Local Sports Hero:

The irony is that my cousin might have been a hometown boy who would have done them proud. Just imagine if Allen had recruited my cousin WITH Wilt Chamberlain. All who saw Wesley play agree: JOHN Hadl, Bob Altenbernd, Larry Hatfield, Ralph King, and many others, that Wesley was an exceptional player. What might good coaching have added?  KU sports would have been electric! Allen would have gotten even more national attention. He could have been seen as a great figure in the civil rights movement. He could have been on the right side of history. Sad.

We know from Wilt’s biography that the unusually tall, talented high schooler was brought to Allen’s attention by KU sports information director, Don Pierce, and by B. H. Born, the Kansas All-American “almost run off the court by Wilt in the summer of 1954 in the Catskills.”  So, the question is: Did pierce know about Wesley? Wesley was scoring big in city leagues. Chances are that Pierce did not follow non-collegiate sports. But what about Allen? Three things worked against Wesley here: First, Allen was a segregationist under the powerful influence of Jim Crow, who refused to even consider Black talent until forced.  Second, Wesley was not in high school basketball, only city league and intra-mural play. Third, although tall enough by the standards of the day, my cousin was not the kind of tall that had sports directors taking notice. Allen was responding to outside pressure to bring in Blacks after 1954. He had his own agenda to keep the game “pure.” He would see no reason to scout out local Black talent. To him Wesley would have been invisible.

Allen was a segregationist, and I find it a paradox that he wanted Wilt to play at KU.  In a telephone interview  Steve Jansen points out that six foot ten inch George Mikan of DePaul, six foot nine inch Clyde Lovellette of the University of Kansas, and seven foot Bob Kurland  of Oklahoma A&M (later Oklahoma State) were impacting the game, (in both offense and defense), and that Allen wanted to counter height advantage by hiking up the basket.  He wanted to keep what he considered “structured fairness.” That was Allen’s pet project

In Allen’s day, basketball was a totally different game from what we see today. It was a “slow down” game. That is, the objective, rather than high scoring, was good ball handling and passing. The idea was to have more of a defensive than an offensive game, to keep the other team mentally off-balance. The winningest team would pass the ball in and around their opponent’s defense, waiting for just the right shot. Then they would move in for the “high percentage” shot. Most games had a low score. (Coach Hank Iva of Oklahoma held his scores down to under 20 to 25 points per game for many years.) The idea was to create mental tension in an opponent’s mind. The shot, when it came, would be either a lay-up, two hand set shot, or a bank shot off the backboard. Then the higher score would be maintained by holding the ball and, by deft handling and passing, to confuse and frustrate the opposing players. This all changed with taller player who could make jump shots. The fans became more and more intolerant of a “keep-away” game, so that in 1985, a new rule was introduced. It was the 45 second clock, which made it necessary to shoot the ball, rather than hold onto it. Then in 1993, the game was further speeded up with the 35 second clock.

Early on, Allen began to notice that strategy was being replaced by natural aptitude. Allen wanted to eliminate height advantage totally. But he was also a realist who knew KU needed to recruit the best players to keep its prominent place in college sports. A couple of years after Wilt Chamberlain was brought to Allen’s attention, he began a full court press to bring him to KU.

In Robert Cherry’s biography of Wilt, he describes what that entailed:

But it wasn’t until the winter of 1955 that Allen began to recruit Wilt and actually saw him play. Allen flew to Philadelphia in January 1955 and attended the Overbrook-Germantown game. That evening Wilt received a local award as “the outstanding scholastic athlete in Philadelphia.” Coach Cecil Morenson recaptured the event: “Phog Allen came to the Cliveden Award Banquet and introduced himself to me. Then he sat down with Wilt’s mother and he schmoozed her. And she loved him.”

KU sent plane tickets, so Wilt and his coach took a trip to Lawrence. Even though the plane came in at 3:00 on a cold Kansas morning, there were about 50 people waiting. Allen recruited a lineup of “distinguished Kansas citizens, black and white, to win Wilt’s heart for the university.” 

The thing that was most appealing, perhaps, was that Wilt looked forward to being coached by one of the winningest coaches in history. “Allen won or shared 24 conference championships in his 39 years at Kansas. He helped to found the National Basketball Coaches Association, was the driving force behind the decision to include basketball as an Olympic event in 1936, and had helped to coach the United States Olympic team to a gold medal in 1952.”

But that was not to be. Allen was forced to retire before he ever coached the star athlete.

The irony is that it was Wilt w