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To view an excerpt from the Current Biography profile,
choose from the list of names.
BROWN, LARRY (with
photograph)
DALY, CHUCK
DAVIS, AL
DITKA, MIKE
GASTON, CITO
GIBBS, JOE
HOLTZ, LOU
JACKSON, PHIL
JOHNSON, JIMMY
JONES, K. C.
KEENAN, MIKE (with photograph)
KNIGHT, BOB
LASORDA, TOMMY
LUCAS, JOHN
MADDEN, JOHN
PARCELLS, BILL
PATERNO, JOE
PINIELLA, LOU
RILEY, PAT
ROBINSON, EDDIE
SMITH, DEAN
WALSH, BILL
WEAVER, EARL
WILKENS, LENNY
 BROWN, LARRY*
Sep. 14, 1940- Basketball coach.
A lifelong student of basketball as well as a master teacher
of the game, Larry Brown has never enjoyed the iconic status of such sideline legends as
Red Auerbach and Dean Smith, largely because he has been perceived as a vagabond who
wanders from team to team in search of the perfect coaching situation. While presiding
over eight clubs in 24 years of coaching, he has suffered a losing season just once, and
he invariably "leaves a team in better shape than it was when he arrived," as
Ira Berkow noted in his profile of Brown for the New York Times (June 14, 1993). Twice,
however, he has abandoned play-off-bound National Basketball Association teams during the
regular season, citing, among other things, his frustration with the arrogance and egotism
of professional athletes. On each of those occasions, he defected to the college ranks. In
his seven seasons as a college coach, for two universities, he led his team to the Final
Four three times, and in 1988 his University of Kansas squad won the national
championship. But he has always returned to the NBA, on account of what Berkow called his
"distaste for recruiting and coddling young people." Brown has been criticized
for becoming paternally close to the players he eventually leaves behind, yet his ability
to revitalize mediocre franchises derives from his sternness and his unwavering commitment
to unselfish, team-oriented basketball. As Paul Attner wrote in the Sporting News (May 30,
1994), "He's one of the last of a generation of coaches who yell and prod and
provoke, who consider winning, not the feelings of players, to be most important, who have
established rules and expect them to be followed without exception, who target their stars
for the most verbal abuse."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found in the April 1996 issue of Current
Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current
Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography
Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).
* Photo courtesy of the Indiana Pacers.
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DALY, CHUCK
July 20, 1933- Basketball coach.
In the history of the National Basketball Association, only
three coaches--Red Auerbach of the dynastic Boston Celtics, Pat Riley of the fabulous Los
Angeles Lakers, and Chuck Daly of the swaggering Detroit Piston "Bad Boys"--have
led their teams to back-to-back championships. If the Larry Bird-led Celtics provided the
NBA with a chord-crunching rock-'n'-roll soundtrack in the 1980s and the gifted Lakers
were its soul music, then the Bad Boy Pistons--aggressive, menacing, and physically
intimidating--were the league's rap attack.
One of basketball's most respected and well-liked coaches,
Chuck Daly reached the pinnacle of his profession after more than thirty years of toil,
starting out as a lowly $3,600-a-year high school coach in rural Pennsylvania.
"People in our business were genuinely happy for Chuck," Ron Rothstein, a former
assistant of Daly's, has said. "He worked his way to the top, from high school to
college to here. Nobody ever handed Chuck anything." The dapper and fashion-conscious
Daly exudes what one writer has called "an easy one-of-the-boys conviviality."
"It may have taken a long time," Jack McCallum wrote in Sports Illustrated
(December 18, 1989), "but the coach with all those suits and all that hair has proved
to be a man of style and a man of substance. And how many men like that are there?"
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.
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DAVIS, AL
July 4, 1929- Football executive.
An ever-controversial rebel, Al Davis is the managing general
partner and "total boss" of the fabled Los Angeles Raiders. Often abrasive and
sometimes devious, Davis has not hesitated to buck the powerful National Football League
and Commissioner Pete Rozelle to achieve his goals. In 1982 he transferred his team from
Oakland to Los Angeles in defiance of the league's rules, a move upheld after years of
court battles. Long known as "the Genius," and as an innovative strategist and
hard worker, Al Davis acquired his football smarts in a turbulent career as head coach,
general manager, league commissioner, and part-owner that began in 1963 when he set about
refashioning the Oakland Raiders in his image. Brawling their way to the top record in
professional sports--217 wins, 11 ties, and 87 losses in twenty winning seasons--the
Raiders have won the world championship three times, in Super Bowls XI, XV, and XVIII.
