If Vandeweghe Joins Knicks, It Would Be a Homecoming of Sorts

In 1952, en route to the championship round of the NBA playoffs, the New York Knickerbockers edged the Boston Celtics in a best-of-three Eastern Division semifinal series. The third game was decided in double overtime by a foul shot at the buzzer. There’s a story behind that shot, as told by Ernest Maurice Vandeweghe Jr.

“We’re in Boston,” Vandeweghe recalled. “It’s a tie game. With seven seconds left, I miss two free throws. But we steal the ball and call time out. Joe Lapchick sets up a play for me to drive. He says, ‘Give the ball to Ernie.’ Someone in the huddle says, ‘But he’ll get fouled.’ And Lapchick nods. ‘Any idiot can make one of three,’ he says.”

That particular idiot was fouled and made the shot that lifted the Knicks to an 88-87 triumph. “I wouldn’t be telling the story,” Vandeweghe said, “if I didn’t.”

This was almost a decade ago and Dr. Ernie Vandeweghe was sitting in the restaurant of a Provo, Utah, hotel a few hours before the oldest of his four children was to play a game for UCLA in the NCAA West regional. His son, Ernest Maurice III, was called Kiki. Now Kiki Vandeweghe is a professional, and the Knicks have made what they consider a reasonable offer for his services, considering his age (30) and the chronic condition of his back.

Should the Portland Trail Blazers finally agree to the terms and conclude a trade that has progressed with all the dispatch of a daytime soap opera, the franchise will be able to boast of its second second-generation player. Allie McGuire, son of the elder Vandeweghe’s former teammate, Al McGuire, appeared in two games during the 1973-74 season and scored four points. The Knicks are expecting more from Kiki Vandeweghe, perhaps even the shot that eliminates the Celtics from the playoffs. It would be altogether fitting.

To look at the 6-8 Vandeweghe, he appears born to the game. In addition to his size and his smooth offensive moves, there are those genes. Not only was his father an All-America at Colgate and a skilled pro but his mother’s brother, Mel Hutchins, was a four-time NBA All-Star with the Milwaukee Hawks and later the Fort Wayne Pistons.

And yet the youngster did not decide to devote his energy to basketball until he was 13. His first interest was swimming, a sport in which he was a national age-group champion at 10 and 12. That was the doing of his mother, Colleen Kay Hutchins, who was an outstanding swimmer, a factor not taken into consideration in the Miss America competition she won in 1952, the same year in which her future husband hit the shot that beat the Celtics.

“We lived for four years in Palm Desert,” Papa Vandeweghe said, “in a condominium with a pool. My wife was worried about the pool so she lined up the kids and started working with them. They’d get in the water at 8 in the morning and climb out at 9 at night.”

Tauna Vandeweghe, the second oldest, became sufficiently accomplished to qualify for the 1976 U.S. Olympic Team. As a youngster, Kiki was better. “I’d go a year without losing a race,” he once recalled. “But every time I got in the pool, people expected a new record. Practice was a grind. Before my performance suffered from lack of practice, I got out.

“My father told me I was crazy to give up the success I had in swimming. Also, he thought there would be too much pressure on me in basketball because of all the success he had and my uncle had.”

Once he cast his lot with basketball, however, the Vandeweghes all pitched in. “In the ninth grade I played in four or five different leagues,” he said. “I used to have four games every Saturday. The family would drive me from game to game.”

His father taught him fundamentals. “Basketball was one of the few things that came hard for me,” he said. “Since I’m the type of person who doesn’t enjoy not doing things well, I worked at it.”

It wasn’t until his senior year of high school that he appeared to be a major-college prospect. Utah and Brigham Young, alma mater of his mother and uncle, recruited him. But he wanted to attend UCLA, located just across Sunset Boulevard from the family’s house in Bel Air. It wasn’t until after he had starred in several high-school all-star games that Gene Bartow walked across the street to offer the Bruins’ last scholarship.

He played under three different coaches in Westwood and didn’t blossom until his senior year when he led Larry Brown’s first UCLA team to the championship game of the NCAA tournament. Somewhere in his development from clumsy beginner to an NBA first-round draft choice, he surpassed his old man. “The last time we played one-on-one,” Kiki reported, “I used his old shot, the left-hand hook, and he couldn’t block it. So now we just play horse.”

In addition to strengthening the Knicks’ bid for a championship, Vandeweghe’s presence in New York would complete the family journey from East to West and back again. The father came out of Oceanside to be the Most Valuable Player in the first East-West All-Star Game in the old Madison Square Garden as a Colgate freshman. He joined the Knicks in the first season of the NBA, roomed with Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton and participated in three championship series while studying medicine at Columbia. He played for Lapchick, a revered figure in New York basketball.

“He was not a great coach,” Dr. Vandeweghe said, “but he was a master psychologist. He’d take you out after a bad play and say, ‘Do you feel all right?’ You’d say, ‘Yeah.’ He’d say, ‘Can you play better?’ You’d say, ‘Yeah.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, play better.’ And he’d send you back in.”

The Knicks now play in a different Garden. And the coach, Rick Pitino, was born the year the father hit the free throw to beat the Celtics. But to New Yorkers with long memories and a sense of tradition, Kiki Vandeweghe would be coming home.