maly, too: In 2006, I Wrote, 'Summing It Up, Basketball Has Been Good To Former Drake Coach Bob Ortegel, and He's Been Good for Basketball'

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

In 2006, I Wrote, 'Summing It Up, Basketball Has Been Good To Former Drake Coach Bob Ortegel, and He's Been Good for Basketball'

A few days ago, I wrote a column about Bob Ortegel, the only man to coach a Drake basketball team to a national championship.

Bob Ortegel

I zeroed in on Ortegel because I'd heard that he and the players from his 1974-1975 Bulldog squad want to hold a reunion here next season.

I think the reunion is a great idea, and I hope it happens.

The 1974-1975 team was the one that seized something called the National Commissioners Invitational Tournament championship in Louisville, Ky.

I haven't seen Ortegel, or visited with him, since his last day at Drake.

But I recalled that I wrote about him a number of years ago for one of my websites. I located the following column that was published June 16, 2006:

By RON MALY

I haven't seen or talked to Bob Ortegel for a while, and that's too bad.

Ortegel's name came to mind the other night when I was spending my usual 3 minutes watching the Dallas Mavericks play the Miami Heat in yet another NBA playoff game.

Old Main at Drake

For overpaid basketball players to still be slam-dunking as I start giving some thought to my Fourth of July fireworks and picnics is....well, idiotic.

Whatever, watching the Mavericks on the tube took me back more than 30 years.

I was thinking of Ortegel, not Mark Cuban and his Dallas players.

I knew Ortegel was the longtime analyst on the Mavericks' telecasts, but that means nothing around here. What he does on Dallas' local telecasts isn't shown in Iowa, now or during the regular season.

It's all network stuff now.

Come to think of it, I'll bet some of you don't even know who Bob Ortegel is.

Well, he was Drake's basketball coach from 1974 through 1981, and his very first team at the school won a national championship.

You read that right.

National championship.

Not every coach can say that.

No, it wasn't the NCAA title, which Drake came so very close to winning in 1969 when Maury John was running the Bulldogs' show so masterfully.

No, it wasn't the National Invitation Tournament, which is where Drake teams played in 1964, 1981 and 1986.

Ortegel's 1974-75 Bulldogs decorated a 19-10 season by winning something called the National Commissioners Invitational Tournament in Louisville, Ky.

The NCIT was a postseason event the National Collegiate Athletic Association bosses put together in an attempt to kill the NIT, which it then had no control over.

In effect, the NCIT was a tournament for third-place finishers in their conferences.

Don't laugh. There were some good teams in it.

Drake beat Southern California, 80-70, in its first game, beat Bowling Green, 78-65, in its second game and held off Arizona, 83-76, to win the championship.

Larry Haralson was Drake's leading scorer that season with a 20.1 average, and Terry McKissick was the top rebounder with an 8.4 average.

I've still got the wristwatch Ortegel made sure I received from the tournament, and it keeps time after all those years.

I do wonder about something, though. The thieves that broke into my home 25 or so years ago didn't bother taking the watch.

I don't know if that's indicative of what they thought of the watch or what they thought of the National Commissioners tournament.

Whatever, unlike the watch, the tournament lasted only a few seasons.

Ortegel had come to Drake as an assistant on Howard Stacey's staff, Stacey was the poor stiff who had to succeed John in the 1971-72 season after the Best Coach In Drake History took the Iowa State job.

It didn't take long for Drake officials to realize that Stacey wasn't the answer. After records of 7-19, 14-12 and 13-13, he was shown the door.

In came Ortegel, who seemed like a breath of fresh air -- especially when his 1974-75 team beat Texas, 103-98, in overtime and won at Iowa State, 65-64, in December.

Ortegel is a guy whose style is probably what Drake needs now. The recruiting rules were looser at the school then, and he was able to bring in players Drake couldn't or wouldn't waste a plane ticket on these days.

One was Lewis Lloyd, who set a record with a 30.2-point season scoring average in 1979-80,

Lewis Lloyd

then averaged 26.3 in 1980-81. His number was retired by the school in 1981, something that still rankles living members of John's 1968-69 team that went to the Final Four.