Alluding to the contradictory images that Davis presents to
football pundits, Al Stump noted in Los Angeles magazine (November 1984) that
"whatever Davis really is--power monger, mad genius, super egoist, brilliant
strategist, renegade opportunist, skilled motivator--he's got one big thing going for him.
Everybody loves a winner. And how can you help but love someone whose only goal is Just
Win, Baby, Win'?"
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.
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DITKA, MIKE
Oct. 18, 1939- Professional football coach.
"Attack--always." That is the football philosophy
of Coach Mike Ditka, an old-fashioned, no-frills exponent of the brawling, do-or-die
school. As a player, Ditka was an All-American end at the University of Pittsburgh before
turning professional. As a pro, he played end with the great Chicago Bears team of the
early 1960s, with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1967 and 1968, and then for four years with
the Dallas Cowboys team that won Super Bowl victories in 1970 and 1971. Following a
coaching apprenticeship under Tom Landry in Dallas, he returned in 1982 to his first love,
the Bears, who had over the years deteriorated into a 6-10 team. Learning to control his
notorious irascibility, he imbued the Chicago players with some of his intensity and
coached the resuscitated team to a five-year record of 50-23, to the National Football
Conference playoffs in 1984, 1985, and 1986, and to triumph in the Super Bowl in January
1986.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.
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GASTON, CITO
(GAS-tuhn, SEE-toh)
Mar. 17, 1944- Baseball manager.
When, in May 1989, Cito Gaston was promoted from hitting
instructor to manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, the team had the second worst record for
the first thirty-six games of the season in the history of the franchise. There was
concern in the Toronto front office that Gaston was too friendly with the players to be a
successful manager, but the team responded well to his easygoing manner and fought their
way to a division crown, the first of four in Gaston's five years as manager. A victim of
high expectations, he was mercilessly criticized by the fans and the media for the
talented squad's late-season collapses, and he faced the prospect of being fired if the
Jays did not reach the 1992 World Series. Silencing the critics, Gaston piloted the Blue
Jays past the Atlanta Braves in 1992 to become the first black manager to win the World
Series, and in 1993 he became the first manager since 1976 to lead a team to consecutive
World Series championships, as Toronto topped the Philadelphia Phillies.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.
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GIBBS, JOE
Nov. 25, 1940- Football coach.
One of only three National Football League coaches to win at
least three Super Bowls (Chuck Noll and Bill Walsh are the others), Joe Gibbs has, in his
eleven years at the helm of the Washington Redskins, won just under 70 percent of his
games. Gibbs's coaching style emphasizes meticulous organization and preparation, and he
is also a master of motivation who pulls no punches with his players. "He won't give
you any bull," Redskins wide receiver Gary Clark told Richard Justice of the
Washington Post (January 24, 1992). "He lays it out for you, and when he tells you
something, you know you've heard the straight story. He's not a phony. He doesn't try to
trick you, as so many coaches do. When we look at the [game] films, he tells you when you
make a good play and when you make a bad one."
Regarded as one of the finest offensive strategists ever to
step onto a football field, Gibbs originated the one-back offense, and he is famous for
confusing defenses by making frequent substitutions and by putting as many as five players
in motion on a single play. Uninterested in defensive strategy, he leaves that part of the
game entirely to his longtime defensive coordinator, Richie Petitbon. Low-keyed and
modest, Gibbs is a deeply religious man who shies away from publicity and likes players
who share his attitudes and values. "There's no one better," Wayne Fontes, the
coach of the Detroit Lions, told a reporter for the Sporting News (January 27, 1992).
"You play a Joe Gibbs team and you're getting an opponent that's going to be prepared
and smart and is going to give you a solid effort for sixty minutes. As a coach, that's
the ultimate compliment you can pay another coach."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1992 Current Biography Yearbook.
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HOLTZ, LOU
Jan. 6, 1937- Football coach.
