Jerry Sloan this weekend became the second person from the University of Evansville inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
Below is a story written recently for the upcoming edition of UE Magazine:
In the weeks leading up to his September 11 induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., Jerry Sloan knew exactly what to expect.
“I’ll be scared to death,” he predicted. “I’ll get up there to speak, and I’m not sure anything will come out of my mouth. All I know is, there are a lot of people more important than me in the Hall of Fame.”
Sloan is now the second University of Evansville graduate enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame. The first was his college coach, Arad McCutchan ‘34, in 1980. There was a time when the thought of Sloan being inducted into anyone’s Hall of Fame seemed more laughable than scary. He stayed only a few weeks at the University of Illinois as a painfully shy and out-of-place freshman in 1961 before returning home to rural southern Illinois, near McLeansboro, to work in the oil fields. Then, one night that he will never forget led him to Evansville College.
“It was cold outside, and I came home from work soaked in oil and salt water,” he recalls. “My mom just looked at me, and said, ‘Are you going to do this the rest of your life?’ About a week later, I called Coach McCutchan. He had recruited me, and he and some others had come over a few months earlier to McLeansboro to visit. I asked him if he might have a place for me on his team, and fortunately for me, he did. I was lost and homesick and not making any headway when I left the University of Illinois. I hadn’t even been out of the county before then. But Evansville and Coach McCutchan made me feel at home.”
Sloan made Evansville and Coach McCutchan feel pretty good, too. McCutchan knew he had a player with great potential, but he also knew Jerry might head back to the oil fields if he didn’t feel comfortable. First, McCutchan convinced a widow who lived near campus with her teenage son to allow Jerry to live with them. It was the closest thing to home that McCutchan could find for Sloan, whose mother had been a widow since he was four. Then McCutchan found a part-time job for Sloan at Whirlpool, and enrolled him midway through the school year so he could slowly adjust to college and life away from home before adding basketball to the mix in his sophomore year. McCutchan’s plan worked. Sloan went on to become an All-American in each of his three seasons with the Aces, and helped Evansville win NCAA College Division national championships in 1964 and 1965. The Aces won 55 of their 58 games in his last two years, including a perfect 29-0 record as a senior in 1965. Average attendance at Roberts Stadium when Sloan enrolled was about 6,500 per game. In his senior year, the Aces averaged 10,901.
Sloan graduated with a degree in education in 1965 and spent most of the next 11 years with the Chicago Bulls. He was tough and aggressive (some opponents preferred the word ‘mean’), making the NBA All-Star Team twice and the NBA All-Defensive Team six times before a knee injury forced him to quit in 1976. One year later, McCutchan retired after 31 seasons as the Aces’ head coach. His teams won 514 games, including five NCAA College Division national championships, in 1959, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1971. With his days as a basketball player over, Sloan thought even more about something that McCutchan told him very early in his playing career.
“It was my sophomore year, and we were going out to Colorado to play over winter break,” Sloan recalls. “Coach McCutchan said to me, ‘Jerry, 10 years from now I want you to come back and coach this team.’ That was the strangest thing for him to say at the time. I was shocked by it because I had only been playing for him a couple months. He probably knew me better than I did. He had lots of ways to help people and give them confidence.”
McCutchan’s request was granted when Sloan accepted the Aces’ head coaching job in 1977, but five days later, he stunned the University and Evansville’s thousands of basketball fans by resigning. He has always explained the change of mind by simply saying, “It didn’t seem to be the right thing to do at the time.” Just months later, on December 13, 1977, the plane carrying new head coach Bobby Watson and his team to a game at Middle Tennessee State University crashed 90 seconds after takeoff from Dress Regional Airport in Evansville, killing all aboard.
Sloan’s jersey was the first ever retired by the Bulls, in 1978. They hired him as their head coach in 1979, and fired him 51 games into the 1981-1982 season. His big break in coaching came in 1984 when Utah Jazz head coach Frank Layden hired Sloan as his top assistant. Four years later, Layden retired and Sloan took over as head coach. He’s been there ever since, with 18 trips to the NBA playoffs in 21 years. Sloan’s 1997 and 1998 teams reached the NBA Finals but lost four games to two each year against the Bulls and Michael Jordan. This will be Sloan’s 22nd consecutive season as Utah’s head coach, extending his legacy as the longest tenured head coach of any team in any major professional sports league. He is the only NBA coach to win 1,000 games with a single team.
“But I really haven’t done anything compared to the others,” Sloan insists, referring to fellow inductees Jordan, David Robinson, John Stockton and Rutgers University coach Vivian Stringer. “I really appreciate the honor, but I’ve never been NBA Coach of the Year. We haven’t been NBA champions. I’ve just been around a long time. Look at the people who are in the Hall of Fame. Coach McCutchan is in there (Class of 1980) because he deserved it. He coached 30-some years and won five national championships.”
True, McCutchan did win more championships, but two of the five were a direct result of UE’s newest member of the Hall of Fame. Winning 1,000 games, reaching the NBA Playoffs 86 percent of the time and representing the league in an ethical, gentlemanly fashion are no minor accomplishments, either. And as nerve-wracking as the Hall of Fame speech in Springfield may have been for Sloan, it sure beats a cold, wet night in the oil fields of southern Illinois.
