A Legend Steps Down

Bob Gaillard leaves Lewis and Clark after 22 years as the winningest coach in school history.

From the outside, there is nothing that would suggest Bob Gaillard’s office is any different from any of the other athletic department offices it shares a hall with at Lewis and Clark.

Yet take one step inside and you know you have stepped into something special. The walls are plastered in enough photos, fliers, awards and memorabilia to make even the best sports museum jealous. Together, they serve as a visual road map of the many stops Gaillard has made on his 40-plus year coaching odyssey.

Beside his desk the nets from four of the titles he won at Lewis and Clark drape the matching trophies. Above the door is a framed photograph of three-time NBA champion Bill Cartwright from when he played for Gaillard at the University of San Francisco. The right wall is covered in photos from the countless clinics Gaillard has held abroad. The left wall features photos of former player, both in their playing days and afterward.

Each picture and artifact has a story and you can bet Gaillard remembers each one.

Whether its the story of a former player who is now a senior exec at Nike, the time he coached a group of Muslim girls in the Philippines or how he learned to coach in Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish – Gaillard can tell you every little detail and he can do so in a way that only the great storytellers can, making you feel as if you were right there.

“I remember all those things,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

I don’t know either, but thank god he does. I sat down with Gaillard last week to talk with him about his decision to retire after this, his 22nd season as Lewis and Clark’s coach. I had a few questions in mind, but before I could even start asking them he was telling me about how the death of Maurice Lucas, the first player he ever recruited, had forced him to think about his own mortality.

I mention that anecdote in my story in tomorrow’s Oregonian, but there were countless other stories I didn’t get to include because of space.

Gaillard's Dons were the talk of the nation with Cartwright at center.

Among my favorites was the story of how he assembled the University of San Francisco team that was ranked No. 1 for nine weeks in 1977.

The heart of that team was Cartwright, a nationally recruited center from outside Sacramento, Calif., who spurned UCLA and USC to play for Gaillard at USF. Gaillard told me how he started recruiting Cartwright as a 10th grader at Elk Grove High. Knowing that Cartwright could be the difference maker, Gaillard spent as much time as he could with Cartwright. He invited Cartwright’s high school team to play a series of games on USF’s floor. He gave the high schoolers their own lockers.

“Bob has a great way about him of making you feel special in the sense that this is where you belong,” Cartwright, now an assistant with the Phoenix Suns, remembered.

Once he’d convinced Cartwright, he turned Cartwright into his best recruiter, asking the high schooler to try and convince Winford Boynes and James Hardy, two highly sought after players that USF was the place for them. Both ended up committing and giving Gaillard a core that other coaches envied but Hardy took some extra work on Gaillard’s part.

Gaillard explained how he flew down to Long Beach every day for 19 days straight to woo Hardy and his mother. In the end Gaillard flew his wife, Sally, down to learn to make Hardy’s favorite meals so that he could have home cooking despite being hundreds of miles from home.

“In those days you could do whatever,” Gaillard explained. “You could outwork people, which gave smaller schools like USF a chance to compete.”

Gaillard thrived on the competition for other sought after players.

“I’m the type of guy who you let know what the rules are and then I’ll figure out how to be successful within the rules,” he said.

When the NCAA began to put more restrictions on recruiting at the end of the 1970s Gaillard saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time for something else.

He spent the next ten years working in the private sector and getting a PhD. By 1989 his passion for coaching had developed into an itch he needed to scratch.

“I had an identity that I was a basketball coach,” he said. “It’s just an innate thing.”

A friend recommended the Lewis and Clark position. Gaillard remembered Portland fondly from a clinic he had run. He flew up on the day applications ended and he applied.

The rest is, as they say, history. Twenty-two years later he is leaving as the winningest coach in Pioneers history and he has over 500 career wins.

Someday soon he will clean out his office and pack 50-plus years of memories into boxes to take to his Arizona home. Dinari Foreman, one of the hundreds of players Gaillard recruited and mentored, will take over as head coach and begin the task of recovering the walls and shelves in memories. Foreman knows it won’t be easy, but he also knows he will always have an ally he can turn to in Gaillard.

“He’ll be here wherever he is,” Foreman said. “He’ll be here whether he’s in the stands, on the sidelines or not.”

Bob Gaillard, longtime Lewis & Clark basketball coach, prepares to step down (Oregonian)

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A Legend Steps Down

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