A baseball eulogy for a hoops legend

By Ron Kantowski (contact)

Friday, Nov. 28, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It’s a good thing giant shadows cast by coaching icons can’t shoot or play defense or the UNLV basketball team might have found a heap of trouble this week.

On Monday the Rebels played at Texas-El Paso, whose legendary former coach, Don Haskins, died in September.

The Miners blew a 13-point first-half lead (not that the Rebels didn’t have something to do with it) en route to a 13-point defeat. So it wouldn’t surprise me if, somewhere in the Big Field House in the Sky, Haskins is putting a dusty cowboy boot to somebody’s rear end, because first, that was Haskins; and second, you could count the times a Haskins-coached team blew a 13-point lead at home on one hand and still have enough fingers left to make the peace sign.

Tonight the Rebels will host the University of California, whose legendary former coach, Pete Newell, died last week.

Like Haskins, Newell won an NCAA championship at a school not really renown for its basketball program. Today’s NBA rosters are littered with guys who learned how to position themselves in the low post at his Big Man camps, the last of which were held in Las Vegas.

Bobby Knight said Newell was as good as anybody who ever coached the game.

Jerry Tarkanian said Newell and John Wooden are the best college basketball coaches of all time.

That’s good enough for me.

But of the thousands of words written about Newell upon his passing at age 93, few, if any, were dedicated to his stint as a baseball coach. Few, if any, even knew he was a baseball coach.

Lou Pisani knew he was a baseball coach. The longtime Las Vegan played center field for Newell at the University of San Francisco back in the day when even legendary college basketball coaches had two jobs, mostly because they paid better than one job.

Still, I was surprised when I learned Pete Newell had coached baseball. It would be like learning that Pavarotti sang the blues, Agatha Christie wrote children’s books or Neil Armstrong flew crop dusters on the side.

One of Newell’s baseball teams, the 1946 champions of the Top Coast Conference, was among the 16 University of San Francisco sports teams honored during the 150th anniversary of the school. That team produced two major leaguers in Con Dempsey and Paul Schramka.

When Pisani arrived on campus three years later, the Dons were still pretty good — and Newell was still pretty demanding of his players.

“He was well-liked but a very tough man,” said Pisani, 82, the former baseball coach at Las Vegas High and Bishop Gorman and a bit of a legend in his own right, having been inducted into the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.

Pisani said Newell didn’t have to speak very loudly or carry a big stick — or even a regulation-size Louisville Slugger — to get his point across.

“He’d just give you this one look that said ‘you’d better wake up.’ ”

Coach Lou — that’s still what people call him around here and the way Newell autographed Pisani’s souvenir program from the 1993 Big Man camp at Cox Pavilion — shared a couple of those “wake-up” anecdotes with a reporter who loves this kind of stuff.

The first was in regard to a game against Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo where there were railroad tracks just beyond the left-field fence. Fats Johnston — Warren “Fats” Johnston, I looked it up on the all-time roster in the media guide — was about to catch a routine fly ball when a locomotive whistle blew and the ground began to shake. The ball caromed right off the top of ol’ Fats’ noggin, Pisani said.

All the Dons had a good laugh.

Newell didn’t think it was very funny.

(I wasn’t there, but I’m going to side with the players on this one. Any time a guy named Fats takes one off the top of the coconut, hilarity is bound to ensue.)

Then there was the time the Dons lost a tough game at St. Mary’s in Moraga — Pisani said it was 2-1, and you know how those can eat at the skipper. Only the Dons weren’t taking it as hard as their coach. The bus ride home was too raucous for Newell’s liking, so as the Dons rolled down California State Highway 24 on approach to the venerable Caldecott Tunnel, Newell ordered the driver to pull over.

He was going to have the Dons run through the entire tunnel — 3,610 feet — to teach them a lesson.

Thankfully, Pisani said, one of the assistant coaches intervened, impressing upon Newell that a guy could get killed in that narrow tunnel. In 1982 seven people did, when a tanker truck turned over and caught fire.

Pisani said clairvoyance never entered into his decision to sit in the back of the bus and silently enjoy the scenery on future road trips with Coach Pete.