Legendary coach Ralph Miller was Northwest original
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On a stormy Tuesday night in the mountains of central Oregon, Ralph Miller died, and that's a bigger upset than any ever generated by the 38 college-basketball teams he coached.
For anybody who got to know him, he was going to live forever, firing up yet another cigarette and spinning another story, about his years coaching Wichita State in the '50s and '60s; about his frenzied, fast-breaking teams at Iowa; about his 19-year reign at Oregon State when the Beavers rose to No. 1 in the country for two months in 1981.
He was an original, so there won't be anybody like Ralph Miller passing this way anytime soon. Every place he coached, and throughout the Pac-10 during his tenure, he acquired the bigger-than-life characteristic of being known by a single name. To friends and detractors alike, he was simply Ralph.
If there is a godfather to Sonic legends, it was Miller. He coached John Johnson and Fred Brown as collegians at Iowa; he coached Lonnie Shelton at Oregon State.
We were sitting on the bleachers at OSU's Gill Coliseum in November of 1986.
"That kid," he said, gesturing to the floor at an 18-year-old Beaver freshman, Gary Payton, "could make me a hero again."
It was Johnson who once said that if you asked Miller what time it was, pretty soon you'd know how to build a clock. He never met a story he didn't like. At the Portland airport, he once got so engrossed in dialogue with a group of media people on a road trip to Washington State that he missed the plane with his team to Spokane.
Miller, 82, seemed to have known everybody in the history of basketball. At the University of Kansas, where all basketball roads lead, he was acquainted with James Naismith, the inventor of the game. As a teenager, he was introduced to a younger kid, Dean Smith. He played for Phog Allen at KU.
He coached against John Wooden, and the two coaches Wooden respected as much as anybody were Miller and Marv Harshman, of Washington State and Washington renown.
He coached 657 college victories, 674 if you count 17 forfeits the Beavers were docked in 1975-76 as a result of a celebrated court injunction that allowed Shelton to play after he had signed a contract with the old American Basketball Association.
The NCAA lists Miller as 18th all-time among Division I coaches. No. 17 on that list is John Chaney, the Temple icon. No. 19 is Harshman. When Miller passed the 500 mark, he shrugged and pointed out that the number didn't include victories he had coached as an Air Force lieutenant in the '40s. And that led him off, inevitably, into another story.
Discharged from the military in the late '40s, he was thrashing about for a career path. He even considered selling toilet seats. He settled on a teaching and coaching job at Wichita East High School, which led him to Wichita State at a time when the Missouri Valley Conference was the nation's most vaunted.
Nobody ever did more with less. Of the top six players on his best team, the '81 OSU club, four were from the Portland area. One of those was a walk-on. When he lost three starters off that team, he coached the '82 Beavers to the West regional final, where it ran into Georgetown and a freshman named Patrick Ewing.
His '74 Oregon State team ended UCLA's remarkable 50-game Pac-8 winning streak. His '80 OSU club broke the Bruins' 13-year run of conference titles.
Above all, Miller loathed any impertinence on the basketball floor. He thought the beauty of the game was in its simplicity. He hated the bounce pass, believing it to be too indirect. He despised the dribble, thinking it an impediment to the bing-bang-boom passing that characterized his teams. He had a term for the dunk shot: "The idiot's delight."
He drank scotch, played gin, and was stubborn as a sinus cold. He resisted innovation, including the shot clock and the three-point field goal. Paul Miller (no relation), one of his early players at OSU, remembered rising on a long jump shot and hearing a raspy advisory from the bench: "Better make it."
Miller even pioneered. He used to tell stories of protecting Wichita State's black star of the '50s, Cleo Littleton, when hotels in Texas wouldn't admit him. He played five black starters at Oregon State in the early '70s, raising some eyebrows in a rural, white town. Then he won, and it didn't matter.
Nobody runs a program anymore quite like Miller did. At practice, he would sit on the sideline in a folding chair, smoking Mores and missing nothing. After road games, he often held court in his hotel room into the wee hours, and if he didn't see sunup, it was only because the sun rises later in winter.
Wherever he's headed now, they might want to pull up a chair. Ralph Miller has a lot of stories to tell.
Bud Withers can be reached at 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com.