Saulsbury went from painfully shy to being a winner

I called the great Connecticut high school coach about Donovan Clingan and got stories about Jimmy Piersall and Haile Selassie, too.

“The Lion of Judah,” Bob Saulsbury said.

This was going to be an interesting phone call.

Still sharp at 92 and forever a gentleman, he will make the short trip to the Floyd Little Athletic Center on Wednesday for the sixth annual event named in his honor: The Saulsbury Invitational. He remains honored and a little uncomfortable with the attention. He spent much of the first half of his life battling shyness and humility never abandoned Bob Saulsbury.

“Everything that came my way is due to my players,” he said. “I couldn’t even dunk a ball. I tried.”

After a 4 p.m. tip-off between Career and Whitney Tech, No. 3 Windsor will meet Hillhouse. At 8 p.m. unbeaten No. 1 Bristol Central, led by the UConnbound Clingan, will face Wilbur Cross.

“I’ve heard an awful lot of glowing things about (Clingan), but I haven’t seen him play beyond a few clips,” Saulsbury said. “I hadn’t known his mom passed away a few years ago and he wanted to stay at Bristol Central in honor of his mom who had been a tremendous player.”

The 7-foot-2 senior turned down prep school offers. With games against East Catholic at Mohegan Sun, Springfield Central at the HoopHall Classic, and the Saulsbury Invitational, coach Tim Barrette has made good on his promise to find Clingan top opponents at bigger venues. A game with Windsor scheduled for the XL Center was moved to Bristol.

Saulsbury knew all about

big games in and out of state during his days at Wilbur Cross. John Thompson and St. Anthony’s of Washington D.C. Home and away with DeWitt Clinton of the Bronx. Countless battles with Hartford Public and on and on.

“When I say I was at the right place at the right time, none of it happens without Red Verderame,” Saulsbury said. “He brought me in when it was not fashionable, when Blacks couldn’t get their foot in the door.”

Verderame hired Saulsbury in 1961 as an assistant at Wilbur Cross, making him the first African-American coach in New Haven history. Five years in when Verderame gave up coaching, Saulsbury had no real aspirations as a head coach.

“I told Red I’m applying for the vacancy if you don’t have anyone in mind,” Saulsbury said. “He said he did. Porky Vieira. I know Porky. I didn’t feel badly. When I was leaving, he said, ‘If Porky doesn’t get the position, you are my man.’ I felt great. I felt, ‘Through Red Verderame, Blacks get a shot.’ ”

Verderame would call. Vieira couldn’t take the job because he wasn’t in the school system.

“You’re my man,” Verderame, who won five state titles at Wilbur Cross, repeated to him.

“I didn’t really want the position,” Saulsbury said. “I just wanted to see if Red was the person I knew.”

He was. Verderame told him to get the application in fast. He called Saulsbury’s wife to hurry him.

“She got after me, ‘Red stuck his neck out for you,’ ” Saulsbury said. “I said, ‘Then why don’t you fill out the application?’ ”

So that’s what his late wife Ilene did.

“I signed my name,” Saulsury said. “She should have been the coach.”

Salisbury won 497 games and nine state championships over 28 years at Wilbur Cross. He had 18 all-state and 10 all-Americans. Soup Campbell, Earl Kelley, Jiggy and Super John Williamson. Great ones. Saulsbury ran off winning streaks the way Geno Auriemma has done with the UConn women. Although he likes to say he thinks his 1968 team was his best, the 1974 team was crowned the No. 1 team in the nation in the Washington Post poll.

“That team could do no wrong,” Saulsbury said.

That team beat DeWitt Clinton at home earlier in the season. DeWitt Clinton went out West, returned East, was beating top teams across the country. Now, folks agreed, we’ll see how it goes at its bandbox. It was over by halftime. Wilbur Cross eased to a 22point victory.

“We were marvelous,” Saulsbury said. “After the game their coach made this statement that happily blew my mind, ‘Wilbur Cross is the best basketball team in the world.’ ”

The New York Post blared it in a headline.

