(Ralph Tasker)
Another six-degrees-of-separation moment: The celebrated Maryland high school basketball coach Morgan Wootten has died at 88. Never met the man. But there is a decided connection here, in a “he knew a guy who knew a guy” kind of way, because Wootten for years could be found in the same laudatory sentence as Ralph Tasker.
Tasker coached at my high school in Hobbs, N.M. and, by the end of his career, had won more games than any other prep coach in America besides Wootten. (Three others have since passed him.) At one point before Tasker retired in 1997, at 79, he briefly led Wootten in total victories on the way to 1,122 over 51 seasons. Wootten coached four years beyond that and wound up with 1,274.
Legendary stuff. The two hoops masters once coached against each other in a special mini-tournament (covered by Sports Illustrated). The national basketball Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award, named for Wootten, was presented posthumously to Tasker a decade ago. And there was this singular occasion when Coach Tasker, in a moment of kindness not to be confused with objective existence, informed me that I appeared to be material for his forever-dominant varsity.
Tasker’s teams were like nothing I’d ever seen before my family arrived for my sophomore year in Hobbs, an oil patch town minutes from the Texas border. Tasker had his lads operate in a constant frenzy—all-court press and fast-break offense at all times. They regularly scored 100 points per 32-minute game; in the 1969-70 season, they averaged a still-record 114.6 points—in the days before there was a three-point shot. Their trapping, suffocating defenses were a human version of swarming locusts. And every bit as destructive.
After facing Tasker’s Hobbs boys while still a high-school coach in El Paso, Hall of Famer Nolan Richardson was inspired to implement what he called the “Forty Minutes of Hell” defense he used to win the 1994 NCAA championship at Arkansas.
I was properly introduced to the Tasker approach months before ever meeting the man or enrolling in my new school. I had played freshman ball in suburban Los Angeles the previous season and figured I was fully capable of handling myself in Hobbs’ vigorous all-comers summer league. (Tasker, I learned years later, had taken the coaching job in 1949 on the condition that he have his own key to the gym—so it always was open.)
Seconds into my first pick-up game, I came face-to-face with Hobbs’ elevated basketball metabolism that rendered opponents as helpless as a leaf in a gale. Every kid in town seemed to surround me the instant I touched the ball. Stripped, embarrassed, left to watch an instant basket scored at the other end of the floor.
I subsequently played a year of B-team ball, mostly as a third-stringer, and never caught up. But my high school years afforded me a front-row seat to the Tasker phenomenon. Our 3,200-seat gym—always packed for a home game—had not yet been renamed Ralph Tasker Arena. But the man already was so central to the basketball operation that the school’s pep band, an essential piece to a night of hoops, was named Taskervitch. Still is.
The story regarding his commitment to up-tempo play was that, a half-dozen years into Tasker’s coaching run, a player named Kim Nash suggested expanding the occasional use of a full-court press—why not go from opening tap to final buzzer?—and Tasker responded that no team was in good enough shape to do that. “So,” Nash reportedly said, “get us in shape.”
That led to a week of the team practicing in the heavy, steel-toed boots worn by the region’s oil-field workers. (Six degrees again: I worked my high school summers in the oil fields. In those boots.) From then on, Tasker’s always pressing, always fast-breaking heat put rivals in the microwave.
Tasker himself was the antithesis of that wild and woolly playing style. He wore these thick coke-bottle lenses, spoke softly and seldom, seemed far older (at least to us teenagers) than he was then—mid ‘40s. His demeanor fit his other job, teaching government and economics, rather than a hard-charging coach. While the other fellows with whistles and clipboards barked instructions and oozed passion, Tasker quietly offered bits of praise.
Personal example: As an assistant coach of our JV football team, he once made a point of publicly commending my blocking success in front of the entire squad. I was a scrub and everybody knew it, but Tasker made a point of encouraging the least of us.
Okay: About that one-time evaluation of my hoop skills.
That came following a summer-league game shortly after my graduation. I had been recruited to join a rag-tag team of friends, some of us who were working days in the oil fields and seeking a little evening fun at the gym. I may have been averaging two points a game until, one night, against a collection of guys who would make up the next year’s varsity, I went for 22 points.
Highlight of my limited athletic life. By far. It included sinking one 20-footer after faking out Larnell Lipscomb, one of the members of the following season’s state championship team. Tasker, who always was around to watch those surprisingly formal informal tilts, sauntered up after the game and offered something like, “You could have made a good Hobbs Eagle.”
Doubt it. But what would Morgan Wootten have thought about that?