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."

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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

Border War brawl in 1961 almost ended bitter rivalry between KU and MU

I wrote about the Border War brawl in 1961 in my blog on May 1, 2019, when KU and MU almost ended the historic and bitter rivalry. Now, I revisit that piece with some new information.

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The final game of the 1960-61 season against Missouri on March 11, 1961 proved the great “animosity” between KU and MU and served as a huge black eye for both schools and college basketball as one of the biggest and ugliest brawls in hoops history broke out in Columbia at Brewer Fieldhouse on national television.

Kansas had always faced hostility playing in Columbia, as did the Tigers when playing in Lawrence. The schools had a deeply rooted and violent rivalry which traced back before the Civil War to “Bleeding Kansas” with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. “Bleeding Kansas,” which historians like Williams Tuttle called the “nation’s battleground over slavery,” pitted pro-slavery forces from Missouri against anti-slavery forces from Kansas. Abolitionists like John Brown “made raids into Missouri and brought back men, women, children.”

Kansas eventually joined the Union as a free state in 1861 and Missouri a slave state.

In “True Sons: A Century of Missouri Tigers Basketball,” Michael Atchison stated that “Missouri’s Constitution of 1875 mandated ‘separate but equal education’ that was anything but. White students were welcome at Mizzou while blacks were restricted to Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Black students who wished to take courses offered only in Columbia were not admitted to the university; rather, they were shipped out of state to integrated schools, with the state of Missouri paying their tuition.”

MU was not integrated until after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine in 1886. Al Abrams, a 6-5 forward, became the school’s first black scholarship athlete in 1956, four years after LaVannes Squires first suited up for Kansas.

“Dixie” had served as Missouri’s fight song until “Fight Tiger” started in 1946, while “for a time” MU’s “official policy prohibited competition against teams that included nonwhite members.”

While Missouri was still a backwards state, the Tigers were more progressive than Southern teams like Mississippi State, which did not integrate and have a black scholarship athlete until 1972.

With KU featuring six blacks on the roster (Ralph Heyward was academically ineligible the second semester) — a virtually unheard of number when the national average per integrated squad in 1960 was just 2.2 — the Jayhawks realized quite early before the game that Missouri fans were in no mood to celebrate diversity this afternoon.

The Jayhawks were target of racial slurs from the outset from the unruly fans, coaches, and players. MU’s band even played “Dixie” when the “Negro-laden KU squad was on the floor,” reported the Lawrence Journal-World’s Bill Mayer.

Butch Ellison, a KU African-American player on that team, said in an exclusive 2007 interview near his home in Kansas City that “nobody really knows” what happened that day.

“They were calling us niggers, spitting on us with (assistant coach) Norm Stewart right on the bench,” Ellison said. “Norm Stewart was sitting on the side (with head coach) Sparky Stalcup yelling nigger and spitting on us.”

Stewart’s actions pained Ellison, who considered him an idol while growing up in Kansas City when Stewart played for Missouri.

“That was the most disappointing thing to me because we didn’t have black role models,” Ellison said. “If a kid was a good ballplayer, that was your model.”

As the hostility mounted during the Border War (the tensions leading up to this always heated game escalated after KU’s 23-7 victory over No. 1 Missouri in Columbia the previous November was later forfeited, as well as its Big Eight championship to MU, after it was ruled that Kansas' standout halfback Bert Coan was ineligible due to a recruiting violation. KU supporters believed MU athletic director Gene Faurot turned the Jayhawks in.) and after MU’s Joe Scott was called for a flagrant foul against Nolen Ellison just before halftime, KU's Bill Bridges had a premonition something bad might happen in the second half.

As KU assistant coach Ted Owens wrote in his book, “At the Hang-up,” “At halftime, Bill Bridges said to coach (Dick) Harp, ‘I have been called the n-word all of my life and I can handle that, but if their players keep spitting on me, something is going to happen.'"

Bridges turned out to be a prophet. Five minutes into the second half, KU’s Wayne Hightower threw a punch at MU’s Charlie Henke following his second-straight hard foul at the Jayhawk star just by the KU bench and MU’s goal.

Henke retaliated with a swing at Hightower. Then it was mayhem.

Both benches cleared and fans — including about 15 MU football players — stormed the court.

“When it (brawl) it broke out, I had one person in mind, that knuckle right there (Butch Ellison pointed to his fist); I was going right for Norm Stewart,” Ellison said.

The heavyweight fight lasted nearly five minutes and the game (MU won, 79-76) was stopped for 10 minutes. 

“Fortunately, Bill Bridges cleared half of the court himself, for no one wanted any part of him, and order was finally restored,” Owens wrote.

Afterwards, Mayer wrote about his thoughts over the melee in Columbia:

“The MU folks stress they think Saturday’s brawl was KU’s fault and that the calling of names and spitting on KU players by MU players was OK. Yet no matter how how MU tries to don a ‘holy’ mantle, the fact remains the Tigers basketball teams have a league-wide reputation as hatchet-men, have been in a number of jams involving physical violence in recent years; generally are among the nation’s fouling leaders, have a home court which because of the crowd is considered by many the loop’s top snake pit. It’s hard to believe that just happens. And if it does, why isn’t there some obvious effort to change it.

“More and more, MU appears to be to the Big Eight what bellicose Russia is to the U.N. If MU doesn’t give evidence of good faith in an effort to clean its own house, maybe severance of the series would be a good idea. Good conduct like this has to be a two-way street.”

The idealist Harp had deep regrets over what happened.

“This is a tragedy,” Harp told the Journal-World after the game. “Competition as such is not the factor here. It is a matter of attitude. Let me emphasize. I’m not singling out Missouri. This condition has been prevalent on all levels, including high school, junior college and college. As yet I do not know the answer, but something must be done.”

Like perhaps canceling the series as Mayer wrote might have to happen?

KU athletic director Dutch Lonborg took on that issue with this statement to the Journal-World following the game:

“I feel that if this extreme bitterness continues between the two schools, we will have to discontinue playing each other, at least for a while.”

Owens certainly got a first-hand lesson over the bitterness between KU and MU that day.

“I left Columbia with a clearer understanding of the deep hatred that exists between the two states,” Owens wrote.

After order was restored in the Border War battle and MU won, this ended KU’s 10-straight wins versus the Tigers and costing the Jayhawks a chance to tie K-State for the conference championship. The MU win was also the first time Harp had ever lost to the Tigers.

That particular game left lasting wounds for some former Jayhawks, including Butch Ellison. He said he ran into Stewart one time years later when Ellison was an administrator at Washington High School in Kansas City and Stewart visited as MU head coach to recruit one of the black athletes.

“I said, ‘Norm, what are you doing here?’” Ellison recalled. “’Before any of our black kids ever go to Missouri, I will shoot him first. He will not come to Missouri.’ That was the last time I saw him (Stewart). He just turned and walked out. Turned red.”

