Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 5: Making the Blackbirds Proud

CHAPTER 5 Making the Blackbirds Proud Trouble along the Way, a 1953 John Wayne film, opens with a panoramic, establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline seen from the distance of one of the other boroughs, possibly even Brooklyn. The next shot closes in on a fictional college campus, St. Anthony’s, the entrance gate to which is falling off its hinges; and the clock in the tower of the main building is perpetually more than a few minutes behind the actual time: A message there, lest we miss it. St. Anthony’s College has fallen on hard times, so hard, in fact, that when we first see its president, intellectual and otherworldly Father Burke (Charles Coburn), he has just received the news from diocesan authorities that they will close the college. Left alone in his study to ponder his school’s fate, Father Burke goes to his library shelves and picks up two college yearbooks. One is the latest from St. Anthony’s, a thin, unimpressive volume.The other, thick, a weighty signifier of success and future promise, is Notre Dame’s. Father Burke hoists both books in either hand and reflects on what accounts for the difference between them. Football, he 65 concludes. To be a thriving college in the United States, you need a successful sports program. To put together a successful sports program, you need a coach, a proven winner to lead the way. Father Burke finds his man, Steve Williams (John Wayne), a borderline alcoholic ex-coach who lost his job in the big time because of some vague gambling situation. Father Burke finds Williams in a seedy section of the city in the backroom of an even seedier bar where the ex-coach is shooting pool for money, making book over the phone, drinking beers, and commenting cynically on the appearance and reality of American intercollegiate sports.1 Long Island University, a young and still-struggling institution but not quite as desperate as St.Anthony’s, found its man down US Route 1 in Trenton, where he was coaching and teaching without a trace of cynicism in his makeup. The year was 1931. Maybe the LIU administration didn’t think of him in exactly these terms, but Clair Bee turned out to be a savior. Of sorts. Overcoming Trouble along the Way to Success Eight years after Bee came to LIU, the story appeared in newspapers late in the basketball season. The story was a combination of a preview of the upcoming National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and a review of LIU’s rise out of the Great Depression years to athletic and academic prominence, with a nod to the institution’s newfound fiscal stability. But an accompanying photo caught the eye first and told the real story. It was a drab black-and-white shot of the Pearl Street building that served as LIU’s campus with a head-andshoulders shot of a determined Clair Bee superimposed over the building.2 The intent of the sports-page iconography was clear—Coach Bee was bigger than the university. For all intents and purposes, Clair Bee was the university. The accompanying print reinforced the point that it was Bee and his basketball success that made LIU a nationally known commodity. 66 Bee at Long Island University “Long Island University is only 12 years of age, so does not boast the dignity of antiquity,” Harry Grayson wrote in the story that ran with the photo. “It’s only link with the Ivy League is the fact that Yale locks formerly were either manufactured or packed for shipping in the building which now is home of 3,000 students.”3 The six-story building was located behind the main post office and close enough to the subway lines that teachers often had to speak over the rattle. The Manhattan Bridge was just down the street, and the Brooklyn Bridge was nearby. By no stretch of a publicist’s imagination could it have been called a leafy campus. That was the point the story made, and it was a point that Bee himself referenced years later: “I had been teaching and coaching at Rider College in Trenton, New Jersey, which hardly was a plush setup, but it was the Ivy League compared to LIU.”4 Bee was referring to the autumn of 1931 when he started at LIU as head football coach, director of athletics, and head of...