Don Chaney

Sport: Basketball

Induction Year: 1991

Induction Year: 1991

Don Chaney didn’t have to make a decision between football and basketball.

His mother made the decision for him.

Chaney wanted to be a quarterback, but his mother learned that one of his friends lost a couple of teeth playing the game. So she marched onto the field, grabbed her son by his collar and led him off the field.

“She totally embarrassed me,” Chaney recalled with a chuckle.

Another decision Chaney didn’t have to make following an outstanding basketball career at McKinley High of Baton Rouge was attending a school that was only two blocks away from his home: Louisiana State University.

In the early 1960s, LSU and other predominantly white schools in the Deep South weren’t recruiting black athletes.

“I was considering a lot of colleges,” Chaney said. “But I’d like to have had the opportunity to consider one more. I was never given that opportunity.”

Looking back, he doesn’t know if he would’ve gone to LSU if he had been given that opportunity. The Tigers were struggling under Coach Jay McCreary at that time, and didn’t break the color barrier until 1971—two seasons after Pete Maravich completed his college eligibility and one season before the arrival of Dale Brown.

“One of my main desires was to get out of Louisiana,” Chaney recalled. “I’d never been out of state.”

Chaney, who earned Parade Magazine and Scholastic Magazine All-American honors at McKinley, didn’t go too far away. He chose the University of Houston. So did Elvin Hayes of Rayville.

“It was a very difficult transition for a lot of reasons,” Chaney said. “I had never been around white people before.”

Although Houston was integrating its basketball team a few years before other universities in this area, Jim Crow laws still applied at some places where the Cougars played. Chaney and Hayes had to eat their pregame meals on the team bus in cities where blacks weren’t allowed in restaurants.

The transition was considerably easier on the basketball court, where the freshmen dominated intra-squad games with Coach Guy Lewis’ varsity team. “After we beat them, they didn’t speak to us,” Chaney recalled.

Nicknamed “Duck” because of his long arms (his wingspan was measured at 82 inches), Chaney’s defensive prowess complemented Hayes’ offense on Houston teams that reached the Final Four two years in a row.

The highlight of their college career was a victory over UCLA and Lew Alcindor (who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the first game ever played in the Houston Astrodome. The Cougars snapped the Bruins’ 47-game winning streak in a nationally televised showdown that attracted a crowd ever to see a basketball game.

Chaney scored 1,133 points in his collegiate career and was a second-team All-American selection in 1968. The Boston Celtics selected him in the first round of the National Basketball Association draft.

It didn’t attract as much attention as the Houston-UCLA game, but Chaney and Hayes also played in the first NBA game ever played in the Astrodome—an exhibition game between the Celtics and Rockets prior to their rookie season.

Chaney spent 10 seasons in Boston, with the Celtics winning five division titles and two NBA championships in those 10 years. He was the first member of an NBA championship team to jump to the American Basketball Association.

Chaney was selected on league all-defensive teams five times.

He spent one year with St. Louis in the American Basketball Association and had brief stint with the Lakers before returning to Boston.

He went into coaching in 1980, first as an assistant with the Detroit Pistons and then as head coach with the Los Angels Clippers.

Chaney returned to Houston as head coach of the Rockets, and was selected NBA Coach of the Year in 1990-91 as the Rockets broke 60 team records. But 52 games into the 1991-92 season, he was fired one day after the Rockets blew a 24 point lead in a 124-122 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. That dropped Houston’s record to 26-26.

“Things have fallen in place for me,” Chaney said when he was inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be standing here.”

Dragging him off the football field wasn’t his mother’s only contribution to Chaney’s basketball career.

“She’s really been the key to my success,” he said. “She basically had to maintain two jobs so we could function. She gave us a little freedom, but at the same time, she had a firm hand.”

Especially when it was attached to her son’s collar.