March 9, 2009

PART TWO OF TWO

Waters turned to coaching after career in NBA

By Roy Mitchell

During the early years of his coaching career, Gilbertton, Ala. native Jack Waters happened upon legendary University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. Rupp was getting a shoe shine in the Atlanta airport when Waters introduced himself. Rupp, who had coached against Waters in college, remembered him.

“My position on the court would put me right next to Coach Rupp on the sideline,” Waters says. “He would try to get under my skin and tell me what a hot dog I was.”

To Waters' delight, Rupp invited him to join him for lunch. The two spent over an hour talking basketball in an airport restaurant.

During Waters' coaching career, which spanned from the 1960's into the new millennium, he coached high school teams as well as teams at Georgia State and Delta State. He was also assistant coach at Georgia Tech.

“I never thought about doing anything else,” Waters says. “I've awakened at three or four in the morning to break down tapes.”

Waters' coaching philosophy was that being on a basketball team should be a privilege, and that players with bad attitudes shouldn't infect the team. He likened such players to a tale he once heard from his grandfather.

“My granddad's best dog came down with the worms, and he had nothing to cure it,” Waters says. “He loved the dog too much to kill it, but then the other dogs caught the worms from it. Worms in dogs are like bad attitudes in people. You can't cure either one, and they spread.”

One legacy of Waters' coaching career was not so much who he wouldn't let play, but who he wanted on his team. During the racially divided 1960's, Waters was the head coach at Delta State in Mississippi. With the inspiration of the college president, Waters integrated the Delta State basketball team -- the first traditional school in the state of Mississippi to do so. Tavar Griffin and Walter Scrubs, the African-American players Waters brought on board, helped lead Delta State to a top five ranking in the nation in Division II.

“That was a great team,” Waters says.

Waters says he has seen numerous basketball changes in his lifetime.
“I would've loved to have the three-point line when I played, and I liked it as a coach, too,” he says. “It opens up the driving lane.”

Perhaps one of the biggest changes in basketball has come in the field of conditioning. According to Waters, weight-lifting was a practice almost unheard during his time as a basketball player.

“Football programs had a few free weights, but basketball players had no weight room, not even in the NBA,” he says. “We just played for conditioning. We had none of the highly developmental stuff like today.”

Waters said he and his wife, Cindy, discovered Centre a few years ago amidst their travels.

“After we discovered Weiss Lake, we put our home up for sale in Tucker, Ga.,” he says. “It's like we've been here all our life.”

Last Christmas, Waters found out from one of his children that he had been nominated to the Ole Miss All-Century basketball team.

“My son and daughter are in grad school,” he says. “They found out from a classmate of theirs who graduated from Ole Miss that I had been nominated. I might not have ever found out.”

Through the help of an Internet blog set up by his children, Waters was voted to the Rebels' All-Century basketball team in January.