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."
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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
