By John
Antonik
Gary McPherson, WVU's long-time athletics
fund-raiser and assistant basketball coach, was on his way to
Davidson College to work a basketball camp for Lefty Driesell.
McPherson, his wife, Peg, and their two young children packed
up their car for a week in Davidson, North Carolina. McPherson,
at the time the head basketball coach at VMI, was apprehensive
about having two young children and his wife living in the dormitory
for an entire week, and was frantically trying to make arrangements
for them.
Unlike today, college basketball coaches in the mid-1960s lived
on far less. Back then, coaches had to work basketball camps
just to help put food on the table.
When the McPhersons arrived on Sunday before the start of camp,
they learned that Driesell not only didn't have a dorm room reserved
for them, but he had made no arrangements whatsoever. Realizing
the visitors' predicament, Lefty's young assistant coach, Gale
Catlett, stepped in and offered the McPhersons his own apartment
to use. Catlett had just taken an assistant coaching position
at Kansas, and his wife, Anise, was back in Morgantown preparing
for the move. He wasn't using it, so why not help out someone
who needed it more?
That was Gale Catlett's way of introducing himself to Gary McPherson.
Gale Catlett's affiliation with West Virginia
University began in 1958 as a member of the Mountaineer freshman
team. The Hedgesville native missed the 1959-60 campaign with
a broken wrist before lettering three straight seasons in 1961,
1962, and 1963.
Catlett played during one of the finest periods in West Virginia
basketball history. From 1957 to 1961, Mountaineer teams spent
a staggering 61 straight weeks in the Top 20. West Virginia's
winning percentage from 1951 to 1961 was 78 percent, second only
to Kentucky.
During Catlett's three varsity seasons, West Virginia won a remarkable
70 of 88 games and went to the NCAA tournament twice.
Although not the team's primary scorer, Catlett managed to produce
407 points and grab 275 rebounds on Coach George King's guard-oriented
teams. Besides all the points and the rebounds he made, Catlett
was a great team player who would do almost anything to help
his team get an edge.
"If he thought he had to knock somebody in the head, he
knocked them in the head," teammate Willie Akers recently
told a statewide radio audience. "That's the way he played."
"He was a competitor,"
added teammate Jim McCormick. "It didn't matter whether
we were shooting pool, playing cards, running a race, or whatever.
Gale didn't like losing."
All-American teammate Rod Thorn, now a successful NBA executive
with the New Jersey Nets, recalled Catlett's impressive focus
and understanding of the game. "Gale was always a very good
student," said Thorn. "Most of us don't have plans,
but he always had a plan. He was a student of the game even then."
Catlett's keen basketball mind was also evident to opposing players.
Chris Smith, Virginia Tech's all-conference center, remembered
how Catlett used to deliberately delay the game when the Mountaineers
were in their vaunted zone press. "He would lie on the ground
and have their trainer come out and stretch him out," Smith
laughed. "All he was doing was catching his breath. He'd
jump up and they'd get back into that press and get a few more
steals."
McCormick believes a great deal of Catlett's coaching style evolved
from King's West Virginia teams. "The things he stressed
as a coach-teamwork, pride in your uniform, and respect for your
elders-those were the things we had on those teams," said
McCormick.
After
completing his senior season in 1963, Catlett immediately turned
to coaching. He got a job as an assistant for Lew Mills at Richmond
and coached there for three seasons before moving to Davidson.
After two years with Lefty Driesell, Catlett became the freshman
coach at Kansas for Ted Owens.
In 1971, Catlett took an assistant coaching position on Adolph
Rupp's staff at Kentucky. In just eight short years, Catlett
had methodically moved his way up the ladder to become one of
college basketball's most recognized assistant coaches.
"He didn't just start out at a small school like a lot of
coaches did back then, he started out at Richmond and then worked
for some of the best basketball coaches in the business,"
said McCormick. "He knew what he was doing."
Catlett spent just one year with Rupp at Kentucky during the
1971-72 season, but that was enough to help him land the head
basketball job at Cincinnati in 1972 at age 31. He took over
for Tay Baker and led the Bearcats to a 17-9 record in 1973.
Two years later he had Cincinnati in the 1975 NCAA tournament,
and they made two more trips in 1976 and 1977.
His '76 Bearcat team won 25 games and was ranked as high as number
two in the nation. Among his top players at UC were guards Lloyd
Batts, Steve Collier, and Gary Yoder, and forwards Mike Jones
and Pat Cummings. Catlett spent another year at Cincinnati in
1978 before returning to West Virginia as the people's overwhelming
choice to replace Joedy Gardner.
