USA – American basketball icon Pete Newell passes away at 93

SAN DIEGO (Olympics) - The basketball world lost a legend on Monday when former Team USA coach Pete Newell passed away at the age of 93.

Tributes have been pouring in for Newell, the gold-medal winning coach of the Americans at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

Bill Walton, a former UCLA star and NBA center with Portland and later Boston who is now a television analyst, knew Newell as a high school player in San Diego.

“He touched everybody who has ever played basketball," Walton said in the San Diego Tribune.

"He was a caring, loving, selfless man who was a coach of not just basketball but life.

“Pete Newell made you feel good about the game and he made you feel good about life…

“I can't help but feel that he's looking down and listening to all the incredibly nice and true things that are being said about him, and blushing.”

The wonderful team he led to the title in Rome with eight wins in as many games included basketball greats Oscar Robertson, Jerry West and Jerry Lucas.

Newell had previously guided San Francisco, Michigan State and California in American college basketball.

He led Cal to an NCAA title in 1959.

The national team coaching job, which he held at the age of 45, proved to be his last.

Doctors advised him to stop coaching because of the emotional toll it took on him.

He didn't leave the game, however, but instead worked as a general manager for the NBA's Rockets and Los Angeles Lakers.

His biggest coup in that respect came in the seventies when Newell engineered a trade that brought another UCLA great, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to the Lakers from the Milwaukee Bucks.

Since 1978, Pete Newell has conducted his famous Big Man Camp, with many of the game’s great centers like Walton and Shaquille O’Neal having attended.

Bobby Knight, the gold-medal winning coach at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, learned a lot from Newell and spoke about him after hearing of his passing.

“I just don’t think anyone contributed to my life in more ways than Pete Newell did,” Knight said in an interview on ESPN.

“Pete was a second father to both Jerry (West) and myself and while I think that we're awfully saddened by the passing, I think that we can both feel extremely good about the relationship that we had with this basketball giant over most of our entire careers. Nobody contributed more to the game and its history than Pete.”

Another big name in American basketball today is Dick Vitale, the great ESPN analyst.

“Obviously he was one of the greatest teachers in basketball history," Vitale said.

"A brilliant basketball mind and many of the most brilliant minds in the game today still think the world of his concepts and his teaching methods.

“His Big Man camps showed techniques that are taught all over the world. I attended several of his clinics over the years and when he gave a clinic everybody, and I mean everybody, hung on his every word.”

FIBA