Morgan Wootten, RIP

Dean Smith called him “the best coach I’ve ever seen.” John Wooden said of him, “I know of no finer coach at any level, high school, college or pro.”

Morgan Wootten, the subject of this praise, died yesterday at the age of 88.

Wootten coached basketball at DeMatha for 46 years. His teams won 1,274 games and lost 192. He was the first basketball coach who coached only at the high school level to be admitted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Red Auerbach gave the introductory speech.

Wootten coached DeMatha to victory in what is probably the most famous high school basketball game of all time — an upset win over Lew Alcindor’s Power Memorial team. I wrote about that game here.

The basketball stars Wootten coached include Bernie Williams, Sid Catlett and Bob Whitmore (all three from the team that beat Power Memorial), James Brown (a great high school player and now a celebrated broadcaster), Adrian Dantley, Kenny Carr, Charles “Hawkeye” Whitney, Sidney Lowe and Dereck Whittenburg (of N.C. State’s national championship team of 1983), Adrian Branch, Jerrod Mustaf, Keith Bogans, and Joe Forte. Mike Brey, the successful current coach at Notre Dame also learned his basketball from Wootten, first at the coach’s summer camps and then as a backup guard for DeMatha.

Nearly all of these players were products of the Washington, D.C. area. Unlike many of the powerhouse private school teams of this era, DeMatha didn’t bring in ready made stars from other parts of the country. Wootten molded his players.

Like most great sports coaches (and probably all great basketball coaches below the pro level), defense came first for Wootten. I can still hear him instructing his players “see the ball and the man” at DeMatha games I attended in the 1970s.

Wootten was quoted as saying that the objective of his defense is to steal the ball before the other team can shoot it. Unless you’re coaching 11 and 12 year-olds, that’s mighty ambitious. But Wootten made this philosophy work for nearly half a century.

In addition to coaching, Wootten taught history at DeMatha. When he turned down an enormous contract to coach at N.C. State (reportedly almost four times as rich as the one given to Jim Valvano, who took the job), Wootten cited his desire to keep teaching history at DeMatha as one of his reasons.

John Feinstein, who majored in history at Duke, attended two days of Wootten’s history classes at DeMatha while working on a profile of the coach. He says Wootten was the finest history teacher he ever saw.

Basketball stars were cut no slack in Wootten’s history classes. Adrian Dantley recalls expecting favorable treatment. When he learned he wasn’t going to get it, he became obsessed with acing Wootten’s test. He did so regularly, or so the story goes.

Dantley says he has spent the last three days (since learning that Wootten was dying) crying. “I never thought I’d tear up as much as I have now,” Dantley told the Washington Post.

I’ll give the last words to two of Wootten’s proteges. Sidney Lowe, now an assistant coach with the Detroit Pistons, said:

He’s probably helped shape my life as much as anybody. He took a kid from the inner city and exposed me [to] a totally different world, which helped shape me to be the person that I am.

Mike Brey, the Notre Dame coach, said:

He was a teacher and molder of youth. He used to say when we worked his basketball camp, and I didn’t quite understand it at that age, “Be the kind of coach you want your son or daughter to play for.” And when you’re 19 and you don’t have kids, you don’t really grasp it. But I have kids now and I’m a coach, and I try to live my life by that.

We all would hand our kids over to Morgan Wootten.

This, more than his incredible record, is what coach Wootten would likely want to be remembered for.

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