Mary Hardin-Baylor men’s basketball coach Ken DeWeese spent five years as a Texas-El Paso assistant under Haskins, who died Sunday, 42 years after guiding Texas Western to the 1966 NCAA championship with five black starters.
And like so many others in the coaching profession, DeWeese has nothing but praise for the humble, hard-working coach nicknamed The Bear.
“He was an unbelievable tactician and the very best basketball mind that I’ve ever been around,” said DeWeese, who was a Miners assistant coach from 1975 to 1980. “There is no other way to put it other than to say that he shaped me into the coach I am.”
Haskins, who posted 719 wins at UTEP - previously known as Texas Western - was thought to be ahead of his time in coaching circles. His polite manner and robust build made him seem, at times, like a pushover. But DeWeese said there was never any doubt as to who the boss was.
“My first day there, he tossed me the chalk in a coaches’ meeting and said, ‘Draw me up an offense,’” DeWeese recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Hey, this is going to be fun,’ and I started drawing stuff.
“He just sat there with his hands folded across his belly for a while, then said, ‘OK, wipe all of that off.’ After I had wiped it all off, he said, ‘That offense up there now is better than the one you just drew up.’ I started getting an idea then of how things would run.”
Haskins counted among his friends legendary coaches Henry Iba - who Haskins played for at Oklahoma A&M (now State) - and Bob Knight.
Haskins helped jump-start the careers of several successful coaches.
“I have won over 700 games and that puts me in a small group,” DeWeese said. “But I wouldn’t be there had I not spent the time with him.”
During DeWeese’s stint at UTEP, other assistants were Gene Iba - nephew of Henry and a future Baylor coach - and Tim Floyd, a future NBA head coach of the Chicago Bulls and New Orleans Hornets who is currently the coach at Southern California.
“Gene Iba is a better coach than a lot of people. Tim Floyd is better than most people. I have had the opportunity to win more games than most people,” DeWeese said. “Gene’s personality, if you don’t know him, can be abrasive. Tim is not brilliant, and my personality is just as goofy as Gene’s and I’m not as smart as Tim.
“Now the three of us weren’t born to be great basketball coaches. We’re no different than Joe Shmoe at whatever university. So why have we been successful? The answer is because we all spent at least five years with Don.”
DeWeese left his job as a high school head coach at Port Arthur Jefferson to become a UTEP assistant in 1975. It was nine years after Haskins’ team defeated Adolph Rupp’s heavily favored, all-white Kentucky team for the national title, and still the Hall of Fame coach talked about the win only in terms of basketball, not racial integration.
“He never set out to be political. He was just trying to figure out how to win the next game,” DeWeese said. “Then when each game was over, he would try to figure out how to win the next one. That’s all he was concerned about.
“If Togo Railey (a white player on the ’66 team) had been performing better than (black teammate) Bobby Joe Hill, then Bobby Joe Hill wouldn’t have started that game.”
DeWeese knows about the hate mail Haskins received that season from “black people who were screaming that it was exploitation and white people who were screaming that he was crazy.
“But even though all of those people hated him for it,” DeWeese said, “I never heard him say a bad thing, even about the haters.”
Haskins and writer Dan Wetzel co-authored the book “Glory Road” that became a movie in 2006, and DeWeese believes that it wasn’t until talk began about a possible film that Haskins fully acknowledged what he had done.
“Being credited with changing the face of college athletics kind of embarrassed him for a long time, in part because he didn’t think he had changed it,” DeWeese said. “But that started to change about the time the book came out and they started talking about making the movie.
“So many people world-wide that he had never met or even talked to were saying, ‘One of the reasons that I was able to succeed was because of this or that happened, and that only happened because of what you did.’ I think then he began to see what he had done, but he still never took credit for personally changing it.”
And DeWeese stresses that Haskins’ refusal to toot his own horn as a civil rights pioneer is what set him apart.
“There are a bunch of guys in college athletics who would have told everybody, ‘I thought I had to do my part to help better society because I have a responsibility socially as well,’” the Crusaders coach said. “Those guys would have made it sound like they sat out to change college athletics on purpose, whether they had or hadn’t.
“But Don had never sat out to do anything other than win, and he always made sure people knew that.”
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