Although the position of head coach at Notre Dame is the most
attention-getting coaching job in America, Lou Holtz likes to describe himself in
unflattering terms: "I am five feet ten inches tall, weigh 152 pounds, speak with a
lisp, and appear to be afflicted with a combination of beriberi and scurvy. I wasn't a
great athlete. I'm not very impressive, I'm not very smart, I'm not very
intelligent." But in just three years after taking over at Notre Dame, the school
whose past and present gridiron glory justifies the claim that it is the home of
"America's team," Holtz took the Fightin' Irish to the national championship in
1988. Notwithstanding his penchant for self-deprecation, Holtz is, along with Michigan's
Bo Schembechler and Penn State's Joe Paterno, one of the coaches who might someday be
regarded as equals of such immortals from the collegiate past as Knute Rockne, Bear
Bryant, Frank Leahy, Woody Hayes, and Ara Parseghian.
Probably the only coach in college football who has traded
quips with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, Holtz is equally popular on the corporate
lecture circuit, where he spices his high-priced speeches on motivational techniques with
his trademark jokes and whimsical banter. He is also a skilled amateur magician, though
the prestidigitation for which he is most renowned owes nothing to feats of optical
illusion. He has a gift for taking over foundering football teams and turning them almost
instantly into winners. Having worked his miracles at William and Mary, North Carolina
State, and the University of Minnesota, Holtz took over at Notre Dame after his
predecessor, coach Gerry Faust, compiled a five-year record of frustration, during which
the team won thirty of fifty-six games and tied one. Faust's would have been a fair record
at most colleges but not at Notre Dame, where Holtz quickly turned into reality the
school's dream of "waking up the echoes" from the fabled Irish past.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.
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JACKSON, PHIL
Sep. 17, 1945- Basketball coach.
Phil Jackson, who led the Chicago Bulls to their second
straight world championship in 1992, is one of the most unlikely individuals ever to coach
in the National Basketball Association. A low-key, thoughtful, and highly intelligent man
who two decades before had been dubbed the "flower child of the New York Knicks"
by one of his teammates, Jackson was promoted to the position of head coach of the Bulls
after the tumultuous dismissal of his boss Doug Collins in the summer of 1989. At the
time, the Chicago franchise was anchored by the presence of the majestic Michael Jordan,
but the organization was rife with internal divisions, and Jordan's supporting cast of
players did not appear to be of championship caliber. Nevertheless, Jackson's team came
within one game of dethroning the 1989 league champion and bitter rival Detroit Pistons in
his first year as head coach. One year later the Bulls succeeded the Pistons as the NBA
titleholder, and in 1992 Jackson's team was widely acknowledged to be among the greatest
in league history as they fell just two games shy of the record for most wins in a season
and repeated as NBA champion. "In coaching," Jackson has said, "whatever
way you get a team to play hard is acceptable....My particular way is for them to find a
way to play for each other where they enjoy playing the game together."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1992 Current Biography Yearbook.
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JOHNSON, JIMMY
July 16, 1943- Football coach; sportscaster.
When Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 and
abruptly replaced the coaching legend Tom Landry, the only coach in the team's history,
with Jimmy Johnson, a brash college coach with no NFL experience, many football fans were
shocked. The venerated Landry seemed to have been shunted aside in favor of a college
coach known as much for his lacquered coiffure as for the successful, if controversial,
teams he fielded at the University of Miami. In the Cowboys, Johnson inherited a
once-mighty club that had fallen on hard times, but in just three seasons he silenced his
critics by transforming Dallas into a title contender. When the Cowboys demolished the
Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII, in January 1993, Johnson became the first coach to have
won both a college national championship and a Super Bowl. With Dallas's second
consecutive NFL championship, in 1994, Johnson joined the select company of Vince
Lombardi, Don Shula, and Chuck Noll as the only coaches to win back-to-back Super Bowls.
Former college teammates and roommates, Johnson and Jones had been portrayed in the media
as best friends who shared the responsibility for restoring the Cowboys to greatness. The
reality, however, was that the two men had never been close. After several well-publicized
verbal jabs at each other, they ended their productive but tempestuous relationship in
March 1994, when Johnson resigned as coach of the two-time defending Super Bowl champions.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.
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JONES, K. C.
May 25, 1932- Basketball coach.
