Joseph Dycus: Ray Mears, A Brilliant Basketball Coach And Promoter Of The Game

In the mid-1960s, Tennessee was football country, and Knoxville was a pigskin province. Hoops was an afterthought for a school obsessed with competing against Tuscaloosa’s Bear for conference titles, as was the case with many of its conference brethren. After winning four conference titles and a 1961 Div-II championship at Wittenberg, the Ohioan moved south and was crowned the next coach of the University of Tennessee’s basketball program.

To the majority of the country and large swaths of the South, SEC basketball was the Kentucky Wildcats and a collection of kitty litter. Coach Mears wanted to change that perception, at least in regard to how the country and the state itself saw the Vols. Known as a brilliant tactical mind and one of the proponents of the 1-3-1 trap defense, Mears was also a “big promoter” according to historian and former Sports Information Director Bud Ford.

“Coach Mears was a big promoter, and to promote basketball he came up with the Big Orange Country that we use,” Ford says. “Our warmup was like Sweet Georgia Brown. We had a fancy and kind of cocky warmup our team would do with ballhandling and passing.”

That’s right, the now ubiquitous term “Big Orange Country” was originally associated with a blossoming hoops program. At a time when stodgy layup lines and monotonous shooting drills were the norm, coach Mears turned the Vols’ pregame warmups into a show. Marques Haynes and Meadowlark Lemon could respect the kind of dribbling exhibitions Vols guards and forwards would put on before the game.

“He turned us loose for entertainment for warmups,” former all-American guard Bill Justus says. “He knew the crowd got there early, and one thing he wanted to do was entertain the crowd early, so our warmups were like the Globetrotters.”

Roger Peltz may have been an undersized 6’5 center who played a total of 22 games and scored 30 points as a reserve from 1968-1971, but for a generation of Vols faithful, he will forever be etched in their memory for his pregame theatrics. Before tip-off, he would sit upon a titanic unicycle and juggle three basketballs as he darted around the court.

“Pregame was fantastic. We did the globetrotter warmup drills, and Rodger Peltz would ride the unicycle and juggle three balls,” remembers former guard Billy Hann.

Within the warm and friendly confines of the old Stokely Center, Tennessee supporters loved the show. But on the road, the circus-like proceedings encouraged a different kind of “cheer” from opposing fans. Of course, it could be argued that Tennessee was still “entertaining” those rival supporters, even if the response was usually mean-spirited.

“We would get razzed when we’d go on the road and do our warmup at an opponent’s school,” Ford says. “We were kind of colorful with what we were doing, with our fancy dribbling and how we handled the ball. We were promoting basketball at the time and we were a good enough of a team to back up what we were doing.”

At a time when Lew Alcindor was shredding west coast defenses with skyhooks and slams, a horrified basketball establishment saw the dunk as an attack on the sanctity of the sport. So for at least the entirety of Justus’ and Hann’s career, they were technically not allowed to thrill fans with high-flying stuffs. That was until, one day, coach Mears came up with a workaround.

“We all really wanted to dunk, so coach Mears created this thing that was nine and a half feet tall,” Hann says. “He would roll it out and the backboard looked like an orange peel. And he would pull it up and we’d start our warmups by everyone going in there and dunking on it.”

At the time, a pregame dunk incurred a technical foul when the game tipped-off, a penalty designed to discourage pregame fun. But the always analytical coach Mears foresaw the referees retaliation coming, so he was prepared to strike back.

“The first time we did that, when the game started the referees called a technical on coach for that, and he was ready for it. He was ready for that, and showed them that we could do that because we weren’t dunking on the normal basket.”

If those weren’t enough theatrics for fans trying to find their seats, the Vols were also known for bringing their pep band to the games, both home and on the road. As the teams warmed up, the band would march around the court and play popular fight songs. In totality, Tennessee would often put on such a show that even the game’s greatest showman couldn’t help but be impressed.

“We’d run through the T and there’d be smoke,” Hann says, “and what would happen would be that Pistol Pete (Maravich) and his teammates or whoever, as good as they were, would stop and watch us and our warm-ups drills.”

But don’t think for a minute that coach Mears used those ahead-of-its-time pregame routines to distract viewers from mediocre basketball. He was a brilliant coach once the warmups ended, and won three SEC titles in a conference ruled by Adolph Rupp from his throne in Lexington. Mears won 71 percent of his games, never had a losing season, and most-importantly, won three SEC titles from 1962 to 1977.

“We would go to bed and the lights would still be on in his office all night long. That was all he did,” Justus says. “He was just an all-around great basketball coach and a great friend. He was one of the guys who challenged Adolph Rupp at Kentucky, and probably motivated other SEC schools to say “We can do this too, we don’t have to let Kentucky run all over us.” He was a leader in upgrading SEC basketball.”