Bob Kurland obit

Bob Kurland, 88, Pioneer for Basketball’s Big Men, Dies

HE WAS NOT ON THE LIST


Bob Kurland, a forerunner of basketball’s dominant “big man,” who led Oklahoma A&M to two consecutive N.C.A.A. championships in the mid-1940s, then starred for two gold-medal-winning United States Olympic teams, died on Sunday at his home on Sanibel Island, Fla. He was 88.

His family announced the death.


When Kurland, a lanky redhead, arrived on the college basketball scene in 1942, players taller than 6 feet 5 inches were viewed as oddities who could do little but tower over their opponents. Labeled the first 7-footer (though he said he was actually 6-10 ½), Kurland gained renown for his athleticism in blocking shots, rebounding and scoring — a rejoinder to the Kansas coach Phog Allen, who had ridiculed him as a “glandular goon.”


Playing for the Hall of Fame coach Hank Iba, Kurland took Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) to N.C.A.A. tournament championships in 1945 and 1946. He was voted the tournament’s most valuable player each time. A three-time all-American, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1961.


In his heyday Kurland vied for supremacy with George Mikan, DePaul’s 6-10 center, who outweighed him by 20 pounds. These celebrated giants of their era faced each other in 1945 at the old Madison Square Garden for what was seen as a symbolic national collegiate championship; Oklahoma A&M had just beaten New York University in the N.C.A.A. finals, and DePaul had won the National Invitation Tournament.


Mikan fouled out late in the first half with only 9 points. Kurland, scoring 14 points, led Oklahoma A&M to a 52-44 victory in what was a wartime contest benefiting the Red Cross.


Kurland was credited with giving national exposure to the slam dunk, often called the duffer when he was stuffing the ball. But he was known chiefly for his defensive presence. The goaltending rule, adopted by college basketball in 1944 and still in effect, was designed primarily to keep Kurland — but Mikan as well — from swatting away shots as the ball headed downward to the basket.


Mikan ultimately overshadowed Kurland, leading the Minneapolis Lakers to five N.B.A. championships as the marquee figure in the professional game.


Viewing the business world as promising a secure future, Kurland shunned the pros and joined the Phillips Petroleum Company of Bartlesville, Okla., as an executive. But he kept playing, leading the United States Olympic basketball team to gold medals in 1948 in London and in 1952 in Helsinki, Finland, and taking the Phillips 66ers to three national Amateur Athletic Union basketball championships.


Kurland, who retired from the Phillips company in the mid-1980s, is survived by his wife, Barbara; two sons, Alex and Ross; two daughters, Dana Warner and Barbara Rintala; and seven grandchildren. The family also had a home in Bartlesville.


Hailing from a school known as the Aggies and nicknamed Foothills by an Oklahoma A&M publicity man, Kurland seemed the embodiment of the country boy when he played at the Garden in 1945. But as he told The Daily Oklahoman 50 years later, he had grown up in the St. Louis area.


“I was no more from the foothills than I was from Cambodia,” he said.


Robert Albert Kurland was born on Dec. 23, 1924, in St. Louis and grew up in Jennings, Mo., a suburb of the city. His basketball skills were raw in high school, but he towered over everyone else — he was 6-6 as a freshman — and after the armed forces deemed him too tall for wartime duty, Iba took a chance on him.


As Kurland told The Tulsa World in 2007: “He said: ‘I’ve never seen anyone like you before. I don’t know if you can play basketball or not, but if you come to school here, enroll and stay eligible, I’ll see that you get a college education.’ ”


At Iba’s insistence, Kurland jumped rope for 30 minutes after each practice to improve his agility, and he gained a knack for swatting opponents’ shots off the rim. His teammates would then bring the ball downcourt, run a weave and look to feed him the ball.


Kurland was voted college basketball’s most outstanding player by the Helms Foundation for the 1945-46 season, when he led the nation in scoring with 643 points, for an average of 19.5 a game, when there was no shot clock and the game was played at a relatively slow pace. (Mikan averaged 23.1 points but played in nine fewer games.)


But scoring did not come naturally for Kurland. “He worked hard to become good,” Iba once said. “I can remember one specific afternoon when he must have tried 600 hooks with his left hand. The first 100 didn’t hit either the rim or the backboard. The next 100 didn’t go in. After that he started to connect.”


In February 1946, Kurland scored 58 points against St. Louis University, victimizing the 6-8 freshman Ed Macauley, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Boston Celtics and the St. Louis Hawks.


Macauley kept a newspaper clipping from that game in a billfold throughout his pro career, he told The Tulsa World in 1996. “Every time I thought I needed to be humble,” he said, “I would look at that box score and remember I was the guy who held Bob Kurland to 58 points.”