Dick Harp is my Hero

.                                                         KU Libraries Digital Collection
This article of mine was published in the Fall 2020 KANSAS! Magazine. I wanted to pay tribute to former KU basketball standout, assistant coach, and head coach Dick Harp as being a true pioneer and revolutionary. I fervently believe Dick has NEVER gotten the credit he justly has deserved as being a brilliant technician with "no superiors," said his assistant JerryWaugh (1956-60), and his pressure defense, which led Kansas to the 1952 NCAA title and revolutionized college basketball.

And ABOVE ALL, when Dick became head coach at KU in 1956, he began revolutionizing the college game with the recruitment of the black athlete. I learned about this in 1988 when I wrote my honors thesis my senior year at KU on Racial Participation and Integration in University of Kansas Men's Basketball: 1952-1975. By recruiting the best players, including the Black athletes before just about anyone else in the country, Dick was making a huge statement about racial equality and equal opportunity for equal ability. For that, Dick Harp is my forever hero!

 Bill Lienhard, who played under head coach Phog Allen and assistant coach Harp, with his senior year in '52 culminating in the national title and Olympic gold medal — and the late beloved father of my kind and sweet childhood friend and South Junior High tennis teammate, Amy, said of Dick after he passed in 2000:

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the college game has ever seen."

Bill, indeed Dick was! And he should never be forgotten for the contributions he made to not only his beloved alma mater, but to humanity and all of college basketball.

Dean Smith may have summed up Harp's character, integrity and who he was as a human being better than anyone, when he once called his former assistant coach at Kansas "one of the finest citizens this country has ever produced."

...

When Kansas basketball lost two straight games in 1952 and trying to find its identity, head coach Phog Allen called his brilliant assistant Dick Harp into his office and told him to change the defense. Harp's response was to institute a innovative pressure defense, propelling KU to 13 straight victories, culminating in the national championship (28-3 record) and revolutionizing college basketball.

Soon, Harp's defense was being adopted on other courts. San Francisco coach Phil Woolpert visited Lawrence in the summer of 1953 to study Harp's defense and then applied it in winning two NCAA titles with Bill Russell in 1955 and '56. Legendary UCLA coach John Wooden used Harp's defense and won a record 10 NCAA titles, including seven straight (1967-73). Wooden once said the "arrival of the Kansas pressure defense was one of the turning points in college basketball."

Harp, who did practically all the coaching in Allen's latter years and saw what the game was becoming, had already established a legacy as a true innovator and basketball genius before being tapped to replace Allen as head coach from 1956-64.

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the coaches the college game has ever seen," Bill Lienhard, a member of the 1952 Jayhawks, said in 2000 after Harp died.

Dean Smith, the late North Carolina Hall of Fame coach, once stated Harp "had the brightest basketball mind of everyone I've ever known." Smith, who also played on Harp's '52 team, wrote about that experience in his 1999 autobiography, A Coach's Life. "That team employed a great innovation: a pressure man-to-man defense that absolutely smothered opponents by overplaying. ...The idea was to cut off the passing lanes and make it hard to complete even the simplest pass. ...This was unheard of at the time, really the first instance of man pressure as we know it. And, Smith added, "The Kansas defense had a lasting influence on the game."

Now, more than 68 years later, virtually all college basketball teams play some version of Harp's defense.

Harp was also a great innovator in recruiting African American players in the early 1960s, when the majority of black athletes weren't given an equal opportunity. His former assistant coach, Jerry Waugh, respected how Harp's integration began with recruitment.

"How adamant Dick was when he took over (for Allen that) the black athlete would not be denied," Waugh says.

In 1962, only 45 percent of the country's collegiate teams had black players on their roster, and the average number of Blacks on integrated squads was just 2.2 Harp's 1959-60 team had four and his revolutionary 1960-61 team had seven, with four starters (a decision that defied unwritten codes to never play more than three Black athletes at any one time). This was five years before Texas Western made history with its all-Black starters beating all-white Kentucky for the 1966 NCAA championship.

An idealist, Harp was far ahead of his time. By comparison, the SEC didn't integrate until Perry Wallace became the first hoops player at Vanderbilt in 1968.

 Harp, a very religious man, also always brought equality to the pews by bringing his black players into white church services. "(He) integrated more churches in the United States than the Pope," Butch Ellison, a member of the 1959-60 and 1960-61 teams, said in 2007.

