Woody Durham, who was about to emcee the dedication for the Dean E. Smith Center at the University of North Carolina last January, called his fellow broadcaster and Carolinian Billy Packer to check a fact.
”I believe Dean is the only active basketball coach in the United States who has ever had a gym named for him,” Durham said.
”I don`t know about the rest of the country,” Packer said, ”but 80 miles from you is the C.E. Gaines Center.”
Dean Smith, you see, is not even the only living legend in North Carolina whose name has become an architectural landmark on his campus.
C.E. Gaines also works inside a building that bears his name, at Winston- Salem State University. What could be more fitting for a man called ”House” by his close friends and ”Bighouse” by everyone else?
All things being unequal, there are some differences between life in the houses fame built at these two state universities, even if both include basketball court, swimming pool and offices. They are as obvious as the facilities` pricetags: The Smith cost $34 million; the Gaines, only four years older, went for $2.2.
They are also as plain as black and white.
”He has never gotten the credit he deserves, nor is he the kind who has wanted it,” Smith says. ”Like in any other field, opportunities for black Americans have come slowly, and so has the recognition.”
Admit it. You still have no idea who this Gaines person is.
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Clarence Edward Gaines, basketball coach, athletic director, physical education teacher and erstwhile photographer at Winston-Salem State University, has coached more winning college basketball games, 760, than all but three men in history. The nearest active coach to Gaines, Jim Phelan of Mount St. Mary`s in Maryland, is nearly 150 victories behind.
Gaines passed De Paul`s Ray Meyer (724) two years ago and Western Kentucky`s Ed Diddle (759) last Tuesday. With at least nine games left to play this season, he has a chance to move into the No. 3 spot on the all-time list, held by Hank Iba at 767.
Sometime next season, only Adolph Rupp, the Baron of the Bluegrass, will remain ahead of Gaines, who, at 63, says he may coach until he is 70. His pursuit of Rupp will eventually attract attention, even if some of it will be for the wrong reasons, as it was when Eddie Robinson was closing in on Bear Bryant`s record for victories by a college football coach.
People are already belittling Bighouse for winning his games at a Division II school in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA). The ”C” stood for Colored until 1950.
”What people have to understand is that House Gaines never said he outcoached Rupp or that he was better than anyone else,” says Packer, who lives just outside Winston-Salem.
”He also never had the same to work with as a Rupp or a Smith, and he has had even less since integration. If this was 1960, Michael Jordan would have played for Winston-Salem, and so would have Cornbread Maxwell and John Lucas and James Worthy and Walter Davis.
”He won then, and he wins now. The scary thing about his record is House is still comparatively young.”
He is in his 41st year of coaching, all of them at the same school. Bighouse Gaines jokes that he once wanted four wives and four jobs at four schools, but he has had only one of each. Of course, he has done everything including the laundry at Winston-Salem, which has also been known as Winston- Salem Teachers College and Winston-Salem State College in the four decades since Gaines landed there fresh out of Morgan State with a degree in chemistry.
At Morgan, he starred as a tackle in football and played what passed for center in basketball, although he calls the position ”right back,” as in
”When they passed me the ball, I passed it right back.” At 6 feet 4 inches and 270 pounds–he`s now well over 300–Gaines set picks that were more like detours. He was, according to the Morgan State equipment manager who gave Gaines his nickname, bigger than a house.
His size and ability–he was a small college All-America–drew interest from the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference. It ended as soon as he asked for a $4,000 contract.
Gaines wanted the money to finance his education at Howard University Dental School. He decided instead to stay at Winston-Salem long enough to save what he needed, which was what his mother wanted him to do.
Education had been the only thing that mattered to Olivia Gaines and her husband, Lester, as they raised their only child in Paducah, Ky. The boy got the message: He would bring books along when his father took him fishing.
When her husband was making $15 a week, Olivia Gaines paid 50 cents a lesson so Clarence could learn to type. He also learned to play the piano and the trumpet. Bighouse Gaines played Edward MacDowell`s ”To a Wild Rose” in his last piano recital, at age 16. He went on to play trumpet in the high school band, entertaining at halftime of the basketball games in which he was also competing. And he mastered the words to ”My Country! `Tis of Thee” in Latin well enough to know them 50 years later.