In coaching the Boston Celtics to the 1985-86 National
Basketball Association championship, K. C. Jones secured an almost
unprecedented twelfth world championship ring in a playing and coaching association with
the NBA going back to 1958. As a play-making defensive guard, Jones helped pace the
University of San Francisco basketball team to two National Collegiate Athletic
Association championships in the mid-1950s, and he was a member of the Boston club that
dominated the NBA from 1958 to 1966. After coaching numerous other teams on the college
and professional levels for nine years, he returned to the Celtics as an assistant coach
in 1977 and became head coach in 1983. During his first three years as head coach, Boston
won the world championship twice and was the runner-up once. Jones and Pat Riley of the
Los Angeles Lakers are the only long-term coaches in NBA history to have won more than 70
percent of their regular-season games, and they also have had the most play-off wins among
active coaches.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.
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 KEENAN, MIKE*
Oct. 21, 1949- Hockey coach.
The "coaching messiah" of the National Hockey
League, according to more than one sportswriter, is Mike Keenan, a no-nonsense
disciplinarian who turned around floundering franchises in Philadelphia and Chicago before
leading the 1994 New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup after 54 years without an NHL title.
A complex, contradictory figure, Keenan is intelligent, introspective, and an acknowledged
master at transforming marginal athletes into overachievers, but his despotic methods and
occasional use of fear as a motivational tool earned him the enmity of his players and the
disapprobation of his club management in both Philadelphia and Chicago. Although he
emerged as a more mature and nurturing presence during his one season in New York, he
squabbled continually with the Rangers' general manager for control of the club, and after
he finally won a championship in his fourth trip to the Stanley Cup finals (he had led
Philadelphia to the play-offs twice and Chicago once), he abruptly turned his back on New
York to become the coach and general manager of the St. Louis Blues. Writing in the New
York Times (October 29, 1993), Robert Lipsyte observed that Keenan "may be hockey's
premier example of the new-breed sports coach, still basically hierarchical and
conservative but trying to upholster the old authoritarianism with plush and cozy New Age
motivational techniques. Keenan is capable of breaking a hockey stick for effect ('This is
a physical game, and sometimes you have to send a physical message.') while allowing
players to make mistakes so they will come off the ice with a 'Dad, you were right'
attitude."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found in the March 1996 issue of Current
Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current
Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography
Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).
* Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Blues.
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KNIGHT, BOB
Oct. 25, 1940- Basketball coach.
Indiana University's intense and volatile Bob Knight is
arguably the best active coach in basketball, amateur or professional--and the most
controversial. Knight, the master of a patient but aggressive strategy based on
relentless, offense-generating man-on-man defense, developed his disciplined system at
Army, where he was head coach for six years before moving to Hoosier country, basketball's
heartland, following the 1971 season. As coach of the Cream and Crimson, he has dominated
the Big Ten and won three national championships (in 1976, 1981, and 1987), a number
unequaled by any other contemporary college coach and surpassed in collegiate history only
by John Wooden (ten) and Adolph Rupp (four). He is the youngest coach ever to have reached
his career win mark of 468 (as against 169 defeats). In addition to his achievements in
the Big Ten and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Knight guided United States
teams to gold medals in the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan (where his hot temper
almost created a virtual international--or intranational, if that is the word--incident)
and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The gist of the discipline that he demands from his
players is, in his words, "doing what you have to do, doing it as well as you
possibly can, and doing it that way all the time."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.
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LASORDA, TOMMY
Sep. 22, 1927- Baseball manager.
If anyone were to cut Tommy Lasorda, the garrulous and
combative manager of baseball's 1988 world champion Los Angeles Dodgers, he would
"bleed Dodger blue"--a metaphorical slogan of his that exemplifies his
combination of sincerity and instinctive showmanship. Lasorda joined the Dodger
organization forty years ago as a minor-league pitcher, which he remained, except for two
brief tries in the majors, until 1960. After working devotedly in the Dodger system for
sixteen years as a scout, a farm-team manager, and the third-base coach in Los Angeles, he
became manager of the Dodgers in time to guide the team to the National League pennant in
1977. Since then, the Dodgers have won five divisional titles, three additional pennants,
and two World Series, the most recent in 1988.
Especially in 1988, the Dodgers' success was achieved against
odds that probably would have been insurmountable without Lasorda's charged personality,
his knowledge of the game, and his grasp of motivational and competitive psychology.
