Houston Sports - Guy V. Lewis

Guy V. Lewis

Born: March 19, 1922

Sport: Basketball (592-279 coaching record, 2-time AP Coach of the Year, Hall of Fame) 

Last week I considered him, and today I'm pulling the trigger.  Yesterday I was watching the University of Houston Cougars take apart a conference opponent and remembered how the team earned the nickname "Phi Slama Jama" in January, 1983 (coincidentally the year I was born).  That team boasted a number of Hall of Fame players, but for some reason their head coach took a long time to finally earn the same recognition.  Fortunately it did finally happen before he passed away in 2015, as the Hall of Fame corrected one of its most glaring omissions in 2013.  So this week let's do the same and not omit Guy V. Lewis from this blog, recognizing the contributions of a man who called UH home through five different decades. 

Guy V. Lewis coached most of his career at the Hofheinz Pavilion on the UH campus

The son of an oil wildcatter, also named Guy, and his wife, Ruth, Guy Lewis was born and raised in the small east Texas town of Arp.  With fewer than 1,000 residents the school was tiny but it afforded Guy the opportunity to play competitive basketball and football during his high school years.  Immediately after graduating, the United States entered World War II, and the 19 year old joined the Air Corps (now Air Force) and became a flight instructor.  While still enlisted he married Geraldine Nelson, and the couple raised three children together.  Once his service time ended, Lewis briefly attended Rice University in the GI Bill before enrolling at the University of Houston in 1946.  His timing was fortuitous as the school was just developing a basketball program and Lewis played center and forward on the very first Cougars team before graduating in 1947.  He didn't stay away for very long, as head coach Alden Pasche hired him as an assistant in 1953.  Lewis didn't leave for another 33 years. 

Upon the retirement of Alden Pasche in 1956, Guy V. Lewis (who had started including his middle initial in his name) took the reins as the UH men's basketball team head coach, and he immediately led them to three straight losing seasons.  They were the last sub-.500 years the Cougars had with Lewis in charge.  He finally broke through with a 13-12 record in 1960, the school's last year in the Mountain Valley Conference before becoming an independent program.  Lewis began to have success in the 60s as he championed an athletic style of play, and he became an important figure in civil rights when he joined UH football coach Bill Yeoman in actively recruiting black players in a segregated city.  In 1964, Elvin Hayes and Don Cheney became the first two African American members of the Cougars basketball team.  They fit perfectly into the team's style, resulting in two runs in the NCAA tournament that reached the Final Four, and other programs were forced to abandon segregation in order to remain competitive.  In 1968 Lewis worked hard to promote a match-up between his #2 Cougars and the #1 UCLA Bruins coached by John Wooden.  In what became known as the "Game of the Century" UH defeated UCLA 71-69 at the Houston Astrodome in front of 52,693 fans at the event and millions of TV viewers, an enormous milestone in the popularization of college basketball.  Lewis earned Coach of the Year honors in recognition of his team's success.  Oddly enough, the dominance of those two programs (especially Lew Alcindor) led to an NCAA ban on the slam dunk two years later, and the restriction remained in place for nine years despite its popularity with fans and regular appearance on the highlight reels. 

The 1980s saw a second rise to dominance for Guy V. Lewis and his Cougars with players like Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler leading the way.  With players embracing the slam dunk with a characteristic high-flying Lewis style UH advanced to three consecutive Final Four appearances, including back-to-back championship games in 1983 and 1984.  Unfortunately for Lewis and everyone cheering for the Cougars, despite him being honored with a second Coach of the Year award, the team came up short each time and the opportunity slipped through their fingers.  Two seasons later, Houston's 30-year head coach retired with 27 consecutive winning seasons, 14 trips to the NCAA tournament, and five Final Fours.  He remained out of the public eye during his retirement years, but was recognized as not only a quality coach but a trailblazer.  UH placed him in their Athletics Hall of Honor in 1971, then renamed their venue the "Guy V. Lewis Court at Hofheinz Pavilion".  He's been indicted in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame (1994), the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame (2007), and finally, at the age of 91, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (2013).  He was all smiles at his induction, despite being confined to a wheelchair and having limited communication after a 2002 stroke, but his daughter commented that it didn't bother him to have waited so long because he was "used to winning in overtime".  Two years later Lewis passed away at a care facility in Kyle, TX.

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