Jerry Waugh spoke of Dick Harp during a three-hour sit-down interview with me in 2015. Waugh said he “knew him more as a coach,” both as an assistant coach under Phog Allen when Waugh, who was known as the “Sheriff” for his tenacious defense, played at KU from 1948-51 and as an assistant under Harp at Kansas from 1956-60. When Waugh joined Harp, “he (Harp) spoke a little more of his differences with Doc (Allen).”
That morning, Waugh had coffee in Lawrence with Harry Gibson, a star player from Wyandotte High School who played for Harp from 1961-64. Waugh, who told Gibson he was meeting with me later that day, asked his friend about his “reflections on Dick.”
“(Gibson) saw him as a very good coach fundamentally, very sound as a teacher, but didn’t reach his players,” said Waugh, who died in September 2022 at age 95. “I knew that of Dick. To me, as an assistant coach, he was not the disciplinarian. Doc was the disciplinarian. Dick was very helpful and approachable, not that Doc wasn’t. But Dick was so close to his players. All that changed when he became head coach. The guys (like), Bill Hougland, Bill Lienhard, Al Kelley (all members of the 1952 national title team) knew Dick in a different way and have a very strong feeling about him. When Dick took the head job, all that changed. I think it was the pressure of Kansas basketball following a great coach and his needs to fulfill the responsibilities of the coach at Kansas. Dick was a sound coach, was fundamentally a very good teacher. He knew the game of basketball as it was played in those days. He knew how to teach those aspects of the game. He knew what they were, but selling the concept to his players was difficult.”
This became especially true after Harp’s experience of coaching Wilt Chamberlain for two seasons (1956-58). Harp became especially troubled with the recruiting inducements and also the special handling of Wilt, how he spent much of his time away from the team and was not very coachable. As Waugh repeatedly said in interviews, Wilt was “politely disobedient.”
“I probably did change when I became head coach,” Harp told Doug Vance in the 1995 book, Max and the Jayhawks. “After the experience with (coaching) Wilt, I was a different person. I was really upset with some of the things (outside the program among boosters) that were done with recruiting. I reached a certain point and decided that I needed to give up the job because I had lost — not my enthusiasm— but my way in life.”
After the 1959-60 season, when KU won the Big Eight title and fell a game short of the Final Four by losing to Cincinnatti, 82-71, and superstar guard Oscar Robertson in the Midwest Regional final, Waugh decided to leave his position and join the Josten Company as vice president.
Waugh reflected about his conversation at the time with his mentor and friend Harp.
“Dick says, ‘If I told you that I would step down in a couple more years and you could have the job at that time, would you stay?’ Number one, I wasn’t sure I could get the job. He wouldn’t have the say to pick the coach, and my stature at the time was not that great. I said, ‘No,’ and I wasn’t sure I was ready to coach at Kansas. I think later in life I had the experience and confidence to do that. Of course, Ted (Owens) comes from junior college (Cameron Community College in Oklahoma). Dick didn’t resign until it was too late. He didn’t resign until late in the spring (March 1964) when it was too late to start looking for coach. He set up so Ted could get the job. I’m glad he did that. By then, he knew he was going to get out of it.
“… He had thought ahead that he wanted to leave. He made up his mind.”
Harp coached four more years at KU before resigning in 1964, where his final KU team posted a 13-12 record, winning five of its last seven games, including the final three contests.
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