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As I'm sure you know, Pete Newell died yesterday. He was 93, and even though he hadn't been a head coach anywhere since 1960, he was one of the biggest names in basketball coaching history.

With good reason.

There is a lot of acrimony in basketball -- it's a cutthroat and macho business in many ways -- but Newell was a rare figure who transcended all that. When Pete Newell comes up, everyone in basketball speaks with tone somewhere between admiration and reverence. 

And it's not that he was some kind of saint. He was a hard charger, fueled by cigarettes and coffee. He stayed up late. He was scrappy. But he was loved and respected like few others, and he was effective. The things he taught weren't things everybody else taught. And they worked -- he was the first coach ever to win the NIT, NCAA, and Olympic tournaments.

A big part of his success had to do with his commitment to teaching, which is not necessarily the same as coaching.

A tale from Dr. Jack Ramsay, as told to ESPN.com editor Andrew Ayres yesterday, illustrates Newell's obsession with the kinds of details that many coaches overlook:

Earlier in his coaching career, Ramsay recalls a phone call he got from Newell during the summer. It had to do with the right way of receiving an entry pass from the side court.

"What foot should the man establish as his pivot foot?"

Ramsay, who had already enjoyed success at the college level, thought a minute.

"Frankly, Pete, I don't think it really matters."

Pause.

"You may want to think about the inside foot."

The gentle suggestion took.

"The more I thought about it, you know, he's right. I went back to my summer league team and started teaching it right away. A great tactic, and it couldn't get more fundamental than that."

When Ramsay visited his son-in-law Jim O'Brien's Indiana Pacers team this summer, he said that Newell pointer from long ago is one he noticed and pointed out to the players how to get on the right (or left) foot.

That kind of perception inspired many of the figures who are central to basketball today. From Bobby Knight and Kiki Vandeweghe to Shaquille O'Neal and Andrew Bynum, Newell touched hundreds, if not thousands. (Listen to ESPN's Neil Everett talking about the cast that surrounded and adored Newell.)

The San Francisco Chronicle's Bruce Jenkins wrote a book with Newell, and wrote a must-read remembrance: 

There are those who feel Newell was the greatest basketball coach of all time, and to them, the issue isn't even debatable. He built empires out of sawdust, all the while molding impressionable youngsters into the men they would become.

As long as I pursue the business of sportswriting, I'll never have a more satisfying project than assembling Newell's biography in the 1990s. An autobiography was the quick and easy way out, but it wouldn't have been worth a damn; Newell wasn't terribly fond of noting his own accomplishments. Through the words of others, the complete Newell came forth: the style, the substance, the quirks.

Bill Russell, seldom inclined to accommodate the media, stopped in his tracks at the mention of Newell's name. Jerry West and Oscar Robertson revealed their frustration, to this day, over losing to Newell's pack of Cal plowhorses. His former players talked reverentially for hours, wishing it could have been days.

And Wooden? He'd just as soon change the subject. He wouldn't admit to me that Newell had his number, even though the evidence was plain for all to see.

There was a landmark Cal-UCLA game, unencumbered by television interests, in which neither Wooden nor Newell had called a timeout. It was a source of pride for both men; forget the flash cards, the meetings or even an assistant coach. Their players knew what to do - any time, any situation - and they were in shape. Timeouts were a blatant sign of weakness.

With about four minutes left, Wooden had no choice; one of his players was noticeably dragging. He called time, and Cal went on to win. That was the spring of 1957, and the streak was born. "Do you know that they never beat us again?" said Newell, who retired three years later with eight straight wins against Wooden. "And they never played timeouts again with us. Psychologically, that had so much to do with our confidence every time we played them. Our guys just figured, 'We never called timeout. They did.'"

In his legendary book The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam describes Kermit Washington's role in the beginnings of the Big Man Camp that became the hallmark of Newell's later years. Halberstam here is in italics, as excerpted and described by David Friedman on his blog 20 Second Timeout:

He had left college coaching (where his teams, with less material, had regularly beaten John Wooden's UCLA teams) because he did not like the direction the game was taking--too much emphasis on recruiting, too little on coaching, too much on selling the school to the young men and too little on the young men selling themselves to the school. He did not like his job at the Lakers; when he talked basketball to Jack Kent Cooke, the owner, he was always being challenged by one of Cooke's cronies who knew nothing about basketball..."Why do you want to take lessons?" he had asked Washington. "Because I want to play like Paul Silas," Washington had answered, which was good enough; Paul Silas was an example of the best of the NBA players, a triumph of character and intelligence over pure athletic skill.

The individual big man skills tutoring that Newell did with Washington eventually evolved into an annual "Big Man" camp that attracted more and more players each summer until it got to the point that virtually every promising post player in the country received coaching from Newell.

When Washington's NBA career was in limbo in the aftermath of Washington's devastating punch that seriously injured Tomjanovich, Newell was one of the few people in the basketball world who maintained contact with him. Halberstam wrote ("Breaks," p. 275):

One day Washington showed up at Newell's door with a huge color television set. With it was a small plaque that said, FOR COACH PETE NEWELL, THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME A BETTER BASKETBALL PLAYER, KERMIT WASHINGTON. Pete Newell tried to turn down the gift but Washington insisted he keep it. He eventually relented and accepted it, partially because Washington seemed the loneliest young man he had seen in a long time.

ESPN's Ric Bucher wrote a great piece about Newell's camp in Hawaii a few years ago, which includes this:

As Newell stands between a podium and a white trellis backdrop in a Hawaii Prince Hotel -- TV and newspaper reporters recording this year's introduction of 17 pros and 40 college players -- [Kiki] Vandeweghe listens from the back, near tables loaded with shrimp, crabmeat and chicken wings.

"You have no idea how hysterical this is," says Kiki, Denver's new GM and a longtime instructor. "I remember the three of us -- Kermit, Pete and myself -- standing outside a little gym in Rogers Park, banging on the door because we couldn't get in. One time we all showed up and nobody brought a ball. Another time t
here was a tarp and a piano on the floor from a dance the night before. As we pushed the piano off to the side, I told Pete I thought we were here to play basketball. He told me this was our strength program." 

Coach Bobby Knight remembers, in this video, the the man he called his second father, who was also something of a father to modern basketball:

(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)