Naturally good-natured and gregarious, he has an informal rapport with his players that
contributes to team cohesiveness and camaraderie without undermining his authority, which
he asserts in clubhouse tirades as fearsome as his dugout vituperation against umpires and
opposing teams. His enthusiasm, optimism, and intensity in competition are contagious, and
his aggressiveness often forces the opposition into defensive mistakes. As Jerry Sullivan
observed in New York Newsday (October 2, 1988), Lasorda has come through more than a
decade of success as a major-league manager a basically unchanged and simple man: "He
remains baseball's bowlegged moveable feast, an American original...willingly present[ing]
himself in caricature--as the engaging, eternally grateful baseball man performing the
only job to which he's ever aspired." Through the 1989 season, in which the club
finished fourth, fourteen games behind the league-leading San Francisco Giants, the
Dodgers under Lasorda have won a total of 1,097 games and lost a total of 955. His .535
winning percentage is third-best among active major-league managers, behind only those of
Sparky Anderson of Detroit and Whitey Herzog of St. Louis.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.
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LUCAS, JOHN
Oct. 31, 1953- Basketball coach; business executive.
"I came back from the dead," John Lucas, the head
coach, general manager, and vice-president of basketball operations of the Philadelphia
76ers, has said of his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse and subsequent return to
professional basketball. Lucas began his career as the top college pick in the National
Basketball Association's 1976 draft. Although he posted respectable numbers over his
fourteen years as a southpaw point guard, he "squandered as much talent as any player
in National Basketball Association history," Mark Starr wrote in Newsweek (March 1,
1993). As a result, Lucas bounced around the league, playing for six different teams, and
he was suspended several times because of his drug use. He hit bottom in March 1986, when
he blacked out after a night-long cocaine binge and woke up with no memory of where he had
parked his car or why he was wearing five pairs of athletic socks and no shoes.
"Something happened that night that said: I have had enough,'" Lucas told
Douglas C. Lyons in an interview for Ebony(June 1993). Lucas, who had tried unsuccessfully
to quit drugs several times before, entered a treatment center and recovered. He returned
to the NBA, and by the time he retired as a player in 1990, he had begun a second career
as the owner of a company whose mission is to help recovering athletes and other substance
abusers maintain their sobriety.
In 1992 Red McCombs, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs,
hired Lucas as head coach, making him perhaps the most prominent ex-drug addict to lead a
major professional sports team. Lucas helped the Spurs rebound from a 9-11 start in the
1992-93 season to a second-place finish in their division. He often inspired players with
the lessons of self-discipline and self-reliance that he had learned from his battle with
drug abuse. The following year the team had one of its best regular seasons ever but lost
in the first round of the play-offs. After the ownership of the Spurs changed hands in
1994, Lucas resigned from the team and accepted the head coaching position with the
struggling Philadelphia 76ers. He has written a book with Joseph Moriarity about his life
titled Winning a Day at a Time (1994). "It's taken a lot of work to find out who I
am," Lucas told Ken Denlinger of the Washington Post (January 20, 1993). "And
even now all I can tell people is that I am a grateful recovering addict and alcoholic.
I'm grateful I didn't get what I deserved."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.
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MADDEN, JOHN
Apr. 10, 1936- Sports commentator; former football coach.
Bluff and boisterous John Madden, formerly a football coach
and currently a television pitchman and commentator, as well as author of a best-selling,
entertaining autobiography, has become heralded nationwide as perhaps the best football
"color caster" on the airwaves. Thirty seconds of exposure on his first Miller
Lite Beer television commercial brought him more popular recognition than his decade, from
1969 to 1978, as head coach of the mighty Oakland Raiders. The youngest football coach at
the time of his appointment, at thirty-three, John Madden guided his troops to seven
division championships, an American Football Conference championship, and a world
championship in Super Bowl XI, in 1977. With a career record of 103 games won, thirty-two
lost, and seven tied, and a .763 percentage, Madden was the second coach in forty years
with 100 or more victories in ten seasons--an achievement equaled only by the Miami
Dolphins' Don Shula.
