Article published May 20, 2007
IN THEIR WORDS: DON DONOHER
Dayton Flyers legend coaching at 75
Don Donoher helps out as a varsity assistant basketball coach for his grandson Kevin's team at Middletown Bishop Fenwick.
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In Their Words is a weekly feature appearing Sundays in The Blade's sports section. Sports columnist Dave Hackenberg talked with Don Donoher, the former longtime University of Dayton basketball coach who played at Central Catholic High School and UD.
Don Donoher was just 32 years old and had very little coaching experience when he was named head basketball coach at the University of Dayton.
Neither youth nor lack of familiarity held him back. In 25 years on the job, Donoher compiled a 437-275 record and coached the Flyers in 15 postseason tournaments. In back-to-back seasons, Dayton advanced to the NCAA Tournament championship game and won the NIT title.
Donoher and his UD mentor, the late Tom Blackburn, were among those inducted into the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame last night in Columbus. He added the honor to a resume that includes the Toledo City League, Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Association, and University of Dayton halls of fame.
Donoher played for Blackburn at Dayton after a prep career under coach Larry Bondy at Central Catholic High School. He grew up on Berkeley Drive on the northwest fringes of downtown Toledo near Mancy's Restaurant and the old St. Agnes Parish.
But illness deprived Donoher, then a junior, of his biggest high school moment, when the Irish made it to the state championship finals before losing to Hamilton in 1949.He fared better as a junior at Dayton, when he starred in the Flyers' late-season upset of top-ranked Seton Hall. And he fared very, very well as the Flyers' coach, although he admits he had "given no thought to coaching," after a two-year hitch in the Army.
He was selling office equipment and took a part-time job scouting opposing teams for Blackburn. That went on for six years until Blackburn hired Donoher as UD's first full-time assistant coach before the 1963-64 season. Shortly after that season, Blackburn died of cancer and Donoher was promoted to the top job.
Don Donoher was a junior on a Central Catholic basketball team which advanced to the state tournament in 1949.
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His first team won 22 games and advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. Two years later, the 1966-67 Flyers did even better, beating Western Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia Tech and North Carolina to reach the national title game, where Dayton ran into a young center named Lew Alcindor, a coach named John Wooden, and a UCLA team that won 79-64 to begin a run of seven straight national championships.
Donoher's teams played in the NCAA Tournament eight times - advancing to the Sweet 16 on five occasions - and earned berths in seven NITs, winning the title in 1968 with wins over West Virginia, Fordham, Notre Dame and Kansas. He compiled a 20-16 record in postseason play.
Donoher served as an assistant under Bob Knight with the 1984 U.S. Olympic team that won a gold medal. His coaching career at Dayton ended after the 1988-89 season - he and Blackburn combined to win 789 games over 42 years - and he later worked as a scout for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers.
Now 75, Donoher lives in the Dayton area and still dabbles in coaching as the varsity assistant at Fenwick High School in Middletown, where his grandson Kevin is a basketball player.
"I HAVE A ton of memories of Central Catholic, and first and foremost is that I had the good fortune to play for Larry Bondy and on an exceptional team. The starters my junior year were Gerry and Specs McClos-key, Gene Hickey, Al Marchall and me with Tom McHugh and Bobby Recker as the first guys off the bench. I got sick during the night before the state tournament and didn't play in either game. Specs hurt his ankle in the semifinals and couldn't play in the title game. I made it down [to Columbus] for the Saturday night game, but I could only watch. Hamilton was really good and we might not have been able to handle them regardless, although I like to think we could have. At least I've been telling myself that for the last 55-plus years.
"THERE WAS quite a connection between Central Catholic and the University of Dayton during the 1930s and '40s. My freshman and junior varsity coaches at Central had gone to Dayton and they went to bat for me with Tom Blackburn. [Near the end of the 1952-53 season, Donoher's junior year, he scored a three-point play that broke a tie and followed with the basket that iced UD's win over No. 1 Seton Hall.] Actually, we weren't very good that year. We went 16-13, but ended it on a high note with that win. Blackburn played five guys the whole way. We never subbed."
"I HAD A JOB selling office equipment and I worked part-time for coach Blackburn scouting opposing teams for six years. I probably put in more time on that than my sales job. It was good preparation, although I'd given no thought to coaching. I kind of flew blind into the job. After one year as the assistant, I was more or less given the head coaching job because Tom, literally on his deathbed, worked to make sure I got the chance. That's a true friend. Larry Bondy and Tom Blackburn were my mentors and what I'd learned from them was all I had to go on.
"WHEN TOM DIED, I don't think the university knew what to do with the situation. They gave me a one-year contract. The thing that saved me was having a 7-foot center named Henry Finkel, who later had a nine-year NBA career. He had transferred from St. Peter's in New Jersey and he was drafted by the NBA but turned it down to stay in school. The money wasn't like it is today, plus his mom wanted him to get his college degree. He actually stayed for two years and, believe me, Henry Finkel is a revered name in the Donoher household. Had he not stayed, it might have been one [year] and out for me.
"IRONICALLY, IT WAS the year after Finkel left that we went to the Final Four and to the championship game. I've always said we were a stronger team the year before. But we were still pretty good and after we got in the tournament we won one nail-biter after another. It was an unbelievable run, but then we ran into UCLA and we weren't quite up to that challenge. I might say that I wasn't up to it as a coach as far as making the overnight adjustments to play that powerful a team.
"[IN 1998, DAYTON named a state-of-the-art addition to UD Arena, for practice and training, after Donoher.] It was a real nice gesture. An alumnus put up the lead money and it was going to be named after him. But he told the university that he'd rather have my name on it than his own. That was very touching and meant a lot to me. But I was more excited when they named the floor in the arena after Tom Blackburn. I've been beating the drums for a long time for Toledo to do the same thing for Bob Nichols, who was a heck of a coach and has been a good friend for many years since we got to know each other in the Army at Fort Benning.
"THE KIDS AT Fenwick know about my background. The story got out. My grandson was the lead-in to me hanging out down there, but after he's gone I still hope to help coach there as long as my health holds up. Coaching is coaching. The talent is all relative as long as the desire to learn and improve is there. And, I'll tell you, from a coaching standpoint, the winning is just as much fun and getting beat is just as painful."
Contact Blade sports columnist
Dave Hackenberg at:
dhack@theblade.com
or 419-724-6398.
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