Coach Mac part of Raps’ roots
Trailblazer McLendon helped to shape team at its inception
There was no overwhelming sense of basketball history when the Toronto Raptors were born in the early 1990s, aside from the pocket of fans that followed the NBA and the sport closely in a hockey-centric city.
Even within the nascent organization that feeling was not prevalent. The workers knew the modern game and its teams and stars, but a true connection to the game’s roots was lacking.
Isiah Thomas knew this when he became the team’s first president and public face, and he wanted it fixed.
That’s how John McLendon, a trailblazing coach credited with promoting a fast-paced game and, more important, race relations in the sport, became a Raptors consultant. And the learning began. “Having that kind of knowledge around and listening to him tell stories was very important,” Thomas said in a telephone interview. “His belief, his saying, was: You play as you live. If you live right, you eat right, you play right. He was a big believer in teaching that philosophy.
“His storytelling was amazing. I would always have the guys just sit down and have him talk basketball and talk life, talk about the way the game is sup- posed to be played and how you should handle yourself in life.”
The Raptors, from Thomas’s time right up until today, can be rightfully proud of the way they handle themselves in both promoting the game, teaching its history and advancing its most important causes.
Thomas knew that and, in many ways, McLendon was to the infancy of the Raptors what Wayne Embry is currently, a tie to an important past.
McLendon, who died in 1999, was a student and discipline of the game’s inventor, Dr. James Naismith. He was a long-time coach at historic Black colleges and universities, but his coaching broke racial boundaries. He was the first Black coach of a predominantly white college at Cleveland State in the early 1960s. He was the first AfricanAmerican on the staff of a United States Olympic team — in both 1968 and 1972. He ar- ranged the so-called Secret Game between his North Carolina College for Negroes and the all-white Duke University Medical School team in 1944.
He is a two-time inductee into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, as both a coach and a contributor, and all that history was available to the original Raptors.
The franchise created the Coach Mac Award, which goes to “an individual who has made a major contribution to the sport while upholding the principles of honesty, integrity, competitiveness, and love of the game.” “John McLendon couldn’t play at Kansas. He could only be a student, but he couldn’t play basketball there,” Thomas said. “The way the African-American players were playing, the style he brought to the game … they called it run-and-shoot basketball, and now that’s the way everybody plays.
“If you go back and talk to a lot of the older white coaches, a lot of them copied John McLendon’s style of fast-break basketball, and this is what (Houston Rockets coach Mike) D’Antoni does now, and that’s what I was trying to do in Toronto.”
McLendon’s coaching history plus his personal history, his ties to the game and matters of racial equality, were an important facet of the Raptors’ infancy.
“It was amazing listening to him tell stories and just talk about the game and life,” Thomas said.