Kansas has many champions and legends. But Dick Harp should never be forgotten because of his revolutionary defense and unwavering commitment to racial equality.

— David Garfield

Dick Harp sought a higher calling and purpose in coaching

Former KU coach Dick Harp dearly wanted to win, but he sought a higher calling and purpose in coaching. He believed strongly in sportsmanship, racial equality, and playing the game the right way. 

On Feb. 17, 1958 during a Border War game against Missouri in Allen Fieldhouse, Harp made a stand on principle that was actually a detriment to his team. It happened with 5:35 remaining in the game and Kansas leading 77-66. 

This was an important game for KU, which entered the game tied with Colorado in second place in the Big Seven at 7-4.

When MU guard Jerry Kirksey went to the foul line for his one-and-one, the crowd madly protested the call. The Lawrence Journal-World reported the “crowd started the feet stomping, shouting routine. ... The most obvious noise was the stamping of feet on the metal floor of the balcony, primarily on the west side of the arena.”

Upset and unable to concentrate with the noise, Kirksey handed the ball back to the referee. The noise persisted. After a third try and after assistant coach Jerry Waugh stood and tried to silence the crowd “to no avail,” Harp asked the referee to give KU a technical foul.

Afterwards, the noise “was quelled sufficiently” and Kirksey made the three free throws. “Later whenever MU boys were at the charity line, there were volleys of ‘shushes’ from the irate audience.”

KU went on to win the game, 84-69. Afterwards, MU coach Wilbur Stalcup commended Harp for asking for the technical. Stalcup told the Journal-World that Harp showed courage and that he admired him. It was “a great act of sportsmanship by a great sportsman.”

Harp, who won three Big Eight Holiday Tournaments and two conference championships while leading KU to the 1957 NCAA title game during his eight-year tenure, explained his actions.

“These people were our guests,” Harp told the Journal-World. “We sometimes find ourselves complaining about crowds on the road and yet how can we point the finger of guilt when we’re as bad as they are - maybe even worse? I kept waiting for the noise to die down so the Missouri boy could get his shots, but it didn’t. I finally decided that the only thing that would do it was a technical, so I asked for it.”

Even after losing the national championship game in 1957 to UNC — a defeat that would pain him the rest of his life, Harp — called the “fiercest competitor of all” by the Journal-World’s Bill Mayer — was a class act who put the game into perspective.

"We started out this year with two main goals," Harp told his players, as reported by the Journal-World. "We wanted to learn how to play basketball well and we wanted to learn how to be better people. You've done a wonderful job of both, regardless of tonight's outcome. Everyone in Kansas is proud of your behavior, and I'm the proudest of all. I think we've all learned what is right and wrong and that's more important than basketball. If you work hard, do your best and try to be gentlemen, you'll generally win and succeed. That didn't quite work out tonight, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep right on trying for those goals. Because it's been proved they're the best ones in the long run."

Like any good coach with honor and integrity, Harp took full responsibility for the loss.

"If anyone is at fault for losing, it is I, for I'm the one who told you what to do and when to do it,” Harp told his team. “The plays were my choices. You did all anyone could do to carry out the assignments and I'm the proudest man in the world. You musn’t waste time blaming yourselves. I know all of you feel that you might have lost it. That's foolish. No single play won or lost this game. If you feel you made an error, think of the times you've done good things this year and tonight, things that got us this far and kept us in it right up to the finish. Each of the 16 boys on our squad has contributed greatly to our success this year. Losing is painful, but you did the best you could. You're the greatest kids I've ever known and No. 1 in the world to me!"

Despite his remarks, Harp spent the rest of his life wondering what might have been.

“It was a disappointment to, of all people, Dick Harp,” Harp’s former assistant Jerry Waugh told the Kansas City Star in March 2010 about losing to North Carolina. “He really suffered with letting Kansas basketball down. It really hurt him. In his eyes, he had failed to keep the torch burning.”

But to Waugh and many of his players, Harp was a giant in his profession.

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the college game has ever seen," said Bill Lienhard (he was a member of the 1952 NCAA title team when Harp was an assistant under Phog Allen) after Harp died in 2000 at age 81.

