What you didn't know about failed Sixers coach Rubin

WHEN ROY RUBIN died on Aug. 5 at the age of 87, it was unfortunate that he was remembered mostly as the guy who coached the 1972-73 76ers to a 4-47 record before being fired at the All-Star break. That team would go on to lose an NBA-record 73 games.

His reputation as a highly successful high school and college basketball coach in New York was an afterthought. After all, who in Philly would know Roy Rubin if it wasn't for 4-47?

The 4-47 was a career death sentence. He retreated to Florida and never coached another game.

Will Klein was Rubin's assistant at Christopher Columbus High in the Bronx and would succeed Rubin as head coach when Rubin departed for Long Island University. Klein, along with Rubin, founded what became the prestigious Five-Star Basketball Camp.

"Roy was an icon in New York," Klein said. "He was a highly, highly successful high school coach."

So how did an "icon," a molder of young men, all of a sudden be perceived so unfairly, according to those who knew him, as a bumbling fool, a coach who had no idea what he was doing?

Rubin was a micromanager, who cared deeply about his players and needed to know what was going on every second of their lives. It worked in high school, it worked in college but, no way it was going to work on the professional level.

Ed Hershey, who was a freshman journalism student in 1961 and arrived on the LIU campus in downtown Brooklyn at the same time as Rubin, witnessed Rubin's micromanaging firsthand.

"He saw me walking hand-in-hand with a cheerleader on campus," said Hershey, who went on to become an award-winning journalist and now resides in Portland, Ore. "Then later in the day, he and I were together and I was aware that this cheerleader had dated a couple of basketball players. Roy was able to tell me, with precision, exactly how far this girl had let me go on our first date.

"He really did believe that in order for him to have a team that was reflective of his values, he really did need to have an understanding of everything his players were doing. And obviously, that was the last thing that was going to happen to anybody in the NBA."

As a student-manager at LIU under Rubin, Jerry Donner was a protege of the coach. He followed Rubin from Columbus to the Brooklyn campus and would eventually succeed him as LIU's athletic director when Rubin left for the NBA.

"As a high school coach and college coach he was a very strict disciplinarian," said Donner, who played junior varsity basketball at Columbus. "He was almost in the Bobby Knight mold. He was a teacher first and foremost and he was a great teacher of basketball.

"I don't think he was quite ready to coach a professional team. I don't think you could tell a professional athlete that he can't drink, he can't smoke, and he's got to cut his sideburns and his mustache."

Ultimately, Rubin's niche was molding young men. Albie Grant was one of them.

He was a rock of a young man, both on the court and off it at Columbus. He was so strong that other players didn't want to go one-on-one against him. And off the court, after being told by teachers that he would never get into college, he set off to prove them wrong. After an All-America basketball career at Columbus, Grant played at LIU for Rubin, graduating with a degree and becoming the school's all-time leading scorer and rebounder. Eventually, he was drafted by the NBA's St. Louis Hawks. Grant was a teacher in the New York City school system for 30 years and even obtained a medical degree from Complutense University of Madrid.

"Roy really shaped his life," Donner recalled, "because as a freshman and a sophomore he was as crude of a basketball player as you would ever see. But Roy helped teach him how to play and he was a terrific person off the court as well as on."

What Grant did off the court really set him apart. His parents died within a short time of each other just before his junior year at Columbus, leaving Grant and his two younger siblings, both of whom had special needs, as orphans. There was always a thought that Rubin helped support the Grant kids, treating Albie like his own son. Somehow, someway, Grant made ends meet.

"Albie, after practice, would get on his bicycle, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock [on a Friday], and ride his bicycle to the old Madison Square Garden area at 50th and 7th and work all [weekend] long at Applebaum's produce store and then ride his bicycle back [a 13.5-mile trek], get an hour or 2 of sleep, get his brother and sister ready for school and then go to school," Donner said. "Mind-boggling. You're talking about a 16-, 17-year-old kid with all those responsibilities, he was amazing."

One of the demands Rubin put on his players, at both LIU and Columbus, was for them to make contact with their teachers and professors, to let them know that they were conscientious students. Grant, according to Klein, took it to another level.

"Albie was in my world history class," Klein recalled. "On the first day, Albie comes up and gives me some papers. I said, 'What's this?' He says, 'Extra-credit report.' I said, 'OK, Albie, but we haven't even started class yet.'

"He gives me an extra-credit report on the American Civil War. And this is World History II. I didn't want to discourage him so I said, 'Well, this is very, very nice but we're not going to quite get up to that this term.'

"Obviously, Rubin had trained him to work hard and get on the best side of his teacher."

Mention Rubin's name among New York high school historians and 4-47 doesn't get a mention, but 21-15 does. That was the score of the famous slowdown game in which Rubin took the air out of the ball during the 1960 public schools postseason tournament against eventual champion Boys High, featuring the great Connie Hawkins. Of course, one reason to slow down the game was because Rubin felt it was the best shot he had of winning. But there was another underlying method to his madness. One that showed how much he cared for his players.

"He held the ball because he had two players that he really wanted to get recognition, 20-point scorers Larry Kessler and Ronnie Miller," Klein said, "and he was afraid if they ran head-to-head, they might get overshadowed by Boys High. So he held the ball and it became a game that was famous for the low score that it was [still the lowest-scoring game in Public Schools Athletic League history]. And eventually his two players were named all-city. And the next year, Roy's team went to the semifinals. Those two guys graduated and they still went to the semis."

In Rubin's 9 years at Columbus, the Explorers won six borough championships.

Soon after, LIU came calling.

At LIU, most of Rubin's players were the first in their families to attend college. He was there to give them guidance and structure.

"He was able to take these city kids - and different kinds - not just raw kids from impoverishness, but very different kinds of kids," Hershey said. "Everyone of these kids that I remember him coaching in college, they had issues and problems of their own and he just coached the hell out them, and cared about them and developed a kind of ability to get the best out of them."

So, how does the man who provided so much advice and guidance to young men not realize what a dreadful situation he was stepping into with the Sixers?

"It dropped out of the sky," Hershey said of the Sixers job. "It was like finding a winning lottery on the sidewalk. How could he not take the job?"

It was reported that Rubin signed a 3-year, $300,000 contract, which was a pretty decent deal for an NBA coach in 1972, but Klein said he knows it was not nearly that lucrative.

"Forget the money aspect," Donner said. "He was a bachelor who, at the time, was married to basketball. Money was not an important factor for him at that time. He had tenure at the university; he could have taught for the rest of his life. But there were things that were changing. Downtown Brooklyn was a tough, tough place. It was getting more and more difficult to recruit. And more importantly, I don't think he had the support of the university at that time to be able to take that program to the next level."

It was time to give moving a thought.

"When you think about an opportunity to go to the next level and make more money when things are dwindling and deteriorating beneath you, it was the right move," Donner said. "In retrospect, maybe it was the wrong move, but how many people can say they coached a professional team? In the profession, there's nothing higher than that. He just took the wrong one."

Later in life, in the 1990s, Rubin was teaching middle school in South Florida. They didn't know about the 4-47. He was just Mr. Rubin, doing what he always did best: teaching young people. It was his niche.