With March Madness basketball upon us, it is past time for me to write about my late friend, John McLendon, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time.
Coach has received many honors. But the greatest honor is probably that the Coach of the Year award for all college basketball is the John McLendon Coaching Award.
I met him at Cleveland State University in the 1990s, where he was spending his retirement years as an advisor to the athletic program and regular instructor of a course on African Americans and Sports.
During these times, I would remind him that he was the only living coach who had learned basketball from the person who invented the game—Dr. James Naismith.
That he learned from Naismith was not unintentional. As a youth, McLendon fell in love with basketball and developed a plan to teach physical education and coach basketball. Born and raised in Kansas, McLendon and his father decided he would attend the nearby University of Kansas where Naismith was located.
In 1891, James Naismith, then a physical education instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, invented the game of basketball. By 1898 he had earned a medical degree and moved to the University of Kansas, where he started the University’s basketball program.
When McLendon arrived on campus in 1932, Naismith had retired from coaching; nevertheless, McLendon’s father dropped off his young son at Naismith’s office, not the registrar’s office. And that was a great move as Naismith taught young McLendon a lot—about basketball, life, and fighting racism, which was rampant at the time on the University of Kansas campus.
McLendon graduated in 1936 and began his coaching career, first as an assistant at the HBCU North Carolina College (NCC). He became head coach in 1941. By 1952 he had led his team to eight conference championships in 12 years.
Perhaps Naismith’s greatest basketball lesson for McLendon was that the game should be played aggressively on offense and defense. Using that philosophy McLendon revolutionized basketball by inventing the fast break, which is evident worldwide today. Before McLendon, players moved at a slow and deliberate pace. After his teams showed so well with the fastbreak, the game became faster as other coaches copied that style.
Before basketball initiated the shot clock, McLendon developed the so-called “Four Corners” offense, a tactic designed to freeze the ball and control play. McLendon called the offensive play the “Box and One,” which he taught to a young Dean Smith, the later legendary coach at the University of North Carolina.
McLendon continually assured me that Dean Smith acknowledged this fact on many occasions. However, I read through Smith’s autobiography, and I did not see any such written acknowledgment, an example of how race works in America.
Coach McLendon moved to Tennessee State University in 1955 when HBCUs were petitioning the NCAA for invitations to the annual end of the year tournament. After not breaking through with the recalcitrant NCAA the HBCU schools petitioned the NAIA for participation. The NAIA basketball association, which incidentally had been organized by James Naismith, was for smaller colleges and universities.
The NAIA agreed to have one HBCU team each year if the HBCUs would choose the team. In 1957 Tennessee State was selected for the NAIA tournament. However, a problem developed when the tournament hotel refused to accept the Black Tennessee State team.
McLendon refused to have his team participate in this segregated situation until the NAIA and the hotel relented and accepted the team. This act by McLendon effectively started the desegregation of Kansas City, Missouri.
There was also a basketball triumph, as Tennessee won the tournament. They returned in 1958 and won again. And they repeated in 1959.
In 1959, McLendon became the first African American to be the head coach of a professional basketball team in a league when he became the Cleveland Pipers coach. The Pipers team was first in an industrial league and then the American Basketball League. He resigned from the Cleveland Pipers when the later infamous owner, George Steinbrenner, began his practice of interfering with his teams, this time trying to force McLendon to bring the team home from a tournament before they finished.
McLendon went over to coach the Cleveland State University basketball team in 1967, making him the first African American to coach at a predominantly White Division 1 school.
In 1969 he joined the ABA Denver Rockets as head coach but was replaced midway through the first year as the team was developing a losing record.
This monumental figure in basketball was elected to the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006. He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 1979 and again in 2016 as a coach.
John McLendon stamped his imprint on basketball, the sport he dearly loved.