For Ellison, seeing Stewart indeed brought back painful memories of that dark day at Brewer Fieldhouse in 1961.

“We were almost killed down there,” Ellison said. “I hadn’t been to Columbia since. When I’m on I-70, I don’t even look that way.” 

Tom Hedrick, the voice of the Jayhawks, was also scared of his life during the brawl.

“I didn’t think the fight would end before somebody got really hurt,” he told the Kansas City Star book, “Rivals: MU vs. KU.”

Steward also commented about the brawl and how MU was treated when it played in Allen Fieldhouse earlier in the year.

“When we played at KU, the booing was so loud that they could not play the national anthem,” Stewart said. “They were booing everything about Mizzou, because they blamed us (for turning in the Jayhawks and costing them to forfeit the football game).

“When they came to Columbia, the refs tried to prevent things from getting out of hand. They did for a while, but then the fight happened. There were 300 people on the court and they weren’t exchanging pleasantries. Everybody got it. It’s like bullets. They don’t put names on them.”

KU’s promising 1960-61 season ends with disappointment and probation

While KU coach Dick Harp wanted his white players to “walk the extra mile” for their black teammates, he also hoped the black players like Maurice King would integrate with the whites and appreciate who they were as human beings. 

That happened one night when African-American player Butch Ellison “got on my knees to pray” as his roommate and white teammate Jerry Gardner looked on curiously.

“Jerry goes, ‘What are you doing?' Ellison recalled in 2007. “I said, 'I’m praying.’ He said, ‘We pray lying down in the bed.’ Since that time, I’ve been lying down in the bed praying. You do pick some little things up.”

Nolen Ellison, Butch’s younger brother, said that was one case where Harp would have rejoiced.

“Dick wanted these players to appreciate each other and to appreciate each other’s culture and to truly become brothers,” Nolen said.

Harp’s dilemma was even more difficult when the team was referred to in such ways as “four blacks and a brave (Dee Ketchum was a Native American).”

Nolen laughs at that reference now and said he didn’t hear that mentioned back when he played in the early 1960s. But the white players who belonged to fraternities such as Sigma Nu, whose chapter was known, Nolen said, as having the “most white right-wing conservatives in the country (and) notorious for racial attitudes, (they) “would hear that stuff.”

“(The white players were) getting mixed messages,” Butch added. “That never showed up on the floor, but they go back (to their frats) and hear that stuff.”

While Harp was doing his best to integrate his team off the court, he was also focused on making the 1960-61 squad one to remember. After starting just 3-3, KU won 12 of its next 14 games, including six-straight victories. The fifth-straight win was a convincing 88-73 victory over MU in Lawrence, where Wayne Hightower dominated with 36 points and 21 boards.

KU was now 7-1 in the league and tied with KSU for first place. The Jayhawks then took a one-game lead in the standings as Colorado beat K-State before KU blew out the Buffaloes, 90-62, in Boulder. K-State, though, crept back in a tie with KU after beating the Jayhawks, 81-63, in Manhattan.

With four regular-season games remaining, Kansas needed a strong push for its second-straight conference championship and third overall in the Harp era.

It didn’t happen. KU lost two of its last four, stumbling to a 10-4 record in the Big Eight (17-8 overall) and tie for second place as the Wildcats won the league.

The Jayhawks lost all life when they learned late in the season that they were put on probation and a one-year postseason ban after recruiting violations surrounding Wilt Chamberlain.

Assistant coach Ted Owens remembers the team’s sadness when they learned the news.

“The problem is we had a great team,” Owens told John Hendel in “Kansas Jayhawks: History-making basketball.” “We had Bill Bridges and Wayne Hightower and Jerry Gardner, who was an excellent guard. And Nolen Ellison and Dee Ketchum and Al Correll. We had dynamite talent.

“And I’ll never forget the day that Dick walked on the court and told them. It was a morale and spirit killer because that was a team that could done very well in the NCAA playoffs.”

Nolen Ellison, a sophomore, was quite angry with Chamberlain.

“(There were) strong feelings that Wilt had betrayed us,” Ellison said. “You take the car and you know that’s going to put the team in trouble. He couldn’t afford a ‘57 oldsmobile, flaming red. (He was a) poor kid. Where are you going to get money (for that car)? That started my career with being under a cloud. Dick called us all together and said we’ve been placed on probation. It was confusing and difficult to accept. (We didn’t have a) chance to stand on our own.”

Owens elaborated on the affects of the probation in his book, “At the Hang-up.”

“Although we finished second in the league, the 1960-61 basketball season was a bit of a disappointment because the expectations were so high after reaching the NCAA regional finals the previous year,” Owens wrote. “Knowing that the team was barred from the NCAA tournament, the players’ spirits had evaporated.”

The Jayhawker Yearbook noted the inconsistency of the team which plagued KU that season.

“When Kansas was ‘on,’ nobody could stop them; when cold the Hawks were a pushover. Consequently, the Jays bowed to two considerably weaker teams, thereby killing any hopes for a conference championship.

“The lack of a team drive at times, as well as the brawl at Missouri, could be in part attributed to the ... NCAA ban clamped on the KU basketball team. The ban hurt the attitudes of those holdovers from last year’s conference champs, who had dreamed of another NCAA tournament berth. Moreover, Missouri Athletic Director Don Faurot has been accused by many of instigating the NCAA probe — an accusation which has only heightened animosity between the two schools.”

KU’s 1960-61 team that changed the color of college basketball

I've always been fascinated with KU's 1960-61 team, which featured seven, yes, seven African-American players. I first learned about this team while doing research on my 82-page honors thesis at KU about racial participation and integration in Kansas basketball: 1952-75. I have this team picture on my wall at home next to my computer, a daily reminder of how strongly committed head coach Dick Harp was to social justice and racial equality. Harp should be greatly commended for his brave and courageous efforts in recruiting so many black players in an era where segregation ruled and many African Americans, especially in the South, were not allowed to be recruited to play college basketball. 

This 1960-61 team should never be forgotten by historians, basketball fans, and all humanity.

Dick Harp is my forever hero!

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Three years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was instituted, five years before Texas Western— with five black starters beat all-white Kentucky for the NCAA championship — and nine years before racial and political unrest reached a crescendo in Lawrence, the young and idealist KU coach Dick Harp and the 1960-61 men’s basketball team were opening eyes and making a bold statement about racial justice and equal opportunity while changing the color of college basketball.

 

Led by Harp and first-year assistant coach Ted Owens (he replaced Jerry Waugh, who resigned to enter private business), the 1960-61 team and its seven black players (plus one Native American in Dee Ketchum) was virtually unheard of throughout college basketball at the time, an age in which many qualified black athletes were being shunned by college teams. Bill Mayer of the Lawrence Journal-World wrote that Al Correll (a black player on that team) once mentioned to him that Kansas may have been the only team in the country which had seven blacks represented out of its top 10 players.