As Sarah Pileggi wrote of John Madden in Sports Illustrated
(September 1, 1983): "His big, doughy, unmade bed of a face and his hulking figure
are known and loved by total strangers from Meridian, Mississippi to Missoula, Montana. He
is both the good-natured but slightly dangerous--to himself as well as others--goof who
breaks through the paper walls in all those Miller Lite commercials and the CBS football
pundit with the common touch who leads us all through television's swamps of verbal
hogwash onto the high ground of enlightenment."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.
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PARCELLS, BILL
(pahr-SELS)
Aug. 22, 1941- Sports commentator.
When Bill Parcells and his New York Giants defeated the
Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV on January 27, 1991, it marked the team's second National
Football League championship in five years. A Giants fan since childhood, Parcells became
the team's head coach in 1983, after having served for two years as its defensive
coordinator. Following a disastrous first season in which the Giants won only three games,
Parcells turned the franchise around, guiding it into the playoffs in five of the next
seven seasons and leading it to its first world title in thirty years, in 1987. Parcells
resigned as head coach of the Giants in May 1991, and a month later he accepted a position
as a football analyst with NBC Sports.
Once described as the "ultimate players' coach,"
Parcells, unlike many NFL coaches, did not believe in keeping his distance from members of
the team, and he refused to give preferential treatment to star players. Parcells's
coaching philosophy emphasized a conservative, ball-control offense, based around a huge
offensive line. On defense, Parcells, a former linebacker and linebacker coach, stressed
that position, keeping at least three linebackers on the field at all times and eschewing
"nickel" or "dime" defenses, which employ only one linebacker. He
called his coaching style "power football." "It's a rather quaint reversion
to the days before sock 'em gave way to slick 'em...," Paul Zimmerman commented in
Sports Illustrated (February 4, 1991). "Draft big, powerful people to play on both
sides of the ball, grind out a rushing game behind a hog-type line,...stuff the run on
defense, and, when the other team passes, make sure the routes are short and the receivers
are funneled to the linebackers."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.
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PATERNO, JOE
Dec. 21, 1926- Football coach.
Shortly after he became head football mentor at The
Pennsylvania State University two decades ago, Joe Paterno, the thinking man's coach,
announced his "grand experiment," aimed at proving that a major college football
program can emphasize academic credibility over winning and still produce a national
champion. The national championship was more of a goad than a goal to Paterno--who
believes that "it is the striving to be number one that's important"--but he
achieved it anyway, when Penn State defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's night
1983, following a 10-1 season in 1982. A year later, Penn State's victory over the
University of Washington in the Aloha Bowl brought Paterno's career record as head coach
to 170 wins, thirty-eight losses, and two ties--the best winning percentage among major
college coaches with tenures of ten years or more.
The remarkableness of Paterno's record can be appreciated
only in light of his priorities, which cut him off from the widespread, scandalous
practice of recruiting physically superior but marginally literate athletes and
maintaining them as "students." The "Penn State way," as his players
call Paterno's approach, rests on two tenets: there is more to college than football, and
there is more to football than winning. Ninety percent of Paterno's scholarship players
have left college with degrees, a record unmatched among major college teams with the
exception of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1984 Current Biography Yearbook.
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PINIELLA, LOU
(puh-NEL-luh)
Aug. 28, 1943- Baseball manager.
The hottest and most precarious seat in professional baseball
is probably that of manager of the American League's storied New York Yankees, whose
activist owner, George Steinbrenner, is viewed by some of his critics as "a fickle
Simon Legree." The current holder of that seat is Lou Piniella, an intensely
competitive former Yankee outfielder who has described himself as a "temperamental
Latin." Piniella, one of the all-time top-ten New York hitters, retired as a player
in June 1984 and remained with the team as a batting coach until October 1985, when he
assumed his present responsibilities. "Managing is the ultimate challenge...,"
Piniella has said. "I can't worry about what happened to my predecessors. You've got
to be optimistic and say it won't happen to me. If it does, life goes on. My job is to
keep the players prepared, to keep them enthusiastic, to keep them with the thought that
winning is numero uno." In his autobiography Sweet Lou (Putnam's, 1986), written with
Maury Allen, he professes himself to be "a contented man--and success or failure as a
Yankee manager cannot change that."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1986 Current Biography Yearbook.
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RILEY, PAT
Mar. 20, 1945- Basketball coach.
