L.I.U.'s Buzzer

Clair Bee is a 50-year-old dynamo with more jobs than most men tackle in a lifetime. In addition to being athletic director and assistant to the president of Long Island University (enrollment: 4,200), busy Bee writes a regular column for the New York Journal-American, manages a productive upstate New York farm, and also turns out magazine articles and books of fact & fiction for children (twelve published). These activities are just Bee's sidelines. His main job: basketball coach of L.I.U., the team with the best early-season record in the East.

Bee's passion for work started when he was orphaned at nine and had to make his own way through high school and college (Ohio State, Waynesburg, Rider and Rutgers), where he earned five degrees (B.S., A.B., B.C.S., M.C.S. and M.A.) and played football, basketball and baseball. This unrelenting will to work shows up in Bee's coaching. "I work my players harder [three hours a day] than any other coach in the business," Bee says pridefully. " work 'em, bawl 'em out, browbeat 'em . . . and they hate me." Though his players may not actually hate Bee, one of his stars recently "quit" the team because "we just couldn't get along." Bee had him back, hard at work, two days later.

How Often? Last week L.I.U., characteristically scoring in spurts, breezed past a strong Bowling Green team, 69-63, for its ninth straight this season. Tall (6 ft. 7 in.), deadeyed Forward Sherman White poured in 24 points for the L.I.U. Blackbirds to boost his three-year point production to 1,053. Long-legged Sophomore Center Ray Felix (6 ft. 11 in.) tapped in ten more L.I.U. points before he fouled out. These two lanky Negroes are Bee's main scoring threats, but because opposing teams concentrate their defense against them, Bee's other sharpshooters also get plenty of scoring chances. Says hard-to-please Clair Bee, who knows that 30% is a good basket-shooting average: "I expect my boys to hit the basket on 40% of all shots."

The victory over Bowling Green was L.I.U.'s 363rd (against 75 defeats) since Clair Bee buzzed into the scene 18 years ago. Included in his coaching record are two national championships (1939 and 1941) and 135 consecutive home-court victories.

How Much? As one trophy of his pace, Bee now nurses a permanent batch of milk-fed ulcers. But nothing in the world, he likes to think, could persuade him to slow down or give up one of his jobs. He gets too much satisfaction out of his multiple roles.

What was the biggest satisfaction he ever got out of the job as assistant to L.I.U.'s President Tristram W. Metcalfe? That was the day in 1946, says Bee, when Metcalfe was away, and Bee, as his assistant, had to answer a letter from the University of Kentucky. Somebody at Kentucky wanted to know what, in the light of L.I.U.'s experience with basketball coaches, they ought to offer to pay Coach Adolph Rupp. Bee answered that at L.I.U. the basketball coach considers his job just a labor of love--and doesn't care about money.

There is a grain of truth to that. Bee has no idea how much L.I.U. pays him for coaching. In the course of a year, he collects about $20,000, for being Clair Bee.

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