Ralph Miller; Basketball Coach
Ralph Miller, whose Oregon State basketball teams were famed for their aggressive defense, died Tuesday at his home in Black Butte Ranch, Ore.
Miller was 82. In recent years, he had suffered from a form of emphysema and had circulation problems that required the use of a wheelchair.
He coached 19 seasons at Oregon State and won four Pacific 10 Conference championships. His 1981 team was ranked No. 1 in the nation for nine weeks. When he retired in 1989 after coaching 38 seasons, his total of 674 wins was sixth best in NCAA history.
He was a no-nonsense, old-school type who banned the dunk shot in practice, calling it “an idiot’s delight.”
The 6-foot-2 Miller paced the sideline at Oregon State’s Gill Coliseum, his face puckered into a steely squint at players or referees who had displeased him.
His practice style was much more reserved. With his assistants on the court, he’d sit in the 10th row of the stands, smoking cigarettes, drinking black coffee and sometimes working on a crossword puzzle.
But if a player made a bonehead play--missing a layup, for example--it often ignited a volcanic reaction from Miller, who would bound down to the court and head for the offending player.
The coach had other pet peeves.
“A center without a hook shot,” he once said, “is like a rowboat without oars.”
He had a prickly personality, never minced words and never played favorites, his players would say.
“He was difficult for some people to take,” Mark Radford, a guard on the 1981 team, told the Portland Oregonian last year. “He was difficult to like. But he was like a Patton or Schwarzkopf. He didn’t want to be liked. He wanted to be respected.”
“I had a tough time dealing with him,” said Steve Johnson, center on the same team. “He was sarcastic, and he didn’t give compliments. But then you understood the guy just wanted perfection. He might have yelled at me 100 times, but I’d screwed up 100 times.”
Former UCLA Coach John Wooden praised his old Pac-10 foe last summer. “Ralph Miller is one of the finest coaches I ever saw,” Wooden said. “His teams were disciplined and so sound fundamentally, two of the most important things a team can have. I don’t think I ever played much better-coached teams than his.”
Miller was born March 9, 1919, in Chanute, Kan. He was a football quarterback and basketball forward at the University of Kansas and broke into coaching at Wichita State in 1952. He compiled a 220-133 record there, then coached six seasons at Iowa before moving to Oregon State.
A 65-year cigarette smoker, Miller needed supplemental oxygen in his last year. When asked last summer what was important to him, he said with a wry smile: “Staying alive.
“Everybody has to go sooner or later; you just don’t want to rush it,” he said.
Miller is survived by his wife of 58 years, Jean; son Paul of Black Butte Ranch; daughters Susan Langer of Vancouver, Wash., and Shannon Jakosky of Newport Beach; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Services will be private, the family said.