In 1960, only 45 percent of college basketball programs had blacks on their rosters and the average number of blacks on integrated squads across America was just two.

Bob Frederick, a white player on that team and future KU athletics director who had a severe knee injury, just played one minute that season. He had no complaints with the black athletes getting the majority of minutes.

“All those fellows were better and deserved to play ahead of me,” he once told Mayer. “I felt privileged to be on the same squad and to get to know them as friends. No resentment about my lack of playing time.”

Butch Ellison, an African-American on that 1960-61 team, was aware of the changing color among his Kansas basketball team and decided to go public with a letter to the editor in Sports Illustrated in the April 4, 1960 issue. Ellison was commenting on a story SI wrote about the Negro (the word associated with blacks in that era) in baseball.

“I enjoyed it, first, because I am a Negro and, secondly, because I am an athlete,” Ellison wrote. “Your article touched on many of the problems of the American Negro in athletics today. On our basketball team here at the University of Kansas this past season, we had four Negro boys on the traveling squad, and next year there will be six and possibly seven. I am sure that everyone who read your article could not fail to be enlightened on the color problem. The one thing which seems most important to me is the quota of Negro athletes in sports, generally speaking. If (somebody) is good, it shouldn’t make any difference what color he is, and if the best nine players happen to be Negro, Chinese, Russian, or Mexican, I think that they they should the ones to play.”

Ellison said the letter got him on “bad personal footing” with Harp, who was proud about the amount of minority athletes on his team but worried about the reactionary and bigoted alumni.

“Dick called me in, he was getting repercussions from alums,” Ellison told me in 2007. “Everyone read that, all the KU alums. (I) never talked to Dick about that. As a 19-year-old kid, I didn’t know that was going to create hat kind of (uproar). ... Dick could not share with us what he was going through. It was risky.”

“It was risky” starting three or four blacks as well, but Harp opened the season with three black players in the starting lineup, including Correll, Wayne Hightower and Bill Bridges up front with Ketchum and Jerry Gardner in the backcourt. 

Expectations were high for the Jayhawks with Hightower and Bridges leading the way. Hightower, who was on some preseason All-American teams, was described by the Journal-World as the “do-everything willow wand.” 

And big things were also expected of Gardner, who could shoot, dribble, and pass with the best, although he needed to control his game to best suit his teammates. He was “touted as potentially the (best) all-around backcourt man in school history.”

“The Gardner, Ellison, Ketchum, (Grover) Marshall crew could be the best backcourt crew in the league, and one of the best in the nation,” the Journal-World added.

And then there was (Ralph) Heyward (another African American player) who got contact lenses in the preseason and was expected to have a “prominent role” on team. Earl Morey of the Journal-World called Heyward the “fastest,” Bridges the “toughest," Hightower the “most outstanding," and Correll “fanciest in around the basket.”

It would be up to Harp, who entered the season with a career 72-31 mark, to mold these men into winners and ideally fulfill his mission by bringing the two races closer together that season. Owens felt he was up for the task on the court.

“Practices under coach Harp were well-planned, which was a good lesson for me,” Owens wrote in his book, “At the Hang-Up.”

“At OU, coach Bruce Drake was a creative offensive coach, and now I could learn from coach Harp, a master of teaching half-court pressure defense. The varsity practices were intense, and we felt that we were positioned to make a run at the conference championship and an NCAA bid.”

After opening the season with an easy 86-56 home victory over Northwestern, KU traveled to Lubbock, Texas, to face Texas Tech. It was the Jayhawks’ first trip to Texas since the 1957 heated Midwest Regional, and Harp and his players were treated to a “vociferous crowd.” Ellison came off the bench to score a career-high 14 points in the second half as KU won 97-75.

He said the team was called “jungle bunnies.”

“We had never heard that before,” he said. “We ran them off the floor. Up and and down the floor, we jut out ran them.”

Mayer wrote that “KU displayed loads of passion de combat. ... But again, the important aspect of the game was the KU desire. If this is maintained, it could be a great season ---NCAA ban or not.”

Kansas didn’t seemed fazed by the “typical hostile Texas crowd of of 8,000.”

“All things considered, we were well treated at Lubbock,” Harp told the Journal-World. “That 1957 Dallas crowd was still the worst I’ve ever seen and though the one Monday was noisy and naturally for Tech, it wasn’t as bad as it might have sounded on the radio. The problem was that (KU announcer) Tom Hedrick’s radio booth was situated in the middle of a group of Tech rooters and everything was amplified out of proportion. I supposed some things that shouldn’t have, screeched through. They asked me afterward what I thought about the crowd and I told them that basically it wasn’t any better or any worse than the average crowd in our own Big 8. I’m sure there were ... unpleasant things. I did notice that several Texas Tech lettermen were in the group that seemed to cause the most furor, and I know the school wasn’t in favor of that, because it has some fine officials. But back to my original premise, we were well treated and accommodated at Lubbock. The boys didn’t mind the crowd, since we won.”

At 2-0 with a date at St. John's in Madison Square Garden in New York four days later,  observers already thought this team could be pretty special.

“Fact is,” Morey wrote, “many already suspect that with proper improvement, this year’s oufit could turn into one of the year’s finest teams ever for the school.”

A critical newcomer was learning the college game and would be in an instrumental player for KU this season with his play and also change the color of Kansas and college basketball. His name was Nolen Ellison (Butch's brother) and KU had high hopes for him despite his struggles in the first two games.

“Ellison hasn’t found the scoring range yet, but his coaches think he will,” the Journal-World wrote.

After coming off the bench the first five games, Ellison was inserted into the starting lineup after Ketchum sprained his ankle. Ellison never lost his starting spot the rest of the season and career, becoming a 1,000-plus point scorer and one of the most underrated and toughest players in KU history.

Reflecting back toward his career, Ellison told me in 2007 that Ketchum, whom he called an “interesting fella,” “made a mistake” by not trying to earn his starting assignment back.

(“I) thought I was a better player, but he was a senior and he accepted it in the same way, I was grateful as I look back that Jackie Robinson would have accepted Branch Richey (if he) would have said, ‘You’re not playing today.' ... He  might have hit three home runs yesterday.

“He (Ketchum) didn’t have the fight in the Native American today, they turned the other cheek. If you do that enough, a man will hit you hard. I felt bad about that, but he didn’t seem to mind.”

With Nolen Ellison starting now, that marked four blacks in the starting five. It was certainly unconventional in college basketball at the time as Harp experienced growing pressure about playing too many blacks.

George Ireland, the head coach at Loyola of Chicago, which beat Cincinnati two years later in the 1963 NCAA title by starting four blacks, said he was a pioneer in the race movement.

“I built the bridges many of those guys crossed,” Ireland told Street and Smith Magazine in 1978. “People don’t understand that now. The black (high school) kid can go on and play now and it is the accepted thing. In those days, it was not the accepted thing.”

Ireland said “there used to be a joke. You play one at home, two on the road, and if you’re behind play three.”

