Trivette Epitomized Kentucky Mountain Basketball

PIKEVILLE, Ky. - The low roar of coal machinery emanating from the adjacent hill did not drown out the preacher's words at the burial site of basketball coach John Bill Trivette.

No. The sound was more a backdrop, an apt mechanical melody accompanying the human voice's harmony, as they laid this product of the mountains to rest.

Forty years ago, coal was king in these mountains. So was high-school basketball. And so, therefore, was Trivette.

The father of the full-court zone press, winner of 427 games and seven regional championships in 17 seasons at Pikeville High School, he was a larger-than-life character during the 1940s and '50s - the golden era of mountain basketball in Kentucky.

Back then, there would always be a thriving coal industry, and there would always be a "King" Kelly Coleman, a Carr Creek High School, a John Bill Trivette to galvanize the basketball fans.

Now the coal jobs continue to disappear. And now they bury legends like Trivette, dead at age 75, on the side of a mountain, under skies as gray and cold as a tombstone. The golden era seems far away.

"It was the heyday of Kentucky basketball, no question," said Ken Trivette, his son and the current head coach at Clark County High School. "It was before TV became so powerful in people's lives, and the community and the school were one.

"It was like God, family and basketball."

Trivette's extended basketball family gathered for his interment this month.

No fewer than 37 former players, managers and assistant coaches joined other friends and relatives at the pretty mountainside cemetery to bid him farewell.

They are a graying, balding bunch now themselves, far different from how they looked when they formed teenage bonds as Trivette's players. But they remember those times and their coach with piercing clarity.

They recalled a rigid disciplinarian, "with steel gray eyes that could bore right through you," as one ex-player said. Yet they also recalled a man who would let the town's youngsters into the locker room to hear his pep talks to the team.

"It was like a religious revival," Ken Trivette said. "I realize now he was getting the young ones ready."

He got the young ones ready in other ways as well. John Bill would buy basketballs for youngsters too poor to afford their own, then make the rounds to verify that they played with them in the summer.

The men gathered to honor him were winners from all walks of life: a judge, a doctor, a lawyer, a retired principal, among many others.

"Only two coaches I had knew more about basketball than I did: John Bill and Adolph Rupp," said Dickie Prater, perhaps Trivette's best player. He was a 1950 Pikeville graduate who played a year for Rupp at Kentucky before joining the Army, then finishing his career at South Carolina.

"One of the things I think young people today are missing is a hero," he said. "I always felt John Bill was my hero and my friend."

Said Bill Duty: "I couldn't play, wasn't good enough, but he took me everywhere they went. Everything I ever learned about coaching I learned from John Bill Trivette."

Duty went on to become a state-champion football coach at Elkhorn City.

Of course, the old players also remember when Trivette devised his "diamond press," the forerunner of the 1-2-1-1 press made famous by UCLA coach John Wooden. It came after an untalented Johns Creek team had used non-stop pressure to disrupt Pikeville's offense in a 1955 game.

"They couldn't play a lick, but they wouldn't let anybody else play a lick," Buddy Elkins, Pikeville Class of '57, said of Johns Creek.

"He went back home and started doodling, and he came up with the full-court press," Duty said. "A lot of people don't believe that, but we were in Louisville one year at the Brown Hotel for the NCAA championships, and John Wooden himself told us that when he coached in Dayton, Ky., and up in Indiana, John Bill Trivette gave him the idea of the press."