Ortegel was a likable guy who I enjoyed dealing with most of the time during his seven seasons at Drake.

He understood my needs as a newspaperman, and I tried to understand his needs as a coach.

One Saturday when I was preparing to drive to Ames to cover an Iowa State football game, he called me at home to tell me Lloyd had been injured in a pickup game. That gave me a good story for the Sunday paper.

I know one thing. Lute Olson never did anything like that when he was coaching at Iowa..

Another time, Ortegel called me at home to tell me he was suspending two or three players who had misbehaved during Drake's road trip to New Mexico State in Las Cruces, N.M.

In those days, Drake's players and traveling party had made a habit of going into Mexico whenever they played at New Mexico State [which then was in the Missouri Valley Conference].

Evidently, a few of the Bulldogs had treated themselves to something other than tacos, enchiladas and cream soda on one of their trips across the border, and Ortegel called me to say he was suspending them.

That made for a good story, too.

Not so good for the players and Drake, but good for me.

Actually, Ortegel was a guy most reporters liked. If you were covering his team on the road, he invited you to dine at the team's pregame meal on game day, and he enjoyed entertaining you with stories, food and cream soda or other liquids on road trips throughout the season.

Ol' Bob never tried to fool you with X's and O's. At one preseason press conference he told us he was planning to install a something called the "street offense," which meant there wasn't much structure to it.

"Street offense" indicated there was about as much discipline connected with it as the "street" games that were being played in the ghettos in those days.

No matter. Ortegel's teams were usually fun to watch.

Ortegel finally called it quits after his 1980-81 team went 18-11 and lost to Minnesota, 90-77, in the first round of the NIT.

My guess is that he had determined he wasn't going to be the next Maury John, even though his teams were much more respectable than those in the 19 straight non-winning seasons the school has had under Gary Garner, Tom Abatemarco, Rudy Washington, Kurt Kanaskie and Tom Davis.

When he left Drake, Ortegel went into what the Mavericks call "the corporate world."

For 14 years, he was an executive with ShowBiz Pizza Time, Inc., and Merle Harmon's FanFair.
It's probably fitting that Ortegel worked for an outfit called ShowBiz because he's always had plenty of show biz in his blood.

He even went Hollywood on us recently. Ortegel played the role of a sportscaster in the movie "Glory Road" that chronicled Don Haskins' Texas Western basketball program.

This was Ortegel's 24th year as a TV basketball analyst and his 18th with the Mavericks. He's worked with ESPN, ABC, the Southwest Conference and the Missouri Valley Conference game of the week. In addition to his TV duties with the Mavs, he headlines the team's speakers' bureau.

It's difficult for me to believe that Ortegel will turn 66 years of age in September and that his four daughters -- Kim, Kari and identical twins Mindi and Missi -- have presented him with eight grandchildren.

But time obviously marches on.

Summing it up, basketball has been good to Bob Ortegel, and he's been good for the game.

JOLTIN' JOE GOT IT STARTED

When Ron Maly was a kid in Cedar Rapids, he wanted to enter an essay contest, and he did. He wrote about Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees being his favorite baseball player. For finishing second in the contest, Ron won a Louisville Slugger baseball bat autographed by DiMaggio. Ron later wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, and he was. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and did what all political science majors do. He became a sportswriter. He had, after all, covered high school football, basketball and baseball games for the Cedar Rapids Gazette while he worked parttime during his university days. Ron wanted to sit in the press box and write about an Iowa-Minnesota football game, and he did. It happened while he was the sports editor at the Albert Lea [Minn.] Tribune, and the game was at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis. Ron wanted to cover a World Series, and he did. Also when he was working for the Albert Lea newspaper. Ron wanted to cover Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Orange Bowls, Cotton Bowls, Holiday Bowls, a Freedom Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Super Bowl and NCAA basketball tournaments, and he did those things after he moved to Des Moines. Ron was a four-time sportswriter of the Year in the state of Iowa [the years were 1977, 1978, 1994 and 1996]. In 2006, he was named a charter member of the University of Iowa's media Wall of Fame in the Kinnick Stadium press box. A photo of the plaque that's displayed in the press box is displayed above this story. Following Ron's retirement from the newspaper business, a publisher asked him if he wanted to write a book about the rich football tradition at the University of Iowa, and he did. The hardback version of "Tales from the Iowa Sidelines" was a best-seller, and so was the revised, softback version. Now he's been asked by his publisher to update the book for a second time. He's in the process of doing that at the present time. Ron considers being asked to update a best-selling book for the second time to be the supreme compliment, considering the Hawkeyes won just four games in the 2012 season. When Ron isn't working on books, he's busy traveling and spending time with his family. Indeed, he attends the athletic, theatrical and musical [both vocal and instrumental] events in which his six grandchildren participate. He also writes about anything that interests him for his many websites. Every chance he gets, Ron proudly wears his America Needs Farmers T-shirt.