In the seven seasons that Pat Riley has served as their head
coach, the Los Angeles Lakers have won four National Basketball Association championships.
The Lakers are not only the dominant team of the current era but also possibly the most
glamorous in any professional sport. Their "showtime" style of play is dazzling
to watch as well as extremely hard for opponents to stop, and their core players are
either basketball legends like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or emerging
superstars like James Worthy and Byron Scott. They are, moreover, adored by Tinseltown
celebrities, and the actor Jack Nicholson is their prototypically rabid fan. Although his
dark good looks and stylish suits make Riley resemble a coach furnished by central
casting, he has imbued the Lakers with a work-ethic approach to basketball and given them
an air of corporate efficiency. Despite his team's phenomenal success, Riley has never
been voted NBA Coach of the Year, and some critics have contended that he is an
unexceptional court tactician. But in June 1988 the Lakers became the first team to win
back-to-back NBA titles in nineteen years, and Riley is now recognized as one of the
shrewdest motivators of athletes in recent sports history.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook.
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ROBINSON, EDDIE
Feb. 12, 1919- Football coach.
The football coaching record for most games won, professional
as well as collegiate, is held by Eddie Robinson of Grambling State University, with more
than 340, or better than 70 percent of his career schedule. Robinson became head coach at
Grambling, then a tiny and obscure segregated black normal and industrial institute, in
1941. Virtually from scratch, he built the Grambling Tigers into a six-time title winner
in the all-black Southwestern Athletic Conference. In the late 1960s he transformed the
team into a barnstorming sensation, which went on to compete not only with such black
powerhouses as Morgan State but also with some Division I-A, traditionally white schools
in packed first-class stadia across the country. Although he thinks of himself as an
"American" rather than a "black" coach, Robinson's achievement on the
athletic field contributed significantly to the elevation of the status of black colleges
and the general public's perception of them. Following the breaking of the color line in
professional football, Grambling sent more players to the pros than any university except
Notre Dame, and Robinson was instrumental in denting the professional misconception that
there were no superior black quarterbacks.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook.
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SMITH, DEAN
Feb. 28, 1931- Basketball coach.
"North Carolina may very well be the best program in the
country," Rick Majerus, the University of Utah basketball coach, has said, "and
Dean Smith may very well be the best coach of all time." As a backup guard for the
1952 national champion Kansas Jayhawks, Dean Smith learned the intricacies of basketball
from a coaching legend, Phog Allen. Building on that experience, Smith has developed a
coaching philosophy that stresses defense and, above all else, teamwork, and he has put
that style to use since becoming head coach for the University of North Carolina Tarheels,
in 1961. In the process, he has helped make the Tarheels the most successful college
basketball team of all time, in terms of the number of wins, and perhaps the premier
college athletics program in the country. While avoiding scandal and graduating almost all
his players, Smith has led the Tarheels to sixteen Atlantic Coast Conference regular
season and twelve tournament titles, a National Invitational Tournament (NIT) crown, and
two NCAA championships. He also coached the United States Olympic basketball squad to a
gold medal at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.
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THOMPSON, JOHN
Sep. 2, 1941- Basketball coach.
"I'm not Mr. Nice Guy," admits John Thompson, who
is, along with Bob Knight, the most controversial coach in college basketball today. But
whereas Knight coaches at Indiana University, a large, state-supported institution,
Thompson, who was the head coach of the 1988 men's Olympic basketball team, has risen to
the top of his profession at Georgetown University, a small, Roman Catholic, and
academically exclusive school in Washington, D.C. Thompson's teams employ a bruising,
harassing style of play, applying relentless defensive pressure designed to wear down the
opponent and force turnovers. Off the court, Thompson shields his players from the press
and rarely gives interviews himself. In keeping with Georgetown's high academic standards,
he requires his players to be full-time students as well. Since Thompson began coaching at
Georgetown in 1972, fifty-seven of the fifty-nine basketball players who entered the
university as freshmen, and who did not drop out or transfer, have graduated.
Although his methods, particularly his restriction of media
access to players, have been criticized by other coaches, both his players (who address
him only as "Mr. Thompson" or "Coach") and his peers regard him with
the utmost respect. A self-styled educator as well as a coach, Thompson believes that the
lessons learned in athletics apply also to other areas of life. Eric Smith, a former
Georgetown player, has summed up Thompson's philosophy as follows: "No one gives you
anything on the basketball court if they can help it, and if they can help it, no one
gives you anything in life."
