Hall of Fame Adds Carril and Haskins

Pete Carril, who never won a national championship but made it difficult for some coaches to do it, and Don Haskins, who won one championship and changed the course of college basketball in doing so, were among seven people elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame on Monday.

They join scoring ace Alex English, forward Bailey Howell, women’s stars Denise Curry--a former UCLA player and longtime star in Europe--and Joan Crawford and longtime Spain coach Antonio Diaz-Miguel. The induction will be Sept. 29.

“I never thought about anything like this when I started coaching,” said Carril, who retired from Princeton a year ago and became an assistant with the Sacramento Kings. “Especially, in the Ivy League. I don’t know if I can feel any better than I do. I’m overwhelmed. I’m on another planet.”

Carril, 67, used a pressing defense and a patient offense to amass a 525-273 record over 29 years and transform Princeton into the most feared underdog in the NCAA tournament.

He retired from college basketball last spring after his team upset defending national champion UCLA, then lost to Mississippi State. Before last year, the Tigers had lost four times in the first round to the top-seeded team, but only by a combined total of 15 points.

Haskins, 66, has quietly kept winning since his Texas Western--now Texas El Paso--team with five black starters beat Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky team for the 1966 NCAA championship.

He ranks among the top five active college coaches with a 687-322 record and seven conference titles in 36 years.

“I’m shocked. I never thought that this would happen to me. I’d never felt that I’d done enough,” he said. “But if I said I wasn’t hoping, I’d be lying. This is even bigger to me than the national [championship]. You start out playing basketball as a little kid. All of a sudden, you’re where I am now, and it doesn’t seem possible.”

English became the NBA’s most prolific scorer in the 1980s and was the first player to score 2,000 points in eight consecutive seasons. Still, he said he hadn’t expected the call because he was left off the NBA’s list of its 50 greatest players.

“I felt slighted,” he said. “But now I’m elated.”

Curry of UCLA was selected the French player of the 1980s during an eight-year pro career in Europe. Crawford was an AAU star in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I’ve been hoping,” said Crawford, who works in a library at Northwestern. “But women’s basketball doesn’t get the recognition it should, and when I played it got hardly any recognition.”

Among the nominees who failed to gain election were coaches John Thompson, Jerry Tarkanian, Tex Winter, Jim Phelan and Alex Hannum.

Also considered were players Gus Johnson, Jamaal Wilkes, Sidney Moncrief, Bobby Jones, Arnie Risen, Dennis Johnson, Jo Jo White and Ubiratan Pereira Maciel of Brazil.