Catlett
and his attractive family took the Mountain State by storm. He
was speaking at formal dinners and functions, judging contests
at the Buckwheat Festival, and riding in open cars at country
parades all over the state. His popular statewide radio call-in
show soon covered more than just basketball. He exchanged recipes,
talked country music, and got to know our uncles, aunts, and
cousins.
West Virginia desperately needed someone with Catlett's personality
to build new steam in a basketball ship that was listing badly.
The Mountaineers were just 12-16 in 1978 and had not been to
the NCAA tournament in 11 years.
The new coach immediately introduced his winning ways, and by
1981 he had developed a team good enough to make postseason play.
A year later, in 1982, Catlett's Mountaineer club cracked the
national rankings for the first time since he was a WVU player
in 1962. West Virginia advanced to as high as sixth in the national
ratings and won a nation's-best 23 games. It was the first of
six NCAA tournament berths for the Mountaineers in a span of
eight seasons.
Players like Greg
Jones, Russel Todd, Dale Blaney, Lester Rowe, Darryl Prue, and
Herbie Brooks helped lead West Virginia to one of its most productive
periods in school history. In 1983, West Virginia defeated number
one-ranked UNLV to become the first and only Mountaineer team
to down a top-ranked team on its home floor. West Virginia also
had great wins over number 17 Oregon State in the first round
of the 1984 NCAA tournament, and an upset of tenth-ranked Auburn
in the 1985 preseason NIT.
"He was always a very bright, innovative coach," said
Temple's John Chaney recently. "He could coach on his feet
as well as anyone in the business."
"I call it tunnel vision," added McPherson. "He
was as good as anyone I've ever been around at blocking out things
before a basketball game. All the great ones can do that."
It was during the 1980s that the WVU Coliseum became one of college
basketball's most feared venues for visiting teams. The Mountaineers
didn't lose a home game for more than two years and posted a
Coliseum-record, 39-game winning streak that was snapped late
in the 1983 season. West Virginia set a single-game attendance
record of 16,704 against Pitt in 1982, and averaged a school-record
11,384 fans that season.
Catlett's success continued in the 1990s. His 1992 team was the
Atlantic 10 runner-up and faced Missouri in the NCAA tournament.
He had NIT teams in 1993, 1994, and 1997 before producing one
of the school's most memorable seasons in 1998.
That year, West Virginia downed nationally rated Georgia and
Connecticut on the way to a third-place Big East finish. The
Mountaineers earned an at-large berth into the NCAA tournament
and soundly defeated a good Temple team by 30 points in the first
round. Two days later, Catlett engineered one of the school's
most memorable victories when his team defeated number nine-rated
Cincinnati on a last-second shot to reach the NCAA "Sweet
16." West Virginia's 24-9 season that year will go down
as one of the finest in school history.
"When you look at the wins and the losses," commented
Dick Vitale on ESPN.com, "it doesn't tell you enough about
the knowledge Catlett possesses. If you ever sat down and talked
basketball with him, he would give you a wealth of information
about the game he gave so much to."
Although
Catlett's competitive nature is almost legendary (in later years
he would gulp down handfuls of Tums to help ease the painful
losses), Catlett never lost sight of his role as a teacher and
molder of young men.
He went through the trouble of getting State Department permission
so that his team could see firsthand the Demilitarized Zone when
they went to Korea. He once convinced a bus driver to get the
team closer to a fire that consumed an entire Philadelphia city
block. He took his assistant coaches and support staff to Broadway
plays. And, just this season, he made sure his players got a
good look at Ground Zero before they played St. John's in New
York City.
"He not only taught us how to become better basketball players,
but he also taught us how to become better men," said former
player Chris Leonard, now a budget analyst for Fairfax County,
Virginia. "He constantly sought out different ways to teach
us about different things in life."
"He did many things that people just never knew about,"
Akers added. "The people of this state will never know all
of the kind things he's done in his life."
Toward the end of his 24th and final season at WVU this year,
when it was becoming unbearable to digest the difficult losses,
to be a part of a game that had so dramatically changed, Catlett,
age 61, decided the time had come for him to step aside. On February
14, a day after the Virginia Tech loss and with five games left
in the regular season, he called Athletics Director Ed Pastilong
and gave him the news.
"He just felt the time had come for him to retire, and then
we reflected back on the times we both had playing at West Virginia
University in the 1960s," said Pastilong. "But the
losses were really weighing heavily on him.
"Gale is a man, and when he's made up his mind, he's made
up his mind," Pastilong added.
No flowery speeches, no emotional press conferences, no roasts.
Just a simple press statement thanking the great people of West
Virginia for the opportunity to do the one thing in life he wanted
to do most-coach at the school he loves so dearly.
That's how he wanted to end it.
