Athletic director Caine makes Hall of Fame
Retired Elkhorn resident will be enshrined Monday
By JEFF CORDES
Express Staff Writer
With our media-saturated culture, you hear a lot these days about
athletes—often good, sometimes bad.
You don’t hear much about the people who make the schedules, pay the
bills and provide equipment for athletic programs around the country.
Those are the athletic directors.
John E. Caine, 75, who retired to Elkhorn eight years ago with his wife
Marilyn, has been one of the most reputable athletic directors in the U.S.
For 22 years, during some of the biggest growth of collegiate programs
including the advent of Title IX, Caine guided Division 1 athletic programs up and down
the West Coast.
He started at Cal State-Fullerton from 1968-72. It was San Jose State from
1972-76, the University of Oregon from 1976-81 and, finally, the Univ. of
California-Irvine from 1983 until his retirement in 1990.
Caine has been an important member of rule-making committees for the
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), Big West Conference and Pac Ten
Conference.
The sport that brought Caine to his chosen profession was basketball.
As a lanky 6-2, 150-pound guard, he played it growing up in Kentucky and
going to college in California. He coached the game for 16 years in California, Minnesota
and Illinois.
He grew up watching the great teams of Adolph Rupp in Kentucky.
First-hand, he has seen the greatest coach in college basketball history, John Wooden at
UCLA.
Indeed, Caine was a member of Wooden’s first team at UCLA.
Sports have been Caine’s life.
He’s at that point in life where honors are bestowed.
On Monday, June 12, Caine will be inducted into the Hall of Fame of
National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA).
Enshrinement will take place at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in
Orlando, Fla. during the NACDA’s 35th annual convention.
Caine will probably play a little golf and renew many friendships. He is a
people person, like many athletic directors who rely on networking, and he appreciates the
honor.
"It’s a darn good way to finish a career," he said last
week.
A great sports town
There are towns in America, and there are great sports towns.
Growing up along the Ohio River in Ashland, Ky. was a matter of growing up
in a great sports town in a great basketball state, Caine recalled.
Ashland was a hard-boiled railroad and factory city, fifth-largest in
Kentucky at one time, that was surrounded by farming and tobacco growing. It’s a
southern city, upstream from Cincinnati, where Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio meet.
John Caine’s father, a World War I veteran, was a railroader for the
Chesapeake & Ohio.
In 1924, the year John was born, Ashland Oil was founded as a small,
eastern Kentucky refinery. In 76 years since, it has become a $13 billion diversified
energy and chemical company. For 51 years it has owned Valvoline, the oldest brand motor
oil.
The industries gave stabilization to Ashland, so its people could
concentrate on their first love—sports.
As the Roaring Twenties came to a close, Caine’s high school went
undefeated in football for five or six years. It won the national high school basketball
championship in 1928, which at that time was held in the University of Chicago field
house.
Winning became a tradition.
"You were supposed to carry on," said Caine. "All we did
was go from one sport to another. The town was very receptive to sports. We had
practically no delinquency problem."
Caine, a righthanded contact hitter, played baseball in the spring and
enjoyed patrolling the outfield. "I loved baseball because it was so much easier than
basketball," he said.
Basketball was much harder, and more was expected of Kentucky kids.
It was Kentucky, after all.
Caine said, "I wouldn’t go as far as saying that basketball is a
religion in Kentucky, but it’s close. People are extremely interested in the
sport."
He was an average high school basketball player on a good team his senior
year. But the country had other things on its collective mind in 1942, when Caine
graduated from Paul Blazer High School.
Caine entered the U.S. Army in March 1943 and served in France and the
European theater through Feb. 1946, in the armored division.
He returned to the University of Louisville and played college basketball
for Peck Hickman in 1946-47. "Louisville’s success as a college basketball
program all started with Peck Hickman," he said.
Basketball was quite different a half century ago, said Caine.
"It was more of a passing game—screening and blocking, more
organized and less individual," he said. "I saw the great Rupp teams of the day.
On offense, once the ball went in, it didn’t come out that often. The big guys
didn’t want to give it up."
Where a man ends up living is usually determined by his heart.
That was certainly the case with John Caine.
His Army buddy Herb Bergen had a sister named Marilyn who lived in
Fullerton, Ca. John transferred to UCLA to be nearer to Marilyn, and they’ve now been
married 52 years.
At UCLA, Caine was a redshirt basketball player on the first Bruins team
coached by now-legendary coach Wooden. It was an education.
"You have to remember that John Wooden was a three-time All-American
at Purdue. He was low key, but very intense and competitive," Caine said.
Wooden’s coaching methods were grounded in simplicity, Caine said.
