A lasting legacy
Newport News High coach Julie Conn, who
died about 25 years ago, became legendary for his tough love, charity,
success — and temper.
October 5, 2008
Julie
Conn was angry, as was often the case. He took the basketball and faked
a pass directly at Jimmy Seward's face. He
might have been trying to frighten away the smile that was Seward's
typical reaction to the volcanic tirades of the legendary Newport News
High School basketball coach.
But as Conn faked, the ball slipped from his hands, hitting Seward in
the face and bloodying his nose.
Conn became angrier.
"He got mad at Jimmy for not ducking," said Billy
Leggette, who played with Seward on Conn's state championship
teams at Newport News in 1951 and '52. "Coach Conn just had that kind of
temper, where he had to get all over you and chew you out, and I
remember he'd tear T-shirts off of Jimmy.
"But he was just trying to make him a better basketball player. Coach
Conn loved Jimmy. He loved all of us. Ten minutes after an outburst,
he'd say something that would make you want to do anything for him."
Said Doug Dickinson: "The man knew how to
love."
"He would cuss you one minute and kiss you the next," said Dickinson,
who won six team and 20 individual track and field titles under Conn.
"All you'd remember was the kiss."
Conn's boys had not forgotten as they reflected recently on their coach,
who died 25 years ago in September. To them, Conn epitomized tough love
long before the phrase came into vogue.
It is unthinkable today that parents would allow a man to roam the halls
of a high school, cigar in mouth, spit flying, as he screamed profanely
at their sons one moment and put his arm around their shoulders the
next. But Conn, a man never given to half-measures, was tough even for
an era when coaches were given more latitude in their treatment of
players.
"He was different than most of the coaches even then," Leggette said.
"Our football coaches never got in our faces the way Coach Conn did."
But he taught them, too, about competition and sportsmanship and life.
He served as a surrogate parent for many athletes whose families could
not provide them with some of life's basic necessities.
So parents trusted their boys to Julie Conn for 45 years, from 1926 to
1970, when mandatory age retirement forced his signature whistle and
stopwatch into a drawer.
During his career, he turned the sons in this shipyard town into
champions.
Conn's basketball teams went 321-77 against high school competition from
1926-53, winning six state titles in 12 appearances in the finals. His
track teams amassed an amazing 330-4-1 dual-meet record, while winning a
combined 26 indoor and outdoor state team titles.
Conn the athletic director hired basketball coaches who carried on the
winning tradition he started, and he brought in a co-coach in track who
helped build his track dynasty to new heights.
"Newport News High School was about winning," said Woodside athletic
director Al Dorner, a captain on Conn's
cross country and track teams during the mid-1960s. "That atmosphere was
pretty special. He built that culture.
"He was that culture."
Conn's love of Newport News High began when he was a standout athlete
for the Typhoon. He played football, basketball and baseball before
graduating in 1922.
He returned to Newport News in 1926 after graduating from the University
of Virginia and became the Typhoon basketball coach at age 21. Conn
guided the Typhoon to state finals in his third and fourth seasons,
losing by one point each time to Jefferson Senior of Roanoke.
His teams won the first of their six state titles in 1931, beating
George Washington of Danville 29-19. Intense defense (usually zone) and
ball movement were the linchpins of his system.
Bill Castelow, a guard on Conn's 1951 and
'52 state championship teams, says Conn was a basketball innovator.
"He's the best high school basketball coach that's ever been around
here," said Castelow, who served as the Apprentice School head coach for
seven seasons. "The things that people think are fairly new, we had in
the early 1950s, even though they went by different names.
"They say the matchup zone is 20 years old, but we had one in the '50s.
He had the four corners long before (former North Carolina coach) Dean
Smith did. We called it the freeze. We had box-and-one defenses and the
pick-and-roll.
"He was ahead of his time."
Castelow experienced Conn's brand of tough love in a practice during the
1952 championship season, when he twice threw the ball over the head of
Buddy Ballard, the team's short but scrappy guard.
Conn shrieked that if Castelow did that one more time, he'd kick him out
of the gym. The next time the ball came to Castelow, he threw it to the
ceiling.
"Coach Conn yelled, 'Get out! Get out!,'" Castelow said. "So I hopped
over the rail and was headed to the dressing room. Then I heard these
feet running behind me.
"He put his arm around me and: 'Aw, Bill, come on back. You know how I
am.' "
Though Conn often motivated inches from his players' faces, he made his
most inspirational speech into a bathroom vent. The Typhoon trailed
Portsmouth's Woodrow Wilson by five points at halftime of the 1951 Group
One (AAA) state basketball championship game, when he asked an assistant
coach to get him a chair.
