| Where legends played | |
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Newport Beach’s greatest basketball legend does not involve the names Jordan or Johnson, Bird or Chamberlain - or, for that matter, either of the future NBA stars who once played for Newport Harbor High School. No, the most enduring tale is the night, somewhere in the mid-1940s, when the local Newport team defeated the Harlem Globetrotters.
During Newport Harbor High’s early days, the famous basketball clowns visited the school almost every year, wowing the locals with their antics on the court - and, in the process, beating the home team. One year, as the story goes, Newport Harbor coach Ralph Reed put together a team of his former players to take on the Globetrotters when they came to town. But through some miscommunication, no one bothered to tell the locals that they were supposed to lose the game. That didn’t sit too well with the Globetrotters, but it gave Newport Beach a night to remember. “It got angry,” remembered Don Cantrell, a 1950 graduate of Newport Harbor who witnessed the game. “Those Globetrotter players, a lot of them were really getting hot-tempered because the Newport Harbor guys were doing things better than the Globetrotters, like bouncing the ball off their heads and rolling it between their legs.” Bud Attridge, one of the Newport Harbor players that night, said that Reed enlisted the young players because he was tired of looking bad on the court. In previ-ous years, the Globetrotters had often played against the school’s faculty, few of whom could shoot over the shoulder from mid-court. The Newport Harbor victory, apparently, turned out to be a one-time affair. “From then on, they started bringing their own team with them that they played against,” Attridge said. Standing across from the closed Robins Hall, surrounded by construction signs and portable classrooms, the Ralph K. Reed Gymnasium is one of the historical landmarks on a campus with plenty of them. Newport Harbor High has undergone its share of changes over the last few years - and, if a school renovation bond passes in November 2005, may undergo twice as many - but one building that has weathered the years well is the old gym, which once housed the likes of George Yardley, Paul Neumann, and, yes, the Harlem Globetrotters. When Newport Harbor High opened its doors in 1930, it was the only high school for miles in what then amounted to a rural small town. Irvine Avenue consisted of a dirt road with farm fields on either side; crews built the famous clock tower on Robins Hall so that the school would be visible from a distance. Fashion Island, South Coast Plaza and most of the attractions in Newport-Mesa were still decades away, but Reed, the first coach hired at the school, had no trouble making the gym a local center of activity. “Ralph Reed was a coach and he should have been a carny,” said Don Donaldson of the class of 1941. “He was a genius at making something out of nothing.” In those early days of the school, Reed coached the basketball team and also ran physical education classes every Monday. On rainy days, he corralled the boys in the gym for three-minute boxing matches. Newport Harbor, back then, belonged to the Sunset League, an all-Orange County group that included Anaheim, Fullerton, Santa Ana, Orange and Huntington Beach - the last the site of the annual championship basketball tournament. Reed’s greatest legacy at the school, though, was the athletic carnival that he ran every year in the Newport Harbor gym. During the 1930s and 1940s, Reed assembled hundreds of his students to put together lengthy extravaganzas featuring boxing, rope-climbing, tug-of-war, pillow fights and other competitions, staged around the gym like a three-ring circus. With no television and few theaters nearby, the carnivals proved one of the top attractions in town. In 1945, when they resumed after a wartime hiatus, the gym couldn’t even accommodate all the visitors. The Newport-Balboa News-Times, on March 20, 1945, reported the scene: “Although the carnival opening was not slated until 7 o’clock, several hundred persons jammed the entrance to the gym long before the ticket-taker had arrived with his necessary equipment. This affair, blacked-out since the war, has always been a popular one with Newport Harbor folk who know that the combination of Ralph Reed and his students spells a bang-up affair. “The main purpose of the program was not perfected performance but rather mass participation, according to the printed program, but the 29 acts with their 300 participants gave a top amateur show that was entirely satisfying to the most discriminating spectator.” It was around that time, too, that Newport Beach’s most famous athletic son was making shows of his own at the Newport Harbor gym. George Yardley, who would go on to set the single-season NBA scoring record, be named to six all-star teams and eventually join the Hall of Fame, was on the school’s B basketball team in 1945, but his senior year on varsity hinted at the laurels to come. Attridge, whom Yardley later cited as one of his heroes growing up, said the future NBA superstar hardly looked like one when he joined Newport Harbor basketball as a freshman. A mere 14 years old when he started the ninth grade, Yardley was younger than many of his classmates, but his prowess on the court soon made up for that. “He was younger than most students, so he was pretty weak as a freshman,” Attridge said. “He peaked later because he was so young. He could have probably still been in high school when he was going to Stanford.” In 1946, Yardley dominated Newport Harbor’s varsity basketball team, making the Sunset League All-Stars and nearly leading his squad to the championship. In the 1950s, he went on to star for the Fort Wayne and Detroit Pistons and the Syracuse Nationals before retiring after a seven-year career. While Yardley was tearing up the NBA, another rising star emerged back at his alma mater. Paul Neumann, who graduated in 1955 and went on to NBA fame with the Nationals, Philadelphia 76ers and San Francisco Warriors, first turned heads in his two varsity seasons for the Sailors. “He was probably the easiest player I ever coached as far as listening, understanding, doing things asked of him,” said Jules Gage, the Newport Harbor basketball coach in the 1950s. “I think he was the first ballplayer I had who really perfected what I call the little jump shot. He amazed me and amazed everybody with this ability - to rise up that high in the air and shoot over his opponents.” Neumann went on to play six seasons in the NBA, retiring in 1967. In 1963, his second year, he led the league in games played with 80. The athletic world at Newport Harbor High has changed somewhat since Yardley and Neumann’s day, even if the gym has stayed largely the same. Back in the 1950s, the small gym on campus, which contains no bleachers, was known as the “girls’ gym”; today, administrators bluster at that term. The carnivals vanished decades ago as Newport Beach and Costa Mesa expanded around them. The late Ralph Reed, whose shows once highlighted a school in the middle of a dirt field, is now the namesake of the gym that he helped to make famous. And despite the superstars who have played at Newport Harbor, Globetrotters and all, many of the school’s older alumni remember a time when sports were less fixated on winning. “We weren’t prima donnas,” Attridge explained. “We were just playing on a team. When we won the CIF deal in the Huntington Beach tournament, most of the school was down at the Rendezvous because a big band was down there that night. It was different than it is now. “We got a six-inch trophy at the Huntington Beach tournament, made of Plaster of Paris. Now they would give you a trophy that would be four feet tall. |
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