When Chicago native Ray Meyer signed on as DePaul University’s
basketball coach in 1942, he agreed to a one-year contract for the modest sum
of $2,500. He turned down a three-year deal, he later explained, “because I
didn’t know if I’d like the job or the profession.”
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RAY MEYER and GEORGE MIKAN.
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Meyer’s first agenda item was
to turn the gangly, six-foot-10 freshman George Mikan into a basketball player.
The two had met before, when Meyer was an assistant coach at Notre Dame (where
he had been a member of the 1936 national championship squad). When Mikan tried out for the Irish, Meyer was not encouraging.
“He said I was so uncoordinated I tripped over the lines on the court,” Mikan recalled.
Head coach George Keogan suggested that Mikan try a smaller school where he
might get to play some. Mikan heeded the advice and enrolled at DePaul, only to
find when he got there that Meyer had been hired in the meantime. “I thought,
‘Oh, no, here we go again,’” said Mikan.But if
Mikan’s lack of polish was a problem, Meyer now made it his problem and
project. “I knew the value of the big man in basketball,” he wrote. “He gets
more points by accident than a little guy does on purpose.” Every day after
the team’s regular practice, Meyer put Mikan through a grueling regimen of skipping
rope, shadow boxing, jumping over chairs, playing catch with medicine balls and
tennis balls, and, almost incidentally, dribbling and shooting a basketball. In
one drill, Mikan would stand under the basket and make a layup with his right
hand, then rebound and make a layup with his left, rebound and layup with his
right, etc., etc., etc. Known as the “Mikan Drill,” this routine has been used
for virtually all big men ever since; among its adherents are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal.
“Mikan was
raw material with a little talent,” Meyer wrote. “His greatest asset was the
desire to improve, which made him willing to listen and work. You can measure
height and even talent, but not heart. Mikan showed me in the beginning he had
the heart to be great.”
Meyer’s
patient tutelage transformed the Clark Kent look-alike into a Superman. Mikan
learned to execute hook shots deftly with either hand and to rebound and block
shots like no one else. In his first season at DePaul, he led the Blue Demons
to a 19-5 record and an appearance in the NCAA tournament’s semifinal round
(which hadn’t yet been labeled the Final Four).
In 1943-44,
Mikan and DePaul advanced to the championship game of the National Invitational
Tournament, which was then equal to the NCAA in prestige, before losing to
St. John’s to
conclude a 22-4 campaign. Mikan was chosen national player of the year. The
next year, DePaul won 18 of 20 regular-season games and marched through the NIT
with awe-inspiring ease, crushing West Virginia 76-54, Rhode Island 97-53, and
Bowling Green 71-54. In the semifinal game, Mikan nearly outscored the other team,
settling for a “tie” with 53. He was selected most valuable player of the NIT
and repeated as national player of the year.
Following
the title game at Madison Square Garden,
the Demons remained in New York
for a contest with NCAA champion Oklahoma A&M and its six-foot-11 center
Bob Kurland, Mikan’s only rival as the finest player in the country. Although
the event was technically an exhibition to benefit the wartime Red Cross, it
was hyped as a national championship game. DePaul had beaten the Aggies 48-46
several weeks earlier, and the rematch was expected to be a barn-burner. Unfortunately,
it became somewhat anticlimactic when Mikan fouled out with six minutes left in
the first half and three other starters soon followed. DePaul lost 52-44.
After three seasons
at DePaul, Mikan had become so outstanding that the rules were changed to
diminish his dominance. It had been his custom to station himself under the opposition’s
basket and simply swat incoming
shots away or even catch them in midair and fling them ahead to teammates for
easy fast breaks. Goaltending was outlawed prior to the 1945-46 season, but the
change seemed not to bother Mikan, who continued to shine. He scored 555 points
in 24 games (the previous year he had tallied 558 points, also in 24 games) and
played superb defense. Rebounds were not counted in those days, but Mikan’s
excellence in that area was well documented by contemporary sources.
DePaul
rolled to a 19-5 mark in 1945-46, winning its final six games by an average of
20 points. Despite this, the Demons were snubbed by both the NCAA and NIT. Meyer
suspected that his harsh comments about the officiating in the previous spring’s
Oklahoma A&M game had gotten him and the Demons blackballed from both tournaments,
but he never knew for sure. With no postseason opportunities forthcoming, the
Mikan era at DePaul ended with a lopsided 65-40 victory over Beloit College
in the regular-season finale on March 9, 1946.
Meyer then prepared
to face life without the man who would later be voted the greatest player of
the first half of the century. “While he was around,” Meyer wrote, “I was a
great coach.” For his part, Mikan said of Meyer, “I’d be nothing without him.” The Demons had won 81 of 98 games in the four years and finished third, second,
and first in their three postseason tournaments. Now Mikan was bound for
greater glory in the pro ranks, while Meyer was destined for decades of obscurity.
The 32-year-old coach would see his age double before he and DePaul returned to
national prominence.
