Last Friday, as the 2005 NCAA Basketball Tournament swung into high gear, one of the men responsible for making college basketball so wildly popular passed away when legendary coach Ray Meyer died at 92 years of age on Saint Patrick’s Day. Saint Patrick held a special place for Coach Meyer, who attended Saint Patrick Academy, and was renowned for wearing a green carnation in his lapel on Saint Patrick’s Day. The high point of Meyer’s coaching career, an upset victory over UCLA to give the DePaul Blue Demons a berth in the 1979 NCAA Final Four, came on Saint Patrick’s Day as well. Meyer was a 1933 graduate of Saint Patrick Academy, a member of the Shamrock Hall of Fame, and the 1998 recipient of the President’s Crystal Shamrock Award. He also served on the Saint Patrick High School Board of Trustees. Meyer was the epitome of the Catholic gentlemen. Through his life’s work, Coach Ray was able to fulfill the mission of the founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, St. John Baptist de la Salle, by “teaching minds and touching hearts.” The Saint Patrick High School family extends their deepest sympathy to the Meyer Family.

Meyer attended Saint Patrick Academy for two years. He was an All-Conference basketball player both years, and he led the Shamrocks to the 1932 Catholic High School National Title. Meyer went on to star as a basketball player for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Meyer served as team captain for two seasons at Notre Dame. Following his graduation, Meyer began his coaching career as an assistant for the Fighting Irish.

In 1942 Meyer accepted the job as head basketball coach at DePaul University. It didn’t take long for Coach Meyer to put DePaul basketball on the map. Meyer took an awkward 6-10 kid with thick glasses named George Mikan and helped mold him into an unstoppable force on the court. Behind Mikan, Meyer’s first DePaul team reached the NCAA Final Four. The Blue Demons followed that with a second place finish in the National Invitational Tournament in 1944 and an NIT Championship in 1945. At the time the NIT Tournament was seen as far superior to the NCAA Tournament.

Over the next 42 years, Meyer would build a legacy that would make him synonymous with college basketball in the city of Chicago. Meyer became a Chicago institution, known to everybody, including his family, simply as “Coach.” In 1979 Meyer joined John Wooden, Adolph Rupp, and Frank McGuire as the only coaches inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame while they were still active. Four times, Meyer was recognized as National Coach of the Year. Meyer‘s 42 years at DePaul is the second longest coaching run in NCAA basketball history. His DePaul teams posted an astonishing 37 winning seasons and 12 seasons with at least 20 victories. When Meyer retired in 1984 with a career record of 724-354, he was the fifth-winningest coach of all-time.

Late in his career Meyer put together his most successful teams, turning the national spotlight on the place that he liked to call “the little school under the ‘L’ tracks” and their loveable coach with the gap-toothed grin. Through the power of television, Meyer became “America’s grandpa.” His 1979 team reached the Final Four before losing by a basket to Larry Bird and the Sycamores of Indiana State. The next three seasons would be bittersweet for Meyer as his Blue Demons posted a 59-3 combined record in the regular season, only to lose in the first round of the NCAA Tournament each year. Meyer retired in 1984, handing the reins of the program to his son, Joey, who had served as his assistant coach for 14 years. Meyer took a job as an analyst on Blue Demon radio broadcasts, and he ran his streak of consecutive DePaul basketball games attended to an amazing 1,467 over 55 years.

Coach Meyer was much more than numbers and statistics, no matter how gaudy, could ever begin to tell. He was a man who always had a smile on his face and gave freely of himself. He opened the Ray Meyer Basketball Camp for Boys in Three Lakes Wisconsin in 1947, and he kept it open until 2001. Hundreds of campers came through the camp where Coach Ray instructed them about basketball and life. As his son Joey said, "I've said this for the last 10 years: the man won 724 games, was a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest coaches ever, but he's known better for the type of person he was. That captures him."