In Part II on Sam Miranda, I write about my tribute to him after he passed in 2009. This was published in Jayhawk Illustrated.
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The news hit me hard and sharp, jolting me wide awake in the late night hours on May 29.
It was near 3 a.m. when I went online and read that former KU assistant basketball coach Sam Miranda had died of cancer the previous day at age 78. I stayed awake the rest of the evening and the next day with Miranda occupying all my thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Miranda was not just a Jayhawk assistant under Ted Owens from 1964-77. He was a legendary recruiter and master teacher who won over recruits and players with his supreme salesmanship, enthusiasm, persistence, tireless work ethic, honesty, and demanding tough love.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Miranda in November of 2000 for a Where Are They Now? feature for Jayhawk Insider magazine. I’ve often thought of that interview the last decade and how much fun I had hearing Miranda’s recruiting stories. And I thought Sam enjoyed reminiscing about his KU days maybe just as much.
He was full of energy that night, full of life, full of love and passion for his family and Kansas basketball. While he was no longer affiliated with KU after he resigned in 1977, Miranda never once stopped believing, cheering, and supporting the school he gave his heart and soul to for 13 years.
He laughed some while recalling his recruiting stories of former Jayhawks like Rick Suttle, Roger Morningstar, Tom Kivisto and Dale Greenlee — four of my first KU basketball heroes and stars on the 1973-74 Final Four team.
These were players I put on a pedestal; they became larger than life to me as a very impressionable 7-year-old boy growing up in Lawrence. They could simply do no wrong. At the time, I gave no thought as to how these players arrived at KU or who was responsible in recruiting them. Heck, I was too young to think about that. I just watched in awe and wonder as Suttle and company drove KU on a magical ride to the Final Four.
Years later, I became a diligent student of KU basketball history and read voraciously every book and article I could find about the Jayhawks’ past. That’s when I learned about Miranda’s influence on KU basketball, how he started the Illinois pipeline to Kansas and got Jo Jo White to sign with Kansas without ever seeing him play in person.
Then I had the good fortune to interview Miranda and many of his former players in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and learned even more about this unsung hero of Kansas basketball.
In 2000, he was voted by a blue-ribbon Jayhawk panel as the best assistant coach in Kansas basketball history.
“There’s been a lot of fine, fine coaches, and whomever that panel was, I appreciate their thoughtfulness very much,” Miranda told me in our interview in 2000. “That’s a fine honor when you think of 103 years of Kansas basketball, and to be selected as the top person, that’s quite a good feeling.”
Miranda’s basketball roots were planted in Collinsville, Ill., where he was Prep Player of the Year for the St. Louis metro area his junior year of high school in 1947 and named first-team All-State in 1948. Miranda, who was inducted as a player into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1973, became a star guard at Indiana under legendary coach Branch McCracken. He earned second-team all-Big Ten honors as a junior in 1951 and was named first-team Little All-American in 1951 and 1952.
Miranda’s dribbling ability gained national acclaim; in 1950, he was selected to demonstrate ball handling skills in a General Mills educational sports film. After his senior year in 1952, Miranda toured against the Harlem Globetrotters as a member of the College All-Star team.
He spent two years in the U.S. Army before embarking on a coaching career in the Illinois high school ranks for eight years, where he built lasting relationships and contacts with his players and fellow coaches. Miranda then became an assistant coach at New Mexico for two years before new KU head coach Ted Owens hired him as his top aide in 1964 after taking over for Dick Harp.
Miranda actually first met Owens (KU assistant at the time under Harp) for about five minutes when he was an assistant at New Mexico during a trip to Lawrence, where he was scouting the Jayhawks in preparation for the Lobos game with Kansas in Albuquerque on Dec. 19, 1963.
New Mexico won, 59-54.
“That was the biggest game and biggest win the University of New Mexico ever had up to that point by far,” Miranda said.
After that 1963-64 season, Miranda stopped at an interstate restaurant north of Chicago on a recruiting trip and picked up the paper and read that Harp had resigned and Owens was the new KU head coach.
