Newell’s camp reborn, for boys and girls

Bill McClintock was a basketball player without talent, or so the skeptics agreed. A rugged frontcourt type, he stood just 6-foot-4, wasn’t particularly quick, and didn’t have a signature shot. He was 22 and a bit overweight when he showed up at Cal in 1958, three years out of high school and with a juniorcollege season in Monterey behind him.

“I thought he was some football player coming out of a beer parlor,” coach Pete Newell once recalled. “He looked like Bronko Nagurski.”

By the end of the ’58-59 season, McClintock was a sophomore starting forward on Newell’s championship team. He held that position in 1960, when the 28-2 Bears lost the title game to Ohio State. And he finished his senior season as an all-conference and all-coast selection, averaging 15 points and 10 rebounds per game.

More than anything, this remarkable success story was about footwork, a hallmark of Newell’s philosophy. Clever, well-timed footwork can transport players well beyond their dreams — and McClintock couldn’t wait to pass on his precious knowledge.

Over the years, McClintock became a fixture at Newell’s famed “Big Man’s Camp.” Prior to Newell’s death in 2008, the two of them set up tall-women’s camps in various regions. And McClintock presses on, now focused on kids who haven’t been taught the fundamentals so essential to unlocking their potential.

On April 7-8, a three-hour session Friday night and two three-hour sessions on Saturday, McClintock will host his “America’s Premier Camp” for boys and girls ages 12-19 at Menlo School in Atherton (www. frontlinebasketball.com; contact McClintock at 831-233-8760 for prices and details). It’s just one of a series of McClintock-organized camps, featuring a staff of notable coaches; the great Jennifer Azzi, a star at Stanford and on the U.S. Olympic team, will be a guest instructor on Saturday afternoon from 11:30-12:30.

“This is something I promised Pete I would do,” McClintock said this week. “The fundamentals of the game are disappearing. Kids are so skilled and athletic these days, bigger and faster than before, but you rarely see good footwork.

“As Pete always said, in a 32-minute high-school game, you spend about 16 on offense. You may have the ball in your hands for three or four minutes total. But you play the whole 32 with your feet.”

As with Newell’s camp, one described as revelatory by the likes of Bill Walton, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, James Worthy and Bernard King over the years, the sessions are about positioning, passing, getting open without the ball, shot technique, rebounding, seeing your options a split-second ahead of time, avoiding the illadvised pass. That’s exactly how Newell’s Cal teams got past the likes of Oscar Robertson and Jerry West in the glory days, but such fundamentals are rarely so precisely executed these days.

“I see kids in high-school or AAU ball in offenses with no continuity,” McClintock said. “I see everything based around the three-point shot, when a welltimed pass into the low post can really open up the floor — or get you a good shot inside. Good defense comes and goes. Kids see the pros turning the ball over like it doesn’t even matter, up to 20 times a game, so they get pretty careless.

“These are things we work on. We show the kids 40-50 moves and give ’em a DVD to take home. If they take just two or three of those moves — maybe it’s about reading the defense and always having a countermove — and things become habit, that’s when it can make a difference.”

The essence of Pete Newell’s camp wasn’t a superstar center fine-tuning his inside game, but rather the life-changing experiences of Kermit Washington, Wayne Cooper, Kiki Vandeweghe, Chris Dudley, Tyrone Hill and many others crediting Newell for maximizing their NBA experience. Vandeweghe once said, “A lot of players are quicker than me, infinitely stronger and can jump higher. But very few of them can guard me.”

Something to think about for basketball-minded kids with a plan.