Ireland, who most historians give credit for bringing in a new era of integrated basketball, played four blacks on the court at the same time during the 1961-62 season while breaking the longstanding gentlemen’s agreement about not playing more than three blacks at any given time. He also was credited with fielding the first all-black lineup in a game against Wyoming in December 1962.

But historians have to look long, hard and clear at what Harp was doing in 1961 before Ireland in playing and starting the best players, and they happened to be four blacks. Also, the two coaches had contrasting personalities. They were both recruiting blacks to win games, but Harp seemed to being do so also to give blacks their shot at the American dream and an equal opportunity to success. He loved his players, and was color blind.

Ireland, meanwhile, was also color blind but didn’t have a true affinity for his players. He certainly wasn’t making a stand on principle for recruiting and playing so many blacks.

The Chicago Reader wrote in April 2012 that “Ireland wasn’t a civil rights activist; he cared about the civil rights of players who could help his teams win." He also wasn't beloved by his players. "George didn't see color," Jack Egan, the team's lone white starter, said at Ireland's funeral in 2001. "He hated all of us the same.”

Harp died a year earlier than Ireland in 2000, and hate was one word never used to describe the former KU head coach. Each of the mourners and his former players expressed extreme gratitude over the man who made such an indelible impact on their lives.

With Harp starting four blacks in 1961, this didn’t set well with alumni and boosters, who protested adamantly.

Harp sadly received threatening notes and criticisms for playing too many blacks.

“Sometimes an alumnus would come up to Harp and refer to the team’s black athletes as niggers, ‘and I’d get so mad I wanted to kill them,'” Harp told Sports Illustrated in 1968.

While Harp was confronted with racist boosters, he also became conscious of the racial slurs he heard in Allen Fieldhouse. During home games, Harp “heard certain sounds from the cheering sections whenever he started a few Negroes.

“They’d play Sweet Georgia Brown, the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme song, when our boys came on the court, or they’d take the Kansas yell — ‘Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU,’ and change it to ‘Rock Chalk, Blackhawk, KU.’”

For Harp, he knew he was doing the right thing by starting four blacks, but he also felt an internal struggle about offending the alumni.

Jack Olsen wrote in 1968 in SI that “Harp first began to think of quitting his job as Kansas coach on the day he found himself wondering whether it would offend the Kansas spectators if he started four Negroes.

“All four of them deserved to start, but the mere fact that I had to think about whether I should start that many brought me up short,” Harp said.

Olsen wrote that “Harp played the four and kept on playing them, but the insult of the fans and digs from the alumni wore him down. ... He could feel the pressure of a quota system and he did not want to be a part of it.”

While Harp encountered difficulty at home with boosters, he and his black players faced even more prejudice and discrimination when his team ventured to such southern schools as Texas Tech.

“I never even calculated (what blacks) were on those other (Big Eight) teams, but I know when we got to Texas Tech, we were slipping in the back doors to restaurants because we couldn’t go in the front door,” Nolen Ellison said.

That was the plight of the black person in America in the early 1960s. He was still viewed as inferior to whites, particularly in the Jim Crow South. And even in 1960, historian William Tuttle said “Lawrence was still a segregated town.”

He wrote in “Beyond John Brown: The Story of Race Relations in Lawrence," that Joanne Hurst, who grew up in Lawrence during the 1940s and 50s, was sickened by the treatment of blacks. She “remembered ‘sitting in the balcony of the three theaters we were allowed to attend, balcony only; and I remember that the Granada Theatre was off limits completely, and when it was finally opened to us, white lines were painted on the back of the seats to identify our section. I would go without seeing a movie for the rest of my life before I would subject myself to the humiliation of  sitting in a seat with a white stripe on it.’”

And that wasn’t the worst for Hurst and many other blacks in Lawrence in 1960.

When Hurst was pregnant “about to deliver, she was placed in a bed in the hallway of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. It wasn’t that rooms were unavailable. But she was told that ‘the black rooms on the obstetric floor were all filled up and so it’s the hall for you, young lady.’”

A transformation in race relations eventually came to Lawrence to lift the city and university out of dark and troubled times.

“Much change, including progress in race relations, would come in the 1960s both to Lawrence and the University of Kansas. And in the decades since, the people of the community have tried to build on these victories to ensure that racial equality, once achieved, would endure,” Tuttle wrote. 

Recalling when pioneer LaVannes Squires broke KU basketball's color line

Part II in racial integration in KU basketball history:

Just in 1947, Kansas basketball coach Phog Allen said that African Americans shouldn’t play basketball at KU, but instead compete in track and field, because that sport “didn’t require as much body contact as basketball.” And a year later when Allen called a team meeting explaining all the problems it would cause for an African American to play basketball at KU, the legendary coach had a change of heart in 1950 when he finally signed his first black player — LaVannes Squires from Wichita (Kan.) East High School, a 6-1 slender guard who played for KU graduate and former star player Ralph Miller under Allen. One year later, he and Gene Wilson from Kansas State became eligible and were the first black players in the Big Seven.

Squires was an exceptional gentleman and outstanding citizen and student, but played sparingly at KU. According to Butch Ellison, a black player at KU in the late 1950s and early 1960s and a KU sports historian, Kansas and Allen actually were more interested in Cleo Littleton, who was Squires’ teammate at Wichita East and also a black player.

 “They wanted Cleo Littleton," Ellison told me in 2007. "They wanted a package deal.”

It didn’t work out. While Squires signed with Kansas, Littleton opted to play for Wichita State the next year in 1951 when Miller was hired by WSU. He became an All-American and one of the best players in WSU history. Littleton was the forerunner who helped Wichita State break into national prominence in college basketball. He was the first college player west of the Mississippi River to score more than 2,000 points in a career and finished with 2,164, which still ranks No. 1 all time at WSU.

Littleton’s jersey (No. 13) is one of only four retired in the Shocker basketball program. He remains the only men’s basketball player in Missouri Valley Conference history to be named first-team all-conference four times. In 1953-54, Littleton led WSU to a 27-4 record and the team’s first-ever berth in the NIT.

As for Squires? 

He earned a Freshman Basketball Award in 1950-51 before scoring 32 points in his three-year career in 33 games for 1.0 points per game. The Wichita native also battled lung ailments. According to the KU Media Guide, he was actually supposed to contend for a starting guard position his junior year in 1952-53 before being sidelined by his lung problem. KU marched to the national finals that season before losing to Indiana while winning the national title the previous year.

The Jayhawks had another reason, and arguably an even more important one, for signing Squires in 1950. With KSU’s signing of Wilson, Allen wasn’t about to let the Wildcats and head coach Jack Gardner have the upper hand.

In Jesse Newman's 2009 book, "Local Sports Hero: The Untold Story of the University of Kansas Sports and Wesley B. Walker," longtime KU radio announcer Max Falkenstein said:

“Doc Allen used to joke, You’ve got to fight fire with fire. If the other team has a Jewish player, you’ve got to get a Jewish player. ... if they’ve got a Polish player, we’ve got to get a Polish player...if Kansas State has a black player, we've got to get a black player.”

