Zags couldn’t have danced without Hank

Every home date a deafening sellout, every game on TV, every week in the Top 25 – the nonstop party of Gonzaga basketball slows only to consider its next conquest or buzz about the latest recruit. Occasionally, ancient history is toasted – the Elite Eight team of 1999, for instance.

It is an impressive and wondrous thing, this Zagmania.

And it doesn’t happen if not for Hank Anderson.

The name may be alien to Gonzaga’s latter-day acolytes who have scarfed up so many of the good seats, and that’s almost as sad as the news of Anderson’s passing on Monday at the age of 84. His funeral service is Monday afternoon at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Gig Harbor, where he lived out his retirement, but surely a local memorial would be appropriate. Tribute is overdue, if only for this reason:

“I never knew anybody,” said Harry Watson, who played for him in the 1950s, “who didn’t like Hank Anderson.”

Such a thing may not be possible in college basketball anymore.

Nice guys can finish first, last or anywhere in between, which is where the math puts Anderson – a 290-275 record between 1951 and 1972, the most wins in Gonzaga history and the most losses, too.

And a most superficial accounting.

What happened to Gonzaga basketball on Anderson’s watch was elementary and largely unheralded, but in the context of the time and the campus was no less miraculous than the recent events that have made the Zags a national phenomenon. It started with something as simple as upgrading the schedule and culminated in the political improbabilities both of getting the Bulldogs into a league and building a facility they could call home.

Frank Burgess was not only a witness to most of it, he was Anderson’s exhibit A – the NCAA scoring champion in 1961, Gonzaga’s first true bit of basketball profile.

“Hank had a vision – I think that’s safe to say,” Burgess said. “He’d played at big-time basketball himself and I believe he thought Gonzaga was ready for something more than what it had been to that point.”

Gonzaga had dropped football in 1941 and, in effect, lost its athletic identity. Boxing would win a national title in 1950, but that sport was popular in only scattered precincts and would be dead within a decade. The basketball team had a good post-war run, but that was on the small-college level and the campus fathers seemed perfectly content playing a provincial schedule.

“I used to say our schedule took us clear out to Whitworth,” said George Chalich, a senior on Anderson’s first team. “And on our western jaunt, we went to Eastern.”

By his second year, Anderson opened the season with a midwest trip to DePaul, Illinois State and AAU powerhouse Peoria Caterpillar, which won the Olympic Trials in 1952. When Burgess was a senior, the showcase trip was four games in five nights at Detroit, Providence, St. John’s and Xavier – three of them Top 15 teams.

That was also the year the Zags moved into what is now known as NCAA Division I. If they weren’t in Wake Forest’s league yet, they weren’t in Whitman’s anymore, either.

Not only had the schedule gone national, but so had recruiting. The team Anderson inherited in 1951 was made up mostly of Spokane and Montana kids. Year two saw a transfer from George Washington, the next year one from Fordham. Burgess came from Arkansas via the Air Force, and suddenly service veterans turned into an Anderson staple – Charlie Jordan, Blake Elliott, Gary Lechman. And, of course, the most legendary recruit was the 7-foot-3 Frenchman, Jean Claude Lefebvre.

Which is not to say Anderson wouldn’t still forage around here.

Little Billy Suter, all 5-foot-8 of him, scored 42 points for Morton in the State B championship game in the Spokane Coliseum, which got Anderson’s attention. Suter was impressed that Anderson stopped by to chat afterward. He was more impressed when the 6-foot-7 coach showed up in his home.

“Not in Morton – in Mineral, population 200, which is even more out of the way than Morton,” Suter recalled. “I was sold just to see that he’d come that far.”

He came on a shoestring. Technically, there was no such thing as a recruiting budget. Burgess was lured over the phone – and by an Air Force captain also stationed in Germany who’d grown up in Spokane. Anderson disciples remember knocking over the Coke machine in the COG so the coach could have gas money to get to a state tournament.

Gonzaga, as an independent, was still playing almost two-thirds of its schedule on the road – and its home schedule off campus in the Coliseum because the crackerbox gym in the Administration Building was too tiny and primitive. Again, Anderson worked diligently to solve those issues. His warm relationship with rivals in the region allowed the Zags charter membership in the Big Sky Conference even though Gonzaga no longer played football. And with the stewardship of Fr. Arthur Dussault and Gonzaga regent Dr. Edgar Fitzgerald, he got Kennedy Pavilion – you know it as The Kennel – built in 1965 at the bargain price of $1 million.

And surely it didn’t hurt when Anderson won two Big Sky titles with Suter and Lechman, among others.

“It was important that the school got that the program going – that can be seen in what’s happening today,” said Jerry Vermillion, who set the school’s rebounding records in the early ‘50s and later coached himself at St. Martin’s. “They gave Hank a free hand, to an extent. There was never any help, really – so much of it he did himself. And in the process, he took care of all of us.”

It’s almost unanimous among his former players, this notion of debt. Burgess even remembers the rare Anderson butt-chewing as a reason for gratitude – his last college game when he needed 34 points for the scoring title and came in at halftime with nine. The message: do what you can do and shoot the damned ball.

Maybe only Anderson knew what Burgess’ feat could mean for the program.

“Hank Anderson had a lot more foresight than people want to give him credit for,” Burgess said. “But I suppose sometimes it takes a little hindsight to understand that kind of foresight.”