COACH AIKEN. As promised last week, this is the continuation of the Jim Aiken story. The legendary Nevada coach is well remembered by those who had the good fortune to play for him.
After I felt I had convinced Coach Aiken that my hands were indeed “big enough” for basketball and that my mother actually did sleep with my press clippings under her pillow; our first interview continued to move forward.
He rather politely asked if I had found a bed in the Lincoln Hall dorm and I replied in the affirmative. “Did you find the Gow House for breakfast this morning?” I answered that I had, in the company of George Vucanovich. “O.K.”, he said, “your next stop is over at the registrar’s office, see Mrs. Rhoads and get your classes lined-up. Practice starts tonight at 6:30. Any other questions?”
I noted to him that my wooden army footlocker, with all my clothes and other gear had not arrived on the same Greyhound bus upon which I had hit Reno around last midnight. However, I had called Greyhound this morning and they said the footlocker was at the station.
“Should I get another cab to go pick it up?” I asked Aiken. “No, no, here take my car,” and with that he threw me a set of keys. I envisioned tooling into town in a big Chrysler or Caddie–or a Buick at least. “Where is it parked?” I enquired. “Here, right outside,” and with that he strode over to the window and pointed out a dull green coupe parked outside the main gate of the school.
When I made my way down to the car I found that it was a vintage Dodge or Plymouth, probably a 1934 or so, and that it had a teeny passenger compartment, but fortunately sported a rumble seat. Unfortunately, my foot locker had some pretty sharp corners and when I took it out of the rumble seat in front of Lincoln Hall I spotted some new tears it had made in the well-worn leather of the backseat. Carefully closing the rumble seat cover I could only hope that Aiken would not be opening it again in the frigid winter weather. Apparently he didn’t, as he never mentioned the condition of his car to me for the rest of the semester.
That night I went to my first practice in the old, Old Gym (now gone) and it was a creaky facility—built much along the lines of “Y” gyms of the early 20th Century. The dressing rooms were upstairs and they opened onto a running track. It didn’t look as though the seating could take care of more than a couple of hundred people on the floor and the baskets had seen decades of wear.
One of Aiken’s favorite “warm-up” drills was to place a player on each side of the basket while he stood at the free throw line and tossed the ball at the backboard. The object of the drill was to get the rebound away from the other guy.
I was paired against another freshman, Ed Diercks. Aiken flipped the ball, Ed and I leapt for it, unfortunately my right elbow caught Ed’s two front teeth and broke them off. Both of us were bleeding pretty good and Ed was looking on the floor for his teeth when Aiken came over and said, “That’s the way to fight for the ball!”
He told Ed to head for the dressing room and get a wet towel for his mouth. He slapped a good sized piece of adhesive tape on my elbow, when he noticed Ed crying pretty profusely. Turning to the team manager, Clayson Triguero, he growled, “Give me that ball!” Looking up at Ed, who was upstairs by now, Aiken hurled the ball at him and struck him smartly on the head. “Big sissy!” he shouted.
Most of all the practices that followed that first one were of the same sort – full contact basketball. It didn’t take long to figure out that Aiken was using the basketball season as a method of keeping his more talented football players in shape, rather than trying to impart any round ball skills to them. (To be continued)
MANCHIN CAVES. For the longest time recently Senator Joe Manchin (D.) of West Virginia seemed to be the only rational individual when it came to the Dems big spending Bill. He constantly repeated that it was no time to raise taxes during a period of inflation. Because of his stance, the Bill seemed in jeopardy. However, he quickly changed his mind when he was given a pet project by Schumer. In so doing, he lost most of his credibility and was called, “Just another politician.”
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