So here he was on the phone the other day talking about Hartford Public coach John Cuyler and how their families went on vacations together and avoided talking about their epic battles. How he held John Williamson out of the fourth quarter once against Public when he already had scored 39 points and has long felt he did Super John an injustice.

“Hartford Public beat us twice one year and we came back to beat them in the state finals,” Saulsbury said. “John (Cuyler) called me after we won to congratulate me and I’ve often wondered to myself, would I have been that gracious? Would I?

“I tried to learn from people. I remember watching Frank McGuire after he lost a very big game with Carolina. Frank was always suave, but I saw a lot of referee discrepancies in that game. In the interview afterward, he was never bitter. He took it. I said, ‘If I ever get in that situation, I’m going to do a Frank McGuire.’ I’m not going to make a public display of myself and blame the referees. I’ll never do that.”

John Thompson did in February 1970. Before he went on to coaching immortality at Georgetown, Thompson had the topranked team in the nation with St. Anthony’s. Well, they ran into Super John and Saulsbury’s Governors. With Cross up eight and 2:47 left, a St. Anthony’s player was called for a personal and technical foul. Thompson went ballistic. He got a technical, another technical, pulled his team off the floor, got on the bus and went back to D.C.

“I was angry with his actions,” Saulsbury once told the late Chip Malafronte. “I always felt that to teach young men how to play the game the right way, you have to accept the decisions of the referee, like it or not. What kind of example are you setting when you pull your team off the floor?”

Saulsbury called himself “a Mother Hen.” He said he wanted his players to represent the school and the city the best way possible. No Afros. Clean shaven. Shirts and ties every day of the season. He’d keep an eye out on schoolwork and on the street. They didn’t call him coach. They called him Mr. Saulsbury. He wanted to craft gentlemen.

“I wrote out rules and regulation parents signed so there would be no repercussions,” Saulsbury said. “Some didn’t like it. They thought I had too much autonomy over their children. But I’d always care for them and fight for them as long as they were doing the right thing.”

While he said he couldn’t dunk, Saulsbury, twice was all-state and all-New England, did lead Hillhouse to three state titles in the late 1940s. He played big games in the old New Haven Arena. He played against Piersall, who led powerhouse Leavenworth High of Waterbury to the 1947 New England basketball title, and whose battle as a major-leaguer with mental illness became the subject of the movie “Fear Strikes Out.”

“Jimmy and I became friends,” Salisbury said. “He was a tremendous competitor. Incredible tenacity.”

Verderame accepted several coaching assignments as a foreign service officer with the U.S. Dept. of State. One day he had a question for Saulsbury.

“Would you like to go to Africa?” Saulsbury said. “Africa? I hadn’t even been to West Haven.

“You might not know it now, but I was always painfully shy. It was one of the reasons I didn’t want to be a head coach. I didn’t want to be interviewed. I’d break out in sweat. Really. It got to a point where I thought I had to get some help. I was fearful of speaking.”

And now here he was with a group of Kenyans going into Ethiopia, representing the U.S., about to meet Emperor Haile Selassie.

“I couldn’t get over it,” Saulsbury said. “Here’s one of the great personalities in history. And I’m some kid from New Haven.” What happened?

“We had champagne and cookies.”

Saulsbury played at West Virginia State and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame. He’s among the first class of inductees in the New England Basketball Hall of Fame. Wilbur Cross named its gym after him. In 2017, he was nominated for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Yet it was what he held in his hand that brought him to tears on this phone call.

Although he once turned down a full-time job from LSU coach Dale Brown, Saulsbury used to coach during summers in Louisiana. A few months back, he received a long letter in the mail. It was from an attorney in New Orleans who had won an award, and in his speech he had credited two people for having a major impact on making him a better person:

His dad and Bob Saulsbury.

“He was a high school kid, it was for a summer, and it was over 50 years ago,” Saulsbury said. “Think about that. Something so unexpected coming back to you all these years later …”

It is called karma. It was in that moment, Bob Saulsbury realized the impact of a coach.