“I just thought at the time, ‘Man, what a great break for Ted. A relatively young person to get that kind of job,’” Miranda said. “And then about four or five days later, I got a call from him in regards to (joining his staff). He wanted to recruit the Illinois and St. Louis area, where I had some success recruiting. He came out to Albuquerque and we visited a night or so. I came back the next weekend (to Lawrence) and looked around and decided to come to KU.”
Miranda went right to work, securing a commitment from fellow Collinsville native and high school All-American Rodger Bohnenstiehl, and then soon lured White from St. Louis.
He was just beginning.
Focusing primarily in the Illinois and St. Louis area, Miranda brought in a boatload of talent from Illinois the next 13 years. In fact, the 1974 Final Four team comprised 10 players from Illinois, including seven of the top eight.
"I was from Illinois and knew it was a great basketball state," Miranda once told writer Taylor Bell of the Chicago Sun-Times. "I knew a lot of high school coaches. I figured we had to outwork people. I was on the phone every night from 7 to 10 talking to players in Illinois. We had practice on Friday afternoon. Afterward, I'd catch a flight in Kansas City, fly to Illinois, see a game, visit with parents,
go to dinner, then fly back on a 12:45 flight to Kansas City."
Miranda simply outworked his competition. He was quite passionate about recruiting.
“I enjoyed recruiting,” Miranda told me. “It’s a challenge. You go in a home the summer time prior to their senior year. You’re in there with all the big schools and you’re trying to be one of the five to come out and visit your school. When you walk out on a summer evening, you know if you’ve done a good or bad job. It’s an exhilarating feeling when you walk out and you’ve done a good job of recruiting and get the kid to commit and say, ‘Yes, I’ll come visit Kansas.’”
Bell said Miranda was peerless in his profession.
“Since I began covering high school sports in the 1950s, I've become acquainted with the process and some of the best football and basketball recruiters who ever persuaded a highly impressionable teenager to leave his family, friends and hometown for a name on a map that the youngster didn't know existed. In some cases, there wasn't even a name,” Bell wrote.
“Sam Miranda was the best of all. ... Miranda built Kansas into a Final Four program in the 1970s by recruiting many of the best high school players in Illinois, including Springfield's Dave Robisch, East Aurora's Tom Kivisto, Collinsville's Rodger Bohnenstiehl, Kenwood's Donnie Von Moore and Kewanee's Tommie Smith. He set the standard for recruiters who followed him. He wrote the book. Nobody worked harder. In an era where there were virtually no restrictions on recruiting, Miranda literally camped out on a recruit's doorstep. Before anyone else, he understood the two most important axioms of recruiting:
“1. The first coach in the door usually is the one who signs the kid.
2. You must learn who will make the final decision—athlete, father, mother, grandmother, uncle, high school coach, AAU coach—and form a close relationship.”
Miranda spoke to me about that recruiting philosophy.
“In recruiting, I always thought in any family, there’s basically one person who is the key person in recruiting the youngster,” Miranda said. “You recruit the young man and then you recruit the person who is going to help (him) make that decision.”
In Suttle’s case, Miranda won over his mother’s respect. Suttle was leaning towards Jacksonville, which had been to the Final Four in 1970, before eventually signing with KU.
“I recruited him hard for three years,” Miranda said. “Finally in the end, (Suttle’s mom) said, ‘You’re going with Sam. That’s it.’ ... She just had confidence in us.”
Miranda landed White through the confidence and trust of his high school coach, Jodie Bailey.
“About the third or fourth time I was back to see Jo Jo, we’re at a restaurant talking and I’m going over why I thought he should come to Kansas and everything,” Miranda said. “Jodie Bailey was sitting there and he said, ‘Jo Jo, that sounds good to me.’ And that was it. That kind of sealed it.”
There was another reason why White signed with Kansas.
"I went to Kansas because I couldn't talk to any other coaches. I was always on the phone with Sam," Bell reported White once saying.
