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.
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