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.
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WALSH, BILL
Nov. 30, 1931- Sports commentator.
When San Francisco won its third Super Bowl in eight seasons
on January 22, 1989, the 49ers were hailed as the football team of the decade. Throughout
the 1980s the 49ers had won consistently because they possessed the NFL's most imaginative
and sophisticated offense, whose inventor was Bill Walsh, the team's head coach from 1979
until his retirement after the Super Bowl in 1989. One of the most innovative coaches in
the history of the game, Walsh has been called the Vince Lombardi of the 1980s and a
"genius," though Walsh himself denies that a term so hyperbolic can be applied
to anyone in the profession of coaching. An unlikely inheritor of the mantle of the gruff
Lombardi, Walsh is a distinguished, cultivated, and white-haired man of professorial
appearance who toiled as an assistant coach and developer of quarterbacks for seventeen
years before becoming a head coach at the age of forty-five.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.
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WEAVER, EARL
Aug. 14, 1930- Former baseball manager.
"Tired of yelling at people," the irascible and
colorful Earl Weaver retired in October 1982, after fifteen successful seasons managing
the Baltimore Orioles--the longest unbroken tenure of any contemporary major-league
baseball manager. Over that span, Weaver guided the Orioles to a winning percentage second
to none, to four American League pennants, to a world championship, and to five 100-win
seasons, a record matching Connie Macks and excelled only by Joe McCarthy's six. As the
scourge of umpires, he won another distinction, that of the most ejected manager in the
majors, with eighty-nine dismissals from games and three suspensions. A brilliant, driven
scrambler whose aggressiveness was more methodical than mad, Weaver made unprecedented use
of statistical science in the charting of players and the configuring of lineups, and he
was a master at motivating his men. As Terry Pluto observed in his biography The Earl of
Baltimore (1982), "Clearly, his record makes Earl a hot commodity, but it is his
temper, his inner constitution, and his wit which have made him a star and the games
resident genius." Weaver's major-league career winning percentage was .596, the third
best in history, excelled only by Joe McCarthys .614 and Frank Selees .598.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found on the Current Biography
CD-ROM and in the 1983 Current Biography Yearbook.
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WILKENS, LENNY
Oct. 28, 1937- Basketball coach.
Despite having won more games than any coach in the history
of the National Basketball Association and earned Hall-of-Fame recognition for his 15-year
career as an NBA player, Lenny Wilkens is seldom mentioned in the same breath as such
coaching immortals as John Wooden or Red Auerbach, the retired Boston Celtics legend whose
record of 938 NBA victories was considered to be out of reach even as the low-key Wilkens
was quietly approaching it. Having received little fanfare following a truncated high
school career at a ghetto basketball factory in Brooklyn, he was an All-American at
Providence College, but Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, once-in-a-generation superstars
who played at better-known basketball schools, overshadowed him both in college and,
later, in the pros. A quick, savvy point guard, Wilkens appeared in nine NBA All-Star
games even though he played and coached (sometimes simultaneously) in the NBA
hinterlands--St. Louis, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, and Atlanta--never in such major
media markets as New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago.
Midway through his 22d season at the helm of an NBA
franchise, the modest, unassuming Wilkens became the league's winningest coach when, on
January 6, 1995, his Atlanta Hawks defeated the Washington Bullets, 112-90. Remarkably, he
achieved that landmark without help from a dynastic team (of the four teams he has
coached, to date only one--Seattle, in 1979--has won the NBA crown) or the presence of a
single superstar on the roster of any club he has commanded. "I never received the
recognition a lot of other players did," he said in an interview with Mike Lopresti
of USA Today (December 27, 1994). "That's the way it is. In the early years of
coaching, maybe I didn't get the recognition. But it's happening now. What goes around,
comes around. It catches up." An assistant on the men's basketball squad, popularly
known as the Dream Team, that won a gold medal for the United States at the 1992 Olympic
Games, Wilkens serves as the head coach of Dream Team III, a collection of NBA All-Pros,
at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta.
Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.
The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current
Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current
Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography
Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).
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