Caine said, "You had to be in better physical condition than your
opponent, and you had to keep it simple—keep the offense simple and the defense
simple.
"He drilled and drilled and drilled until you reacted the way the
defense reacted, and you outran your opponent.
"Wooden always had success, but the players who made him a great
coach were fellows like Alcindor and Walton. That was the thing about Wooden. He knew what
to do with great players. He was able to get great play out of great players."
Great coaches are always motivators and excellent teachers, Caine said. He
got to know Pete Newell, the legendary Univ. of California-Berkeley basketball coach, and
Caine met Bobby Knight of Indiana Univ. when Knight was visiting Newell.
"Newell’s stuff was simple, particularly offensively. His system
was sound. Knight is a good teacher as well. It’s his technique and style that have
gotten him into trouble," Caine said.
Back in his first year at Louisville, Caine thought he might go into
business education. By the time he finished his undergraduate degree at UCLA in 1950, he
decided he wanted to be a teacher and coach.
He earned his Masters degree from UCLA in 1952, shortly after taking his
first coaching job (head boys’ basketball, assistant in baseball and football) at
Bellflower High School in Bellflower, Ca.
"I was a World War II veteran and married. I had to get out and go to
work," he said.
Caine coached basketball for 16 years—seven at Bellflower in the Long
Beach area, then another seven at Cerritos Community College in Norwalk, Ca.
"At Cerritos we had very competitive basketball teams. We were
playing good, strong community college programs and it was tough," Caine said.
He obtained his doctorate in education from the Univ. of Northern Colorado
in Greeley in 1966, then coached basketball for two more years—at Lea College in
Minnesota and at Eastern Illinois Univ.
Getting the doctorate in education was one of the most important moves in
his professional life, he said.
"It opened up new vistas and challenges," Caine said. "I
had coached for 15 years, and I was getting to the point where I couldn’t relate to
the players as well as I once had. The kids were younger. There was more and more of a
gap."
Caine’s first administrative job was director of athletics at Cal
State-Fullerton in 1968. For the next 22 years he fought many battles and raised a lot of
money.
"If you’re the athletic director or the president of the
university, your number-one job is to raise money. It’s always a struggle. You have a
budget and you try to meet it. It’s a heckuva challenge every year," he said.
Having a background as an athlete and coach helps in the competitive world
of financing college athletics. Caine said, "You take every edge you can that is
legal and legitimate. It’s every bit a 365-day-a-year job."
Caine added, "I tried to stand for things that are right about
college athletics. It does so much for young people."
His work in professional organizations includes Big West and Pac 10
long-range planning committees and basketball committees, as well as Caine’s
membership in the NACDA, dating way back to 1969.
Caine is the only two-time member of the NACDA executive committee. He has
chaired numerous convention sessions and panels at the annual NACDA conventions. Next week
he’ll receive the group’s top honor—Hall of Fame enshrinement.
Florida is always a desirable destination, but it will be tough to leave
Sun Valley’s beautiful late-spring weather. John and Marilyn Caine have become very
fond of Idaho.
He said, "Marilyn has always been interested in it, since seeing the
movie It Happened in Sun Valley.
"I was on the NCAA Tennis Committee about 1987, and we met at
Elkhorn. We liked it. After I retired in 1990, we were living on the campus at UC-Irvine,
and we decided to have Christmas in Sun Valley. We got condos out at Dollar, and liked it
so much we decided to return.
"We’ve been here since 1992, living close to Elkhorn
Village."
Caine has stayed busy with volunteer work in the valley.
He’s a member of the Ketchum-Sun Valley Rotary Club. For the past
five-and-a-half years, he’s been on the session at the Presbyterian Church of the Big
Wood in Ketchum, helping to manage and guide the church.
Caine is also a member of the citizen’s committee involved in the
proposed public golf course up Quigley Canyon east of Hailey.
In September, he’ll return to his roots, traveling back to Ashland
for a reunion of the 1941-45 wartime classes at Paul Blazer High School.
The Caines have three children and two grandchildren.
Cinda Caine Wight, a Colorado College graduate, is a lawyer in northern
California near the Oregon border. Her daughter Lindsey is a senior in high school.
Nancy Caine Kreisler, a 1974 University of Redlands graduate, is a college
professor in southern California. An animal behaviorist, Nancy specializes in monkeys. Her
daughter Alison is a sixth-grader.
John Chipman "Chip" Caine followed in his father’s
basketball footsteps, playing backcourt for UC-Davis. He earned his doctorate in clinical
psychology and is branching into the cyber world of technology in the Bay Area, at San
Mateo.