"He developed the defensive scheme which led us to the national championship and which Dean Smith took and refined so productively at North Carolina after learning it as a KU player under Dick and Doc (Allen). John Wooden at UCLA used the same principles in his long run of championships.

"Dick never got enough credit for all the things he developed and he was a top-notch citizen and Christian gentleman along with all of it. You can't imagine the long list of players and students who believe Dick added countless positive things to their lives."

Waugh also speaks with reverence towards Harp. Waugh was also a player at KU when Harp was assistant coach.

"Dick was first my coach, then my head coach but most of all my friend,” Waugh said. “There is no way to describe how my life was enriched by my association with him. I was saddened by the way his health deteriorated (in his latter years) but I can bypass that by remembering the many great times we had. I never got up to go to work with Dick that I didn't feel excited and blessed. There were laughs, heartaches, successes and failures but he made my life so much better than it would have been without him. His sense of humor was inestimable.

"In my opinion, Dick was a basketball genius who never got enough credit as a strategist and innovator. He was ahead of his time in many, many respects and made a far greater impact on coaching than most realize. He was a key figure in the middle years of Kansas basketball. Dean Smith carried away a lot of good things from Dick, and passed them on to Roy Williams, so in a sense, we have seen a full circle from Dick to Dean to Roy. There is no way to express how my life was enriched by Dick Harp.”

“Dick had a great coaching mind,” Waugh added in “What it Means to be a Jayhawk.”

“As a technician, there were no superiors. ... But Dick didn’t have total control of recruiting at KU, and that troubled him. Dick wanted to exclude the involvement of alumni in the recruiting of athletes. He went to the administration at the time and asked for their support. He was turned down. They were people of great influence, not only in athletics, and keeping them away would be a hot potato the administration didn’t want to touch.

“In his own eyes, I think Dick saw himself as a failure. I don’t think he walked away from all of this feeling fulfilled.”

But to Waugh and the people that knew Harp well, he was a great coach and human being who made a huge impact on people’s lives. Floyd Temple, a former KU athlete, KU assistant football coach, and longtime KU baseball coach, said Harp was a superior person.

"Dick was one of the great people I've ever known,” Temple once stated. “There's something special about KU that turns out folks like that, and I've been blessed to know a lot of them like Dick. He was one of the most impressive, God-fearing guys I ever met and I often used him as a role model. So did a lot of others around the campus, athletes and otherwise.

"Dick seemed to have a good word for just about everyone even if they weren't too favorable to him. I only regret that he had some difficult times near the end. It had to be tough, but he surely left a great legacy for KU and KU athletics."

Mayer stated he left a great legacy to not only KU, but to society.

“He long has had one of the keenest basketball minds extant and is recognized for that. But like most of the great ones, Harp's best contribution to society is as a strong moral and ethical citizen,” Mayer wrote in 1994.

Al Correll, who played for Harp in the late 1950s and early 60s, said his former coach cared passionately about KU basketball.

“To Dick Harp, wearing the Kansas uniform has a special significance,” Correll told “Max and the Jayhawks.”

“One night we had finished practicing, and we were not doing very good. It was my senior year and I was the last one out of the locker room. As I was leaving, I looked out on the floor. The whole court was dark and there was one light on above the big scoreboard and it shined down on the big K on the floor. 

“Coach Harp was sitting there in a chair by himself on the big K with the light over his head. It was kind of an eerie thing, and I walked out to check on him. I looked at him  and asked, ‘Coach, are you all right?’ He said he was fine, but he just couldn’t understand why a player wouldn’t give his all and realize how important this game is and what it means to wear a Kansas uniform. He was real serious. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as strange as I did at that moment. It really hurt him.”

Harp had countless admirers, in addition to Waugh, Lienhard, Temple, Mayer and Correll.

Just listen to Bob Kenney, who who played on the 1952 national championship team. He said Harp taught the players about basketball and life.

“If Harp had a fault, he was too nice a guy. The only thing I can tell you is he was as close to a father as I’ve ever had,” Kenney told “Kansas Basketball: Legacy of Coaches.”

Just ask Bill Hougland, who also played on the 1952 title team.

“He was happy to do what he was doing (as an assistant) and let Doc take all the credit,” Hougland told “100 Things KU Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die.” 