While KU matched Squires for Wilson, Wilson was a player who Falkenstein said “did so well, no one could touch him, he ran circles around everybody.”

Wilson’s career was interrupted by military service and averaged 4.2 points and 3.8 rebounds in just six games during the 1954-55 season.

Falkenstien talked previously to the Chicago Tribune on March 28, 1986 about Allen’s signing of Squires. Mike Kiley of the Tribune wrote that “Kansas` team in the early 1950s was integrated, in part, because of the idiosyncratic nature of legendary coach Phog Allen.”

Falksenstien said: ''Doc (Allen) said you matched an Italian against an Italian, a Jew against a Jew. So, when Kansas State signed a black player (Gene Wilson), he courted LaVannes Squires from Wichita.''

Squires, who didn’t make the traveling team until his junior season, came from humble beginnings. According to his Wikipedia page, he was born in Hartsdale, Mo., as the eighth of 12 children to parents Arthur and Charlotte Squires. Squires’ dad died when he was age 3, and his mother just had a fifth-grade education. Still, she inspired LaVannes and her children with her unwavering and courageous work ethic. Squires grew up filling coal bins, working in wheat fields, doing construction work, and digging graves in a cemetery.

He served as a captain for Miller at Wichita East, earning All-City and All-State honors his senior year. Nicknamed “Felix the Cat” for his quickness and slender build, Squires graduated in the top-10 percent of his class and became the first in his family to attend college.

In his first game as a Jayhawk at Hoch Auditorium in KU’s 57-46 victory over Baylor on Dec. 3, 1951, Squires scored four points on 2-of-3 shooting. He was listed as the 10th man on KU’s box score in the Lawrence Journal-World.

Here’s Bill Mayer comments after the game:

“Coach Allen used 10 boys last night in an obvious attempt to develop a second platoon to spell his regulars. Johnson, Dyer, Squires, Heithholt and Born show promise of becoming a capable set of shock troops and may give the Jays the depth they didn’t have last year.”

Mayer also wrote specifically about Squires:

“LaVannes Squires, the Wichita sophomore who last night became the first Negro to perform on a KU varsity cage team, may be one of the boys who will help Kansas this year if his initial effort is any criterion.”

“LaVannes played high school ball under Ralph Miller when he was at Wichita East,” Coach Allen said. “He shows fine early coaching and has a lot of fire, enthusiasm and ability. If he continues to improve as he has in the past few weeks, he’ll play a lot for us.”

Mayer wrote that, “Squires, according to the Kansas coach, is well-liked by his teammates, so it appears there will be absolutely no antagonism there. The crowd in Hoch Auditorium last night also went for the hustling 6-2, 165-pounder.”

Squires did not play much that season or his entire career. He played in just 13 more games (14 total for what would be a career high in games) during that 28-3 NCAA championship season and scored 11 points all year. Squires scored a career-high 12 points his junior season, and then just nine points his senior year. He made 11 career field goals and 10 career free throws.

He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and the Owl Society, an honorary organization for junior men.

In Squires' Wikipedia page, "Coach Allen came under fire in 1953 from sports editor Jim Hall when he left Squires at home in Lawrence when the Jayhawks were set to play Tulane and LSU. The prestigious Jayhawks lost both games and their prestige by bending over to Southern Jim Crow laws."

While Squires was mainly a practice and role player who pushed his teammates tirelessly in practice, he was a groundbreaking player and set the foundation for future black athletes like Maurice King, Bob Lockley (the third black player at KU who played in eight games during the 1955-56 season and scored nine points) and Wilt Chamberlain to be recruited, in addition to countless other African-Americans who followed Squires' lead.

If not for Squires breaking the KU color line, it is doubtful Chamberlain would have ever attended KU.

The progressive student newspaper, The University Daily Kansan, hoped that change was on its way in the early 1950s to overturn the Jim Crow practices that had pervaded Lawrence for the first half of the 20th century.

“It is time that racial discrimination was ended,” an editorial writer for the University Daily Kansan wrote in 1952. 

“It is time we ended it here at the University of Kansas.”

Many KU basketball fans, though, weren’t ready for a black player on the team in 1951. While Mayer wrote favorably at the time over the crowd reaction to Squires during his first game at KU, he painted a different story in an Aug. 14, 2009 article in the Journal-World. 

Mayer first wrote about the discrimination and racism KU’s first modern-day football black players (the first African-American football player at KU was Ed Harvey in, yes, 1893) endured in halfbacks John Francisco and John Traylor, who came to KU with head coach Chuck Mather in 1954 from Massillon, Ohio. 

“Since this was the 1950s, they ... were stung by the same kinds of racial barbs as was Ed Harvey more than 60 years earlier. It happened on the road and at home. Vicious and demeaning, both places. Bear in mind that Lawrence, the state of Kansas and the Big Seven-Big Eight Conference were not exactly hotbeds of liberalism in those days. Some of KU’s Kansas City alumni actually got up and left the stadium the first few times coach Mather sent Francisco and Traylor into action.”

Then, Mayer addressed Squires’ first home game at KU:

“Matter of fact, several of the KU ‘faithful’ who walked out on the Massillonians were the same ones who took a huffy hike from Hoch Auditorium the night Phog Allen broke the basketball color line with LaVannes Squires in the early 1950s.”

Squires wound up graduating with a business degree in the top-10 percent of his class and worked for the “Look” Magazine Subscription Office in Des Moines as a junior accountant. He eventually became manager of the accounting department of the magazine office before becoming a successful businessman in the banking profession. 

He is now age 88. It is never easy to be a pioneer and the first to break a racial barrier, as the great and legendary Jackie Robinson would attest, so I can only imagine the great adversity LaVannes endured being the first black basketball player at Kansas and living in segregated Lawrence in the early 1950s. I hope LaVannes, who has never come back to any of KU basketball reunions and lives in Pasadena, Calif., is at peace with his KU experience and fervently hopes he returns to Lawrence and is rightfully honored in a resounding celebration at Allen Fieldhouse. That is what he deserves. KU owes that to him. While LaVannes didn’t stand out as a player, he stood out immensely as a pioneer who should be recognized for his outstanding, brave and courageous efforts.

I’m thinking of you LaVannes Squires, ever since I first found out about you and did my research during my 82-page senior honors thesis at KU on racial participation and integration in KU basketball: 1952-1975. I have SO much respect, admiration and love for you.

LaVannes MUST NEVER BE FORGOTTEN by KU sports fans and all humanity.

1961 brawl between Mizzou and KU almost ended Border War

Many KU and Missouri fans would like to see the Border War revived after the series was discontinued after the 2012 season after MU bolted to the SEC. The two teams played in a charity Hurricane Relief game in 2017 at Sprint Center, which brought great excitement that day and renewed hope that the series might be continued. But don’t look for the series to be revived any time soon.

