Then suddenly, his foghorn voice pierces the quiet as he shouts at a player, waving his cigarette to get his point across.

“That cigarette is like his magic wand,” said Eric Knox, a senior guard from Inglewood. “He’s deceptive. You think he’s not paying attention, and all of a sudden he’ll yell something at you. He just has a way of bringing the best out in you.”

Miller, 69, has been getting the best out of his players for a long time now. His college coaching career spans 4 decades at 3 schools--Wichita State, Iowa and Oregon State, where he is in his 19th season.

“Ralph’s truly a giant,” said Pete Newell, the former California coach. “To coach as many years as he has, and be as successful as he is, is amazing. He’s been a monument to the game.”

After he was enshrined in the basketball Hall of Fame last spring, Miller announced that this would be his final season.

“Ralph should have been in the Hall of Fame a long time ago,” said Hank Iba, former Oklahoma State coach. “He helped to revolutionize basketball. He’s one of the all-time greatest coaches.”

Said Coach Jimmy Rodgers of the Boston Celtics, who played for Miller at Iowa: “Ralph has always been ahead of his time. What he was doing in 1965, other coaches are doing today. If you look at the great coaches, they’ve all withstood the test of time. Anyone in the basketball world recognizes that he’s done a great job.”

Miller is the winningest active coach in college basketball with a 656-363 record. He has had only 3 losing seasons in 38 years.

“The thing that marks Ralph as a great coach is that he’s established his record without a lot of talent over the years,” said Dick Schultz, executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., who assisted Miller at Iowa. “He’ll take an average team and turn it into an outstanding team.”

Said USC Coach George Raveling: “No one ever gives Ralph his due. If there’s anybody in the last 25 years who hasn’t gotten his day on the throne, it’s Ralph Miller. He’s right up there with the Dean Smiths and the Denny Crums and the John Thompsons. I put him up there with John Wooden.”

Miller needs 12 more victories to move ahead of Wooden into sixth place on the all-time list.

“You shouldn’t judge Ralph on the number of games won or his percentage, but the way his teams play,” said Wooden, who won 10 NCAA championships at UCLA. “And they play good, sound basketball. They’re fundamentally sound.

“The number of victories is meaningless because the person with the greatest number of victories also has the greatest number of losses. Today, they play far more games than they did in my day. I don’t think even the percentage method is a good criterion.

“I think a better criterion might be (NCAA) championships, because that’s against everyone. There are some coaches who have tremendous won-lost records because they were great schedulers.”

Miller downplays the significance of possibly passing Wooden.

“John Wooden is John Wooden,” Miller said. “What he did, nobody else is going to do, period. The fact that I would get ahead of him means that I just got higher on the scale. I’m sure that we’ll both go down in a few years, because Dean Smith is catching up with us very fast.”

However, Miller, who has a reputation for crustiness, doesn’t mind arguing a bit with Wooden.

“I beat John Wooden 3 times before I came to Oregon State in 1970,” Miller said. “He had never used pressure defense, but after I beat him, he started to use (pressure defenses), and he made them famous.”

Agreed John Gales, who played for Miller at Wichita State: “Ralph came out with the 2-2-1 pressing, trapping defense, and we pulled it on UCLA when we played them (in 1957), and we gave them a good spanking (83-68).

“Wooden and the boys went back to the Coast, and they decided that they would use the same press that Ralph ate them up with in Wichita.”

Not so, Wooden said.

“I used the press before I ever heard of Ralph Miller,” he countered. “I used it in high school in the 1930s. I lost to Ralph at two different places, but after he came to Oregon State, we played 12 times, and I only lost once.”

In any event, it probably will be as difficult for Oregon State to replace Miller as it has been for UCLA to replace Wooden.

Jim Anderson, an Oregon State assistant coach for 30 years who has been designated as Miller’s successor, agrees.

“I don’t think you really replace a Ralph Miller. You just take the players you have and you just do the best job you possibly can,” he said. “It’s almost like replacing John Wooden.”

Unlike Wooden, who has remained close to UCLA in the 13 years since his retirement, Miller doesn’t plan to hang around Oregon State. He plans to sell his house in Corvallis and retire to his vacation home in Black Butte, Ore., in the Cascade Mountains.

“I really wanted him to retire last year,” said Miller’s wife, Jean. “I went through the whole year thinking that, sadly, this would be his last year. Then I realized in March that he really wanted to go another year.”

Said Miller’s daughter, Shannon: “If he could, he’d probably coach forever because he loves it, and I think he’s still very good at it. But there comes a time in everyone’s life where you have to make changes. I think he feels very good about stepping out at this time. But it’s going to be an adjustment for all of us.”

This may be Miller’s last time around, but he is making no big deal of it.

“The best way to describe it is that it’s just another year,” he said at the Pacific 10 media day last month. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I see no reason to change my approach. Each year I try to develop the best basketball team I can with the personnel at hand.

“All of the rest of the foolishness that goes along with being a coach, I’m not going to miss. It won’t make me unhappy not to have to come to Los Angeles for a (media day) press conference.

“I think I’m going to miss the kids next year. I’ve always said that the only reason I’m in coaching is because I enjoy teaching young people. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”

If Miller will miss the players, the feeling seems to be mutual.

“Ralph has changed my career,” said Teo Alibegovic, a freshman center from Yugoslavia. “I had 10 coaches in 6 years of international basketball, and I think he’s the best coach I’ve ever had in my life. The other coaches never found out my good side and bad side, and Ralph found it out in 5 minutes.”