“Dick scouted (opposing teams). He’d go to games, come back, and have it all written up. Dick was really good at that. Doc was the motivator. Dick was the one who really got us playing the way we had to play to win.”

Just listen to Everett Dye, another member of the 1952 championship team.

“He knew what he wanted, he knew how to communicate it and he did in such manner as you wanted to listen. I have all kind of affection for that man, always have, always will,” Dye said.

And just ask Dean Smith, the legendary Hall of Fame coach and still another player on the ‘52 title team.

“Dick had the brightest basketball mind of anyone I’ve ever known,” Art Chansky quoted Smith as once saying about Harp in his book, “Dean’s Domain.”

Dick Harp led KU to the national championship in 1952 with his pressing defense and revolutionized college basketball

Kansas basketball had grand expectations entering the 1951-52 season. After all, this was the year that coach Phog Allen said KU would win the national championship and go to the Olympics when he recruited Bob Kenney, Bill Hougland, Bill Lienhard and Clyde Lovellete.

KU roared out and won its first 13 games and looked like a potential championship team. Lovellete had changed his game and was passing the ball more, getting his teammates involved. Lienhard spoke to Jayhawk Insider in 2000 about the transformation in Lovellete’s game.

“I think they (coaches) finally convinced Clyde that he had to play team ball and pass the ball to the other players,” Lienhard said. “When he started doing that and when we started working really as a team, it made a big difference. We finally jelled. … It paid off for him, because when he started throwing the ball to the other players, the defenders couldn’t stay on him all the time. They had to guard somebody else.”

While there was great chemistry on the team, adversity struck the Jayhawks when they lost two consecutive road games at Kansas State (81-64) and Oklahoma State (49-45).

Suddenly, KU’s dream of a national championship season hit a roadblock and Allen knew he needed to make a change. So the following morning after the OSU loss, he called his brilliant assistant coach Dick Harp into his office.

“(Phog) said, ‘Dick do something with the defense,’” Bill Mayer recalled in the 2008 Kansas Basketball Legacy of Coaches DVD. “’I don’t know what you’re going to do, but do something with the defense.'” 

An enlightened student of the game, Harp went to work and devised a defensive scheme which would spearhead KU to the national title and eventually revolutionize the game.

Dean Smith, a reserve guard on the 1952 team and later a legendary coach at North Carolina, talked about that defense in his 1999 autobiography, “A Coach’s Life.”

“That team employed a great innovation: a pressure man-to-man defense that absolutlely smothered opponents by overplaying,” Smith wrote. “The idea was to cut off the passing lanes and make it hard to complete even the simplest pass. This was unheard of at the time, really the first instance of man pressure as we know it. The closest things to it it was Henry Iba’s 2- Defense at Oklahoma State, which was a half-court man-to-man pressure defense, but the Kansas defense was a far more extreme version.”

Charlie Hoag, also member of the 1952 team, said the new pressure defense ignited the Jayhawks.

“Other coaches started saying we picked up our opponents when they got off the bus, and stayed on ‘em,” Hoag told the Topeka Capital-Journal in 2000. “We put pressure on all over the court, and we started running more on offense, and it paid off. We beat K-State by 17 and OSU by 20 in return games.”

Jerry Waugh, a former player under Allen and assistant coach under Harp, talked about Harp’s defensive innovation at his memorial service in 2000.

"Doc Allen received most of the credit, and rightfully so, but Dick was very instrumental," Waugh said. "In the middle of the season, that team was struggling a little bit. Doc said to Dick, 'We gotta change something.'

"Dick came up with a half-court pressure defense, and that really seemed to pick up the offense as the team went on to its championship ways. Those of us who played knew what Dick meant to that team.

"Dick understood early that the game was changing," Waugh added. "As I recall, Doc was in the twilight of his career and was standing pat on what had made him successful. Dick saw the future, where the game was going.

"Dean (Smith) took a lot of what he learned from Dick Harp, in the strategies of the game and techniques of teaching. And then you find Roy Williams working with Dean, so you see those things coming back here (to KU)."

Harp’s innovation worked wonders. KU won 13 straight games en route to the national championship before winning two more consecutive games in the U.S. Olympic Playoffs before falling to Peoria, 62-60. The Jayhawks, indeed, qualified for the 1952 Olympic Games as Allen predicted during his recruiting pitch to Lovellette, Kenney, Hougland and Lienhard.

