Doors To Hoop Hall Open Wide For Seven Carril, Haskins, Alex English Lead Way; Gus Johnson Misses
Princeton’s Pete Carril and Texas-El Paso’s Don Haskins, two of college basketball’s most likable and successful coaches, were among seven people elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame on Monday.
Scoring ace Alex English, power forward Bailey Howell, women’s stars Denise Curry and Joan Crawford, and longtime Spain coach Antonio Diaz-Miguel were elected and will be inducted Sept. 29.
“I never thought about anything like this when I started coaching,” said Carril, who retired from Princeton a year ago and became an assistant with the Sacramento Kings. “Especially, in the Ivy League. I don’t know if I can feel any better than I do. I’m overwhelmed. I’m on another planet.”
Haskins, 66, has quietly kept winning since his five black starters beat Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky stars for the 1966 NCAA championship.
He ranks among the top five active college coaches with a 687-322 record and seven conference titles in 36 years at El Paso.
“I’m shocked. I never thought that this would happen to me. I’d never felt that I’d done enough,” he said. “But if I said I wasn’t hoping, I’d be lying. This is even bigger to me than the national (championship). You start out playing basketball as a little kid. All of a sudden, you’re where I am now, and it doesn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem very long ago.”
Haskins, who played for Henry Iba, another Hall of Famer, at what was then Oklahoma A&M, had to overcome a slow start in the game.
“It seemed like yesterday that I was playing basketball outside,” he said. “My dad built me a small hoop. It was the hardest game I ever played. I was cut from my seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade teams.”
After setting career scoring records at Dreher High School in Columbia, S.C., and at the University of South Carolina, English became the NBA’s most prolific scorer in the 1980s. Still, English said he hadn’t expected the call since he was left off the NBA’s list of its 50 greatest players.
“I felt slighted,” he said. “But now I’m elated.”
During his 15-year pro career, mostly with the Denver Nuggets, English scored 25,617 points. He was the first in the NBA to score 2,000 points in eight straight seasons and still ranks among the league’s top-10 career leaders.
Curry, UCLA’s leading women’s scorer, was named the French player of the 1980s during an eight-year pro career in Europe. Crawford was an AAU star for Nashville Business College in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Among the nominees who failed to gain election were coaches John Thompson of Georgetown, Jerry Tarkanian of UNLV and Fresno State, Tex Winter of Kansas State and the Chicago Bulls, Jim Phelan of Mount St. Mary’s, and Alex Hannum, who won NBA titles with St. Louis and Philadelphia and an ABA crown with Oakland.
Players considered were former Idaho star Gus Johnson, Jamaal Wilkes, Sidney Moncrief, Bobby Jones, Arnie Risen, Dennis Johnson, Jo Jo White and Ubiratan Pereira Maciel of Brazil.
Lee Williams, who helped create the basketball hall in 1962 and was its executive director for 19 years, was proposed as a contributor.