The Show Goes On

Susan McKinney remembers the first time she rode a bike without training wheels.

“My father took me to the Aronimink School playground in Drexel Hill,” she recalls. “The area was full of these big hills, and when I got on the bike, my dad told me I was going to ride down the hill just fine. Although I was scared, I believed him. He gave me a little push and let go, and I stayed upright until the ground leveled out. Just as the bike began to slow and wobble, I heard 'pedal!' from way behind me, and I made my legs move. I made it all the way over to the swings, and I knew from then on that when my dad told me I could do something, then I could.”

Leadership is something that Susan’s father learned at an early age. Born in 1935 in Chester, Pennsylvania, Jack McKinney ’57 was the son of a police detective and a homemaker. He played high school basketball at St. James, where he was coached by Dr. Jack Ramsay ’49. After a successful high school career, he came to Saint Joseph’s in 1953, followed two years later by Ramsay, who became the Hawks’ head coach in 1955. Together, they would lead the program to its first-ever postseason in 1956, finishing third in the National Invitation Tournament.

McKinney’s own coaching career began back at St. James in 1959, but it wouldn’t be long before Ramsay brought him back to Hawk Hill as an assistant. McKinney took the reins from Ramsay in 1966, and his eight seasons as head coach were among the most successful that Hawk basketball has ever seen. Five of his teams went to the NCAA tournament, and he holds the third-best winning percentage in program history, behind only Ramsay and fellow alumnus Jim Lynam ’63. He mentored some of SJU’s greatest-ever players, including All-Americans Clifford Anderson ’67 and Mike Bantom ’73.

“He was a very dedicated coach,” Bantom remembers. “He really worked hard and knew the game well. He focused on preparation, building his schemes based around our strengths and getting us ready to play each opponent.”

In 1973-74, McKinney led the Hawks, who had lost stars Bantom and Pat McFarland ’73 to graduation, and was picked by some experts to win fewer than five games to a 19-11 record and an NCAA Tournament berth. The performance earned McKinney the title of Eastern College Coach of the Year, but that season would be his last at Hawk Hill. The decision was unpopular among fans; almost 1,000 students gathered on campus to protest the coaching change.

McKinney soldiered on to the NBA, joining the Milwaukee Bucks as an assistant coach. He then reunited with Ramsay, who had become the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. In McKinney’s first season as Ramsay's assistant, the team won the NBA championship. It remains the only major sports championship that the city of Portland holds.

“Being in Portland was nirvana because when a team is winning, everybody loves you,” Claire McKinney, his wife of 60 years, remembers. “The city had a love affair with everybody associated with the Trail Blazers. It was a really fun, wonderful time.”

In 1979, McKinney got the call his career had been leading toward. Jerry Buss, the new owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, had just drafted college phenom Earvin “Magic” Johnson and wanted a coach who could capitalize on his talent and balance it with that of veterans Spencer Haywood and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. McKinney, who was known for his ability to create an offense based on his players’ strengths and who had coached Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee, was the perfect choice.

The season started well for the Lakers — the team won nine of their first 13 games and McKinney was developing a good rapport with his star players. Then, everything changed.

On November 8, 1979, the Lakers had their first day off for the season. McKinney’s idea of relaxation was to play tennis with his friend and assistant coach Paul Westhead ’61. He was riding his bike through Los Angeles on his way to meet Westhead when the bike’s brakes seized at a stop sign, sending McKinney tumbling over the handlebars and head-first into the concrete. He suffered a serious concussion and was in a coma for three weeks.

Westhead stepped in as interim head coach, and the Lakers would go on to win the 1980 NBA championship over the Philadelphia 76ers. Johnson became a sensation, and the free-flowing style of play that McKinney and Westhead installed — which would come to be known as “Showtime” — would become the signature style of the Lakers through the 1980s, a decade that saw them win five titles.

When asked years later about the Lakers’ success, McKinney would often demur, citing his Lakers successors — Westhead and Pat Riley — as the masters of the Showtime style. But Westhead gives credit to the man who wouldn’t take it for himself.

“[McKinney] set down the rules of operation,” Westhead says. “He was very clever in his offense in that he literally had five plays for five different starters. The players gravitated to that; they felt that they were included in the game. So he schemed it close to perfection, and when he was out for the season, I stayed with the scheme.”

Buss released McKinney from his coaching duties before the end of that first championship season, not wanting to disturb the momentum that the team had built around Westhead. After spending months recovering from his injuries, McKinney returned to coaching in 1980, taking the sideline with the Indiana Pacers. The team had underperformed in previous seasons but had a good core: future Hall-of-Famer George McGinnis, two-time all-star Billy Knight and Bantom.

“Jack was considering the job, and he called me to ask my assessment of our team,” Bantom recalls. “I told him that we were good enough and had the talent, and if he were to come on board, the structure and the consistency I knew he would bring would make us a playoff team for the first time since the franchise joined the NBA.”

The Pacers would indeed reach the playoffs in McKinney’s first year, and he earned Coach of the Year honors for the turnaround, but the team regressed over the following three seasons, and McKinney was fired after finishing with the league’s worst record in the 1983-84 season. He was quickly hired by the Kansas City Kings but resigned after beginning the 1984 season with just one win in his first nine games as coach. He wouldn’t coach in the NBA again.

While his injury affected McKinney’s cognition, those close to him say that his coaching acumen remained.

“I could see him struggling at times with his memory,” Bantom says. “He'd struggle remembering names or remembering faces, and you could see he was frustrated by it at times because he'd look at people and he knew that he knew them but couldn’t pin down from where or when. But when he was focused on the game and coaching? He was just as sharp as always.”

Undoubtedly, though he would eventually have to leave basketball full time, the game never left Jack McKinney. He ran and coached clinics in 17 different countries, including Brazil, Lebanon, Portugal and Denmark, where he again teamed with Ramsay. He spent one season as a TV analyst for the 76ers. And, in every aspect of his life, he did what made him so successful as a coach: He got the best out of the people around him and found the paths where they were meant to succeed.

“He never expected any of [his kids] to go into sports or to be interested in sports in any way,” Susan recalls. “He really supported whatever direction we wanted to go in and whatever interests we had.”

McKinney’s influence continues to inform the NBA: The up-tempo offense built around the strength of star players is no longer called Showtime, but it’s still an important aspect of the modern game. And the people he mentored have seen success in the league: Jim O’Brien ’74, who played on Hawk Hill when McKinney was an assistant coach, credits him with creating the push that got O’Brien into coaching.

“I was a business major, and in my senior year I was offered a pretty lucrative job with Procter & Gamble,” O’Brien says. “I told [McKinney] how happy I was that I was offered the job, and he said, ‘Congratulations. Now turn it down.’ He told me I’d be miserable doing anything but coaching basketball.”

O’Brien took the advice. He has spent the last 40-plus years as an assistant and head coach in college and the NBA and is currently an assistant with the 76ers.

McKinney’s name will be a part of Hawk legend for years to come: He was inducted to the Men’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980, the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame in 1998 and the SJU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2004. And his name will live on in an endowed scholarship organized by O’Brien, Mike Kempski ’68 and others, for students from Philadelphia and Delaware County who are academically gifted but need financial assistance to attend college.

“[McKinney] believed in the Jesuit way of education,” O’Brien says. “He believed that everyone had an unlimited ability to improve and give back, and that life was about more than just basketball. We wanted to be sure that he would be remembered for that.”

Jeffrey Martin '04, '05 (M.A.) is the former managing editor of Saint Joseph’s University Magazine and host and producer of the “Good to Know” podcast.