The Hawkeyes' Rich Football Tradition, Revisited

I mentioned a while back that I was in the process of updating my Tales from the Iowa Sidelines book. Updating it for the second time. The original hardback edition of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines [pictured at the right] was published in 2003, during the 10-3 season, when coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa football team had a 10-3 record that included a 37-17 victory over 15th-ranked Florida in the Outback Bowl and after the Hawkeyes went 11-2 in 2002. That book was a best-seller, so the publishers came to me again in 2005, a season that finished with a breathtaking 30-25 victory over No. 11 Louisiana State in the Capital One Bowl on New Year's Day, 2005. Because buyers had cleaned out the the shelves in the bookstores, the publishers wanted to know if I'd do an updated version of the book. I agreed, The revised, soft-cover edition [pictured at the left] was published in 2005. Warren Holloway, who teamed with quarterback Drew Tate on a miraculous 56-yard touchdown pass to win the Capital One Bowl, was featured on the cover. That book, too, turned into a best-seller, So I had reason to feel very good about my years as a published author. It's not every day that a the original version is a best-seller, and so is the updated version. Then, imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from a senior editor at the publishing company last fall, wanting wanted to know if I was interested in doing a second updated version of the book. It came at a time when things weren't going well for the Hawkeyes in the 2012 season. They lost their last six games and finished with a 4-8 record. Frankly, the thought of doing a revised edition of the book during a 4-8 season seemed to be a stretch. "Maybe producing a revised edition in a year or two would be a better idea," I told the publishers. "We'd like to do it now," I was told. "Let me think about it," I said. After a few days of thought, I accepted the idea. I talked myself into the idea that this was the supreme compliment--being asked to do a second book update during a 4-8 season showed strong confidence by the publishers in me and in the Hawkeyes' football program. So I got back into the business of interviewing players and coaches again, going to postgame press conferences, weekly press conferences and a scrimmage in West Des Moines. After a press conference in Iowa City, I did a one-on-one interview with coach Kirk Ferentz, and mentioned to him that I was in the process of doing a revised edition of my two best-selling books. I congratulated him on the excellent things he had done for Iowa's football program--all of which contributed to the success of my books. "I think Coach Fry had more to do with it," he told me, bringing up the name of Hayden Fry, his one-time boss at Iowa and a man who brought Iowa's football program back from the dead in the 20th century. That's modest Kirk Ferentz for you. Even though the 2012 season wasn't something Hawkeye coaches, players and fans will recall with any special feeling, Ferentz has a 14-year record of 100-74 at Iowa that includes two 11-victory seasons [2002 smd 2009], two 10-victory seasons [2003 and 2004], plus he's been the Big Ten coach of year in 2002, 2004 and 2009, and national coach of the year in 2002. Indeed, Ferentz has done some wonderful things at Iowa City, and I fully expect his success to continue. I've concluded my writing for the second update of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines, and the senior editor has furnished me with an early look at the book. Not only are the Kirk Ferentz years included in the updated version, but so is the stuff I previously wrote about Howard Jones, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick and the 1939 Hawkeye Ironmen, Ronald Reagan, Ozzie Simmons, Ossie Solem, Randy Duncan, Alex Karras and lots of other legends from Iowa's rich football history. I expect the book to be in stores soon. I hope you like it.