Basketball: Veteran Mountainburg Coach Garringer To Retire

Feb. 07--MOUNTAINBURG -- Dan Garringer closed his eyes one night not long after he and his wife Kathy were married. He was young, spry and chatty.

He soon learned his pockets had holes in them.

It was Sept. 1, 1970. The Vietnam War was raging, the Beatles had broken up, Keith Partridge and Marcia Brady were television sitcom icons, and Don Meredith and Howard Cosell had were reinventing football in a good way as part of "Monday Night Football's" groundbreaking TV coverage.

Dan Garringer was making $5,200 a year as a first-year history teacher and basketball coach at Frederick, Okla., a tiny parch of mostly treeless land a few miles from the Texas border. "A bird could kill himself trying to land down there," quips Garringer.

Kathy, whom he'd married two hours following their May 30 graduation from Oklahoma Baptist University, had a first-year teaching salary of $4,000. Dan Gallinger thought he'd won the lottery.

"We bought everything we could get our hands on," he said. "We went to Sears and bought a refrigerator. We bought a house for $10,000!

"We thought we had made it."

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and affable Danny Garringer and his deep-rooted Oklahoma twang is every bit the storyteller in 2016 as he might have been at Frederick High School in the winter of 1971. The images meld in melancholy.

Dan Garringer has a lot of stories.

Last month, after he celebrated his 68th birthday, Garringer told his team that 2016 would be his last year as Mountainburg's girls basketball head coach. It's been a quick but never boring 46-year coaching run for Garringer.

The man known for witty one-liners, who coached All-American baseball star Alan Cockrell (Joplin Parkwood), is an accomplished carpenter and taught himself to love and respect golf, is ready to be a full time grandparent.

"I grew up in Glencoe, Okla., about 14 miles outside of Stillwater," Garringer said. "There were 13 kids in my class, and I turned 8 years old on Jan. 8, 1956, and that was my first organized year of basketball that year. On January 8th of this year I turned 68 years old, so I figured 60 years of basketball in one form or another is a pretty good round number to retire on."

Garringer has coached at 11 different schools, coaching both girls and boys basketball. Often, he coached both during the same year.

He made four stops during an eight-year Oklahoma swing that took him to Frederick, Oktaha, Skiatook and Warner. In 1979, Garringer moved the family to Joplin, Mo., where he spent a dozen years at Parkwood and Joplin High School. His 1984 baseball team won the state title.

Parkwood and Memorial merged to form Joplin High School in 1985-86.

Garringer spent two years at Bolivar, Mo., before taking a job in Olive, Okla., to be near Kathy's ailing parents.

After a two-year stint at Prairie Grove, Garringer talked former Cedarville principal Curt Ledbetter into an impromptu interview.

Soon, he was handed the keys to another gym.

"I called up Kurt on a Thursday, and he said, 'We have two good applicants, and we're planning on making a recommendation Monday,," Garringer said. "I went down and talked to him and the superintendent, met some of the players, and the next morning he (Ledbetter) called and said we're going to recommend you for the job."

Garringer spent five years at Cedarville and one more at Decatur before traversing the Boston Mountains one final time to Mountainburg. His last five seasons at Mountainburg has produced a 117-34 record, highlighted by a 32-3 squad in 2013.

But records mean nothing to Dan Garringer. It's about relationships.

"I've never consciously kept up (with records), but it was never very important to me," he said. "Winning was never a goal; getting better each day and doing the right things were the goals. Winning is a residue of that. I just wanted us to be our best as players and people by the end of the season."

Tough Childhood

Garringer was actually born in one of the towns he coached in -- Prairie Grove, though he has very little memory of living there. The family moved to Stillwater, Okla., when he was 4.

Somehow, the kid who grew into a 6-foot-4 frame by high school survived a childhood that by today's standards might have been fodder for an episode of "Sally Jesse Raphael."

His late mom, Ruby, was diagnosed with schizophrenia when Garringer was not yet out of elementary school. His dad Floyd took off when he was 9. By the time Danny was 10, he moved in with his older brother and his wife -- not that Floyd and Ginger were well beyond their years.

"My dad basically took off when I was 9 or 10 years old, and my mother was schizophrenia, so when I was about 10 years old my 18-year-old brother and his 16-year-old wife took me and two of my brothers in," Garringer said. "Basically, that little town of Glencoe raised us."

Despite the dysfunctional surroundings, Garringer was a dedicated newspaper delivery boy as kid, throwing the Tulsa World to help him earn extra spending money. Or, as was often the case, help put food on super table.

Ruby? She was in and out of institutions.

"She'd be sitting in there at the dining room table talking to J. Edgar Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower," Garringer said. "Of course, I never heard them talking back to her. She would be talking to them, and then pause. It just seemed normal. I could name two dozen people in that town that took care of us."

Garringer later reunited with his dad, though he was tragically killed in a spring tornado while working on a construction site in 1990.

Coaching Tree

Garringer's coaching tree started before he ever blew his whistle. Henry Iba and Eddie Sutton weren't officially part of his tree.

But they coached some of his college teammates.

"Henry Iba was still coaching at Oklahoma State when I was in high school," Garringer said. "We would play pickup games at OSU in the summer and when he (Iba) walked through the gym, every ball stopped bouncing. He wasn't ever called 'coach' -- he was referred to as Mr. Iba."

Garringer could have played Division I basketball. He opted for the latter, explaining it as only Garringer can.

"I could be a little duck on a big pond or a big duck on a little pond," he said, matter-of-factly, "so I chose Oklahoma Baptist University, and never regretted it."

Three of his OBU teammates had played for Eddie Sutton at Oklahoma Central High School before Sutton made it big on the collegiate level at Oklahoma State, Arkansas and Kentucky.

"Our senior All-American at OBU, Al Tucker, was the first player taken by the Seattle Supersonics in the NBA draft," Garringer said. "He was considered the greatest collegiate player in Oklahoma in the 1960s."

Back in the '60s, Converse Shoes fielded All-American teams. OBU's Tucker was a first-team All-American with Elvin Hayes (Houston) and Lew Alcindor (UCLA).

"Al Tucker was Kevin Durant before Kevin Durant existed," Garringer said. "His dad (Albert Amos Tucker) was one of the original Harlem Globetrotters."

The three previous seasons before Garringer enrolled at OBU, the Bison finished national runnerup, national champions, and national runnerup in the NAIA Tournament.

Because opponents focused on Tucker, Garringer shot nearly 65 percent as a freshman.

He holds the school record for points in a half (28). Of course, he'll remind you he also fouled out of that same game -- without scoring another point in the second.

Same Flowers

Dan Garringer's always been a simple man. Simple car, simple cloths. Getting married proved to not be the exception.

"I graduated from college and got married, all in the same day," he said. "We took the flowers from graduation and moved them to the chapel at noon -- I went from one institution to the other in one day.

"My wife was magna cum laude (Latin for honors), and I was 'come and get it' (graduation certificate) -- she's very, very smart."

The former Kathy Crittendon's late father, Bob, married the couple at high noon on May 30, 1970.

And soon, the Garringers will come full circle.

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