Harp said that defense invigorated the 1952 team and gave it some much-needed confidence.

“Probably as much as the new defense helped, the change itself gave the kids new enthusiasm,” Harp told Blair Kerkhoff in his 1996 book on Phog Allen. “We spent most of our time in practice on it. As soon as we started playing that, opponents knew we were doing something different. They began to think when they played us they needed a new offense. It played right into our hands. We had a new enthusiasm, a new perspective.”

Smith wrote that “the Kansas defense had a lasting influence on the game.”

Coaches like John Wooden and San Francisco’s Phil Woolpert copied Harp’s defense to win championships of their own with Wooden winning 10 NCAA titles, including a record seven straight and Woolpert claiming consecutive titles with USF in 1955 and 1956.

In fact, during the summer of 1953, the 38-year-old Woolpert visited Lawrence and studied Harp’s pressing defense.

James W. Johnson wrote about this in “The Dandy Dons.”

“Woolpert wanted to get firsthand knowledge of the press from Kansas coach Phog Allen’s astute assistant coach, Dick Harp. He told Harp, ‘I have a guy named Bill Russell coming, and he’s going to be a great shot blocker.’”

Wooden once said the “arrival of the Kansas pressure defense was one of the turning points in college basketball.”

Smith agrees.

“The defense stood the test of time, too,” Smith wrote. “This is how innovative it truly was. Almost exactly 40 years later in the 1991 Final Four, I couldn’t help but notice that all four teams — Carolina, Duke, Las Vegas, and Kansas — used schemes that stemmed from that first Kansas pressure defense.”

At the 1991 Final Four, Smith gave credit to Harp for starting the pressure defense and revolutionizing the game.

"It began with Dick Harp at Kansas in 1952," Smith told the Deseret News. "Harp was an assistant coach to Dr. Allen, and he taught ball-to-man pressure defense to the team. ..."I don't know if anyone is old enough to remember back to 1953, when Kansas played Washington in the (national) semifinals, but that was the game when Washington couldn't get off a shot at the start of the game.”

KU used that pressure defense under Harp to advance to the NCAA Finals in 1953 before losing to Indiana.

By the time KU won the national championship in 1952 and the latter years of Allen’s illustrious coaching career, the game was changing for him. While he was still a brilliant motivator, Harp was the one running the show. His former players speak of this fact and Harp’s influence on the actual coaching and game strategy.

“Coach Allen was the psychologist of the team and got you read to play, but  Dick Harp was the man who mapped the strategy,” said Al Kelley, a member of the ‘52 title team.

“If hadn’t been for Dick Harp, we wouldn’t have won the national championship.” Lienhard said boldly.

Charlie Hoag said Allen hit his head three or four years before Hoag joined the team in 1951, which may have caused some repurcussions.

”While he was still a great organizer and motivatior, to me, the game was passing him by,” Hoag said in Mark Stallard's 2005 book, "Tales of the Jayhawks Hardwood." “He was trying to do the things when I first got there that he was doing back in 1930 or 1935. The old Hank Iba/Phog Allen type of offense, you couldn’t win with it really, although they did. But it could be beaten."

But with Harp’s arrival at KU in 1948 as assistant, the Jayhawks became a much better team and eventually a national championship squad.

“Dick Harp turned out to be very important for Kansas basketball and to Phog Allen. He was able to do some of  the innovations, the little changes in defense, that Phog wasn’t capable of doing,” Hoag said.

“The game had passed Phog, by really, is what happened. He was a great motivator, did great things for the University of Kansas, but we could not have won a national championship without Dick Harp,” said Hoag, echoing Lienhard’s comments.

“And that’s a fact. I’m very strong about that, but I also realized the importance of Phog Allen.”

“I would never say anything that would take anything from Phog,” Hoag added. “... Phog was a great leader, a great inspiration and a great motivator, but we needed Dick.”

Lienhard couldn't agree more.

"Dick was one of the most underrated coaches the college game has ever seen," Lienhard said in 2000 after Harp died. "He developed the defensive scheme which led us to the national championship and which Dean Smith took and refined so productively at North Carolina after learning it as a KU player under Dick and Doc (Allen)."

And all Jayhawks fans and the college basketball world should be ever thankful to Dick Harp for revolutionizing the game.