Here is a look back at my 2012 story in Phog.net before KU’s last basketball trip to Columbia about how the Border War almost ended in 1961 after the infamous brawl at Brewer Fieldhouse on national televison. Many thanks to Butch Ellison, a reserve guard on that 1960-61 KU team for this exclusive interview in 2007 near his home in Kansas City. I also interviewed his younger brother Nolen that day, who was on that 1961 team as well.

KU featured seven black players on that team (six that day at Brewer Fieldhouse since Ralph Heyward was declared ineligible after the first semester). That many number of black players didn’t set well with the hostile Mizzou crowd.

I also reported that Butch Ellison said then-MU assistant coach Norm Stewart spit on the KU players and called the team the N-word.

P.S. Butch Ellison sadly passed on Feb. 13 at age 79. He was a great person and did so much to better people’s lives in a lifetime working in education, public service and politics. A junior college All-American at Kanssas City Kansas Community College, Butch was a great sharpshooter off the bench for KU. I’m forever grateful for Butch and Nolen Ellison meeting me that summer day in 2007 for three hours for a most candid interview I’ll never forget. You’ll be greatly missed Butch. Much love and peace to all your friends, family and loved ones. RIP!

Here is that February 2012 story I wrote for Phog.net.

By David Garfield

Emotions will be at a fever pitch on Saturday night at 8 p.m as Kansas plays Missouri in Columbia at Mizzou Arena for the last time — at least in the foreseeable future — with the rivalry being discontinued as MU bolts to the SEC next season.

While it’s difficult to fathom KU and MU not playing anymore, this series actually almost ended 51 years ago.

Rewind to March 11, 1961 as Kansas and Missouri staged a bloody Border War battle at Brewer Fieldhouse in Columbia, Mo., on national television.

KU, which featured six black players on the roster (Ralph Heyward was a seventh black player on coach Dick Harp’s team who was declared academically ineligible after the first semester; that was a relatively unheard of number of blacks during that era when the national average per integrated squad around the time was just 2.2), was the target of racial slurs from the outset from the unruly fans and players. The MU band even played “Dixie” when the “Negro-laden KU squad was on the floor,” reported the Lawrence Journal-World’s Bill Mayer at the time.

KU started four black players in Wayne Hightower, Bill Bridges, All Correll and Nolen Ellison, with Butch Ellison and Jim Dumas being the reserves. Butch Ellison said in an exclusive 2007 interview near his home in Kansas City that “nobody really knows” what happened that day.

“They were calling us n----s, spitting on us with (assistant coach) Norm Stewart right on the bench,” Ellison said. “Norm Stewart was sitting on the side (with head coach) Sparky Stalcup yelling n----r and spitting on us.”

Stewart’s actions pained Ellison, who considered him an idol while growing up in Kansas City when Stewart played for Missouri.

“That was the most disappointing thing to me because we didn’t have black role models,” Ellison said. “If a kid was a good ballplayer, that was your model.”

As the hostility mounted during the Border War and tensions escalated after MU’s Joe Scott was called for a flagrant foul against Nolen Ellison (Butch’s younger brother) just before halftime, five minutes into the second half, KU’s Wayne Hightower threw a punch at MU’s Charlie Henke following his second straight hard foul at the Jayhawk star just by the Tigers’ bench.

Henke retaliated with a swing at Hightower. Then it was mayhem.

Both benches cleared and fans — including about 15 MU football players — stormed the court in what was one of the ugliest brawls in basketball history.

“When it (brawl) it broke out, I had one person in mind, that knuckle right there (Butch Ellison pointed to his fist); I was going right for Norm Stewart,” Ellison said.

The fight lasted nearly five minutes and the game (MU won, 79-76) was stopped for 10 minutes. 

Afterwards, Mayer wrote in the Journal-World about his thoughts over the melee in Columbia:

“The MU folks stress they think Saturday’s brawl was KU’s fault and that the calling of names and spitting on KU players by MU players was OK. Yet no matter how how MU tries to don a ‘holy’ mantle, the fact remains the Tigers basketball teams have a league-wide reputation as hatchet-men, have been in a number of jams involving physical violence in recent years; generally are among the nation’s fouling leaders, have a home court which because of the crowd is considered by many the loop’s top snake pit. It’s hard to believe that just happens. And if it does, why isn’t there some obvious effort to change it.

“More and more, MU appears to be to the Big Eight what bellicose Russia is to the U.N. If MU doesn’t give evidence of good faith in an effort to clean its own house, maybe severance of the series would be a good idea. Good conduct like this has to be a two-way street.”

The idealist Harp had deep regrets over what happened.

“This is a tragedy,” Harp told the Journal-World after the game. “Competition as such is not the factor here. It is a matter of attitude. Let me emphasize. I’m not singling out Missouri. This condition has been prevalent on all levels, including high school, junior college and college. As yet I do not know the answer, but something must be done.”

Like perhaps canceling the series as Mayer wrote might have to happen?

Then-KU athletic director Dutch Lonborg took on that issue with this statement to the Journal-World following the game:

“I feel that if this extreme bitterness continues between the two schools, we will have to discontinue playing each other, at least for a while.”

Despite the brawl, the two teams continued playing each other every year — at least once in Columbia and once in Lawrence. But now, over 50 years since that infamous game at Brewer Fieldhouse, the No. 8 and Big 12-leading Jayhawks (18-4, 8-1) will be making their last trip to Columbia to face No. 4 Missouri (20-2, 7-2), which is tied with Baylor for second place in the league. ESPN’s College GameDay will be there for the first time in MU history.

All those factors make this a can’t miss game. And there’s no doubt Mizzou Arena will be rocking in what should be the most hostile environment in Columbia since the “full-blown riot” in 1961, as reported then by the Journal-World.

That particular game left lasting wounds for some former Jayhawks, including Butch Ellison. He said he ran into Stewart one time years later when Ellison was an administrator at Washington High School in Kansas City and Stewart visited as MU head coach to recruit one of the black athletes.

“I said, ‘Norm, what are you doing here?’” Ellison recalled. “’Before any of our black kids ever go to Missouri, I will shoot him first. He will not come to Missouri.’ That was the last time I saw him (Stewart). He just turned and walked out. Turned red.”

For Ellison, seeing Stewart indeed brought back painful memories of that dark day at Brewer Fieldhouse in 1961.

“We were almost killed down there,” Ellison said. “I hadn’t been to Columbia since. When I’m on I-70, I don’t even look that way.” 

A tribute to former KU player, assistant and head coach Dick Harp

Former KU player, assistant and head coach Dick Harp was a complex man who never received much respect, despite his longtime and lasting contributions to the University of Kansas and to basketball history. 