While Miranda was instrumental in recruiting and signing countless prospects over the years, he selflessly credited Owens for KU’s recruiting success.
“Of course, the head coach is naturally the vital guy because he’s got to make an impression,” Miranda said. “I don’t care how good an assistant coach is in recruiting, if the head coach doesn’t make a great impression, it’s going to be hard to get the kid. And Ted always did a great job recruiting.”
With his fierce coaching personality, Miranda was the perfect blend to Owens. As former Jayhawks like to say, Owens was the nice “good cop,” while Miranda played the “bad cop” role.
“Owens was the nice guy that tried to be mean,” Morningstar said. “We all kind of laughed at. Coach Miranda, you never looked at crosswise. He had the fear of God in all of us.”
But he also had the unyielding respect and love of all his players.
Just ask Morningstar.
“He was a great guy and meant so much to a lot of us,” Morningstar wrote me in an email after Miranda’s death.
Just ask former KU center Roger Brown.
Brown was one of countless post players who made huge strides under Miranda’s tutelage. Brown credits Miranda, who worked primarily with KU’s big men — as a key factor in his development.
“He said (during the recruiting process) he was going to be out there every day working with me,” Brown said during an interview in 2002. “I didn’t take him seriously. I just took it in passing, but when I got there and realized how intense he was as a coach and that he was true to his word, I said, ‘OK, then.’
“He spent a lot of time with me and Dave (Robisch) every day. I think that was a big factor in my development. I think that was a major thing that he gave attention to all the players, especially the big men. I think that was instrumental.”
Just ask Von Moore.
“If it wasn’t for Sam I would not have ever gotten off the bench at Kansas,” Von Moore commented last April in Suntimes.com after a story on Miranda. “I can still hear those familiar words: ‘Don't you think we should put Donnie in the game.’ Every time he said it Ted would put me in the game. He taught me how to play the game and believed in me. But most importantly he taught me honor, dignity and respect. He was my role model and I carry a part of him with me to this very day. When I coach and when I teach.
“What a gift. Thanks Sam.”
Just ask Greenlee.
“Sam Miranda is one of the finest men I have ever known,” Greenlee commented in Suntimes.com in May. “I had broken my ankle my senior year of high school playing football, so all of the colleges that had been recruiting me for basketball backed off. My high school football coach in Rockford, Illinois, Bill Swaby, grew up with Coach Miranda in Collinsville, and got Sam to take a look at me. Coach showed faith in me and allowed me to come to KU for a fantastic four years of my life. Best break I ever had. Thanks Coach Miranda, for everything.
“You're the best!”
Just ask Bohnenstiehl.
“Sam was a great man to play for,” Bohnestiehl said during an interview in 2003. “He made you work. He was very disciplined. You had to work hard.”
Just ask White.
“Ted is like a second father to me, he and coach Miranda,” White said after his jersey retirement ceremony at Allen Fieldhouse in 2003. “They (Miranda and Owens) were more than just coaches.
They were friends to us, they were our confidant. Our relationship continues on, far beyond the KU days.”
Indeed, many of Miranda’s former players kept in touch and met with him when they visited Lawrence. Miranda cherished the lifetime relationships he built with his players and was so proud of their post-KU accomplishments.
“I think the association with the players is probably the most important thing for any coach, really, particularly after your finished coaching,” Miranda told me. “The players that you do get and how they perform and how they work hard and how they do a great job for the university and their teammates is always something to reflect and look back on.”
“(It’s a) good feeling to see the guys go on and be successful in sports and out of sports.”
After the 1976-77 season, two Final Fours (1971 and ‘74) and 23 years in the coaching profession, Miranda left KU and went to work for Maupintour Travel. He was an outside sales manager for 17 years before retiring in 1994.
He lived in Lawrence ever since with his wife, Polly.
“It’s been a very satisfying life,” Miranda said in 2000.
Miranda left an indelible impact with everyone he met along the way. One reader of the Respublica.com captured the sentiments of all who knew Miranda with a comment on the Illinois community blog’s website after Miranda’s death.