Conn used the chair to speak into a vent that adjoined the Typhoon
locker room with Wilson's. Wilson had won their previous meeting that
season by 19 points, and Conn wanted the Presidents to think the Typhoon
was giving up.
Legendary basketball coach Lefty Driesell
heard the story when Conn hired him as the Typhoon coach in 1957.
"Coach Conn said, 'Fellows, Wilson is the greatest team in the history
of Virginia high school basketball,' " Driesell said. "Then he said:
'All I'm asking is that you not lose by more than 20 points.
"He closed the vent, jumped off of the chair and said: 'This is the
sorriest team in the state. If you don't get out and beat them in the
second half, I'm going to kick all of your butts.
"That might be one of the greatest moves ever made by a coach in state
championship history. I learned a lot about motivation from Julie Conn."
The Typhoon rallied from eight points behind late in the third quarter
to win 44-42.
The next morning's Daily Press labeled it Conn's "Greatest triumph."
Leggette said the city celebrated wildly.
"We played for the city," said Julie's son Harry
Conn, who went on to play point guard for Driesell's 1958 state
titlists. "That was the entertainment for the blue-collar workers on
Friday night."
Conn retired as a basketball coach following the 1953 season. His
greatest coaching glory came off the hardwood, in the sport he loved
most: track and field.
Conn became the track coach in 1932 and guided the Typhoon to the first
of 26 state titles in 1934.
Newport News had won 12 state titles when Conn hired
Charlie Nuttycombe in 1957 and named him
co-coach a year later. Together, they won 14 indoor and outdoor state
titles during the 1960s, with Conn motivating as always and Nuttycombe
providing an influx of technical expertise.
Nuttycombe believes that Conn's emphasis on the most technique-oriented
events was the key to the school's big-meet success.
"Mr. Conn always said that no one is going to walk onto the track from a
gym class and beat you in the events that require a lot of coaching," he
said in a 2004 Daily Press interview. "We scored a lot of our points in
the events like the pole vault, discus and hurdles."
Newport News athletes won at least one gold medal in every state meet
event during Conn's tenure. But the Typhoon dominated the most difficult
technical event — the pole vault — winning 21 state-meet gold medals.
"We won some of our state championships before the running events
started," Nuttycombe said.
The Typhoon developed the depth it took to produce its amazing dual-meet
record because Conn nurtured all of his athletes.
"Mr. Conn had a list of (about 20) sayings that he coached by,"
Nuttycombe said. "One was: 'Know where your bread is buttered, but once
practice starts, your last man is as important as your first.' "
That meant that Conn knew who his best athletes were, but he understood
the importance of coaching up his lesser athletes.
"He treated the scrubs the same as the state champions," Al Dorner said.
"I was an average runner, but he gave me just as much attention as Doug
Dickinson and the other stars."
Nuttycombe says that Conn instinctively understood the strengths of
athletes such as Dorner. Dorner was a leader, so Conn named him the
captain of his cross country and track teams.
"That meant a lot to me," Dorner said. "I've taken a lot of what I
learned from Coach Conn into my own coaching."
That included working athletes harder than they thought they could be
worked.
Dickinson says that Conn's and Nuttycombe's workouts were brutal.
"The practices were unbelievably competitive, and we looked forward to
them more than the meets," Dickinson said in a 2004 Daily Press
interview. "The coaches kept practice records for everything, like bound
drills, and we competed for those records against the ghosts and legends
of the Newport News tradition."
Conn turned 65 shortly after Dickinson and the Typhoon won the school's
final state track title in 1969, and he was required by the school
system to retire in 1970.
His rich legacy went beyond victories and state titles, and it included
an impressive coaching tree.
Conn, the athletic director at Newport News from 1930 to 1970, hired a
succession of basketball coaches who won big and made names for
themselves: Elmo Stephenson,
Bill Chambers, Driesell,
Warren Mitchell and
Charlie Woollum.
From 1953 to 1971, the Typhoon won four state titles, once won 57
consecutive games and produced a 100-game home winning streak.
Stephenson went on to become a judge, while the other four became
Division I basketball coaches.
Some of his track athletes became coaches in the city. Multiple state
champion Fred Anspach coached at Ferguson.
Dorner guided Denbigh's cross country teams to 13 Peninsula District and
six regional titles.
Dickinson coached at Menchville and guided Christopher Newport
University to its first conference titles. Dickinson, who has battled a
series of illnesses since his sophomore season at Penn State in 1971,
says Conn's life lessons helped him.
"He taught me what competition is all about," he said in a Daily Press
interview after Conn's death. "It's not about competing against others
as much as yourself."
Dickinson said Conn also taught him compassion. Harry Conn, a retired
dentist, echoed that sentiment.
