Center helped Cal win ’59 NCAA basketball title
Darrall Imhoff, the starting center on Cal’s 1959 NCAA championship team and an NBA player for 12 seasons, died Friday evening near his home in Bend, Ore. He was 78.
Friends said Mr. Imhoff was playing miniature golf when he had a heart attack and collapsed. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He leaves behind his wife, Susan, whom he met at Cal, and five children, along with a “slew” of grandchildren, said Ned Averbuck, a teammate of Mr. Imhoff ’s for the 1958-59 and 1959-60 seasons.
As success stories go, Mr. Imhoff ’s ranks among the highly improbable. When he showed up at Cal as a forestry major in the fall of 1956, head coach Pete Newell had no idea who he was. “He came into the office and introduced himself,” said Newell’s assistant at the time, Rene Herrerias, in a Sunday interview. “Pete didn’t know a thing about him, except that he was tall (6-foot-10), so what the heck, he put Darrall on the freshman team.”
Earl Shultz, a fellow freshman who went on to play on the 1958-59 team, immediately dismissed Mr. Imhoff as any kind of player. “I kept telling
Ned, how the hell did they even let this guy in school? He’s terrible,” Shultz said Sunday. “He can’t jump, can’t stuff, can’t shoot — he isn’t any good. And as the year went on, he was still terrible. I could not understand why they gave him a uniform.”
The turning point came in a game at USC in Mr. Imhoff ’s sophomore season. “Big, tough guy named Jim Hanna went up for a hook shot, and Darrall sent it all the way to halfcourt,” Shultz recalled. “It’s like a light went on. That’s when Pete knew he had something. He had Bob McKeen (a former Cal forward) work with Darrall every day in practice, working on positioning, center moves, little hook shots. And from that point on, Darrall was just kickin’ ass and takin’ numbers. I really think it was Pete’s greatest coaching job of all time.”
Newell recalled that Mr. Imhoff “could run all day, like a deer, and he became our Bill Russell. Not quite that good — nobody was — but he dominated people with his rebounding, shot blocking and passing.” Herrerias described him as “the heart of our team, no question. Without him, I don’t think we could have done such great things in the tournament.”
Not that everyone saw the beauty of Mr. Imhoff ’s game. “The kind of players Pete had, they might not be the material I’d pick,” said UCLA’s John Wooden in a 1990 interview. “Imhoff, for example. He wasn’t a guy you’d figure would carry you. But he was great for Pete.”
As a junior, Mr. Imhoff averaged 11.3 points and 11 rebounds on the Cal team that stunned the college basketball world, beating Cincinnati and West Virginia in what later became known as the Final Four. He had 22 points and 16 rebounds in the semifinal against Cincinnati, led by the great Oscar Robertson, and hit the game-clinching basket — tipping in his own miss with 17 seconds left — against West Virginia and Jerry West.
“If Darrall doesn’t hit that shot and West Virginia gets the ball, it would have been the end of us,” Newell said in a 1988 interview. “We all knew West would score if he got his hands on the ball.”
Mr. Imhoff wound up being a teammate of West’s on the 1960 Olympic team, coached by Newell and featuring a number of future NBA greats. Mr. Imhoff also joined West on the Lakers for four seasons (196468). His Cal teammates, though, focused on Mr. Imhoff ’s original NBA team, the Knicks, and a single game in particular: Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point night for the Philadelphia Warriors in Hershey, Pa., on March 2, 1962.
Mr. Imhoff was the Knicks’ starting center that night.
“Luckily for Darrall, there are no photographs from that night,” joked Averbuck. “A bunch of us had a telegram waiting for him when he got back to New York. Said, ‘Congratulations — we’re all so proud of you. Particularly your defense.’ ”
Two nights later, the teams met again at Madison Square Garden. “Darrall fouled out with about two minutes to go in the game, and the Knicks won,” Averbuck said. “He told us, ‘I got a standing ovation for guarding Wilt. Held him to 54 points.’ ”
Newell was proud to proclaim that all of the players on the ’59 championship team graduated, although it took Mr. Imhoff a while. “He got waylaid by his pro career, and he was just six units shy of graduation,” Averbuck said. “Well, 33 years later, he got that degree. Typical Pete: Darrall phones him with the news, and Pete goes, ‘You know what? I’m proud of you. I had you down for 40 years at least.’ ”
Mr. Imhoff had his best NBA seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers. He averaged 13.6 points and 9.5 rebounds in 1969-70, including a 28-point game against Phoenix. The previous season, facing the last of Russell’s championship teams with the Boston Celtics, Mr. Imhoff averaged 18.2 points and 16.4 rebounds in a five-game series loss in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Mr. Imhoff was inducted into the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2009, as Cal celebrated the 50th anniversary of the ’59 title, his No. 40 jersey was retired.