Harp is one of my true heroes whom I’ve put on a pedestal for many years, a person I greatly admire and first researched as I was writing my honors thesis at KU in 1988 on racial participation and integration in Kansas Basketball history: 1952-1975. I read about Harp in Sports Illustrated and in Jack Olsen’s 1968 breakthrough book, “The Black Athlete.” I came away with a lasting impression of him as a kind, genuine, good-hearted man who was a pioneer in recruiting black athletes to Kansas and as an idealist coach who wanted to use basketball as a vehicle to bring his white and black athletes closer together.

I’ve thought of Harp often since writing my thesis, and regret that I never interviewed him before he died in 2000.

After college and during my years covering KU basketball since 1998, I also learned that Harp was a giant in his profession who played or coached in four Final Fours at the same school, and was instrumental in helping lead KU to the 1952 NCAA title with his pressing and innovative defense as Phog Allen’s astute assistant. It was a defense which many coaches copied, including UCLA’s John Wooden, who ran off 10 NCAA titles in 12 seasons, including seven straight.

Nolen Ellison, one of Harp’s players in the early 1960s, spent about three hours with me talking about Harp and his experiences at KU in 2007 at a restaurant near his home in Kansas City. I asked to meet with Nolen that summer day since I wanted to learn more about Harp and Nolen’s experiences on an integrated team, especially the 1960-61 squad which featured seven African-Americans. Nolen’s older brother Butch, who also played at KU and was a member of the 1961 team, was there as well for a good portion of our talk and offered great insights about KU basketball history. 

Nolen again told me what he said during my Where Are They Now? interview with him in 2003 — that Dick Harp needs to be vindicated in Lawrence, Kan., in large part, since he recruited many black athletes at a time when few coaches in America were doing so. Not only did Harp recruit those athletes, he did everything possible to make sure they succeeded off the court at KU. He was deeply committed to his players, loved them, and wanted to see his white players “walk the extra mile” for their black teammates.

Of course, with any basketball coach and person, Harp was not without his flaws (as the late Wilt Chamberlain would attest), but to me, the real Dick Harp was a remarkable human being and a respected coach.

...

Thirty years after Dick Harp resigned as KU head basketball coach in 1964 and disillusioned about what the game had become, his former players who served under him as an assistant and head man honored his contributions to Jayhawk basketball and society during an early January reunion weekend in 1994.

It was a fitting tribute to a man who had done so much for Kansas basketball during his lifetime.

“Such an honor is long overdue for an intelligent, intense, low-profile man of 75 who is as loyal to KU as anyone who ever graced this earth,” longtime Lawrence Journal-World writer Bill Mayer commented on Jan. 7, 1994.

“He's not the flamboyant, flashy type, yet he has one of the sharpest senses of humor I've been fortunate enough to encounter. He loves to laugh and to make people laugh with his unlimited supply of stories and anecdotes. He and ‘Mar'Sue’ have retired here and Kansas University has never been represented with more dedication and dignity than it has been and is by these two.

“Dick is still sought out by coaches, including former student Dean Smith and Roy Williams, for advice and counsel. 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.”

The reunion was a resounding success with over 100 former players honoring Harp at a luncheon at the Adams Alumni Center. Then-KU coach Williams and athletic director Bob Frederick presented Harp a “framed piece of the original Allen Fieldhouse floor with his name, coaching years and championships embedded around a Jayhawk.”

Also, former player and member of the 1952 national championship team Bill Lienhard, who was then a Lawrence banker, announced creation of the Dick Harp Scholarship Fund, which will “provide an annual grant to a student athlete of the former coach's choice. The grant will be funded by ex-players and friends of Harp.”

Broadcaster Max Falkenstien was master of ceremonies at the roast-style event, while others spoke, including Jerry Waugh, former player and assistant to Harp, Jerry Gardner, a player in the early 1960s under Harp, Frederick, Williams and Mayer.

The Lawrence Journal-World reported that Williams said a principal reason behind his decision to leave his job as assistant coach for the University of North Carolina (in 1988) was the reverence and love of KU he gained from Harp during Harp's years as an administrative aide to UNC coach Smith, who also played on the 1952 national title team.

Harp was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support. While he said he enjoyed many events surrounding his association of KU basketball, this tribute was "one of the greatest experiences I've had -- something Martha Sue and I will remember forever.”

Everyone at the luncheon had great reason to celebrate this former coach and humble humanitarian. After all, the accomplishments are rich, poignant and lasting for Dick Harp. The ex-KU basketball coach, who died six years later in 2000 at age 81, is the only man ever to be with four Final Four teams (1940, 1952, 1953, 1957) as a player, assistant and head coach at the same school. 

He is also the only person to appear as a player, assistant coach and head coach in the NCAA basketball finals. Harp, too, is one of just five men who were involved in the national championship game as both a player and head coach.

He is the unsung hero who propelled KU to the national championship games in 1952 as head coach Phog Allen’s brilliant assistant, instituting an innovative pressing defense which would revolutionize basketball.

Harp is also the pioneer who helped integrate Kansas basketball and was a firm believer in racial justice and equality.

And Harp, as an assistant to North Carolina head coach Dean Smith from 1986-89, played an instrumental role in luring an unknown ‘Carolina assistant named Roy Williams to become head coach at Kansas in 1988, where Williams enjoyed a magical 15-year ride as KU head man, leading KU to four Final Fours and two national title games.

Williams affectionately described Harp as the closest thing to “Mr. Kansas Basketball.”

Smith has called Harp “one of the greatest basketball minds I have ever encountered, and one of the finest citizens this country has ever produced.” Smith said that Harp’s contributions as his administrative aide in the 1980s were “at great benefit to me. There’s never never been anybody I respect and admire more than Dick.”

However, such praise by Williams and Smith have been minimized over the years by Harp’s critics. He’s never really been given the credit for his accomplishments and unique gifts he bestowed upon his beloved alma mater.

Why?

Harp was actually put in position to fail when he first accepted the KU job after Allen’s mandatory retirement in 1956 at age 70. Allen, who never get the chance to coach Wilt Chamberlain (he became eligible the following year after Allen’s retirement), said KU could win the national title with “The Big Dipper, two aggressive cheerleaders, and two Phi Beta Kappas.”

“He had great misfortune to follow Dr. Allen, and then you give him the greatest player to come along in the game of basketball and he’s expected to succeed at the highest level. Although he was capable of performing at the highest level, he had no chance,” Waugh said in 1998.

Monte Johnson, who played under Harp and later became KU’s athletic director told Doug Vance and Max Falkenstien in their 1996 book, “Max and the Jayhawks,” that “Dick’s role, to me, was near impossible. If he didn’t win the national championship, he would be considered a failure. If he did win it, it was Doc’s players, Doc’s recruiting, all of Doc’s influence. It was a no-win deal.”

KU lost the national championship game in 1957 in triple overtime to North Carolina, and Harp’s strategy to slow the game down in the second half and overtimes came into question afterwards.