"He loved Newport News High School beyond family," Harry Conn said. "I
had an extended family of people he was taking care of that I didn't
really know about until years later."
Dickinson knew about them.
"He knew every banker, lawyer, dentist, doctor and store owner in the
city," Dickinson said. "Heck, he'd coached most of them. If a kid had
bad teeth or needed a job or a place to live, Coach Conn would help
them.
"They'd all help out the kids because they loved Coach Conn so much."
Joe Madagan, manager of the 1957 state
championship team, said Conn kept his charitable actions quiet because
he would've been embarrassed had the public known of them.
"Time and again, I would observe a young person come to Coach Conn to
tell him (he) did not wish to make the trip with the team because (he)
could not meet the dress code of NNHS," Madagan wrote on
an Internet site dedicated to the school's history.
"A phone call to one of (Conn's) many friends would soon have the
embarrassed young athlete looking like he stepped out of a fashion
magazine."
Conn spent his final years as a ticket manager for the Virginia Squires
of the American Basketball Association and fishing. He died in September
1983 at 78, after battling diabetes for several years.
Newport News survived as a high school only one year after Conn's
retirement. It became an intermediate school in 1971 and later was
converted to Navy housing.
But many of Conn's former athletes live on, graying, in their mid-50s or
older, so the memories of their former coach live on. They remember the
cigar, the stopwatch, the whistle, his shrieking voice and his hug.
They remember his tough love.
"You've got to be tough," Conn told the Daily Press in 1970. "You've got
to work 'em hard, but in the end you've got to show 'em you love 'em."
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More on Julie Conn
October 5, 2008
About Julie Conn
SOPHIE'S CHOICE
Conn is mentioned in "Sophie's Choice,"
Newport News native William Styron's 1979
novel later made into a popular movie starring
Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Stingo,
the story's narrator, refers to Conn, a Jew, while describing the
"mysterious" Jewish worship services in Newport News during his
pre-World War II youth.
"I could not understand how my adored Miriam Bookbinder, or Julie Conn,
the volatile high school athletic coach whom everyone idolized, could
survive such a Sabbath environment."
HONORS
One of Conn's most illustrious
distinctions came in 1951, when he was named the Peninsula Sports Club's
first Man of the Year. Conn was selected in 1968 as the National High
School Coaches Association Track and Field Coach of the Year.
Conn was inducted into the Virginia High School Hall of Fame in 1991, a
year after his greatest track athletes — Benton
Dodd and Doug Dickinson — were
inducted into the inaugural class. Conn was inducted into the Athletic
Hall of Fame of the Virginia Lower Peninsula and was inducted into the
inaugural class of the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
The annual Conn-Madden Relays, held each spring at Todd Stadium in
Newport News, are named for Conn and legendary Huntington High coach
Thad Madden.
FAMILY
In 1930, Julie Conn married
Garland January, who also taught at Newport
News High and became a guidance counselor at the school. They were
married for 53 years and had two children, the late
Julius Conn Jr. and
Harry Conn, both of whom played basketball at Newport News. Conn
coached Julius Jr. but didn't play him much because he was afraid he
would be accused of favoritism. Conn stopped coaching basketball in 1953
rather than be in a similar situation with Harry. Julius Jr. became a
vascular surgeon and Harry became a dentist.
Julie Conn worked nights at his brother's drug store at 24th and
Jefferson Avenue to finance his sons' education.
"My father wanted us both to become doctors," Harry Conn said. "My
brother had expressed a desire to go into coaching, but my father and
Lou Plummer (Newport News' football coach) talked him out of it, so I
didn't even bother."
Lefty Driesell, who guided NNHS to the 1958
state basketball title, said this of the late Garland Conn: "She was a
wonderful, sweet woman, the perfect coach's wife. She never got excited.
I said at their 50th wedding anniversary that she should get an award
for putting up with Julie for 50 years."
MOJO
A superstitious man, Conn dispensed black
rubber cats, the size of a thimble, to coaches and players who did
something extraordinary. Conn called them mojos.
"You wouldn't trade a mojo for a million dollars," said
Mickey Marcella of Conn's 1952 state title
team. "You knew you had done something special if Coach Conn had given
you one."
Driesell, who went on to coach four colleges to 786 victories, cherished
his. He said he kept them until five years ago, when his wife asked him
to discard them since they were "sacrilegious."
When he lived in Atlanta, Driesell threw them into the rough of a golf
course. When his 5-year-old grandson found one months later while
playing outdoors, Driesell pocketed the black cat and still has it.
"I remember Julie behind the wire bars in his office, looking down at
the gym floor while we were at the free-throw line during games,"
Driesell said. "He'd say: 'Knock 'em in, baby. I got my mojo working.
I'm rubbing my mojo.' "
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