Said Gary Payton, the Beavers’ all-conference guard: “We’re going to come out and give him a great season so he can go out with great heroics. We want him to have fun and let his last season be a great one for him.”

Although he is being honored before every conference road game this season, the attention makes Miller uneasy.

After being told that Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery planned to read a 1 1/2-page tribute to Miller at a game in Palo Alto last weekend, Oregon State officials replied that Miller would prefer a shorter introduction--like a paragraph.

Montgomery read the short introduction and presented Miller with a golf bag and a plaque, and then his team handed Oregon State a 29-point beating.

But there will be more tributes, because Miller is widely respected.

“I have yet to talk to a Pac-10 coach who wasn’t a great admirer of Ralph,” said Ted Owens, a former coach at Kansas who is now a TV commentator.

Said Don Monson, Oregon coach: “Ralph’s a different hombre . He’s a wise old fox. It appears that he doesn’t know what’s going on, and then, bam! It’s game time and you’d better be ready or he’ll take you apart.”

Said UCLA Coach Jim Harrick: “Coaching against Ralph is like a chess match. He’s the master. He’s the best in the business. His teams do the same thing over and over again. It’s like playing the old Green Bay Packers when (Vince) Lombardi was coaching: ‘Here it comes, stop it.’

Jean Miller thinks her husband should write a book.

“I don’t want Ralph to write about coaching techniques and basketball fundamentals,” she said. “I think he should tell all the funny stories that have happened to him over the years.”

Miller has indeed accumulated plenty of stories in his 38-year career. Where to start?

--When Miller was hung in effigy outside his home after a tough loss at Wichita State, his players removed the dummy, remade it to resemble a local newspaper columnist who had been critical of Miller, and rehung it.

“We added a hat, stuffed it with pillows to make it look like the sportswriter because he was fat, and we put it back up and called the newspaper to come and take a picture of it,” said Lanny Van Eman, a Boston Celtics assistant coach who has known Miller for 30 years.

--Miller hired his brother Dick as an assistant at Wichita State and assigned him to scout the University of San Francisco.

“After watching USF, Dick reported back that ‘USF is pretty good and they’ve got a couple of big, tall players who are formidable, but I think we can take care of them,’ ” Jean Miller said.

Bill Russell and K.C. Jones were those big, tall players. They played a spectacular game against Wichita State and went on to lead USF to two NCAA titles before joining the Boston Celtics.

Dick Miller got out of coaching.

--After Miller had suggested that he switch his focus from defense to offense at Iowa, Downtown Freddie Brown went on to become one of the NBA’s more explosive offensive players.

“People don’t believe that I was more interested in passing than shooting at Iowa,” Brown said. “But Coach Miller saw something in me and he brought it out of me.”

--Miller is a strict disciplinarian, and Oregon State’s players were surprised when he dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out gifts while conducting a bed check on the road one Christmas night.

On another trip, Miller agreed to extend the team curfew after a player made an impassioned plea that he needed extra time to visit his relatives.

Said Miller: “OK, (seeing your girlfriend) must be that important to you.”

--A notorious referee baiter, Miller once got a technical foul he didn’t deserve when an usher seated at the end of his bench berated an official.

--Although Miller forbids smoking on his team, he is a chain-smoker. In the midst of a nicotine fit during a cab ride after a game, Miller turned to a player in the back seat and asked him for a cigarette.

The shocked player hadn’t realized that Miller knew he smoked. Sheepishly, he handed the coach a cigarette.

--Miller’s wife calls him Old Whiskey Sour Face.

“I’ve been called everything in the book,” Miller said, adding that his wife’s name for him is one of the nicer ones.

Not all of Miller’s stories are lighthearted. He helped break down racial barriers in basketball in the 1950s.

His first job was at Wichita East High, whose teams were nicknamed the Aces. When Miller led them to the state championship with an all-black starting lineup, they were called the Black Aces.

“When I was growing up in Kansas, track was the only sport that blacks could participate in,” Miller said. “They didn’t want them to be in any contact sports with whites. But I could never see the difference in blacks and whites.”

Said Gales: “Ralph was a pioneer. Playing for him was a true experience, one I’ll never forget. I came from Ft. Worth, which was a totally segregated environment, and all of a sudden, I was in Wichita, and Ralph came up with an idea that was eye-opening for me.

“It was the idea of being able to call white people by their first name. I had never been able to do that before.”

Wichita boosters were angered when Miller began to recruit blacks. It caused problems not only at home, but on trips to the segregated South. On one trip, Miller got into a heated argument with a Houston cab driver who refused to transport blacks.

“The cab driver told Ralph, ‘I can’t take those colored boys,’ and Ralph blew up,” Gales said.

“Ralph crawled in the front seat with the guy and for 5 minutes called him every name you could imagine. At the time, Ralph was smoking 3 or 4 packs of cigarettes a day, and I don’t think there was a time during the day when his breath was pleasant, and he was right up in the guy’s nose. I really felt sorry for the cab driver.

“We wound up having to call a black taxicab to take us to our hotel. All the white guys stayed at one hotel and we stayed at a black motel over by Texas Southern University.

“Ralph didn’t make excuses for the world. He just let you know that he knew what the situation was and he was doing what he could to change it, but he didn’t worry about what he couldn’t worry about.”

After moving to Iowa in the turbulent 1960s, Miller continued to break down barriers.

“Ralph didn’t care what color you were or how long your hair was as long as you could play,” Brown said. “When Ralph first walked into that gym, there wasn’t a lot of love because we (came from different backgrounds). But we all grew to love the guy.”

That seems to have happened all over the basketball world.