Tribune: How do you think DePaul has come along in the last few years?
Meyer: You know, a school like DePaul, we’re not going to be like Duke, where players come in every year and it’s like a river that keeps flowing along. You have your good years and you’re going to have some mediocre years. And you’re not always going to get the best ballplayers because they go to all these big schools that are on TV almost every game.
One of the big reasons DePaul went down is because we got off WGN. That’s where so many people saw us play. We were recognizable to players all over the country. We became the darling for a while. Everybody rooted for you. We were playing Goliath all the time. I remember vividly we were playing Notre Dame and we were losing by six points with two or three minutes to go and we pulled it out. Probably 1978. People wrote us from all over the country. A lot of people wrote, “We won the game for you. We put this statue of St. Vincent on the TV and the game turned around.”
T: Do you think Chicago will ever really embrace DePaul again?
M: Oh, they’ll do it in a minute if they win. Chicago is probably one of the greatest of athletic towns. If you win here, you’re a hero. The people are starved for good basketball. The Bulls were way down and we were playing very well [in the late 1970s, early 1980s]. We had a good base of season ticket-holders. Of course, when the team went down, the people lost interest. Now they’re coming back.
T: Is Hall of Famer George Mikan (1942-46) the best player you ever coached?
M: You can’t compare players from 50 years ago and now. Everything’s changed. There weren’t many big guys at that time. I remember when we went into Philadelphia to play the first year Mikan was at DePaul and there were headlines in the papers calling him a freak. The next day they came out and said, “Apologies to George Mikan.”
You used to see kids walking through the hallways hunched over. They didn’t want to be big. We used to tell Mikan, “Be proud of being big.” He’d be good today. He wouldn’t dominate as he did, but he’d be a hell of a ballplayer. He was a great guy in the sense he was very intelligent. I learned from the beginning it’s easier to coach an intelligent ballplayer than a dumb one. The intelligent ballplayer, you tell him and he knows what you’re talking about. The dumb one you’ve got to go over and over and over it.
T: Are you a guy who saves things from your career?
M: I used to save everything. Now I throw everything away. Or I gave it away–I’m too old for that. I had so much junk around the house. Pictures under the bed. Closets, you’d find things. I gave a lot to the family. I gave a lot to the Basketball Hall of Fame too. They had a display, basketball and clothing. I was there for the dedication of the new one.
T: Who are some of the great college players you coached or saw?
M: A lot of star players played for me in the 1950s when I coached the college all-stars against the Globetrotters for about eight years. Then the NCAA put in a rule that said you couldn’t play or you would lose your scholarship. Bob Pettit, the Hall of Famer from the [old NBA St. Louis] Hawks, was one of my favorites. He’s a great friend today. We had almost all the stars. Bob Cousy, Ernie Beck, Tom Gola. Later we had Frank Ramsey, K.C. Jones.
We had regular games against the Globetrotters. They weren’t putting on a show. We started in New York and worked our way west. We played about 20 games a year. The only time they put on a show where we went along with them was when we played a night game in the Rose Bowl with about 40,000 people. Nobody knew about putting the floor on the grass. It was like a sheet of glass. We slid all over the floor. They couldn’t call walking.
T: Which arena did you enjoy playing at in Chicago?
M: We played some games on campus at DePaul and we called it The Barn. But it wasn’t very big and who would come to play? So we had to go off-campus. We played 15 or 16 games at the Chicago Stadium.
T: Getting back to Chicago as a basketball town. This city has a number of colleges, but no college dominates the interest of the fans. Will that change?
M: Back in 1963, Loyola was the team. They won the NCAA championship. You know, we had just as good a team that year, only Emmette Bryant broke his leg. We were 13-0 when he broke his leg against Indiana. He was a hell of a ballplayer. He played in the NBA and he wrote me the nicest letter when he graduated. He said, “I thought you were the meanest man in the world when you were coaching. But I would never have graduated and I would never have gone on if it weren’t for you.” Boy, I was all over that kid. Emmette was the oldest player who ever came to me because he was six years in the service. He was in the Army. Tough as nails. He could shoot the ball.
T: How do players of today compare?
M: Players are a lot different today. They are recruited so heavily today that when they come to you, you’ve got to break some of their habits. They say, “How come when you recruited me I was so good and now I’m not so good?” They’ve got to be corrected all the time. They’re not listeners like they were before. It’s only at the good programs that they get the high-class kids where they know what they’re doing.
Basically, they’re all good kids. But they get spoiled in high school. A real star in high school, now he’s no longer the star. He’s one of the five players. He’s got to get oriented to where he’s not going to get the ball all the time. They have to learn a lot of things and a lot of that is mental. Mental and emotional. The players are much better today, though.
T: Why can’t Americans shoot these days?
M: You’ve got to give the Europeans credit. One year I had a Japanese coach through the State Department and you had to give them an hour a day and let them film your practice. This was the late `60s or early `70s. They were doing this all over. Then [the foreign teams] started coming over here and playing the colleges. I was surprised how much they knew about basketball. They could shoot the ball real well, these European teams, but they didn’t have our instinct. They didn’t have our motion and movement. Now they’ve got our game. It’s no longer our game.
Services Tuesday
Services are scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday at St. Vincent DePaul Church on the DePaul campus. Visitation will be at the church from 1 to 9 p.m. Monday.
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ON THE INTERNET Sign a guestbook and view photos of Ray Meyer at chicagotribune.com
