Ex-Tiger basketball coach Bob Vanatta dies at 98
Bob Vanatta, considered by many to be the coach who first put University of Memphis basketball in the national spotlight, died Saturday in Melbourne, Florida. Vanatta was 98.
When Vanatta accepted the then-Memphis State head coaching job in 1956 — after two seasons at Bradley — he led the Tigers to a 24-6 record, which included upset wins over No. 3 Louisville and No. 20 Western Kentucky and a trip to the National Invitational Tournament finals at Madison Square Garden in New York. In the championship game of the NIT, a prestigious event in the 1950s, the Tigers dropped a one-point decision to Vanatta’s former school, Bradley.
When the Tigers returned home from the NIT, several thousand fans greeted them at the airport, including Elvis Presley, who had routinely attended practices at the Field House during the season.
“I think you can look back and say Memphis basketball came of age when he took them to the NIT finals,” said Memphian Allie Prescott, a longtime community leader and former president and general manager of the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds. “He really put the program on the map.”
Prescott, as a 10-year-old, attended the NIT championship game with his mother and uncle, Dr. Clifton Woolley, who was a team doctor for the Tigers.
“Bob was a class act,” Prescott said. “In all circles, he was well-respected and he was well-respected in the coaching fraternity.”
In Vanatta’s six seasons as the Tigers’ coach, the team went 109-34, returning to the NIT in 1959-60 and 1960-61, but failing to reach the finals again. In Vanatta’s last season at Memphis in 1961-62, the Tigers went 15-7 and earned a spot in the NCAA tournament. He accepted the head coaching job at Missouri after the season and spent five years in Columbia.
“I’ll miss him, he was like a father to me,” said Don Duckworth, the former basketball coach at Rhodes College who played for Vanatta at Southwest Missouri State in the early 1950s. Duckworth also served as a graduate assistant on Vanatta’s first Tiger basketball team and said he remembers the stories about how the 1957 NIT team captured the city’s attention.
“Policeman said when the game was being played on television — all those black-and-white sets back then — that there was no traffic on the streets because everybody was watching the basketball game,” Duckworth said. “I think that team was instrumental in not only getting Tiger basketball on the map, but I think it led to emphasizing football, too.”
Three years after the NIT run, Tiger football began a four-year stretch in which it went 33-5-1.
Vanatta’s son, Tim, who also lives in Melbourne, said his father had battled kidney and heart problems “for a long time.”
Tim said being in Memphis represented “a very special part of my life” from the success in basketball to the meetings with Elvis. The Vanattas lived on campus the first few years.
“Elvis came to practice all the time,” he said. “I met Elvis when I was a little boy. He and Orby (Arnold, a player on the 1957 team) were good friends. They’d go to the Mid-South Fair and win a bunch of teddy bears and come back to the dorm and I’d get to go out and get my pick of the teddy bears in Orby’s trunk.”
Bob Vanatta, inducted into the school’s M Club Hall of Fame in 1989, had a lengthy and memorable career in athletics as a basketball coach and administrator. As basketball coach at Army during the 1953-54 season, he also was an assistant football coach, working on the same staff as another assistant: offensive line coach Vince Lombardi.
After a coaching career that included back-to-back NAIA national titles at Missouri State in the early 1950s, Vanatta served as athletic director at Oral Roberts University and Louisiana Tech and commissioner of several conferences, including the Ohio Valley and Atlantic Sun. He also spent time as executive director of the Independence Bowl.