Jan. 15, 2008

by Bill Gilbert

"People say Morgan Wootten is the best high school basketball coach in the country. I disagree. I know of no finer coach at any level - high school, college, or pro. I've said it elsewhere, and I'll say it here: I stand in awe of him." - John Wooden

John Wooden, the immortal UCLA coach who was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame twice, as both a player and a coach, gave added meaning to the respect he has long expressed for Morgan Wootten. He nominated him for the Hall of Fame. Wooden's fellow Hall of Famer, Red Auerbach, quickly endorsed the nomination.

And no wonder. Consider these qualifications: In Wootten's 47 years at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC, his teams won more than 1,200 games. And all of this has been accomplished while playing the hardest high school schedule in America every year. His teams have won five national championships. He has been selected as National Coach of the Year four times and Coach of the Year in the Washington, DC area ten times.

His teams have won over 100 major championships and have been voted number one in the Washington area more than 20 times. Fourteen of his players and assistant coaches have become head coaches at Division I colleges. In one dazzling two-month period this year that must be a first in basketball history, three of his former players were appointed to prominent head coaching positions - Mike Brey at Notre Dame, Perry Clark at the University of Miami, and Sidney Lowe at Vancouver in the NBA.

Another fourteen of his players became successful at the professional level, including Danny Ferry, the long-time star with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Adrian Dantley, who led the NBA in scoring three times.

As impressive as those facts are, Wootten is prouder of still another achievement: over one 30-year stretch, he helped every senior, more than 250, including the lowest substitute on the far end of the bench, to earn a full college scholarship.

There is more. He has been honored by the Walt Disney Company as the top sports coach in the United States. The Basketball Hall of Fame selected him for its John W. Bunn Award in 1991 for his "outstanding contributions" to basketball. Sports Illustrated called him "The Wizard of Washington" in a feature article on him. The magazine saluted him again this year as one of the top 50 sports figures of the century in Maryland. He was chosen as one of America's greatest sports figures of the Twentieth Century in a special program televised by ESPN and ABC, making him the only high school coach in any sport to be included. He is a charter member of the Washington Basketball Hall of Fame. Washingtonian magazine named him as one of the "Treasures of Washington" and also chose him for its annual award as "Washingtonian of the Year."

Yet Morgan Wootten never intended to become a coach. He wanted to be a lawyer. That was because his debating team in the ninth grade at Washington's Gonzaga High School went undefeated, giving Wootten the idea that he might make a good lawyer. But all that changed when he was still only 19.

That was when Sister Batilde of the Order of the Holy Cross, the Mother Superior of Saint Joseph's Home for Boys in Washington, an orphanage, talked him into coaching the Home's teams, starting with the 1951 baseball season, for $75 a month. In his first year, this future Hall of Famer's team finished with no wins and 16 losses.

Something happened at that orphanage that forever changed Wootten's career plans. Under Wootten, the school's football team went undefeated that fall and won the city's CYO Championship. Through a mutual friend, Wootten arranged for the new heavyweight champion of the world, Rocky Marciano, to visit the orphanage. By this time, a closeness had developed between Wootten, still only 20 years old, and the boys. To many of them, he was the only male figure in their lives.

During a question-and-answer session after a motivational talk by Marciano, one of the orphans stood up and asked, "Rocky, do you think you could beat Morgan?" The boxing champion kept his composure despite what seemed like a ridiculous question, sized Wootten up and said, "I don't really know. It would be a great fight. I'm a little bigger than he is, but it would be a terrific fight."

The kid disagreed. "I don't think you can," he said. I think Morgan would kill you."

"That incident," he says, "told me something - I was reaching those boys."

When Wootten was appointed by DeMatha in 1956, it was a marriage made in heaven.

The school and the coach put each other on the map.

He remembers the start of the relationship vividly. "For $3,200 a year," he says, "I was head football coach, head basketball coach, assistant baseball coach, athletic director, world history teacher five periods a day, and the one who called the numbers at Bingo every Tuesday night. The second year they told me they wanted me to work full time."

People still talk about the night of January 30, 1965, when 12,000 fans jammed Maryland University's Cole Field House to see a long-awaited duel between DeMatha's Stags, winner of 29 games in a row, and the Panthers of Power Memorial Academy in New York, with a 71-game winning streak. Power was led by its 7-foot superstar, Lew Alcindor, now fellow Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The game was covered by all of the Washington media, plus the national radio and television networks. DeMatha shocked the high school basketball world in only Wootten's second season by defeating Power by five points, holding Alcindor, who was averaging 30 points a game, to 16. That came after Wootten, acting on a suggestion by Principal John Moylan, had some of his players hold tennis rackets over their heads during their last few practices before the game so DeMatha's shooters would become accustomed to lofting their shots over the 7-footer.

With all of his success, Wootten achieved his biggest victory in July, 1996, when he overcame a near-death experience brought on by primary biliary cirrhosis, a rare liver disease with no known cause. The attack threatened to kill him. He was one of the top stories in the Washington papers and on the evening news for days until, with only hours left, a liver donor was found. A transplant was performed as the surgeons raced against time. The coach's life was saved, and he returned to coaching in time for the start of DeMatha's basketball season that fall.

Throughout the journey that has led his school, his players, and himself to national and even international acclaim, Morgan Wootten has emphasized to his student-athletes that sports should never be the most important thing in their lives. He tells his freshmen ever year, "If you came to DeMatha because basketball is the most important thing in your life, then you're not going to make it here because your priorities are out of order."

He tells them their proper order of priorities should be:

1. God.
2. Family.
3. Education.
4. Basketball, or any other interest.

On March 8, 1980, the coach practiced what he preaches when he turned down an offer to coach North Carolina State for $700,000 plus free college educations for his five children. Jim Valvano then took the job and won the national championship with what would have been Wootten's team.

His rejection of the offer from NC State was the biggest story in Washington as Wootten pondered the dizzying opportunity over several weeks. In a statement to the news media when he decided to decline the offer, he admitted that others had reminded him of the money involved and the need to continue climbing mountains in his career. "As for money," he told the media, "I have always told my history students and my basketball players their top three priorities in life should be God, family, and education, in that order. Money was never included, and it has never been the primary factor in my definition of happiness for myself and my family."

He continued, "As for climbing mountains, they are where you find them. Any time I help a student in one of my classes get a better start during his formative years, or touch the life of one of my basketball players, I feel I have climbed another mountain. That's the kind I prefer to keep on climbing."

Byline:

Bill Gilbert, Morgan Wootten's ninth grade classmate and a member of that undefeated debate team, is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the best-selling author of 18 books. Two of these books are Coach Wootten's autobiographies: From Orphans to Champions and A Coach for All Seasons.