Shot Of Lemons To Cure The Blues

If a team can win games while its coach is eating Tex-Mex food or trudging against a cold Denver wind, it follows in Abe's mind that a team has its own makeup and doesn't need a lot of advice from him on how to behave. On the road. Abe's teams have no curfew, no blackboard meetings and no required meals. He tells them at what hour they are to be suited up—he prefers that his teams dress at the hotel rather than in some strange locker room—and in warmups he lets them practice whatever the players decide they want to.

Pan American arrived four days early in Las Vegas last year, and all Lemons told the players was to show up in time for the game. Pan Am lost 100-95 to a Nevada-Las Vegas team that had beaten Michigan. But in Abilene, Abe told his players they were on a reverse curfew. Nobody could go to bed in the motel before 10 p.m., and Abe would, by God, check to make sure.

His halftime responses are unpredictable. In an NIT game against Duke at Madison Square Garden, Lemons made OCU stay on the floor during halftime and scrimmage, shirts vs. skins. Or at halftime he may take his team into the locker room and silently brood, or he may tell tales of his childhood in Oklahoma, or he may bring in a magician to do tricks, or he may attend to tactics, or he may scream at his players.

If he is truly bored or frustrated, Abe will skip practice. He might play golf. In Austin, Abe and his wife, Betty Jo, live in a house in a country-club development called Onion Creek, which has a tight, short course; Abe claims he once found 18 balls on a single hole.

"I tell my players, 'Listen, if you miss practice tell me the truth about it the way I do,' " he said." 'Don't tell me you had swine flu or were trapped in an elevator. Tell me you were sick of basketball for a day, or were swamped by life, or whatever the truth happens to be. I understand those things.' "

With three hours to go before his University of Texas coaching debut, Lemons walked to the blackboard in his office in Belmont Hall, a 12-story building tucked into the football stadium. He picked up a piece of chalk and drew swooping arrows on a blackboard to demonstrate a basketball lesson he feared his players hadn't learned.

"But if you do come to practice, you shouldn't waste everybody's time," he told them. "You should try to learn what we're up to." When he arrived at Texas, Lemons chose what he thought were the five best all-round players from last year's 9-17 Longhorn team and the available newcomers. "Our first five have possibilities," he said. "A freshman, two sophomores and two juniors. But you really need eight players to have a strong team. Our first five are going to look like they've got iceboxes on their backs by the second half."

Lemons is in demand as an after-dinner speaker. Two months ago he spoke at the Notre Dame basketball banquet. The week before his coaching debut at Texas, he was master of ceremonies at the Longhorn Hall of Honor dinner. The inductions were held in a banquet room of an Austin motel. Down the hill to the west of the motel shone the lights of Memorial Stadium, where that night an ABC-TV crew was rehearsing for the following night's Texas-Arkansas football game, which was to be televised to the nation.

One of those inducted into the Hall of Honor was Darrell Royal, who several days later would resign as football coach but remain as athletic director. Royal had brought Abe's name before the Athletic Council. Royal and Lemons are about the same age and both were born in small towns in Oklahoma. Lemons is president of the American Basketball Coaches Association (his assistant, Barry Dowd, formerly head basketball coach at the University of Texas-Arlington, is vice-president and will succeed him next year). Royal has been president of the comparable organization in football. Royal says college athletic recruiters ought to be willing to take lie detector tests. Lemons agrees. Books of Royal's country-sage epigrams have been published. Abe's remarks are printed all over the world.

The University of Texas football team is usually in the nation's Top Ten. The basketball team is never considered among the nation's elite. SWC teams seldom make the Top 20—though Arkansas is currently mentioned in the AP poll. Explanations are plentiful. Eight SWC teams compete for talent in one state that also has dozens of basketball teams that do well at different NCAA levels and in the NAIA. The Texas high school athletic governing board has a rule that forbids high school players from taking part in basketball summer camps or amateur league games after freshman year. The first black basketball player in the Southwest Conference was James Cash, now a professor at the Harvard Business School. He played for TCU only 10 seasons ago.