”Te cano patria, candida libera,” Bighouse sings in a soft baritone that barely carries across his 6-by-10-foot office. On the shelves behind his desk are copies of ”Art Today,” ”History and Principles of Physical Education” and ”The Catalogue of Anatomy Slides.”
The door to the office is open. The phone rings constantly, and the only black man inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach answers it himself. He does not shut the door or ask a visitor to leave.
”My wife says, `You`ll pick a conversation with a dog.` I tell her, `If it can talk, I will.` ”
That makes it easy to communicate with Bighouse. One need not interview him as much as simply eavesdrop on his life. There are no lackeys poised to keep him from annoyances, major or minor. Whatever befalls him in the course of a day, from the death of the man who started golf in the CIAA to the possibility that one of his players had been involved in a car theft, he simply takes as it comes.
”My life has always been that flexible,” Gaines says.
He has run practice at 6 a.m. one day and 8 p.m. the next, if that was the only way his players could also get to the classes they wanted. He runs his program on $250,000, chump change to the folks 80 miles down the tobacco roads in Chapel Hill. After four decades at the school, his $52,000 salary is less than what many Division I coaches are paid in endorsements by shoe companies.
In those four decades, Gaines` basketball teams have had just two losing seasons while winning an NCAA College Division championship, eight CIAA tournament titles and 8 of the past 15 CIAA Southern Division titles, including the last two.
”He has regularly gone about producing teams that have reached their potential,” Smith says. ”His legions of players speak for what he has accomplished.”
In fact, if legions are the measure, it would be better to count the number of successful businessmen and teachers whom Gaines coached. Where players are concerned, the mention of Gaines and Winston-Salem evokes memories of just one man: Earl Monroe.
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Getting Earl Monroe was luck. Recruiting was always such an offhand proposition for Bighouse Gaines.
In the early days, he and old friend John McLendon, then the coach at North Carolina Central, would pool their meager financial resources and tour the state in McLendon`s car. Rather than explain what presumed rivals were doing together, McLendon would simply pose as Gaines` assistant when they visited a player, and vice versa.
”We never got crossed up on a player. That`s the kind of person he was,” says McLendon, who retired from college coaching in 1969 and was later elected to the Hall of Fame as a contributor.
The players Gaines first attracted that way would go on to recruit other players in the same situation. That is how Ted Blunt, now a city councilman in Wilmington, Del., wound up playing at a school he had never heard of for a coach he had never heard of. That is how Monroe, then a Philadelphia shipping clerk, followed Blunt two years later. Both were sent by Leon Whitney, who played for Gaines in the early 1950s.
Gaines had other good players before Monroe. From 1953 through 1957, his teams were 23-5, 25-8, 21-6, 23-7 and 24-6. Oris Hill (1947) and Carl Green
(1954) went to the Globetrotters. And Cleo Hill, not Monroe, was both the first widely recognized great player and the first National Basketball Association player from Winston-Salem.
”Cleo was so superior to anyone I was playing against in the Atlantic Coast Conference I was amazed.” Packer says.
Packer found that out the night he dared to cross the racial gap that divided Wake Forest and Winston-Salem State to watch the other team in town. When Gaines saw the only white face in the gym, he invited Packer to sit on the bench. From there, Packer got an eyeful of the 6-1 Hill doing things, including goaltending, he had never seen before.
”Cleo was way ahead of his time,” Packer says.
Too far. When he joined the St. Louis Hawks as a first-round draft choice in 1961, Hill apparently was seen as a threat by the two southern boys, Cliff Hagan of Kentucky and Bob Pettit of Louisiana State, who were the Hawks`
established stars.
Expected to be primarily a ballhandler, Hill averaged nearly 20 points in the exhibition season. He had 26 points in just 33 minutes of the season opener, ”drawing roars from the big crowd with his spectacular leaps while driving for shots or snaring rebounds,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But Hill went on to average just 5.5 points and 18 minutes in his only NBA season, and Gaines will always believe he was blackballed.