A poor lob pass by Ron Loneski to Chamberlain in the final seconds was intercepted, sealing KU’s doom and Harp’s fate.

“Dick Harp took over as coach in 1957 to find that everyone in the state expected him and sophomore Wilt Chamberlain to win the national championship. The Jayhawkers finished second, and it was considered a disgrace,” Sports Illustrated wrote on Dec. 7, 1964.

Lienhard wonders what might have been.

“If Wilt Chamberlain would have made that goal, he would have been one of our all-time great coaches, but he didn’t so everybody’s forgotten about Dick Harp now because of that. They blame him for not winning a national championship,” Lienhard said.

It is a “blame” he certainly doesn’t deserve.

Harp’s Jayhawks went 18-5 and finished second in the Big Seven during Chamberlain's junior season and final year at KU in 1957-58. With Chamberlain joining the Harlem Globetrotters, Kansas suffered an 11-14 record the next season.

Behind sophomore Wayne Hightower and junior Bill Bridges, KU rebounded in 1959-60 and shared a tie for the Big Eight title. The Jayhawks, who went 19-8 and 10-4 in conference play, lost to Cincinnati in the NCAA Midwest Regional Championship game.

After recording a 17-8 record in 1960-61, Kansas went into a tailspin during Harp’s final three seasons with records of 7-18, 12-13 and 13-12.

When KU suffered a 70-46 defeat to Kansas State in February of his final year in 1964, Harp was hanged and burned in effigy on the KU campus. Kansas, though, closed the season winning its last three games and five of its final eight.

Harp, who had openly discussed the possibility of retirement earlier in the season, finally called it quits on March 25, ending his eight-year head coaching career with a 121-82 record. Just the fourth head coach in KU’s storied history, Harp led KU to two conference titles and two NCAA tournament berths, including that magical run to the national championship game in 1957.

Mayer commended Harp for his fine work at Kansas after succeeding the legendary Allen.

“Suppose you followed Knute Rockne as football coach at Notre Dame, Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma, John Wooden in basketball at UCLA and Red Auerbach with the Boston Celtics,” Mayer wrote on Jan. 7, 1994, the weekend when Harp’s former players had honored him.

“And started off your very first year with a player expected to make an even bigger impact on basketball than Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. That's as tough as my trying to take over for Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, even without Woodward and Bernstein to add to the pressure.

“Dick Harp entered the equivalent of that scenario when he succeeded the immortal Phog Allen at Kansas for the 1956-57 season -- and inherited a promising sophomore named Wilt Chamberlain. The guys who followed Rockne, Wilkinson, Wooden and Auerbach didn't last as long or handle the post-legend challenge as well as Harp did in his eight years as head coach at KU.”

Unfortunately for Harp and KU, attendance and fan interest widely decreased since the Wilt years.

With a 32-43 record his last three years, SI wrote in 1964 that “home attendance, which averaged 15,500 in 1957, was down to less than 5,000 a game last year.”

“I have determined that it time for me to retire from coaching,” Harp said. “My association with the University of Kansas has been a wonderful experience.”

While it was a difficult decision to resign, Harp was comforted that he lived out a childhood dream.

“From the time I was a little boy, the biggest thing in my life was the University of Kansas,” Harp told the Topeka Capital-Journal. “If I had to draw a pattern, I would draw it again. I was at Kansas as a player and coach. What more could I ask?

“The fact that it’s time to change jobs doesn’t alter that.”

Waugh told me during a three-hour interview in 2015 that Harp always wanted to play for KU.

“He talked fondly about coming to KU and play basketball. That was his dream,” Waugh said. “The  opportunity to do that was a fulfillment of what he wanted in his life to play basketball for Doc Allen. Doc was such a prominent person at the time. Doc was known in the field. To be able to come here was a fulfillment to him as a student. He lived in a fraternity. He took advantage of the experiences that he had. The fraternity system was a big social deal, and to be a part of that was great.”

After playing on the national championship runner-up team in 1940, eight years later in 1948, Harp served as Allen’s assistant for eight years before fulfilling another dream he had in high school by serving as head coach at his alma mater for eight years.

Harp told “Max and the Jayhawks” that he made his decision to resign after that loss to K-State.

“We were having some guests to the house after the game, and I called my wife, Martha Sue, and told her I would be late. I went up and sat down on the grass under the Campanile Memorial. I was looking around and praying a little bit and probably crying a little when it started to rain. I thought, ‘OK Lord, I recognized what you want me to do now.’ So I got up and went home and told Martha Sue that I’d decided to resign. She wasn’t particularly happy with that decision, but it was my decision. That’s the way it went.”

Harp, though, actually made his decision to eventually resign a few years before his official announcement.

“The winning and losing, that’s why you play,” Harp told John Hendel in  his 1991 book, “Kansas Jayhawks: History Making Basketball.” 

“I enjoyed the play to see who was going to win and lose, but there came a point in my time here that I realized that I needed to do this other thing. So we made a decision a couple years before I did resign that that was what I was going to do. By then I recognized that for many different reasons, and there were a number of reasons, that I probably shouldn’t continue.”

After officially resigning that March day, Harp made it clear he would never coach again.

“Once you’ve coached at Kansas, there could be no other place to be happy,” Harp told the Lawrence Journal-World.

Mayer praised Harp for being a class act and stepping “out in style.”

“One of his big problems as a coach was that he too often tried to do too much for his players, to the point they didn’t do enough for themselves,” Mayer wrote. “But if a coach is to be condemned for something, that’s not bad to have on the record.”

Harp had grown disillusioned by the win-at-all costs environment of college athletics and the influence of alumni and boosters in recruiting. He was also troubled by the quota system in the number of black athletes he could play at the same time and the insults fans and alumni directed at his black players. A deeply religious man with strong moral values and ethics, Harp said he had “lost my way in life.”

“I probably did change when I became head coach (at Kansas),” Harp told “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.”

Retiring athletic director Dutch Lonborg was not caught off guard by Harp’s resignation.

“This comes as no big surprise since we realize Dick has been contemplating the move for sometime,” Lonborg said. “I personally want to express my thanks to him for his contribution to our athletic program and wish him well in whatever future endeavor he follows.”

Waugh told Ken Davis in his 2013 book, “100 things KU fans should know and do before they die,” that “after he became (Kansas) coach, he was never happy."

Waugh elaborated about Harp’s feelings to Doug Vance and Jeff Bollig in their 2007 book, “What it Means to be a Jayhawk.”

“To be a part of Kansas basketball was the heart of him,” Waugh said. “He was so proud of being at Kansas, to be a Jayhawk and be a part of all of this. I don’t think there has ever been anyone who felt it as deeply as Dick Harp did.

“There is no doubt in my mind that that Dick had all the ingredients to be a great coach. He was presented with the opportunity he had wanted all of his life: to come back to the University of  Kansas and be the head basketball coach. If anyone had a dream, Dick had that one and saw it fulfilled. Then when he got that dream, he didn’t enjoy it.”