Passionate Waters played basketball in Cedartown
by Roy Mitchell, The Post in Centre, Ala
Like many Southern schoolboys, Jack Waters developed a love for football. When his family moved north to Madison, Ind., before his sophomore year, Waters found himself in a school that did not sport a football team. With his football dreams dissipating like fog in the morning sun, Waters decided to introduce himself to the school’s basketball coach.
As Waters grew up in Gilberttown, Ala., the only time he played basketball was at school recess. Only in Waters freshman year, while his family lived in Cedartown, had he played organized basketball, and that was only because his football coach insisted upon it. The coach wanted Waters to improve his hands for football season.
Despite his basketball inexperience, Waters football loss in the move away from Cedartown turned into a tremendous athletic gain.
"It was the best thing that ever happened to me...[Basketball] became a passion."
Waters truly did make the game a passion. Much of Waters next fifty years were devoted to the sport of basketball. Waters competed in high school, in college for the University of Mississippi, and in the most talented basketball league in the world, the NBA, for the Cincinnati Royals. According to WikiAnswers.com, the odds of playing in the NBA are close to one in a million. In his retirement from a coaching career that saw him coach on almost every level, he moved to nearby Centre, Ala.
Now 70, Waters plays golf, enjoys leisurely drives on local backroads, and recollects on that inauspicious, but influential, first year in Indiana.
According to Waters, he had a huge growth spurt the summer after his departure from Cedartown. Yet before he grew tall, he had been taught how to play guard, the player who often dribbles the ball.
Because of his skilled coordination and his knowledge of the guard position, his coach kept him there.
Waters would grow to be 6’ 5", much taller than the other guards. When he took his basketball skills to the University of Mississippi, he continued to utilize his height.
"I was the first big guard in the SEC [Southeastern Conference]. If a smaller man guarded me, I would take him inside. If a bigger man guarded me, I would take him outside."
During the early sixties, Waters starred for the Rebels, becoming an all-SEC selection for three straight years, racking up impressive statistics along the way. In 1960, he led the nation in free throw percentage, scoring 1,384 points at the rate of 19.5 per game, fifth best in Ole Miss history.
Yet Waters remains humble about his accolades. He states, "A lot of this stuff I was not really aware of. I just loved playing ball...I’m a gym rat. I’m happiest when I’m in the gym."
Out of college, Waters was drafted and signed by the Cincinnati Royals of the NBA. While today’s players may make millions of dollars per season, Waters’s rookie contract earned him a humble $14,500.
One of the game’s greatest, Oscar Robertson, played with Waters in Cincinnati. Unfortunately for Waters, Robertson also played guard. "Oscar just didn’t make mistakes," states Waters.
Having been a hoops star ever since high school, toiling behind one of the game’s most talented was quite an adjustment for Waters.
Once having scored seventeen points in the first half, Waters asked the coach why he was replaced. The coach looked at Waters, who wore number 41, pointed to the court, and said, "The fans paid money to see number 14 [Oscar Robertson]. They didn’t pay to see number 41."
Waters’s pro career was interrupted that same year when the Selective Service called upon him to serve in the Marine Corps.
Before leaving the Royals, he would brush elbows with some of basketball’s all-time legends. Against Boston, Waters once advanced the ball up the side of the court only to see Celtic great Bill Russell beating him to the basket.
"I knew I wasn’t going to drive in on him," Waters explains. "So I pulled up short for a jump shot. He swatted it all the way to the other end of the court. As Russell and I are running back up the court, he slaps me on the butt and says, ‘Welcome to the NBA, rookie!’"
Waters also took the court against the most prolific scorer of his era, Wilt Chamberlain. "Wilt’s arms were massive. They were as big as my legs," recalls Waters.
After his stint with the Marine Corps, Waters joined the Kansas City Steers of the ABL (a rival league in the early 1960’s). He was there just long enough for the franchise to fold. By then, Waters was ready to continue his basketball journey as a coach, not a player.
He continues, "There were too many messages. My passion is to coach, anyway. I never looked back."
During the early years of his coaching career, Waters happened upon legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. Rupp was getting a shoe shine in the Atlanta airport when Waters re-introduced himself. Rupp, who had coach against Waters in college, remembered him.
Waters recalls when his Ole Miss Rebels used to play Rupp’s Wildcats, “My position on the court would put me right next to Coach Rupp on the sideline. He would try to get under my skin and tell me what a hot dog I was.”
To Waters delight that day years later at the airport, Rupp invited him to have lunch with him. According to Waters, the two talked basketball for over an hour in an Atlanta airport restaurant.
Waters coaching career saw him roam the sideline from the sixties into the new millennium in high schools and even colleges. He lead, amongst other schools, the basketball teams for Georgia State and Delta State, and he was an assistant coach at Georgia Tech.
“I never thought about doing anything else,” Waters claims, “I’ve awakened at three or four in the morning to break down tapes.”
Waters philosophizes that being on a basketball team should be a privilege, and that players with bad attitudes shouldn’t infect the team. He likens such players to a tale he once heard from his grandfather.
He recalls, “My Granddad’s best dog came down with the worms, and he had nothing to cure it. He loved the dog too much to kill it, but then the other dogs caught the worms from it. Worms in dogs are like bad attitudes in people. You can’t cure either one of them, and they spread.”
Waters continues, “Winning is something you practice all the time. You can get a pretty good idea if a kid is a winner by watching him between classes and whether he wants to stay and shoot after practice.”
One of Waters’s legacy as a coach was not so much who he wouldn’t let play, but who he wanted on his team. In part of the racially divided 1960’s, Waters was the head coach at Delta State in Mississippi. With the inspiration of the college president, he integrated Delta State basketball - the first traditional school in the state of Mississippi to do so.
Tavar Griffin and Walter Scrubs, the African-American players Waters brought on board, helped lead his Delta State team to a top five ranking in the nation in NCAA Division II.
“That was a great team” Waters beamed.
Waters has seen numerous basketball changes in his lifetime.
“I would’ve loved to have had the three-point line when I played, and I liked it as a coach, too. It opens up the driving lane.”
Perhaps one of the biggest changes in basketball has come in the field of conditioning.
According to Waters, weight-lifting was a practice almost unheard of in basketball.
“Football programs had a few free weights, but basketball players had no weight room, not even in the NBA. We just played for conditioning. [We had] none of the highly developmental stuff like today.”
On Christmas of 2008, Waters found out that he had been nominated to the Ole Miss All-Century basketball team, a discovery made through his children. He explains, “My son and daughter are in grad school. They found out from a classmate who graduated from Ole Miss...that I had been nominated. I might not have ever found out.”
Through the help of an internet blog set up by his children, Waters was indeed named to the University of Mississippi All-Century basketball team in January.
